Chapter 38
   
As the superflu epidemic wound down, there was a second epidemic that lasted roughly two weeks. This epidemic was most common in technological societies such as the United States, least common in underdeveloped countries such as Peru or Senegal. In the United States the second epidemic took about 16 percent of the superflu survivors. In places like Peru and Senegal, no more than 3 percent. The second epidemic had no name because the symptoms differed wildly from case to case. A sociologist like Glen Bateman might have called this second epidemic “natural death” or “those ole emergency room blues.” In a strictly Darwinian sense, it was the final cut—the unkindest cut of all, some might have said.
   Sam Tauber was five and a half years old. His mother had died on June the twenty-fourth in the Murfreesboro, Georgia, General Hospital. On the twenty-fifth, his father and younger sister, two-year-old April, had died. On June the twenty-seventh, his older brother Mike died, leaving Sam to shift for himself.
   Sam had been in shock ever since the death of his mother. He wandered carelessly up and down the streets of Murfreesboro, eating when he was hungry, sometimes crying. After a while he stopped crying, because crying did no good. It didn’t bring the people back. At night his sleep was broken by horrible nightmares in which Papa and April and Mike died over and over, their faces swollen black, a terrible rattling sound in their chests as they strangled on their own snot.
   At quarter of ten on the morning of July 2, Sam wandered into a field of wild blackberries behind Hattie Reynolds’s house. Bemused and vacant-eyed, he zigzagged among blackberry bushes that were almost twice as tall as he was, picking the berries and eating them until his lips and chin were smeared black. The thorns ripped at his clothes and sometimes at his bare flesh, but he barely noticed. Bees hummed drowsily around him. He never saw the old and rotted well-cover half buried in tall grass and blackberry creepers. It gave under his weight with a grinding, splintering crash, and Sam plunged twenty feet down the rock-lined shaft to the dry bottom, where he broke both legs. He died twenty hours later, as much from fear and misery as from shock and hunger and dehydration.
   Irma Fayette lived in Lodi, California. She was a lady of twenty-six, a virgin, morbidly afraid of rape. Her life had been one long nightmare since June twenty-third, when looting had broken out in town and there had been no police to stop the looters. Irma had a small house on a side street; her mother had lived there with her until she had died of a stroke in 1985. When the looting began, and the gunshots, and the horrifying sound of drunken men roaring up and down the streets of the main business section on motorcycles, Irma had locked all the doors and then had hidden in the spare room downstairs. Since then she had crept upstairs periodically, quiet as a mouse, to get food or to relieve herself.
   Irma didn’t like people. If everyone on earth had died but her, she would have been perfectly happy. But that wasn’t the case, Only yesterday, after she had begun cautiously to hope that no one was left in Lodi but her, she had seen a gross and drunken man, a hippie man in a T-shirt that said I GAVE UP SEX AND DRINKING AND IT WAS THE SCARIEST 20 MINUTES OF MY LIFE, wandering up the street with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He had long blond hair which cascaded out from under the gimme cap he was wearing and all the way down to his shoulders. Tucked into the waistband of his tight bluejeans was a pistol. Irma had peeked around the bedroom curtain at him until he was out of sight and then had scurried downstairs to the barricaded spare room as if she had been released from a malign spell.
   They were not all dead. If there was one hippie man left, there would be other hippie men. And they would all be rapers. They would rape her. Sooner or later they would find her and rape her.
   This morning, before first light, she had crept up to the attic, where her father’s few possessions were stored in cardboard boxes. Her father had been a merchant seaman. He had deserted Irma’s mother in the late sixties. Irma’s mother had told Irma all about it. She had been perfectly frank. Her father had been a beast who got drunk and then wanted to rape her. They all did. When you got married, that gave a man the right to rape you anytime he wanted. Even in the daytime. Irma’s mother always summed up her husband’s desertion in three words, the same words Irma could have applied to the death of almost every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth: “No great loss.”
   Most of the boxes contained nothing but cheap trinkets bought in foreign ports—Souvenir of Hong Kong, Souvenir of Saigon, Souvenir of Copenhagen. There was a scrapbook of photographs. Most of them showed her father on ship, sometimes smiling into the camera with his arms about the shoulders of his fellow beasts. Well, probably the disease that they were calling Captain Trips out here had struck him down in whatever place he had run off to. No great loss.
   But there was one wooden box with small gold hinges on it, and in this box was a gun. A .45 caliber pistol. It lay on red velvet, and in a secret compartment below the red velvet were some bullets. They were green and mossy-looking, but Irma thought they would work all right. Bullets were metal. They didn’t spoil like milk or cheese.
   She loaded the gun under the single cobwebby attic bulb, and then went down to eat her breakfast at her own kitchen table. She would not hide like a mouse in a hole any longer. She was armed. Let the rapers beware.
   That afternoon she went out on the front porch to read her book. The name of the book was Satan Is Alive and Well on the Planet Earth. It was grim and joyful stuff. The sinners and the ingrates had gotten their just deserts, just as the book said they would. They were all gone. Except for a few hippie rapers, and she guessed she could handle them. The gun was by her side.
   At two o’clock the man with the blond hair came back. He was so drunk he could hardly stand up. He saw Irma and his face lighted, no doubt thinking of how lucky he had been to finally discover some “pussy.”
   “Hey, baby!” he cried. “It’s just you and me! How long—” Then terror clouded his face as he saw Irma put down her book and raise the .45.
   “Hey, listen, put that thing down… is it loaded? Hey—! ”
   Irma pulled the trigger. The pistol exploded, killing her instantly. No great loss.
   George McDougall lived in Nyack, New York. He had been a teacher of high school mathematics, specializing in remedial work. He and his wife had been practicing Catholics, and Harriett McDougall had borne him eleven children, nine boys and two girls. So between June 22, when his nine-year-old son Jeff had succumbed to what was then diagnosed as “flu-related pneumonia,” and June 29, when his sixteen-year-old daughter Patricia (and oh God she had been so young and so achingly beautiful) had succumbed to what everyone—those that were left—was then calling tube-neck, he had seen the twelve people he loved best in the world pass away while he himself remained healthy and feeling fine. He had joked at school about not being able to remember all his kids’ names, but the order of their passing was engraved on his memory: Jeff on the twenty-second, Marty and Helen on the twenty-third, his wife Harriett and Bill and George, Jr., and Robert and Stan on the twenty-fourth, Richard on the twenty-fifth, Danny on the twenty-seventh, three-year-old Frank on the twenty-eighth, and finally Pat—and Pat had seemed to be getting better, right up to the end.
   George thought he would go mad.
   He had begun jogging ten years before, on his doctor’s advice. He didn’t play tennis or handball, paid a kid (one of his, of course) to mow the lawn, and usually drove to the corner store when Harriett needed a loaf of bread. You’re putting on weight, Dr. Warner had said. Lead in the seat. No good for your heart. Try jogging.
   So he had gotten a sweatsuit and had gone jogging every night, for short distances at the start, then longer and longer ones. At first he’d felt self-conscious, sure that the neighbors must be tapping their foreheads and rolling their eyes, and then a couple of the men that he had only known to wave to when they were out watering their lawns came and asked if they could join him—probably there was safety in numbers. By that time, George’s two oldest boys had also joined in. It became a sort of neighborhood thing, and although the membership was always evolving as people dropped in and dropped out, it stayed a neighborhood thing.
   Now that everyone was gone, he still jogged. Every day. For hours. It was only when he was jogging, concentrating on nothing more than the thud of his tennis shoes on the sidewalk and the swing of his arms and his steady harsh respiration, that he lost that feeling of impending madness. He could not commit suicide because as a practicing Catholic he knew that suicide was a mortal sin and God must be saving him for something, so he jogged. Yesterday he had jogged for almost six hours, until he was completely out of breath and almost retching with exhaustion. He was fifty-one, not a young man anymore, and he supposed that so much running was not good for him, but in another, more important way, it was the only thing that was any good.
   So he had gotten up this morning at first light after a mostly sleepless night (the thought that played over and over in his mind was: Jeff-Marty-Helen-Harriett-Bill-George-Junior-Robert-Stanley-Richard-Danny-Frank-Patty-and-I-thought-she-was-getting-better) and put on his sweatsuit. He went out and began to jog up and down the deserted streets of Nyack, his feet sometimes gritting on broken glass, once leaping over a TV set that lay shattered on the pavement, taking him past residential streets where the shades were drawn and also past the horrible three-car crash at the Main Street intersection.
   He jogged at first, but it became necessary to run faster and faster to keep the thoughts behind him. He jogged and then he trotted and then he ran and finally he sprinted, a fifty-one-year-old man with gray hair in a gray sweatsuit and white tennis shoes, fleeing up and down empty streets as if all the devils of hell were after him. At quarter past eleven he suffered a massive coronary thrombosis and fell down dead on the corner of Oak and Pine, near a fire plug. The expression on his face was very like gratitude.
   Mrs. Eileen Drummond of Clewiston, Florida, got very drunk on DeKuyper crème de menthe on the afternoon of July 2. She wanted to get drunk because if she was drunk she wouldn’t have to think about her family, and crème de menthe was the only kind of alcohol she could stand. She had found a baggie filled with marijuana in her sixteen-year-old’s room the day before and had succeeded in getting stoned, but being stoned only seemed to make things worse. She had sat in her living room all afternoon, stoned and crying over photographs in her scrapbook.
   So this afternoon she drank a whole bottle of crème de menthe and then got sick and threw up in the bathroom and then went to bed and lit a cigarette and fell asleep and burned the house down and she didn’t have to think about it anymore, ever. The wind had freshened, and she also burned down most of Clewiston. No great loss.
   Arthur Stimson lived in Reno, Nevada. On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, after swimming in Lake Tahoe, he stepped on a rusty nail. The wound turned gangrenous. He diagnosed the trouble by smell and tried to amputate his foot. Halfway through the operation he fainted and died of shock and blood loss in the lobby of Toby Harrah’s gambling casino, where he had attempted the operation.
   In Swanville, Maine, a ten-year-old girl named Candice Moran fell off her bike and died of a fractured skull.
   Milton Craslow, a rancher in Harding County, New Mexico, was bitten by a rattlesnake and died half an hour later.
   In Milltown, Kentucky, Judy Horton was quite pleased with events. Judy was seventeen years old and pretty. Two years before, she had made two serious mistakes: she had allowed herself to get pregnant, and she had allowed her parents to talk her into marrying the boy responsible, a four-eyes engineering student from the state university. At fifteen she had been flattered just to be asked out by a college man (even if he was only a freshman) and for the life of her she couldn’t remember why she had allowed Waldo—Waldo Horton, what a yuck name—to “work his will” on her. And if she was going to be knocked up, why did it have to be him? Judy had also allowed Steve Phillips and Mark Collins to “work their will” on her; they were both on the Milltown High football team (the Milltown Cougars, to be exact, fight-fight-fight-fight-for-the-dear-blue-and-white) and she was a cheerleader. If it hadn’t been for yucky old Waldo Horton, she would have made head cheerleader her junior year, easy. And, getting back to the point, either Steve or Mark would have made more acceptable husbands. They both had broad shoulders and Mark had stone bitchin shoulder-length blond hair. But it was Waldo, it could have been no one but Waldo. All she had to do was look in her diary and do the arithmetic. And after the baby came she wouldn’t have even had to do that. It looked just like him. Yucky.
   So for two long years she had struggled along, through a variety of crummy jobs in fast food restaurants and motels, while Waldo went to school. It got so she hated Waldo’s school most of all, even more than the baby and Waldo himself. If he wanted a family so bad, why couldn’t he get out and work? She had. But her parents and his wouldn’t allow it. Alone, Judy could have sweet-talked him into it (she would have gotten him to promise before she let him touch her in bed), but all four of the in-laws had their noses in things all the time. Oh Judy, things will be so much better when Waldo has a good job. Oh Judy, things would look so much brighter if you’d go to church more often. Oh Judy, eat shit and keep smiling until you get it down. Until you get it all down.
   Then the superflu had come along and had solved all her problems. Her parents had died, her little boy Petie had died (that was sort of sad, but she got over it in a couple of days), then Waldo’s parents had died, and finally Waldo himself had died and she was free. The thought that she herself might die had never crossed her mind, and of course she didn’t.
   They had been living in a large and rambling apartment house in downtown Milltown. One of the features of the place that sold Waldo on it (Judy, of course, didn’t have a say) was a large walk-in meat freezer in the basement. They had taken the apartment in September of 1988, and their apartment was on the third floor, and who always seemed to get stuck taking the roast and the hamburger down to the freezer? Three guesses and the first two don’t count. Waldo and Petie had died at home. By that time you couldn’t get hospital service unless you were a bigwig and the mortuaries were swamped (creepy old places anyway, Judy wouldn’t go near one on a bet), but the power was still on. So she had taken them downstairs and put them in the freezer.
   The power had gone off in Milltown three days ago, but it was still fairly cool down there. Judy knew because she went down to look at their dead bodies three or four times a day. She told herself she was just checking. What else could it be? Surely she wasn’t gloating?
   She went down on the afternoon of July 2 and forgot to put the rubber wedge under the freezer door. The door swung shut behind her and latched. It was then that she noticed, after two years of coming and going down here, that there was no inside knob on the freezer door. By then it was too warm to freeze, but not too cold to starve. So Judy Horton died in the company of her son and husband after all.
   Jim Lee of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, hooked up all the electrical outlets in his house to a gasoline generator and then electrocuted himself trying to start it up.
   Richard Hoggins was a young black man who had lived his entire life in Detroit, Michigan. He had been addicted to the fine white powder he called “hehrawn” for the last five years. During the actual superflu epidemic, he had gone through extreme withdrawal as all the pushers and users he knew died or fled.
   On this bright summer afternoon he was sitting on a littered stoop, drinking a warm 7-Up and wishing he had a pop, just a small, minor skinpop.
   He began to think about Allie McFarlane, and something he had heard about Allie on the streets, just before the shit hit the fan. People were saying that Allie, who was about the third-biggest in Detroit, had just gotten a fine shipment. Everybody was going to get well. None of that brown shit. China White, all kinds of the stuff.
   Richie didn’t know for sure where McFarlane would keep a big order like that—it wasn’t healthy to know about such things—but he had heard it said at different times in passing that if the cops ever got a search-writ for the Grosse Pointe house that Allie had bought for his great-uncle, Allie would go away until the new moon turned to gold.
   Richie decided to take a walk up to Grosse Pointe. After all, there was nothing better to do.
   He got the Lake Shore Drive address of one Erin D. McFarlane from the Detroit phone book and walked out there. It was almost dark by the time he made it and his feet hurt. He was no longer trying to tell himself that this was just a casual stroll; he wanted to shoot and he wanted to bad.
   There was a gray fieldstone wall around the estate and Richie went over it like a black shadow, cutting his hands on the broken glass embedded in the top. When he broke a window to gain entry, a burglar alarm went off, causing him to flee halfway down the lawn before he remembered there were no cops to answer. He came back, jittery and slicked with sweat.
   The main power was off, and there were easily twenty rooms in the fucking place. He’d have to wait until tomorrow to look properly, and it would still take three weeks to dump the place upside down in the proper way. And the stuff probably wasn’t even here. Christ. Richie felt sick despair wave through him. But he would at least look in the obvious places.
   And in the upstairs bathroom, he found a dozen large plastic bags bulging with white powder. They were in the toilet tank, that old standby. Richie stared at them, sick with desire, dimly thinking that Allie must have been greasing all the right people if he could afford to leave a stash like this in a fucking toilet tank. There was enough dope here to last one man sixteen centuries.
   He took one bag into the master bedroom and broke it open on the bedspread. His hands trembled as he got his works out and cooked up. It never occurred to him to wonder how much this stuff was cut. On the street the heaviest hit Richie had ever taken was 12 percent pure, and that had put him into a sleep so deep it was nearly a coma. He hadn’t even nodded. Just bang and off he went, outta the blue and into the black.
   He injected himself above the elbow and pushed the plunger of his spike home. The stuff was almost 96 percent pure. It hit his bloodstream like a highballing freight and Richie fell down on the bags of heroin, flouring the front of his shirt with it. He was dead six minutes later.
   No great loss.

