Posted on July 18, 2007

The Hole: Part 20

He wasn’t tied down and that was good. Did they sleep? he wondered. He rolled onto his side and no one protested. When he sat up, the crazies watching him only glared, giving him “don’t try anything funny” looks. Slowly, keeping his movements as unthreatening as he could manage, Elliot stood up.

The tall suit put a hand on his shoulder but didn’t push him back down. Elliot looked at him hard, without flinching, trying to make it very clear that, while he wasn’t going to run, he also wasn’t going spend the night cowering on the cave floor. The suit leaned in at Elliot and pulled his lips back from his teeth. Whether it was a grin or a snarl, Elliot couldn’t tell.

Up close, the man looked weathered but healthy, like he’d been though a rough hiking vacation and hadn’t had time to recover. He was young, in his thirties at most, and Elliot found himself thinking of the guy less as a crazy or a zombie and more the way he’d see a police officer in a third world country: you know he’s trouble and can hurt you but it’s okay to assume he’s working on rational set of rules that can be exploited–if only you knew what they were.

The woman in red walked over now, running her hand across the tall suit’s back as she went by, and Elliot saw him stiffen at the contact. She was their leader but what kind? He wished he know how the crazies were organizing themselves–and what they were organizing for. And, he wondered, where had they come from? Everyone he’d seen get sick had died. With the Wal-mart woman, it might have just been a case of a single person going mad with grief. In fact, he was surprised they hadn’t seen more of those. But ever since the swarm on the road, these things had been in huge numbers, and with their own distinct way of doing things. Was it related to the sickness? He didn’t know.

The woman in red stopped in front of him. She turned back to the taller suit and gestured, asking him to give her something. He did: a small, pencil like object taken from the pocket of his pants. It was gold, Elliot saw, as she took it and held it up in front of her face. Gold and slim. It might have been a pen except there wasn’t a point, nothing to actually write with. Clarine had given him a Palm Pilot for Christmas once and it’d come with something similar, a stylus, but his was grey plastic and he’d lost it within a week of opening the box.

The woman in red waved this at him, acting like he ought to know what it was, ought to recognize its significance. He didn’t, of course, and he shrugged his shoulders to tell her this. She gave him a frustrated look, then turned and walked over to one of the walls. She began scratching at it with the golden stylus, making white lines in the soft rock. It was the runes she was drawing, just like the trees and the roof of the cave. They had done them all, he thought. It could be their language. But that was nuts. These were crazy people, insane from something–he didn’t know what–but just insane, nonetheless. People like that don’t make up language, they don’t make up writing systems. They just say weird things until someone gives them the right medication.

He was still thinking about this, pondering what he’d learned during the frantic events after the crash, when things went all to hell.

Shouts came from the mouth of the cave and the woman in red dropped the stylus. She yelled something at the short suit, who let go of Elliot’s arm and ran outside, the line of crazies opening to let him through. In that brief gap, Elliot thought he saw more crazies, a sizable group, running toward the cave, waving clubs. Were they fighting each other now? Had they really, genuinely lost it?