Cruel World(63)

He glanced at her and then out the window. The deer were gone and the meadow was empty with the settling night.

“You make it sound like a war.”

“Isn’t it?”

“The stilts are just an aftereffect of the disease. We’ve already lost, don’t you think?”

Alice didn’t reply. She moved to the fire and dumped her meal into the flames, quickly pulling her hands away before stepping back.

“They don’t seem to be territorial, do they?”

“No. They almost have a pack mentality from what I’ve seen.”

“What would you guess their numbers are? Roughly.”

“There’s no way of knowing really, but if I had to guess, well, let me think about it.” Quinn shifted on the floor, leaning back on one hand. “If we go by how many people we saw in Portland to how many stilts we saw, we’d have a three to eleven ratio.”

“But we don’t know that some of the ones we saw today weren’t from last night either. They’re so damn alike I have trouble telling if they’re male or female.”

“That’s true, but I don’t think the ones from today were the same that…” He cleared his throat. “…that were near the development.”

“Okay, so we have what type of percentage of the population dead from the plague?” Alice asked, returning to her sleeping bag that was spread open on the floor.

“They were saying seventy to seventy-five percent death rate the last time I watched TV.”

“Bullshit. I didn’t see anyone alive in town when we left, but there were several of those things meandering around.”

Quinn shrugged. “Let’s say ninety-five percent death rate then.”

“Sounds closer to reality. You can’t trust the news anyway. They’re a bunch of lying bastards.”

Quinn laughed. “That’s true. So we have three hundred and seventeen million people alive after the last census and ninety-five percent of that is,” he closed his eyes and rubbed the back of his neck, “approximately three-hundred million people give or take a million. That leaves seventeen million people alive. And for every three that are still human, there are eleven that aren’t so…” He scrunched up his brow again, carrying numbers and shifting figures. “There’s four and a half million of us and—”

“Over twelve million of them,” Alice finished.

They sat in the heavy silence that pervaded the room like some oppressive fog.

“Four million of us left in the entire country. Doesn’t feel like that many.” She sighed and drew her legs up to her chest. “Damn it, I need a drink.”

“Yeah. That would be welcome,” he said, staring into the fire.

“They can’t even feed on the dead since the people who got the plague turned into that stinking jelly. They’ll only have live food to go after.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Quinn said.

“Leave it to me to think of something gloomy.” She fell silent and gazed at the fire before glancing at him again. “By the way, are you some kind of math whiz or something?”

“No. I was homeschooled and—” He almost blurted out everything to her but managed to stifle it at the last second. “We reached fairly high levels in most of the subjects.”

“I guess. I’m terrible at math, always preferred art and English to algebra.”

“Right brained.”

“I don’t know if there’s anything right about it.”

They sat in silence for a while, the fire crackling in the hearth, the quiet chirp of frogs somewhere off in the night. It could have been any night, any normal night. They could’ve been here as a family on holiday.

He shook his head, casting the thoughts away as Alice spoke again.

“There’s nothing left of them, is there? The people they once were,” she said.

Quinn remembered the stilts’ cold stare of hatred, the hunger in their gazes as they pursued them down the street, how the thing Graham had become lifted him toward its waiting mouth.

“No, I don’t think there is,” he replied.

“How tall do you think they get?” Alice asked in almost a whisper. “I mean, really? The tallest one I saw was when we were leaving the apartment. It was walking along the next street, and its head was only a few feet under the stop light when it passed.”