Chapter 39
 
 Lloyd Henreid was down on his knees. He was humming and grinning. Every now and then he would forget what he had been humming and the grin would fade and he would sob a little bit, and then he would forget he was crying and go on humming. The song he was humming was “Camptown Races.” Every now and then, instead of humming or sobbing, he would whisper “Doo-dah, doo-dah” under his breath. The holding cellblock was utterly quiet except for the humming, the sobbing, the occasional doo-dah, and the soft scrape of the cotleg as Lloyd fumbled with it. He was trying to turn Trask’s body around so he could get at the leg. Please, waiter, bring me some more of that cole slaw and another leg.
   Lloyd looked like a man who had embarked upon a radical crash diet. His prison coverall hung on his body like a limp sail. The last meal served in the holding cellblock had been lunch eight days ago. Lloyd’s skin was stretched tightly across his face, limning every curve and angle of the skull beneath. His eyes were bright and glittering. His lips had drawn back from his teeth. He had an oddly piebald look, because his hair had begun to fall out in clumps. He looked crazy.
   “Doo-dah, doo-dah,” Lloyd whispered as he fished with his cotleg. Once upon a time he hadn’t known why he had bothered hurting his fingers to unscrew the damn thing. Once upon a time he had thought he had known what real hunger was. That hunger had been nothing but a slight edge to the appetite when compared with this.
   “Ride around all night… ride around all day… doo-dah…”
   The cotleg snagged the calf of Trask’s pantsleg and then pulled free. Lloyd put his head down and sobbed like a child. Behind him, tossed indifferently in one corner, was the skeleton of the rat he had killed in Trask’s cell on June 29, five days ago. The rat’s long pink tail was still attached to the skeleton. Lloyd had tried repeatedly to eat the tail but it was too tough. Almost all the water in the toilet bowl was gone despite his efforts to conserve it. The cell was filled with the reek of urine; he had been peeing out into the corridor so as not to contaminate his water supply. He had not—and this was understandable enough, considering the radically reduced conditions of his diet—had to move his bowels.
   He had eaten the food he had squirreled away too fast. He knew that now. He had thought someone would come. He hadn’t been able to believe—
   He didn’t want to eat Trask. The thought of eating Trask was horrible. Just last night he had managed to slap one of his slippers over a cockroach and had eaten it alive; he had felt it scuttering madly around inside his mouth just before his teeth had crunched it in two. Actually, it hadn’t been half bad, much tastier than the rat. No, he didn’t want to eat Trask. He didn’t want to be a cannibal. It was like the rat. He would get Trask over within reaching distance… but just in case. Just in case. He had heard a man could go a long time without food as long as he had water.
   (not much water but I won’t think about that now not just now no not just now)
   He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to starve. He was too full of hate.
   The hate had built up at a fairly leisurely pace over the last three days, growing with his hunger. He supposed that, if his long-dead pet rabbit had been capable of thought, it would have hated him in the same way (he slept a great deal tow, and his sleep was always troubled with dreams of his rabbit, its body swollen, its fur matted, the maggots squirming in its eyes, and worst of all, those bloody paws: when he awoke he would look at his own fingers in dread fascination). Lloyd’s hate had coalesced around a simple imagistic concept, and this concept was THE KEY.
   He was locked in. Once upon a time it had seemed right that he should be. He was one of the bad guys. Not a really bad guy; Poke had been the really bad guy. Small shit was the worst he would have done without Poke. Still, he shared a certain amount of the blame. There had been Gorgeous George in Vegas, and the three people in the white Continental—he had been in on that, and he supposed he had owned some of that heat. He supposed he deserved to take a fall, do a little time. It wasn’t something you volunteered for, but when they had you cold they gave you the bullet and you ate it. Like he had told the lawyer, he thought he deserved about twenty for his part in the “tri-state killspree.” Not in the electric chair, Christ no. The thought of Lloyd Henreid riding the lightning was just… it was crazy.
   But they had THE KEY, that was the thing. They could lock you up and do what they wanted with you.
   In the last three days, Lloyd had vaguely begun to grasp the symbolic, talismanic power of THE KEY. THE KEY was your reward for playing by the rules. If you didn’t, they could lock you up. It was no different than the Go to Jail card in Monopoly. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. And with THE KEY went certain prerogatives. They could take away ten years of your life, or twenty, or forty. They could hire people like Mathers to beat on you. They could even take away your life in the electric chair.
   But having THE KEY didn’t give them the right to go away and leave you locked up to starve. It didn’t give them the right to force you into eating a dead rat and to try to eat the dry ticking of your mattress. It didn’t give them the right to leave you in a spot where you might just have to eat the man in the next cell to stay alive (if you can get ahold of him, that is—doo-dah, doo-dah).
   There were certain things you just couldn’t do to people. Having THE KEY only took you so far and no farther. They had left him here to die a horrible death when they could have let him out. He wasn’t a mad dog killer who was going to waste the first person he saw, in spite of what the papers had said. Small shit was the worst he had ever gotten into before meeting Poke.
   So he hated, and the hate commanded him to live… or at least to try. For a while it seemed to him that the hate and the determination to go on living were useless things, because all of those who had THE KEY had succumbed to the flu. They were beyond the reach of his vengeance. Then, little by little, as he grew hungrier, he realized that the flu wouldn’t kill them. It would kill the losers like him; it would kill Mathers but not that scumbag screw who had hired Mathers because the screw had THE KEY. It wasn’t going to kill the governor or the warden—the guard who said the warden was sick had obviously been a fucking liar. It wasn’t going to kill the parole officers, the county sheriffs, or the FBI agents. The flu would not touch those who had THE KEY. It wouldn’t dare. But Lloyd would touch them. If he lived long enough to get out of here, he would touch them plenty.
   The cotleg snagged in Trask’s cuff again.
   “Come on,” Lloyd whispered. “Come on. Come on over here… camptown ladies sing dis song… all doo-dah day.”
   Trask’s body slid slowly, stiffly, along the floor of his cell. No fisherman ever played a bonita more carefully or with greater wile than Lloyd played Trask. Once Trask’s trousers ripped and Lloyd had to hook on in a new place. But at last his foot was close enough so that Lloyd could reach through the bars and grab it… if he wanted to.
   “Nothing personal,” he whispered to Trask. He touched Trask’s leg. He caressed it. “Nothing personal, I ain’t going to eat you, old buddy. Not less I have to.”
   He was not even aware that he was salivating.

Lloyd heard someone in the ashy afterglow of dusk, and at first the sound was so far away and so strange—the clash of metal on metal—that he thought he must be dreaming it. The waking and sleeping states had become very similar to him now; he crossed back and forth across that boundary almost without knowing it.
   But then the voice came and he snapped upright on his cot, his eyes flaring wide, huge and lambent in his starved face. The voice came floating down the corridors from God knew how far up in the Administration Wing and then down the stairwell to the hallways which connected the visiting areas to the central cellblock, where Lloyd was. It bobbed serenely through the twice-barred doors and finally reached Lloyd’s ears:
   “Hooooo-hoooo! Anybody home? ”
   And strangely, Lloyd’s first thought was: Don’t answer. Maybe he’ll go away.
   “Anybody home? Going once, going twice?… Okay, I’m on my way, just about to shake the dust of Phoenix from my boots —”
   At that, Lloyd’s paralysis broke. He catapulted off the cot, snatched up the cotleg, and began to beat it frantically on the bars; the vibrations raced up the metal and shivered in the bones of his clenched fist.
   “No! ” he screamed. “No! Don’t go! Please don’t go! ”
   The voice, closer now, coming from the stairway between the Administration and this floor: “We’ll eat you up, we love you so… and oh, someone sounds so… hungry.” This was followed by a lazy chuckle.
   Lloyd dropped the cotleg on the floor and wrapped both hands around the bars of the cell door. Now he could hear the footfalls somewhere up in the shadows, clocking steadily down the hall that led to the holding cellblock. Lloyd wanted to burst into tears of relief… after all, he was saved… yet it was not joy but fear he felt in his heart, a growing dread that made him wish he had stayed silent. Stayed silent? My God! What could be worse than starvation?
   Starvation made him think of Trask. Trask lay sprawled on his back in the ashy afterglow of dusk, one leg stretched stiffly into Lloyd’s cell, and an essential subtraction had occurred in the region of that leg’s calf. The fleshy part of that leg’s calf. There were teeth-marks there. Lloyd knew whose teeth had made those marks, but he had only the vaguest memory of lunching on filet of Trask. All the same, powerful feelings of revulsion, guilt, and horror filled him. He rushed across to the bars and pushed Trask’s leg back into his own cell. Then, looking over his shoulder to make sure the owner of the voice was not yet in sight, he reached through, and with the dividing bars pressed against his face, he pulled Trask’s pantsleg down, hiding what he had done.
   Of course there was no great hurry, because the barred gates at the head of the cellblock were shut, and with the power off, the pushbutton wouldn’t work. His rescuer would have to go back and find THE KEY. He would have to—
   Lloyd grunted as the electric motor which operated the barred gates, whined into life. The silence of the cellblock magnified the sound, which ceased with the familiar click-slam! of the gates locking open.
   Then the steps were clocking steadily up the cellblock walkway.
   Lloyd had gone to his cell door again after neatening up Trask; now he involuntarily fell back two steps. He dropped his gaze to the floor outside and what he saw first was a pair of dusty cowboy boots with pointed toes and rundown heels and his first thought was that Poke had had a pair like that.
   The boots stopped in front of his cell.
   His gaze rose slowly, taking in the faded jeans snugged down over the boots, the leather belt with the brass buckle (various astrological signs inside a pair of concentric circles), the jeans jacket with a button pinned to each of the breast pockets—a smiley-smile face on one, a dead pig and the words HOW’S YOUR PORK on the other.
   At the same instant Lloyd’s eyes reluctantly reached Randall Flagg’s darkly flushed face, Flagg screamed “Boo! ” The single sound floated down the dead cellblock and then rushed back. Lloyd shrieked, stumbled over his own feet, fell down, and began to cry.
   “That’s all right,” Flagg soothed. “Hey, man, that’s all right. Everything’s purely all right.”
   Lloyd sobbed: “Can you let me out? Please let me out. I don’t want to be like my rabbit, I don’t want to end up like that, it’s not fair, if it wasn’t for Poke I never would have got into anything but small shit, please let me out, mister, I’ll do anything.”
   “You poor guy. You look like an advertisement for a summer vacation at Dachau.”
   Despite the sympathy in Flagg’s voice, Lloyd could not bring himself to raise his eyes beyond the knees of the newcomer’s jeans. If he looked into that face again, it would kill him. It was the face of a devil.
   “Please,” Lloyd mumbled. “Please let me out. I’m starving.”
   “How long you been shitcanned, my friend?”
   “I don’t know,” Lloyd said, wiping his eyes with thin fingers. “A long time.”
   “How come you’re not dead already?”
   “I knew what was coming,” Lloyd told the bluejeaned legs as he drew the last tattered shreds of his cunning around him. “I saved up my food. That’s what.”
   “Didn’t happen to have a chomp on this fine fellow in the next cell, by any chance?”
   “What?” Lloyd croaked. “What? No! Christ’s sake! What do you think I am? Mister, mister, please—”
   “His left leg there looks a little thinner than his right one. That’s the only reason I asked, my good friend.”
   “I don’t know nothing about that,” Lloyd whispered. He was trembling all over.
   “How about Br’er Rat? How did he taste?”
   Lloyd put his hands over his face and said nothing.
   “What’s your name?”
   Lloyd tried to say, but all that came out was a moan.
   “What’s your name, soldier?”
   “Lloyd Henreid.” He tried to think what to say next, but his mind was a chaotic jumble: He had been afraid when his lawyer told him he might go to the electric chair, but not this afraid. He had never been this afraid in his entire life. “It was all Poke’s idea!” he screamed. “Poke should be here, not me!”
   “Look at me, Lloyd.”
   “No,” Lloyd whispered. His eyes rolled wildly.
   “Why not?”
   “Because…”
   “Go on.”
   “Because I don’t think you’re real,” Lloyd whispered. “And if you are real… mister, if you’re real, you’re the devil.”
   “Look at me, Lloyd.”
   Helplessly, Lloyd turned his eyes up to that dark, grinning face that hung behind an intersection of bars. The right hand held something up beside the right eye. Looking at it made Lloyd feel cold and hot all over. It looked like a black stone, so dark it seemed almost resinous and pitchy. There was a red flaw in the center of it, and to Lloyd it looked like a terrible eye, bloody and half-open, peering at him. Then Flagg turned it slightly between his fingers, and the red flaw in the dark stone looked like… a key. Flagg turned it back and forth between his fingers. Now it was the eye, now it was the key.
   The eye, the key.
   He sang: “She brought me coffee… she brought me tea… she brought me… damn near everything… but the workhouse key. Right, Lloyd?”
   “Sure,” Lloyd said huskily. His eyes never left the small dark stone. Flagg began to walk it from one finger to the next like a magician doing a trick.
   “Now you’re a man who must appreciate the value of a good key,” the man said. The dark stone disappeared in his clenched fist and suddenly reappeared in his other hand, where it began to finger-walk again. “I’m sure you are. Because what a key is for is opening doors. Is there anything more important in life than opening doors, Lloyd?”
   “Mister, I’m awfully hungry…”
   “Sure you are,” the man said. An expression of concern spread over his face, an expression so magnified that it became grotesque. “Jesus Christ, a rat isn’t anything to eat! Why, do you know what I had for lunch? I had a nice rare roast beef sandwich on Vienna bread with a few onions and a lot of Gulden’s Spicy Brown. Sound good?”
   Lloyd nodded his head, tears oozing slowly out of his overbright eyes.
   “Had some homefries and chocolate milk to go with it, and then for dessert… holy crow, I’m torturing you, ain’t I? Someone ought to take a hosswhip to me, that’s what they ought to do. I’m sorry. I’ll let you right out and then we’ll go get something to eat, okay?”
   Lloyd was too stunned to even nod. He had decided that the man with the key was indeed a devil, or even more likely a mirage, and the mirage would stand outside his cell until Lloyd finally dropped dead, talking happily about God and Jesus and Gulden’s Spicy Brown mustard as he made the strange black stone appear and disappear. But now the compassion on the man’s face seemed real enough, and he sounded genuinely disgusted with himself. The black stone disappeared into his clenched fist again. And when the fist opened, Lloyd’s wondering eyes beheld a flat silver key with an ornate grip lying on the stranger’s palm.
   “My—dear—God! ” Lloyd croaked.
   “You like that?” the dark man asked, pleased. “I learned that trick from a massage parlor honey in Secaucus, New Jersey, Lloyd. Secaucus, home of the world’s greatest pig farms.”
   He bent and seated the key in the lock of Lloyd’s cell. And that was strange, because as well as his memory served him (which right now was not very well), these cells had no keyways, because they were all opened and shut electronically. But he had no doubt that the silver key would work.
   Just as it rattled home, Flagg stopped and looked at Lloyd, grinning slyly, and Lloyd felt despair wash over him again. It was all just a trick.
   “Did I introduce myself? The name is Flagg, with the double g. Pleased to meet you.”
   “Likewise,” Lloyd croaked.
   “And I think, before I open this cell and we go get some dinner, we ought to have a little understanding, Lloyd.”
   “Sure thing,” Lloyd croaked, and began to cry again.
   “I’m going to make you my righthand man, Lloyd. Going to put you right up there with Saint Peter. When I open this door, I’m going to slip the keys to the kingdom right into your hand. What a deal, right?”
   “Yeah,” Lloyd whispered, growing frightened again. It was almost full dark now. Flagg was little more than a dark shape, but his eyes were still perfectly visible. They seemed to glow in the dark like the eyes of a lynx, one to the left of the bar that ended in the lockbox, one to the right. Lloyd felt terror, but something else as well: a kind of religious ecstasy. A pleasure. The pleasure of being chosen. The feeling that he had somehow won through… to something.
   “You’d like to get even with the people who left you here, isn’t that right?”
   “Boy, that sure is,” Lloyd said, forgetting his terror momentarily. It was swallowed up by a starving, sinewy anger.
   “Not just those people, but everyone who would do a thing like that,” Flagg suggested. “It’s a type of person, isn’t it? To a certain type of person, a man like you is nothing but garbage. Because they are high up. They don’t think a person like you has a right to live.”
   “That’s just right,” Lloyd said. His great hunger had suddenly been changed into a different kind of hunger. It had changed just as surely as the black stone had changed into the silver key. This man had expressed all the complex things he had felt in just a handful of sentences. It wasn’t just the gate-guard he wanted to get even with—why, here’s the wise-ass pusbag, what’s the story, pusbag, got anything smart to say? —because the gate-guard wasn’t the one. The gate-guard had had THE KEY, all right, but the gate-guard had not made THE KEY. Someone had given it to him. The warden, Lloyd supposed, but the warden hadn’t made THE KEY, either. Lloyd wanted to find the makers and forgers. They would be immune to the flu, and he had business with them. Oh yes, and it was good business.
   “You know what the Bible says about people like that?” Flagg asked quietly. “It says the exalted shall be abased and the mighty shall be brought low and the stiffnecked shall be broken. And you know what it says about people like you, Lloyd? It says blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And it says blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.”
   Lloyd was nodding. Nodding and crying. For a moment it seemed that a blazing corona had formed around Flagg’s head, a light so bright that if Lloyd looked at it for long it would burn his eyes to cinders. Then it was gone… if it had ever been there at all, and it must not have been, because Lloyd had not even lost his night vision.
   “Now you aren’t very bright,” Flagg said, “but you are the first. And I have the feeling you might be very loyal. You and I, Lloyd, we’re going to go far. It’s a good time for people like us. Everything is starting up for us. All I need is your word.”
   “W-word?”
   “That we’re going to stick together, you and me. No denials. No falling asleep on guard duty. There will be others very soon—they’re on their way west already—but for now, there’s just us. I’ll give you the key if you give me your promise.”
   “I… promise,” Lloyd said, and the words seemed to hang in the air, vibrating strangely. He listened to that vibration, his head cocked to one side, and he could almost see those two words, glowing as darkly as the aurora borealis reflected in a dead man’s eye.
   Then he forgot about them as the tumblers made their half-turns inside the lockbox. The next moment the lockbox fell at Flagg’s feet, tendrils of smoke seeping from it.
   “You’re free, Lloyd. Come on out.”
   Unbelieving, Lloyd touched the bars hesitantly, as if they might burn him; and indeed, they did seem warm. But when he pushed, the door slid back easily and soundlessly. He stared at his savior, those burning eyes.
   Something was placed in his hand. The key.
   “It’s yours now, Lloyd.”
   “Mine?”
   Flagg grabbed Lloyd’s fingers and closed them around it… and Lloyd felt it move in his hand, felt it change. He uttered a hoarse cry and his fingers sprang open. The key was gone and in its place was the black stone with the red flaw. He held it up, wondering, and turned it this way and that. Now the red flaw looked like a key, now like a skull, now like a bloody, half-closed eye again.
   “Mine,” Lloyd answered himself. This time he closed his hand with no help, holding the stone savagely tight.
   “Shall we get some dinner?” Flagg asked. “We’ve got a lot of driving to do tonight.”
   “Dinner,” Lloyd said. “All right.”
   “There’s such a lot to do,” Flagg said happily. “And we’re going to move very fast.” They walked toward the stairs together, past the dead men in their cells. When Lloyd stumbled in weakness, Flagg seized his arm above the elbow and bore him up. Lloyd turned and looked into that grinning face with something more than gratitude. He looked at Flagg with something like love.

Chapter 40
 
 Nick Andros lay sleeping but not quiet on the bunk in Sheriff Baker’s office. He was naked except for his shorts and his body was lightly oiled with sweat. His last thought before sleep had taken him the night before was that he would be dead by morning; the dark man that had consistently haunted his feverish dreams would somehow break through that last thin barrier of sleep and take him away.
   It was strange. The eye which Ray Booth had gouged into darkness had hurt for two days. Then, on the third, the feeling that giant calipers had been screwed into his head had faded down to a dull ache. There was nothing but a gray blur when he looked through that eye now, a gray blur in which shapes sometimes moved, or seemed to move. But it wasn’t the eye injury which was killing him; it was the bullet-graze down his leg.
   He had gone without disinfecting it. The pain in his eye had been so great that he had barely been aware of it. The graze ran shallowly along his right thigh and ended at the knee; the next day he had examined the bullet hole in his pants where the slug had exited with some wonder. And on that next day, June 30, the wound had been red along the edges and all the muscles of that leg seemed to ache.
   He had limped down to Dr. Soames’s office and had gotten a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He had poured the whole bottle of peroxide over the bullet wound, which was about ten inches long. It had been a case of locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. By that evening his entire right leg was throbbing like a rotten tooth, and under the skin he could see the telltale red lines of blood poisoning radiating out from the wound, which had only begun to scab over.
   On July first he had gone down to Soames’s office again and had rummaged through his drug closet, looking for penicillin. He found some, and after a moment’s hesitation, he swallowed both of the pills in one of the sample packets. He was well aware that he would die if his body reacted strongly against the penicillin, but he thought the alternative might be an even nastier death. The infection was racing, racing. The penicillin did not kill him, but there was no noticeable improvement, either.
   By yesterday noon he had been running a high fever, and he suspected he had been delirious a great deal of the time. He had plenty of food but didn’t want to eat it; all he seemed to want to do was drink cup after cup of the distilled water in the cooler which stood in Baker’s office. That water had been almost gone when he fell asleep (or passed out) last night, and Nick had no idea how he might get more. In his feverish state, he didn’t care much. He would die soon, and there would be nothing to worry about anymore. He was not crazy about the idea of dying, but the thought of having no more pain or worry was a great relief. His leg throbbed and itched and burned.
   His sleep those days and nights after the killing of Ray Booth had not seemed like sleep at all. His dreams were a flood. It seemed that everyone he had ever known was coming back for a curtain call. Rudy Sparkman, pointing at the white sheet of paper: You are this blank page. His mother, tapping lines and circles she had helped him make on another white page, marring its purity: It says Nick Andros, honey. That’s you. Jane Baker, her face turned aside on the pillow, saying, Johnny, my poor Johnny. In his dreams Dr. Soames asked John Baker again and again to take off his shirt, and again and again Ray Booth said, Hold im… I’m gonna mess im up… sucker hit me… hold im… Unlike all the other dreams he had had in his life, Nick did not have to lip-read these. He could actually hear what people were saying. The dreams were incredibly vivid. They would fade as the pain in his leg brought him close to waking. Then a new scene would appear as he sank down into sleep again. There were people he had never seen in two of the dreams, and these were the dreams he remembered the most clearly when he woke up.
   He was on a high place. The land was spread out below him like a relief map. It was desert land, and the stars above had the mad clarity of altitude. There was a man beside him… no, not a man but the shape of a man. As if the figure had been cut from the fabric of reality and what really stood beside him was a negative man, a black hole in the shape of a man. And the voice of this shape whispered: Everything you see will be yours if you fall down on your knees and worship me. Nick shook his head, wanting to step away from that awful drop, afraid the shape would stretch out its black arms and push him over the edge.
   Why don’t you speak? Why do you just shake your head?
   In the dream Nick made the gesture he had made so many times in the waking world: a laying of his finger over his lips, then the flat of his hand against his throat… and then he heard himself say in a perfectly clear, rather beautiful voice: “I can’t talk. I am mute.”
   But you can. If you want to, you can.
   Nick reached out to touch the shape then, his fear momentarily swept away in a flood of amazement and burning joy. But as his hand neared that figure’s shoulder it turned ice cold, so cold it seemed that he had burned it. He jerked it away with ice crystals forming on the knuckles. And it came to him. He could hear. The dark shape’s voice; the far-off cry of a hunting night-bird; the endless whine of the wind. He was struck mute all over again by the wonder of it. There was a new dimension to the world he had never missed because he had never experienced it, and now it had fallen into place. He was hearing sounds. He seemed to know what each was without being told. They were pretty. Pretty sounds. He ran his fingers back and forth across his shirt and marveled at the swift whisper of his nails on the cotton.
   Then the dark man was turning toward him, and Nick was terribly afraid. This creature, whatever it was, performed no free miracles.
   –if you fall down on your knees and worship me.
   And Nick put his hands over his face because he wanted all the things the black manshape had shown him from this high desert place: cities, women, treasure, power. But most of all he wanted to hear the entrancing sound his fingernails made on his shirt, the tick of a clock in an empty house after midnight, and the secret sound of rain.
   But the word he said was No and then that freezing cold was on him again and he had been pushed, he was falling end over end, screaming soundlessly as he tumbled through these cloudy depths, tumbled into the smell of—
   –corn?
   Yes, corn. This was the other dream, they blended together like this, with hardly a seam to show the difference. He was in the corn, the green corn, and the smell was summer earth and cow manure and growing things. He got to his feet and began to walk up the row he had found himself in, stopping momentarily as he realized he could hear the soft whicker of the wind flowing between the July corn’s green, swordlike blades… and something else.
   Music?
   Yes—some sort of music. And in the dream he thought, “So that’s what they mean.” It was coming from straight ahead and he walked toward it, wanting to see if this particular succession of pretty sounds came from what was called “piano” or “horn” or “cello” or what.
   The hot smell of summer in his nostrils, the overarching blue sky above, that lovely sound. In this dream, Nick had never been happier. And as he neared the source, a voice joined the music, an old voice like dark leather, slurring the words a little as if the song was a stew, often reheated, that never lost its old savor. Mesmerized, Nick walked toward it.
   I come to the garden alone
   While the dew is still on the roses
   And the voice I hear, falling on my ear
   The son… of God… disclo-o-ses
   And he walks with me and he talks with me
   Tells me I am his own
   And the joy we share as we tarry there
   None other… has ever… known.
   As the verse ended, Nick pushed through to the head of the row and there in the clearing was a shack, not much more than a shanty, with a rusty trash barrel to the left and an old tire swing to the right. It hung from an apple tree that was gnarled but still green with lovely life. A porch slanted out from the house, a splintery old thing held up with old, oil-clotted jacklifters. The windows were open, and the kind summer breeze blew ragged white curtains in and out of them. From the roof a peaked chimney of galvanized tin, dented and smoky, jutted at its own old, odd angle. This house sat in its clearing and the corn stretched away in all four directions as far as the eye could see; it was broken only on the north by a dirt road that dwindled away to a point on the flat horizon. It was always then that Nick knew where he was: Polk County, Nebraska, west of Omaha and a little north of Osceola. Far up that dirt road was US 30 and Columbus sitting on the north bank of the Platte.
   Sitting on the porch is the oldest woman in America, a black woman with fluffy white thin hair—she is thin herself, wearing a housedress and specs. She looks thin enough for the high afternoon wind to just blow her away, tumble her into the high blue sky and carry her perhaps all the way to Julesburg, Colorado. And the instrument she is playing (perhaps that’s what is holding her down, keeping her on the earth) is a “guitar,” and Nick thinks in the dream: That’s what a “guitar” sounds like. Nice. He feels he could just stand where he is for the rest of the day, watching the old black woman sitting on her porch held up by jacklifters in the middle of all this Nebraska corn, stand here west of Omaha and a little north of Osceola in the county of Polk, listening. Her face is seamed with a million wrinkles like the map of a state where the geography hasn’t settled down—rivers and canyons along her brown leather cheeks, ridges below the knob of her chin, the sinuous raised drumlin of bone at the base of her forehead, the caves of her eyes.
   She has begun to sing again, accompanying herself on the old guitar.
   Jee-sus, won’t you kun-bah-yere
   Oh Jee-sus, won’t you kun-bah-yere,
   Jesus, won’t you come by here?
   Cause now… is the needy time
   Oh now… is the needy time
   Now is the—
   Say, boy, who nailed you to that spot?
   She puts the guitar across her lap like a baby and gestures him forward. Nick comes. He says he just wanted to listen to her sing, the singing was beautiful.
   Well, singing’s God’s foolishness, I do it most the day now… how you making out with that black man?
   He scares me. I’m afraid —
   Boy, you got to be afraid. Even a tree at dusk, if you see it the right way, you got to be afraid. We’re all mortal, praise God.
   But how do I tell him no? How do I —
   How do you breathe? How do you dream? No one knows. But you come see me. Anytime. Mother Abagail is what they call me. I’m the oldest woman in these parts, I guess, and I still make m’own biscuit. You come see me anytime, boy, and bring your friends.
   But how do I get out of this?
   God bless you, boy, no one ever does. You just look up to the best and come see Mother Abagail anytime you take a mind to. I be right here, I guess; don’t move around much anymore. So you come see me. I be right —
   –here, right here —
   He came awake bit by bit until Nebraska was gone, and the smell of the corn, and Mother Abagail’s seamed, dark face. The real world filtered in, not so much replacing that dream world as overlaying it until it was out of sight.
   He was in Shoyo, Arkansas, his name was Nick Andros, he had never spoken nor heard the sound of a “guitar”… but he was still alive.
   He sat up on the cot, swung his legs over, and looked at the scrape. The swelling had gone down some. The ache was only a throb. I’m healing, he thought with great relief. I think I’m going to be okay.
   He got up from the cot and limped over to the window in his shorts. The leg was stiff, but it was the kind of stiffness you know will work out with a little exercise. He looked out at the silent town, not Shoyo anymore but the corpse of Shoyo, and knew he would have to leave today. He wouldn’t be able to get far, but he would make a start.
   Where to go? Well, he supposed he knew that. Dreams were just dreams, but for a start he supposed he could go northwest. Toward Nebraska.
   Nick pedaled out of town at about quarter past one on the afternoon of July 3. He packed a knapsack in the morning, putting in some more of the penicillin pills in case he needed them, and some canned goods. He went heavy on the Campbell’s tomato soup and the Chef Boy-ar-dee ravioli, two of his favorites. He put in several boxes of bullets for the pistol and took a canteen.
   He walked up the street, looking in garages until he found what he wanted: a ten-speed bike that was just about right for his height. He pedaled carefully down Main Street, in a low gear, his hurt leg slowly warming to the work. He was moving west and his shadow followed him, riding its own black bike. He went past the gracious, cool-looking houses on the outskirts of town, standing in the shade with their curtains drawn for all time.
   He camped that night in a farmhouse ten miles west of Shoyo. By nightfall on July 4 he was nearly to Oklahoma. That evening before he went to sleep he stood in another farmyard, his face turned up to the sky, watching a meteor shower scratch the night with cold white fire. He thought he had never seen anything so beautiful. Whatever lay ahead, he was glad to be alive.

Chapter 41

Larry woke up at half past eight to sunlight and the sound of birds. They both freaked 
him out. Every morning since they had left New York City, sunlight and the sound of birds. And as an extra added attraction, a Bonus Free Gift, if you like, the air smelled clean and fresh. Even Rita had noticed it. He kept thinking: Well, that’s as good as it’s going to get. But it kept getting better. It got better until you wondered what they had been doing to the planet. And it made you wonder if this was the way the air had always smelled in places like upstate Minnesota and in Oregon and on the western slope of the Rockies.
   Lying in his half of the double sleeping bag under the low canvas roof of the two-man tent they had added to their traveling kit in Passaic on the morning of July 2, Larry remembered when Al Spellman, one of the Tattered Remnants, had tried to persuade Larry to go on a camping trip with him and two or three other guys. They were going to go east, stop in Vegas for a night, then go on to a place called Loveland, Colorado. They were going to camp out in the mountains above Loveland for five days or so.
   “You can leave all that ‘Rocky Mountain High’ shit for John Denver,” Larry had scoffed. “You’ll all come back with mosquito bites and probably with a good case of poison ivy up the kazoo from shitting in the woods. Now, if you change your mind and decide to camp out at the Dunes in Vegas for five days, give me a jingle.”
   But maybe it had been like this. On your own, with nobody hassling you (except for Rita, and he guessed he could put up with her hassle), breathing good air and sleeping at night with no tossing and turning, just bang, fast asleep, like somebody had hit you on the head with a hammer. No problems, except which way you were going tomorrow and how much time you could make. It was pretty wonderful.
   And this morning in Bennington, Vermont, now headed due east along Highway 9, this morning was something special. It was the by-God Fourth of July, Independence Day.
   He sat up in the sleeping bag and looked over at Rita, but she was still out like a light, nothing showing but the lines of her body under the bag’s quilted fabric and a fluff of her hair. Well, he would wake her up in style this morning.
   Larry unzipped his side of the bag and got out, buck naked. For a moment his flesh marbled into goosebumps and then the air felt naturally warm, probably seventy already. It was going to be another peach of a day. He crawled out of the tent and stood up.
   Parked beside the tent was a 1200-cc Harley-Davidson cycle, black and chrome. Like the sleeping bag and the tent, it had been acquired in Passaic. By that time they had already gone through three cars, two blocked by terrible traffic jams, the third stuck in the mud outside of Nutley when he had tried to swing around a two-truck smashup. The bike was the answer. It could be trundled around accidents, pulling itself along in low gear. When the traffic was seriously piled up it could be ridden along the breakdown lane or the sidewalk, if there was one. Rita didn’t like it—riding pillion made her nervous and she clung to Larry desperately—but she had agreed it was the only practical solution. Mankind’s final traffic jam had been a dilly. And since they had left Passaic and gotten into the country, they had made great time. By the evening of July 2 they had recrossed into New York State and had pitched their tent on the outskirts of Quarryville, with the hazed and mystic Catskills to the west. They turned east on the afternoon of the third, crossing into Vermont just as dusk fell. And here they were in Bennington.
   They had camped on a rise outside of town, and now as Larry stood naked beside the cycle, urinating, he could look down and marvel at the picture postcard New England town below him. Two clean white churches, their steeples rising as if to poke through the blue morning sky; a private school, gray fieldstone buildings shackled with ivy; a mill; a couple of red brick school buildings; plenty of trees dressed in summer green-gowns. The only thing that made the picture subtly wrong was the lack of smoke from the mill and the number of twinkling toy cars parked at weird angles on the main street, which was also the highway they were following. But in the sunny silence (silent, that was, except for an occasional twittering bird), Larry might have echoed the sentiments of the late Irma Fayette, had he known the lady: no great loss.
   Except it was the Fourth of July, and he supposed he was still an American.
   He cleared his throat, spat, and hummed a little to find his pitch. He drew breath, very much aware of the light morning breeze on his naked chest and buttocks, and burst into song.
   Oh! say, can you see,
   by the dawn’s early light,
   What so proudly we hailed,
   at the twilight’s last gleaming…
   He sang it all the way through, facing Bennington, doing a little burlesque bump and grind at the end, because by now Rita would be standing at the flap of the tent, smiling at him.
   He finished with a snappy salute at the building he thought might be the Bennington courthouse, then turned around, thinking the best way to start another year of independence in the good old U.S. of A. would be with a good old all-American fuck.
   “Larry Underwood, Boy Patriot, wishes you a very good m—”
   But the tent-flap was still closed, and he felt a momentary irritation with her again. He squashed it resolutely. She couldn’t be on his wavelength all the time. That’s all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship. He had been trying very hard with Rita since that harrowing experience in the tunnel, and he thought he’d been doing pretty well.
   You had to put yourself in her place, that was the thing. You had to recognize that she was a lot older, she had been used to having things a certain way for most of her life. It was natural for her to have a harder job adapting to a world that had turned itself upside down. The pills, for instance. He hadn’t been overjoyed to discover that she had brought her whole fucking pharmacy along with her in a jelly jar with a screw-on lid. Yellowjackets, Quaaludes, Darvon, and some other stuff that she called “my little pick-me-ups.” The little pick-me-ups were reds. Three of those with a shot of tequila and you would jitter and jive all the live-long day. He didn’t like it because too many ups and downs and all-arounds added up to one mean monkey on your back. A monkey roughly the size of King Kong. And he didn’t like it because, when you got right down to where the cheese binds, it was a kind of slap in the face at him, wasn’t it? What did she have to be nervous about? Why should she have trouble dropping off at night? He sure as hell didn’t. And wasn’t he taking care of her? You were damned tooting he was.
   He went back to the tent, then hesitated for a moment. Maybe he ought to let her sleep. Maybe she was worn out. But…
   He looked down at Old Sparky, and Old Sparky didn’t really want to let her sleep. Singing the old Star-Speckled Banana had turned him right on. So Larry turned back the tent-flap and crawled in.
   “Rita?”
   And it hit him right away after the fresh morning cleanness of the air outside; he must have been mostly asleep before to have missed it. The smell was not overpoweringly strong because the tent was fairly well ventilated, but it was strong enough: the sweet-sour smell of vomit and sickness.
   “Rita?” He felt mounting alarm at the still way she was lying, just that dry fluff of her hair sticking out of the sleeping bag. He crawled toward her on his hands and knees, the smell of vomit stronger now, making his stomach knot. “Rita, you all right? Wake up, Rita!”
   No movement.
   So he rolled her over and the sleeping bag was halfway unzipped as if she had tried to struggle out of it in the night, maybe realizing what was happening to her, struggling and failing, and he all the time sleeping peacefully beside her, old Mr. Rocky Mountain High himself. He rolled her over and one of her pill bottles fell out of her hand and her eyes were cloudy dull marbles behind half-closed lids and her mouth was filled with the green puke she had strangled on.
   He stared into her dead face for what seemed a very long time. They were almost nose to nose, and the tent seemed to be getting hotter and hotter until it was like an attic on a late August afternoon just before the cooling thundershowers hit. His head seemed to be swelling and swelling. Her mouth was full of that shit. He couldn’t take his eyes off that. The question that ran around and around in his brain like a mechanical rabbit on a dogtrack rail was: How long was I sleeping with her after she died? Repulsive, man. Reeee -pulsive.
   The paralysis broke and he scrambled out of the tent, scraping both knees when they came off the groundsheet and onto the naked earth. He thought he was going to puke himself and he struggled with it, willing himself not to, he hated to puke worse than anything, and then he thought But I was going back in there to FUCK her, man! and everything came up in a loose rush and he crawled away from the steaming mess crying and hating the cruddy taste in his mouth and nose.
   He thought about her most of the morning. He felt a measure of relief that she had died—a great measure, actually. He would never tell anyone that. It confirmed everything his mother had said about him, and Wayne Stukey, and even that silly bit of fluff with the apartment near Fordham University. Larry Underwood, the Fordham Flasher.
   “I ain’t no nice guy,” he said aloud, and having said it, he felt better. It became easier to tell the truth, and truth-telling was the most important thing. He had made an agreement with himself, in whatever back room of the subconscious where the Powers Behind the Throne wheel and deal, that he was going to take care of her. Maybe he wasn’t no nice guy, but he was no murderer either and what he had done in the tunnel was pretty close to attempted murder. So he was going to take care of her, he wasn’t going to shout at her no matter how pissed he got sometimes—like when she grabbed him with her patented Kansas City Clutch as they mounted the Harley—he wasn’t going to get mad no matter how much she held him back or how stupid she could be about some things. The night before last she had put a can of peas in the coals of their fire without ventilating the top and he had fished it out all charred and swelled, about three seconds before it would have gone off like a bomb, maybe blinding them with flying hooks of tin shrapnel. But had he read her out about it? No. He hadn’t. He had made a light joke and passed it off. Same with the pills. He had figured the pills were her business.
   Maybe you should have discussed it with her. Maybe she wanted you to.
   “It wasn’t a friggin encounter session,” he said aloud. It was survival. And she hadn’t been able to cut it. Maybe she had known it, ever since the day in Central Park when she had taken a careless shot at a chinaberry tree with a cheap-looking .32 that might have blown up in her hand. Maybe—
   “Maybe, shit! ” Larry said angrily. He tipped the canteen up to his mouth but it was empty and he still had that slimy taste in his mouth. Maybe there were people like her all over the country. The flu didn’t just leave survivor types, why the hell should it? There might be a young guy somewhere in the country right now, perfect physical condition, immune to the flu but dying of tonsillitis. As Henny Youngman might have said, “Hey, folks, I got a million of em.”
   Larry was sitting on a paved scenic turnout just off the highway. The view of Vermont marching away to New York in the golden morning haze was breathtaking. A sign announced that this was Twelve-Mile Point. Actually Larry thought he could see a lot farther than twelve miles. On a clear day you could see forever. At the far side of the turnout there was a knee-high rock wall, the rocks cemented together, and a few smashed Budweiser bottles. Also a used condom. He supposed that high school kids used to come up here at twilight and watch the lights come on in the town below. First they would get exalted and then they would get laid. BID, as they used to say: big fucking deal.
   So why was he feeling so bad, anyway? He was telling the truth, wasn’t he? Yes. And the worst of the truth was that he felt relief, wasn’t it? That the stone around his neck was gone?
   No, the worst is being alone. Being lonely.
   Corny but true. He wanted someone to share this view with. Someone he could turn to and say with modest wit: On a clear day you can see forever. And the only company was in a tent a mile and a half back with a mouthful of green puke. Getting stiff. Drawing flies.
   Larry put his head on his knees and closed his eyes. He told himself he wouldn’t cry. He hated to cry almost as bad as he hated to puke.
   In the end he was chicken. He couldn’t bury her. He summoned up the worst thoughts he could—maggots and beetles, the woodchucks that would smell her and come in for a munch, the unfairness of one human being leaving another like a candy wrapper or a discarded Pepsi can. But there also seemed to be something vaguely illegal about burying her and to tell the truth (and he was telling the truth now, wasn’t he?), that was just a cheap rationalization. He could face going down to Bennington and breaking into the Ever Popular hardware store, taking the Ever Popular spade and a matching Ever Popular pick; he could even face coming back up here where it was still and beautiful and digging the Ever Popular grave near the Ever Popular Twelve-Mile Point. But to go back into that tent (which would now smell very much like the comfort station on Transverse Number One in Central Park, where the Ever Popular dark sweet treat would be sitting for eternity) and unzip her side of the sleeping bag the rest of the way and pull out her stiff and baggy body and drag it up to the hole by the armpits and tumble it in and then shovel the dirt over it, watching the earth patter on her white legs with their bulging nodules of varicose veins and stick in her hair…
   Uh-uh, buddy. Guess I’ll sit this one out. If I’m a chicken, so be it. Plucka-plucka-plucka.
   He went back to where the tent was pitched and turned back the flap. He found a long stick. He took a deep breath of fresh air, held it, and hooked his clothes out with the stick. Backed away with them, put them on. Took another deep breath, held it, and used the stick to fish out his boots. He sat on a fallen tree and put them on, too.
   The smell was in his clothes.
   “Bullshit,” he whispered.
   He could see her, half in and half out of the sleeping bag, her stiff hand held out and still curled around the pill bottle that was no longer there. Her half-lidded eyes seemed to be staring at him accusingly. It made him think of the tunnel again, and his visions of the walking dead. Quickly he used the stick to close the tent-flap.
   But he could still smell her on him.
   So he made Bennington his first stop after all, and in the Bennington Men’s Shop he stripped off all his clothes and got new ones, three changes plus four pairs of socks and shorts. He even found a new pair of boots. Looking at himself in the three-way mirror he could see the empty store spread out behind him and the Harley leaning raffishly at the curb.
   “Sharp threads,” he murmured. “Heavy-heavy.” But there was no one to admire his taste.
   He left the store and gunned the Harley into life. He supposed he should stop at the hardware store and see if they had a tent and another sleeping bag, but all he wanted now was to get out of Bennington. He would stop farther up the line.
   He looked up toward where the land made its slow rise as he guided the Harley out of town, and he could see Twelve-Mile Point, but not where they had pitched the tent. That was really all for the best, it was—
   Larry looked back at the road and terror jumped nimbly down his throat. An International-Harvester pickup towing a horsetrailer had swerved to avoid a car and the horsetrailer had overturned. He was going to drive the Harley right into it because he hadn’t been looking where he was going.
   He turned hard right, his new boot dragging on the road, and he almost got around. But the left footrest clipped the trailer’s rear bumper and yanked the bike out from under him. Larry came to rest on the highway’s verge with a bone-rattling thump. The Harley chattered on for a moment behind him and then stalled out.
   “You all right?” he asked aloud. Thank God he’d only been doing twenty or so. Thank God Rita wasn’t with him, she’d be bullshit out of her mind with hysterics. Of course if Rita had been with him he wouldn’t have been looking up there in the first place, he would have been TCB, taking care of business to the cubistic among you.
   “I’m all right,” he answered himself, but he still wasn’t sure he was. He sat up. The quiet impressed itself upon him as it did from time to time—it was so quiet that if you thought about it you could go crazy. Even Rita bawling would have been a relief at this point. Everything seemed suddenly full of bright twinkles, and with sudden horror he thought he was going to pass out. He thought, I really am hurt, in just a minute I’ll feel it, when the shock wears off, that’s when I’ll feel it, I’m cut bad or something, and who’s going to put on a tourniquet?
   But when the instant of faintness had passed, he looked at himself and thought he was probably all right after all. He had cut both hands and his new pants had shredded away at the right knee—the knee was also cut—but they were all just scrapes and what the fuck was the big deal, anybody could dump their cycle, it happens to everybody once in a while.
   But he knew what the big deal was. He could have hit his head the right way and fractured his skull and he would have lain there in the hot sun until he died. Or strangled to death on his own puke like a certain now-deceased friend of his.
   He walked shakily over to the Harley and stood it up. It didn’t seem to be damaged in any way, but it looked different. Before, it had just been a machine, a rather charming machine that could serve the dual purpose of transporting him and making him feel like James Dean or Jack Nicholson in Hell’s Angels on Wheels. But now its chrome seemed to grin at him like a sideshow barker, seeming to invite him to step right up and see if he was man enough to ride the two-wheeled monster.
   It started on the third kick, and he putted out of Bennington at no more than walking speed. He was wearing bracelets of cold sweat on his arms and suddenly he had never, no never, in his whole life wanted so badly to see another human face.
   But he didn’t see one that day.
   In the afternoon he made himself speed up a little, but he could not force himself to twist the throttle any farther once the speedometer needle had reached twenty, not even if he could see the road was clear ahead. There was a sporting goods and cycle shop on the outskirts of Wilmington, and he stopped there and got a sleeping bag, some heavy gloves, and a helmet, and even with the helmet on he could not force himself to go faster than twenty-five. On blind corners he slowed down until he was walking the big cycle along. He kept having visions of lying unconscious at the side of the road and bleeding to death unattended.
   At five o’clock, as he was approaching Brattleboro, the Harley’s overheat light went on. Larry parked it and turned it off with mingled feelings of relief and disgust.
   “You might as well have pushed it,” he said. “It’s meant to run at sixty, you goddam fool!”
   He left it and walked into town, not knowing if he would come back for it.
   He slept on the Brattleboro Municipal Common that evening, under the partial shelter of the bandshell. He turned in as soon as it was dark, and fell asleep instantly. Some sound woke him with a jerk a time later. He looked at his watch. The thin radium lines on the dial scratched out eleven-twenty. He got up on one elbow and stared into the darkness, feeling the bandshell huge around him, missing the little tent that had held in body heat. What a fine little canvas womb it had been!
   If there had been a sound, it was gone now; even the crickets had fallen silent. Was that right? Could it be right?
   “Is someone there?” Larry called, and the sound of his own voice frightened him. He groped for the .30-.30 and for a long and increasingly panicky moment could not find it. When he did, he squeezed the trigger without thinking, just as a man drowning in the ocean will squeeze a thrown life preserver. If the safety hadn’t been on, he would have fired it. Possibly into himself.
   There was something in the silence, he was sure of it. Perhaps a person, perhaps some large and dangerous animal. Of course, a person could be dangerous, too. A person like the one who had repeatedly stabbed the poor monster-shouter or like John Bearsford Tipton, who had offered him a million in cold cash for the use of his woman.
   “Who is it?”
   He had a flashlight in his pack, but in order to hunt for it, he would have to let go of the rifle, which he had drawn across his lap: Besides… did he really want to see who it was?
   So he just sat there, willing movement or a repetition of the sound which had awakened him (had it been a sound? or just something he had dreamed?), and after a little while he first nodded, then dozed off.
   Suddenly his head jerked up, his eyes wide, his flesh shrinking against his bones. Now there was sound, and if the night hadn’t been cloudy, the moon, nearly full, would have shown him—
   But he didn’t want to see. No, he most definitely didn’t want to see. Yet he sat forward, head cocked, listening to the sound of dusty bootheels clocking away from him down the sidewalk of Main Street, Brattleboro, Vermont, moving west, fading, until they were lost in the open hum of things.
   Larry felt a sudden mad urge to stand up, letting the sleeping bag slither down around his ankles, to shout: Come back, whoever you are! I don’t care! Come back! But did he really want to issue such a blank check to Whoever? The bandshell would amplify his shout—his plea. And what if those bootheels actually did return, growing louder in a stillness where not even the crickets sang?
   Instead of standing, he lay back down and curled up in the fetal position with his hands wrapped around the rifle. I won’t sleep again tonight, he thought, but he was asleep in three minutes and quite sure the next morning that he had dreamed the whole thing.

Chapter 42
   
While Larry Underwood was taking his Fourth of July spill only a state away, Stuart Redman was sitting on a large rock at the side of the road and eating his lunch. He heard the sound of approaching engines. He finished his can of beer at a swallow and carefully folded over the top of the waxed-paper tube the Ritz crackers were in. His rifle was leaning against the rock beside him. He picked it up, flicked off the safety catch, and then put it down again, a little closer to hand. Motorcycles coming, small ones by the sound. Two-fifties? In this great stillness it was impossible to tell how far away they were. Ten miles, maybe, but only maybe. Plenty of time to eat more if he wanted to, but he didn’t. In the meantime, the sun was warm and the thought of meeting fellow creatures pleasant. He had seen no living people since leaving Glen Bateman’s house in Woodsville. He glanced at the rifle again. He had flicked the safety because the fellow creatures might turn out to be like Elder. He had left the rifle leaning against the rock because he hoped they would be like Bateman—only not quite so glum about the future. Society will reappear, Bateman had said. Notice I didn’t use the word “reform.” That would have been a ghastly pun. There’s precious little reform in the human race.
   But Bateman himself hadn’t wanted to get in on the ground floor of society’s reappearance. He seemed perfectly content—at least for the time being—to go for his walks with Kojak, paint his pictures, putter around his garden, and think about the sociological ramifications of nearly total decimation.
   If you come back this way and renew your invitation to “jine up,” Stu, I’ll probably agree. That is the curse of the human race. Sociability. What Christ should have said was “Yea, verily, whenever two or three of you are gathered together, some other guy is going to get the living shit knocked out of him.” Shall I tell you what sociology teaches us about the human race? I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. Show me a man or woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call “society.” Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.
   Was that true? If it was, then God help them. Just lately Stu had been thinking a great deal about old friends and acquaintances. In his memory there was a great tendency to downplay or completely forget their unlovable characteristics—the way Bill Hapscomb used to pick his nose and wipe the snot on the sole of his shoe, Norm Bruett’s heavy hand with his kids, Billy Verecker’s unpleasant method of controlling the cat population around his house by crushing the thin skulls of the new kittens under the heels of his Range Rider boots.
   The thoughts that came wanted to be wholly good. Going hunting at dawn, bundled up in quilted jackets and Day-Glo orange vests. Poker games at Ralph Hodges’s house and Willy Craddock always complaining about how he was four dollars in the game, even if he was twenty ahead. Six or seven of them pushing Tony Leominster’s Scout back onto the road that time he went down into the ditch drunk out of his mind, Tony staggering around and swearing to God and all the saints that he had swerved to avoid a U-Haul full of Mexican wetbacks. Jesus, how they had laughed. Chris Ortega’s endless stream of ethnic jokes. Going down to Huntsville for whores, and that time Joe Bob Brentwood caught the crabs and tried to tell everybody they came from the sofa in the parlor and not from the girl upstairs. They had been goddam good times. Not what your sophisticates with their nightclubs and their fancy restaurants and their museums would think of as good times, maybe, but good times just the same. He thought about those things, went over them and over them, the way an old recluse will lay out hand after hand of solitaire from a greasy pack of cards. Mostly he wanted to hear other human voices, get to know someone, be able to turn to someone and say, Did you see that? when something happened like the meteor shower he had watched the other night. He was not a talkative man, but he did not care much for being alone, and never had.
   So he sat up a little straighter when the motorcycles finally swept around the bend, and he saw they were a couple of Honda 250s, ridden by a boy of about eighteen and a girl who was maybe older than the boy. The girl was wearing a bright yellow blouse and light blue Levi’s.
   They saw him sitting on the rock, and both Hondas swerved a little as their drivers’ surprise caused control to waver briefly. The boy’s mouth dropped open. For a moment it was unclear whether they would stop or just speed by heading west.
   Stu raised an empty hand and said “Hi!” in an amiable voice. His heart was beating heavily in his chest. He wanted them to stop. They did.
   For a moment he was puzzled by the tenseness in their postures. Particularly the boy; he looked as if a gallon of adrenaline had just been dumped into his blood. Of course Stu had a rifle, but he wasn’t holding it on them and they were armed themselves; he was wearing a pistol and she had a small deer-rifle slung across her back on a strap, like an actress playing Patty Hearst with no great conviction.
   “I think he’s all right, Harold,” the girl said, but the boy she called Harold continued to stand astride his bike, looking at Stu with an expression of surprise and considering antagonism.
   “I said I think—” she began again.
   “How are we supposed to know that?” Harold snapped without taking his eyes off Stu.
   “Well, I’m glad to see you, if that makes any difference,” Stu said.
   “What if I don’t believe you?” Harold challenged, and Stu saw that he was scared green. Scared by him and by his responsibility to the girl.
   “Well, then, I don’t know.” Stu climbed off the rock. Harold’s hand jittered toward his holstered pistol.
   “Harold, you leave that alone,” the girl said. Then she fell silent and for a moment they all seemed helpless to proceed further—a group of three dots which, when connected, would form a triangle whose exact shape could not yet be foreseen.
   “Ouuuu,” Frannie said, easing herself down on a mossy patch at the base of an elm beside the road. “I’m never going to get the calluses off my fanny, Harold.”
   Harold uttered a surly grunt.
   She turned to Stu. “Have you ever ridden a hundred and seventy miles on a Honda, Mr. Redman? Not recommended.”
   Stu smiled. “Where are you headed?”
   “What business is it of yours?” Harold asked rudely.
   “And what kind of attitude is that?” Fran asked him. “Mr. Redman is the first person we’ve seen since Gus Dinsmore died! I mean, if we didn’t come looking for other people, what did we come for?”
   “He’s watching out for you, is all,” Stu said quietly. He picked a piece of grass and put it between his lips.
   “That’s right, I am,” Harold said, unmollified.
   “I thought we were watching out for each other,” she said, and Harold flushed darkly.
   Stu thought: Give me three people and they’ll form a society. But were these the right two for his one? He liked the girl, but the boy impressed him as a frightened blowhard. And a frightened blowhard could be a very dangerous man, under the right circumstances… or the wrong ones.
   “Whatever you say,” Harold muttered. He shot Stu a lowering look and took a box of Marlboros from his jacket pocket. He lit one. He smoked on it like a fellow who had only recently taken up the habit. Like maybe the day before yesterday.
   “We’re going to Stovington, Vermont,” Frannie said. “To the plague center there. We—what’s wrong? Mr. Redman?” He had gone pale all of a sudden. The stem of grass he had been chewing fell onto his lap.
   “Why there?” Stu asked.
   “Because there happens to be an installation there for the studying of communicable diseases,” Harold said loftily. “It was my thought that, if there is any order left in this country, or any persons in authority who escaped the late scourge, they would likely be at Stovington or Atlanta, where there is another such center.”
   “That’s right,” Frannie said.
   Stu said: “You’re wasting your time.”
   Frannie looked stunned. Harold looked indignant; the red began to creep out of his collar again. “I hardly think you’re the best judge of that, my man.”
   “I guess I am. I came from there.”
   Now they both looked stunned. Stunned and astonished.
   “You knew about it?” Frannie asked, shaken. “You checked it out?”
   “No, it wasn’t like that. It—”
   “You’re a liar!” Harold’s voice had gone high and squeaky.
   Fran saw an alarming cold flash of anger in Redman’s eyes, then they were brown and mild again. “No. I ain’t.”
   “I say you are! I say you’re nothing but a—”
   “Harold, you shut up! ”
   Harold looked at her, wounded. “But Frannie, how can you believe—”
   “How can you be so rude and antagonistic?” she asked hotly. “Will you at least listen to what he has to say, Harold?”
   “I don’t trust him.”
   Fair enough, Stu thought, that makes us even.
   “How can you not trust a man you just met? Really, Harold, you’re being disgusting!”
   “Let me tell you how I know,” Stu said quietly. He told an abridged version of the story that began when Campion had crashed into Hap’s pumps. He sketched his escape from Stovington a week ago. Harold glared dully down at his hands, which were plucking up bits of moss and shredding them. But the girl’s face was like an unfolding map of tragic country, and Stu felt bad for her. She had set off with this boy (who, to give him credit, had had a pretty good idea), hoping against hope that there was something of the old taken-for-granted ways left. Well, she had been disappointed. Bitterly so, from her look.
   “Atlanta too? The plague got both of them?” she asked.
   “Yes,” he said, and she burst into tears.
   He wanted to comfort her, but the boy would not take to that. Harold glanced uncomfortably at Fran, then down at the litter of moss on his cuffs. Stu gave her his handkerchief. She thanked him distractedly, without looking up. Harold glared sullenly at him again, the eyes those of a piggy little boy who wants the whole cookie jar to himself. Ain’t he going to be surprised, Stu thought, when he finds out a girl isn’t a jar of cookies.
   When her tears had tapered down to sniffles, she said, “I guess Harold and I owe you our thanks. At least you saved us a long trip with disappointment at the end.”
   “You mean you believe him? Just like that? He tells you a big story and you just… you buy it?”
   “Harold, why would he lie? For what gain?”
   “Well, how do I know what he’s got on his mind?” Harold asked truculently. “Murder, could be. Or rape.”
   “I don’t believe in rape myself,” Stu said mildly. “Maybe you know something about it I don’t.”
   “Stop it,” Fran said. “Harold, won’t you try not to be so awful?”
   “Awful? ” Harold shouted. “I’m trying to watch out for you—us—and that’s so bloodydamn awful? ”
   “Look,” Stu said, and brushed his sleeve up. On the inside of his elbow were several healing needle marks and the last remains of a discolored bruise. “They injected me with all kinds of stuff.”
   “Maybe you’re a junkie,” Harold said.
   Stu rolled his sleeve back down without replying. It was the girl, of course. He had gotten used to the idea of owning her. Well, some girls could be owned and some could not. This one looked like the later type. She was tall and pretty and very fresh-looking. Her dark eyes and hair accentuated a look that could be taken for dewy helplessness. It would be easy to miss that faint line (the I-want line, Stu’s mother had called it) between her eyebrows that became so pronounced when she was put out, the swift capability of her hands, even the forthright way she tossed her hair from her forehead.
   “So now what do we do?” she asked, ignoring Harold’s last contribution to the discussion entirely.
   “Go on anyway,” Harold said, and when she looked over at him with that line furrowing her brow, he added hastily: “Well, we have to go somewhere. Sure, he’s probably telling the truth, but we could double-check. Then decide what’s next.”
   Fran glanced at Stu with an I-don’t-want-to-hurt-your-feelings-but kind of expression. Stu shrugged.
   “Okay?” Harold pressed.
   “I suppose it doesn’t matter,” Frannie said. She picked up a gone-to-seed dandelion and blew away the fluff.
   “You didn’t see anyone at all back the way you came?” Stu asked.
   “There was a dog that seemed to be all right. No people.”
   “I saw a dog, too.” He told them about Bateman and Kojak. When he had finished he said, “I was going toward the coast, but you saying there aren’t any people back that way kind of takes the wind out of my sails.”
   “Sorry,” Harold said, sounding anything but. He stood up. “Ready, Fran?”
   She looked at Stu, hesitated, then stood up. “Back to the wonderful diet machine. Thank you for telling us what you know, Mr. Redman, even if the news wasn’t so hot.”
   “Just a second,” Stu said, also standing up. He hesitated, wondering again if they were right. The girl was, but the boy surely was seventeen and afflicted with a bad case of the I-hate-most-everybodies. But were there enough people left to pick and choose? Stu thought not.
   “I guess we’re both looking for people,” he said. “I’d like to tag along with you, if you’d have me.”
   “No,” Harold said instantly.
   Fran looked from Harold to Stu, troubled. “Maybe we—”
   “You never mind. I say no.”
   “Don’t I get a vote?”
   “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see he only wants one thing? Christ, Fran!”
   “Three’s better than two if there’s trouble,” Stu said, “and I know it’s better than one.”
   “No,” Harold repeated. His hand dropped to the butt of his gun.
   “Yes,” Fran said. “We’d be glad to have you, Mr. Redman.”
   Harold rounded on her, his face angry and hurt. Stu tightened for just a moment, thinking that perhaps he was going to strike her, and then relaxed again. “That’s the way you feel, is it? You were just waiting for some excuse to get rid of me, I get it.” He was so angry that tears had sprung to his eyes, and that made him angrier still. “If that’s the way you want it, okay. You go on with him. I’m done with you.” He stamped off toward where the Hondas were parked.
   Frannie looked at Stu with stricken eyes, then turned toward Harold.
   “Just a minute,” Stu said. “Stay here, please.”
   “Don’t hurt him,” Fran said. “Please.”
   Stu trotted toward Harold, who was astride his Honda and trying to start it up. In his anger he had twisted the throttle all the way over and it was a good thing for him it was flooded, Stu thought; if it actually started up with that much throttle, it would rear back on its rear wheel like a unicycle and pile old Harold into the first tree and land on top of him.
   “You stay away!” Harold screamed angrily at him, and his hand fell onto the butt of the gun again. Stu put his hand on top of Harold’s, as if they were playing slapjack. He put his other hand on Harold’s arm. Harold’s eyes were very wide, and Stu believed he was only an inch or so from becoming dangerous. He wasn’t just jealous of the girl, that had been a bad oversimplification on his part. His personal dignity was wrapped up in it, and his new image of himself as the girl’s protector. God knew what kind of a fuckup he had been before all of this, with his wad of belly and his pointy-toed boots and his stuck-up way of talking. But underneath the new image was the belief that he was still a fuckup and always would be. Underneath was the certainty that there was no such thing as a fresh start. He would have reacted the same way to Bateman, or to a twelve-year-old kid. In any triangle situation he was going to see himself as the lowest point.
   “Harold,” he said, almost into Harold’s ear.
   “Let me go.” His heavy body seemed light in its tension; he was thrumming like alive wire.
   “Harold, are you sleeping with her?”
   Harold’s body gave a shivering jerk and Stu knew he was not.
   “None of your business!”
   “No. Except to get things out where we can see them. She’s not mine, Harold. She’s her own. I’m not going to try to take her away from you. I’m sorry to have to speak so blunt, but it’s best for us to know where we stand. We’re two and one now and if you go off, we’re two and one again. No gain.”
   Harold said nothing, but his trembling hand subsided.
   “I’ll be just as plain as I have to,” Stu went on, still speaking very nearly into Harold’s ear (which was clotted with brown wax), and taking the trouble to speak very, very calmly. “You know and I know that there’s no need for a man to be rapin women. Not if he knows what to do with his hand.”
   “That’s—” Harold licked his lips and then looked over at the side of the road where Fran was still standing, hands cupping elbows, arms crossed just below her breasts, watching them anxiously. “That’s pretty disgusting.”
   “Well maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but when a man’s around a woman who doesn’t want him in bed, that man’s got his choice. I pick the hand every time. I guess you do too since she’s still with you of her own free will. I just want to speak plain, between you and me. I’m not here to squeeze you out like some bully at a country fair dance.”
   Harold’s hand relaxed on the gun and he looked at Stu. “You mean that? I… you promise you won’t tell?”
   Stu nodded.
   “I love her,” Harold said hoarsely. “She doesn’t love me, I know that, but I’m speaking plainly, like you said.”
   “That’s best. I don’t want to cut in. I just want to come along.”
   Compulsively, Harold repeated: “You promise?”
   “Yeah, I do.”
   “All right.”
   He got slowly off the Honda. He and Stu walked back to Fran.
   “He can come,” Harold said. “And I…” He looked at Stu and said with difficult dignity, “I apologize for being such an asshole.”
   “Hooray!” Fran said, and clapped her hands. “Now that that’s settled, where are we going?”
   In the end they went in the direction Fran and Harold had been headed in, west. Stu said he thought Glen Bateman would be glad to have them overnight, if they could reach Woodsville by dark—and he might agree to tag along with them in the morning (at this Harold began to glower again). Stu drove Fran’s Honda, and she rode pillion behind Harold. They stopped in Twin Mountain for lunch and began the slow, cautious business of getting to know each other. Their accents sounded funny to Stu, the way they broadened their a’s and dropped or modified their r’s. He supposed he sounded just as funny to them, maybe funnier.
   They ate in an abandoned lunchroom and Stu found his gaze was drawn again and again to Fran’s face—her lively eyes, the small but determined set of her chin, the way that line formed between her eyes, indexing her emotions. He liked the way she looked and talked; he even liked the way her dark hair was drawn back from her temples. And that was the beginning of his knowing that he did want her, after all.
BOOK II
ON THE BOARDER
JUNE 5 – SEPTEMBER 6, 1990

         
        We come on the ship they call the
        Mayflower
        We come on the ship that sailed the
        moon
        We come in the age’s most uncertain
        hour
        and sing an American tune
        But it’s all right, it’s all right
        You can’t be forever blessed…
         

        Paul Simon



         
        Lookin hard for a drive-in
        Searching for a parking space
        Where hamburgers sizzle on an open grille night and day
        Yes! Jukebox is jumpin with
        records back in the U.S.A .
        Well I’m so glad I’m living in the
        U.S.A .
        Anything you want we got it right
        here in the U.S.A .
         

        Chuck Berry

Chapter 43
   
There was a dead man lying in the middle of Main Street in May, Oklahoma.
   Nick wasn’t surprised. He had seen a lot of corpses since leaving Shoyo, and he suspected he hadn’t seen a thousandth of all the dead people he must have passed. In places, the rich smell of death on the air was enough to make you feel like swooning. One more dead man, more or less, wasn’t going to make any difference.
   But when the dead man sat up, such an explosion of terror rose in him that he again lost control of his bike. It wavered, then wobbled, then crashed, spilling Nick violently onto the pavement of Oklahoma Route 3. He cut his hands and scraped his forehead.
   “Holy gee, mister, but you took a tumble,” the corpse said, coming toward Nick at a pace best described as an amiable stagger. “Didn’t you just? My laws!”
   Nick got none of this. He was looking at a spot on the pavement between his hands where drops of blood from his cut forehead were falling, and wondering how badly he had been cut. When the hand touched him on the shoulder he remembered the corpse and scrambled away on the palms of his hands and the soles of his shoes, the eye not covered with the patch bright with terror.
   “Don’t you take on so,” the corpse said, and Nick saw he wasn’t a corpse at all but a young man who was looking happily at him. He had most of a bottle of whiskey in one hand, and now Nick understood. Not a corpse but a man who had gotten drunk and had passed out in the middle of the road.
   Nick nodded at him and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Just then a drop of blood oozed warmly into the eye that Ray Booth had worked over, making it smart. He raised the eyepatch and swiped his forearm across it. He had a little more vision on that side today, but when he closed his good eye, the world still retreated to something which was little more than a colorful blur. He replaced the patch and then walked slowly to the curb and sat beside a Plymouth with Kansas plates which was slowly settling on its tires. He could see the gash on his forehead reflected in the Plymouth’s bumper. It looked ugly but not deep. He would find the local drugstore, disinfect it, and slap a Band-Aid over it. He thought he still must have enough penicillin in his system to fight off almost anything, but his close call from the bullet-scrape on his leg had given him a horror of infection. He picked scraps of gravel out of his palms, wincing.
   The man with the bottle of whiskey had been watching all of this with no expression at all. If Nick had looked up, it would have struck him as queer immediately. When he had turned away to examine his wound in the bumper’s reflection, the animation had leaked out of the man’s face. It became empty and clean and unlined. He was wearing bib-alls that were clean but faded and heavy workshoes. He stood about five-nine, and his hair was so blond it was nearly white. His eyes were a bright, empty blue, and with the cornsilk hair, his Swedish or Norwegian descent was unmistakable. He looked no more than twenty-three, but Nick found out later he had to be forty-five or close to it because he could remember the end of the Korean War, and how his daddy had come home in uniform a month later. There was no question that he might have made that up. Invention was not Tom Cullen’s long suit.
   He stood there, empty of face, like a robot whose plug has been pulled. Then, little by little, animation seeped back into his face. His whiskey-reddened eyes began to twinkle. He smiled. He had remembered again what this situation called for.
   “Holy gee, mister, but you took a tumble. Didn’t you just? My laws!” He blinked at the amount of blood on Nick’s forehead.
   Nick had a pad of paper and a Bic in his shirt pocket; neither had been jarred loose by the fall. He wrote: “You just scared me. Thought you were dead until you sat up. I’m okay. Is there a drugstore in town?”
   He showed the pad to the man in the bib-alls. The man took it. Looked at what was written there. Handed it back. Smiling, he said, “I’m Tom Cullen. But I can’t read. I only got to third grade but then I was sixteen and my daddy made me quit. He said I was too big.”
   Retarded, Nick thought. I can’t talk and he can’t read. For a moment he was utterly nonplussed.
   “Holy gee, mister, but you took a tumble!” Tom Cullen exclaimed. In a way, it was the first time for both of them. “My laws, didn’t you just!”
   Nick nodded. Replaced the pad and pen. Put a hand over his mouth again and shook his head. Cupped his hands over his ears and shook his head. Placed his left hand against his throat and shook his head.
   Cullen grinned, puzzled. “Got a toothache? I had one once. Gee, it hurt. Didn’t it just? My laws!”
   Nick shook his head and went through his dumbshow again. Cullen guessed earache this time. Nick threw his hands up and went over to his bike. The paint, was scraped, but it didn’t seem hurt. He got on and pedaled a little way up the street. Yes, it was all right. Cullen jogged alongside, smiling happily. His eyes never left Nick. He hadn’t seen anyone for most of a week.
   “Don’t you feel like talkin?” he asked, but Nick didn’t look around or appear to have heard. Tom tugged at his sleeve and repeated his question.
   The man on the bike put his hand over his mouth and shook his head. Tom frowned. Now the man had put his bike on its kickstand and was looking at the storefronts. He seemed to see what he wanted, because he went over to the sidewalk and then to Mr. Norton’s drugstore. If he wanted to go in there it was just too bad, because the drug was locked up. Mr. Norton had left town. Just about everybody had locked up and left town, it seemed like, except for Mom and her friend Mrs. Blakely, and they were both dead.
   Now the no-talking-man was trying the door. Tom could have told him it was no use even though the OPEN sign was on the door. The OPEN sign was a liar. Too bad, because Tom would dearly have loved an ice cream soda. It was a lot better than the whiskey, which had made him feel good at first and then made him sleepy and then had made his head ache fit to split. He had gone to sleep to get away from the headache but he had had a lot of crazy dreams about a man in a black suit like the one that Revrunt Deiffenbaker always wore. The man in the black suit chased him through the dreams. He seemed like a very bad man to Tom. The only reason he had gone to drinking in the first place was because he wasn’t supposed to, his daddy had told him that, and Mom too, but now everyone was gone, so what? He would if he wanted to.
   But what was the no-talking-man doing now? Picked up the litter basket from the sidewalk and he was going to… what? Break Mr. Norton’s window? CRASH! By God and by damn if he didn’t! And now he was reaching through, unlocking the door…
   “Hey, mister, you can’t do that!” Tom cried, his voice throbbing with outrage and excitement. “That’s illegal! M-O-O-N and that spells il -legal. Don’t you know—”
   But the man was already inside and he never turned around.
   “What are you, anyway, deaf?” Tom called indignantly. “My laws! Are you…”
   He trailed off. The animation and excitement left his face. He was the robot with the pulled plug again. In May it had not been an, uncommon sight to see Feeble Tom like this. He would be walking along the street, looking into shop windows with that eternally happy expression on his slightly rounded Scandahoovian face, and all of a sudden he would stop dead and go blank. Someone might shout, “There goes Tom! ” and there would be laughter. If Tom’s daddy was with him he would scowl and elbow Tom, perhaps even sock him repeatedly on the shoulder or the back until Tom came to life. But Tom’s daddy had been around less and less over the first half of 1988 because he was stepping out with a redheaded waitress who worked at Boomer’s Bar & Grille. Her name was DeeDee Packalotte (and weren’t there some jokes about that name), and about a year ago she and Don Cullen run off together. They had been seen just once, in a cheap fleabag motel not far away, in Slapout, Oklahoma, and that had been the last of them.
   Most folks took Tom’s sudden blankouts as a further sign of retardation, but they were actually instances of nearly normal thinking. The human thinking process is based (or so the psychologists tell us) on deduction and induction, and the retarded person is incapable of making these deductive and inductive leaps. There are lines down somewhere inside, circuits shorted out, fouled switches. Tom Cullen was not severely retarded, and he was capable of making simple connections. Every now and then—during his blankouts—he would be capable of making a more sophisticated inductive or deductive connection. He would feel the possibility of making such a connection the way a normal person will sometimes feel a name dancing “right on the tip of his tongue.” When it happened, Tom would dismiss his real world, which was nothing more or less than an instant-by-instant flow of sensory input, and go into his mind. He would be like a man in a darkened unfamiliar room who holds the plug-end of a lampcord in one hand and who goes crawling around on the floor, bumping into things and feeling with his free hand for the electrical socket. And if he found it he didn’t always—there would be a burst of illumination and he would see the room (or the idea) plain. Tom was a sensory creature. A list of his favorite things would have included the taste of an ice cream soda at Mr. Norton’s fountain, watching a pretty girl in a short dress waiting on the corner to cross the street, the smell of lilac, the feel of silk. But more than any of these things he loved the intangible, he loved that moment when the connection would be made, the switch cleared (at least momentarily), the light would go on in the dark room. It didn’t always happen; often the connection eluded him. This time it didn’t.
   He had said, What are you, anyway, deaf?
   The man hadn’t acted like he heard what Tom was saying except for those times he had been looking right at him. And the man hadn’t said anything to him, not even hi. Sometimes people didn’t answer Tom when he asked questions because something in his face told them he was soft upstairs. But when that happened, the person who wouldn’t answer looked mad or sad or kind of blushy. This man didn’t act like that—he had given Tom a circle made of his thumb and forefinger and Tom knew that meant Okey Dokey… but still he didn’t talk.
   Hands over his ears and a shake of his head.
   Hands over his mouth and the same.
   Hands over his neck and the same again.
   The room lit up: connection made.
   “My laws!” Tom said, and the animation came back into his face. His bloodshot eyes glowed. He rushed into Norton’s Drugstore, forgetting that it was illegal to do so. The no-talking-man was squirting something that smelled like Bactine onto cotton and was then wiping the cotton on his forehead.
   “Hey mister!” Tom said, rushing up. The no-talking-man didn’t turn around. Tom was momentarily puzzled, and then he remembered. He tapped Nick on the shoulder and Nick turned. “You’re deaf n dumb, right? Can’t hear! Can’t talk! Right?”
   Nick nodded. And to him, Tom’s reaction was nothing short of amazing. He jumped into the air and clapped his hands wildly.
   “I thought of it! Hooray for me! I thought of it myself! Hooray for Tom Cullen!”
   Nick had to grin. He couldn’t remember when his disability had brought someone so much pleasure.
   There was a small town square fronting on the courthouse, and in this square was a statue of a Marine tricked out in World War II kit and weaponry. The plaque beneath announced that this monument was dedicated to the boys from Harper County who had made the ULTIMATE SACRIFICE FOR THEIR COUNTRY. In the shade of this monument Nick Andros and Tom Cullen sat, eating Underwood Deviled Ham and Underwood Deviled Chicken on potato chips. Nick had an x of Band-Aids on his forehead above his left eye. He was reading Tom’s lips (which was a little tough, because Tom kept stuffing food through what he was saying) and reflecting to himself that he was getting damned tired of eating stuff which came out of cans. What he would really like was a big steak with all the trimmings.
   Tom hadn’t stopped talking since they sat down. It was pretty repetitious stuff, with many ejaculations of My laws! and Wasn’t it just? thrown in for seasoning. Nick didn’t mind. He hadn’t really known how much he missed other people until he met Tom, or how much he had been secretly afraid that he was the only one left, out of all the earth. It had even crossed his mind at one point that maybe the disease had killed everyone in the world but deaf-mutes. Now, he thought with an interior smile, he could speculate on the possibility that it had killed everyone in the world but deaf-mutes and the mentally retarded. That thought, which seemed amusing in the two o’clock light of a summer’s afternoon, would come back to haunt him that night and not seem funny at all.
   He wondered where Tom thought all the people had gone. He had already heard about Tom’s daddy, who had run off a couple of years before with a waitress, and about Tom’s job as a handyman out on the Norbutt farm and how, two years ago, Mr. Norbutt had decided Tom was “getting on well enough” to be trusted handling an axe, and about the “big boys” who had jumped Tom one night and how Tom had “fought em all off ‘til they was just about dead, and I put one of em in the hospital with ruptures, M-O-O-N, that spells ruptures, that’s what Tom Cullen did,” and he had heard about how Tom had found his mother at Mrs. Blakely’s house and they were both dead in the living room and so Tom had stolen away. Jesus wouldn’t come and take dead people up to heaven if anyone was watching, Tom said (Nick reflected that Tom’s Jesus was a kind of Santa Claus in reverse, taking dead people up the chimney instead of bringing presents down). But he had said nothing at all about May’s total emptiness, or the road arrowing in and out of town on which nothing moved.
   He put his hands lightly on Tom’s chest, stopping the flow of words.
   “What?” Tom asked.
   Nick waved his arm in a large circle at the buildings of the downtown area. He put a burlesque expression of puzzlement on his face, wrinkling his brow, cocking his head, scratching the back of his skull. Then he made walking motions with his fingers on the grass and finished by looking up at Tom questioningly.
   What he saw was alarming. Tom might have died sitting up for all the animation on his face. His eyes, which had been sparkling a moment before with all the things he wanted to tell, were now cloudy blue marbles. His mouth hung ajar so Nick could see the soggy potato chip crumbs lying on his tongue. His hands were lax in his lap.
   Concerned, Nick reached out to touch him. Before he could, Tom’s body gave a jerk. His eyelids fluttered, and the animation flowed back into his eyes like water filling a pail. He began to grin. If a balloon containing the word EUREKA had appeared over his head, what had happened would not have been more plain.
   “You want to know where all the people went!” Tom exclaimed.
   Nick nodded his head strongly.
   “Well, I guess they went to Kansas City,” Tom said. “My laws, yes. Everybody’s always talkin about what a little town this is. Nothin happens. No fun. Even the roller-skating place went bust. Now there’s nothin but the drive-in, and that doesn’t show anything but those diddly-daddly pitchers. My mom always says people leaves but no people comes back. Just like my dad, he run off with a waitress from Boomer’s Café, her name was M-O-O-N, that spells DeeDee Packalotte. So I guess everybody just got fed up and went at the same time. To Kansas City it must have been, my laws, didn’t they just? That’s where they must have gone. Except for Mrs. Blakely and my mom. Jesus is going to take them up to heaven up above and rock them in the everlasting harms.”
   Tom’s monologue recommenced.
   Gone to Kansas City, Nick thought. For all I know, that could be it, too. Everybody left on the poor sad planet picked up by the Hand of God and either rocked in the everlasting harms of Same or set down again in Kansas City.
   He leaned back and his eyelids fluttered so that Tom’s words broke up into the visual equivalent of a modern poem, sans caps, like a work by e.e. cummings:
   mother said
   ain’t got no
   but i said to them i said you better
   not mess with
   The dreams had been bad the night before, which he had spent in a barn, and now, with his belly full, all he wanted was…
   my laws
   M-O-O-N that spells
   sure do wish
   Nick fell asleep.
   Waking up, he first wondered in that dazed way you have when you sleep heavily in the middle of the day why he was sweating so much. Sitting up, he understood. It was quarter to five in the afternoon; he had slept over two and a half hours and the sun had moved out from behind the war memorial. But that was not all. Tom Cullen, in a perfect orgy of solicitude, had covered him so he would not take a chill. With two blankets and a quilt.
   He threw them aside, stood up, stretched. Tom was not in sight. Nick walked slowly toward the main entrance to the square, wondering what—if anything—he was going to do about Tom… or with him. The retarded fellow had been feeding himself from the A&P on the far side of the town square. He had felt no compunction about going in there and picking out what he wanted to eat by the pictures on the labels of the cans because, Tom said, the supermarket door had been unlocked.
   Nick wondered idly what Tom would have done if it hadn’t been. He supposed that, when he’d gotten hungry enough, he would have forgotten his scruples, or laid them aside for the nonce. But what would become of him when the food was gone?
   But that wasn’t what really bothered him about Tom. It was the pathetic eagerness with which the man had greeted him. Retarded he might be, Nick thought, but he was not too retarded to feel loneliness. Both his mother and the woman who had served as his commonlaw aunt were dead. His dad had run off long before. His employer, Mr. Norbutt, and everyone else in May had stolen off to Kansas City one night while Tom slept, leaving him behind to wander up and down Main Street like a gently unhinged ghost. And he was getting into things he had no business getting into—like the whiskey. If he got drunk again, he might hurt himself. And if he got hurt with no one to take care of him, it would probably mean the end of him.
   But… a deaf-mute and a man who was mentally retarded? Of what possible use could they be to each other? Here you got one guy who can’t talk and another guy who can’t think. Well, that wasn’t fair. Tom could think at least a little, but he couldn’t read, and Nick had no illusions about how long it would take him to get tired of playing charades with Tom Cullen. Not that Tom would get tired of it. Laws, no.
   He stopped on the sidewalk just outside the park’s entrance, hands stuffed in his pockets. Well, he decided, I can spend the night here with him. One night won’t matter. I can cook him a decent meal at the very least.
   Cheered a little by this, he went to find Tom.
   Nick slept in the park that night. He didn’t know where Tom slept, but when he woke up the next morning, slightly dewy but feeling pretty good otherwise, the first thing he saw when he crossed the town square was Tom, crouched over a fleet of toy Corgi cars and a large plastic Texaco station.
   Tom must have decided that if it was all right to break into Norton’s Drug Store, it was all right to break into another place. He was sitting on the curb of the five-and-ten, his back to Nick. About forty model cars were lined up along the edge of the sidewalk. Next to them was the screwdriver Tom had used to jimmy the display case open. There were Jaguars, Mercedes-Benzes, Rolls-Royces, a scale-model Bentley with a long, lime-green cowling, a Lamborghini, a Cord, a four-inch-long customized Pontiac Bonneville, a Corvette, a Maserati, and, God watch over us and protect us, a 1933 Moon. Tom was hunched over these studiously, driving them in and out of the garage, gassing them up at the toy pump. One of the lifts in the repair bay worked, Nick saw, and from time to time Tom would raise one of the cars up on it and, pretend to do something underneath. If he had been able to hear, he would have heard, in the nearly perfect silence, the sound of Tom Cullen’s imagination at work—the lip-vibrating brrrrrr as he drove the cars onto the Fisher-Price tarmac, the chk-chk-chk-ding! of the gas-pump at work, the ssshhhhhhh as the lift inside went up and down. As it was, he could catch some of the conversation between the station proprietor and the little people in the little cars: Fill that up, sir? Regular? You bet! Just let me get that windshield, ma’am. I think it’s your carb. Let’s put her up in the air and take a look at the bass-tud. Restrooms? You bet! Right around the side there!
   And over this, arching for miles in every direction, the sky God had allocated to this little bit of Oklahoma.
   Nick thought: I can’t leave him. I can’t do that. And he was suddenly swept by a bitter and totally unexpected sadness, a feeling so deep he thought for a moment he would weep.
   They’ve gone to Kansas City, he thought. That’s what’s happened. They’ve all gone to Kansas City.
   Nick walked across the street and tapped Tom on the arm. Tom jumped and looked over his shoulder. A large and guilty smile stretched his lips, and a blush climbed out of his shirt collar.
   “I know it’s for little boys and not for grown men,” he said. “I know that, laws yes, Daddy tole me.”
   Nick shrugged, smiled, spread his hands. Tom looked relieved.
   “It’s mine now. Mine if I want it. If you could go in the drug and get something, I could go into the five-and-dime and get something. My laws, couldn’t I just? I don’t have to put it back, do I?”
   Nick shook his head.
   “Mine,” Tom said happily, and turned back to the garage. Nick tapped him again and Tom looked back. “What?”
   Nick tugged his sleeve and Tom stood up willingly enough. Nick led him down the street to where his bike leaned on its kickstand. He pointed to himself. Then at the bike. Tom nodded.
   “Sure. That bike is yours. That Texaco garage is mine. I won’t take your bike and you won’t take my garage. Laws, no!”
   Nick shook his head. He pointed at himself. At the bike. Then down Main Street. He waved his fingers: byebye.
   Tom became very still. Nick waited. Tom said hesitantly: “You movin on, mister?”
   Nick nodded.
   “I don’t want you to!” Tom burst out. His eyes were wide and very blue, sparkling with tears. “I like you! I don’t want you to go to Kansas City, too!”
   Nick pulled Tom next to him and put an arm around him. Pointed to himself. To Tom. To the bike. Out of town.
   “I don’t getcha,” Tom said.
   Patiently, Nick went through it again. This time he added the byebye wave, and in a burst of inspiration he lifted Tom’s hand and made it wave byebye, too.
   “Want me to go with you?” Tom asked. A smile of disbelieving delight lit up his face.
   Relieved, Nick nodded.
   “Sure!” Tom shouted. “Tom Cullen’s gonna go! Tom’s—” He halted, some of the happiness dying out of his face, and looked at Nick cautiously. “Can I take my garage?”
   Nick thought about it a moment and then nodded his head yes.
   “Okay!” Tom’s grin reappeared like the sun from behind a cloud. “Tom Cullen’s going!”
   Nick led him to the bike. He pointed at Tom, then at the bike.
   “I never rode one like that,” Tom said doubtfully, eyeing the bike’s gearshift and the high, narrow seat. “I guess I better not. Tom Cullen would fall off a fancy bike like that.”
   But Nick was provisionally encouraged. I never rode one like that meant that he had ridden some sort of bike. It was only a question of finding a nice simple one. Tom was going to slow him down, that was inevitable, but perhaps not too much after all. And what was the hurry, anyway? Dreams were only dreams. But he did feel an inner urge to hurry, something so strong yet indefinable that it amounted to a subconscious command.
   He led Tom back to his filling station. He pointed at it, then smiled and nodded at Tom. Tom squatted down eagerly, and then his hands paused in the act of reaching for a couple of cars. He looked up at Nick, his face troubled and transparently suspicious. “You ain’t gonna go without Tom Cullen, are you?”
   Nick shook his head firmly.
   “Okay,” Tom said, and turned confidently to his toys. Before he could stop himself, Nick had ruffled the man’s hair. Tom looked up and smiles shyly at him. Nick smiled back. No, he couldn’t just leave him. That was sure.
   It was almost noon before he found a bike which he thought would suit Tom. He hadn’t expected it to take anywhere near as long as it did, but a surprising majority of people had locked their houses, garages, and outbuildings. In most cases he was reduced to peering into shadowy garages through dirty, cobwebby windows, hoping to spot the right bike. He spent a good three hours trudging from street to street with the sweat pouring off him and the sun pounding steadily against the back of his neck. At one point he had gone back to recheck the Western Auto, but that was no good; the two bikes in the show window were his-and-hers three-speeds and everything else was unassembled.
   In the end he found what he was looking for in a small detached garage at the southern end of town. The garage was locked, but—it had one window big enough to crawl through. Nick broke the glass with a rock and carefully picked the remaining slivers out of the old, crumbling putty. Inside, the garage was explosively hot and furry with a thick oil-and-dust smell. The bike, an old-fashioned boy’s Schwinn, stood next to a ten-year-old Merc station wagon with balding tires and flaking rocker panels.
   The way my luck’s running the damn bike’ll be busted, Nick thought. No chain, flat tires, something. But this time his luck was in. The bike rolled easily. The tires were up and had good tread; all the bolts and sprockets seemed tight. There was no bike basket, he would have to remedy that, but there was a chainguard and hung neatly on the wall between a rake and a snowshovel was an unexpected bonus: a nearly new Briggs hand-pump.
   He hunted further and found a can of 3-in-One Oil on a shelf. Nick sat down on the cracked cement floor, now unmindful of the heat, and carefully oiled the chain and both sprockets. That done, he recapped the 3-in-One and carefully put it in his pants pocket.
   He tied the bike-pump to the package carrier on the Schwinn’s back fender with a hank of hayrope, then unlocked the garage door and ran it up. Fresh air had never smelled so sweet. He closed his eyes, inhaled it deeply, wheeled the bike out to the road, got on, and pedaled slowly down Main Street. The bike rode fine. It would be just the ticket for Tom… assuming he really could ride it.
   He parked it beside his Raleigh and went into the five-and-dime. He found a good-sized wire bike basket in a jumble of sporting goods near the back of the store and was turning to leave with it under his arm when something else caught his eye: a Klaxon horn with a chrome bell and a large red rubber bulb. Grinning, Nick put the horn in the basket and then went over to the hardware section for a screwdriver and an adjustable wrench. He went back outside. Tom was sprawled peacefully in the shade of the old World War II Marine in the town square, napping.
   Nick put the basket on the Schwinn’s handlebars and attached the Klaxon horn beside it. He went back into the five-and-dime and came out with a good-sized tote-bag.
   He took it up to the A&P and filled it with canned meat, fruit, and vegetables. He was pausing over some canned chili beans when he saw a shadow flit by on the aisle facing him. If he had been able to hear, he would already have been aware that Tom had discovered his bike. The Klaxon’s hoarse and drawn-out cry of Howww-OOO-Gah! floated up and down the street, punctuated by Tom Cullen’s giggles.
   Nick pushed out through the supermarket’s doors and saw Tom speeding grandly down Main, his blond hair and his shirttail whipping out behind him, squeezing the bulb of the Klaxon horn for all it was worth. At the Arco station that marked the end of the business section he whirled around and pedaled back. There was a huge and triumphant grin on his face. The Fisher-Price garage sat in the bikes basket. His pants pockets and the flap pockets of his khaki shirt bulged with scale-model Corgi cars. The sun flashed bright, revolving circles in the wheelspokes. A little wistfully Nick wished he could hear the sound of the horn, just to see if it pleased him as much as it was pleasing to Tom.
   Tom waved to him and continued on up the street. At the far end of the business section he swerved around again and rode back, still squeezing the horn. Nick held his hand out, a policeman’s order to stop. Tom brought the bike to a skidding halt in front of him. Sweat stood out on his face in great beads. The bike-pump’s rubber hose flopped. Tom was panting and grinning.
   Nick pointed out of town and waved byebye.
   “Can I still take my garage?”
   Nick nodded and slipped the strap of the tote bag over Tom’s bull neck.
   “We going right now?”
   Nick nodded again. Made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.
   “To Kansas City?”
   Nick shook his head.
   “To anywhere we want?”
   Nick nodded. Yes. Anywhere they wanted, he thought, but anywhere would most likely turn out to be somewhere in Nebraska.
   “Wow!” Tom said happily. “Okay! Yeah! Wow!”
   They got on Route 283 going north and had ridden only two and a half hours when thunderheads began to build up in the west. The storm came at them quickly, riding on a gauzy caul of rain. Nick couldn’t hear the thunderclaps, but he could see forks of lightning stabbing down from the clouds. They were bright enough to dazzle the eyes with bluish-purple afterimages. As they approached the outskirts of Rosston, where Nick meant to turn east on Route 64, the veil of rain under the clouds disappeared and the sky turned a still and queerly ominous shade of yellow. The wind, which had been freshening against his left cheek, died away altogether. He began to feel extremely nervous without knowing why, and oddly clumsy. No one had ever told him that one of the few instincts man still shares with the lower animals is exactly that response to a sudden and radical drop in the air pressure.
   Then Tom was tugging at his sleeve, tugging him frantically. Nick looked over at him. He was startled to see that all the color had gone out of Tom’s face. His eyes were huge, floating saucers.
   “Tornado! ” Tom screamed. “There’s a tornado coming! ”
   Nick looked for a funnel and saw none. He turned back to Tom, trying to think of a way to reassure him. But Tom was gone. He was riding his bike into the field at the right of the road, beating a twisted, flattened path through the high grass.
   Goddamned fool, Nick thought angrily. You’re going to break your fucking axle!
   Tom was making for a barn with an attached silo which stood at the end of a dirt road about a quarter of a mile long. Nick, still feeling nervous, pedaled his own bike up the highway, lifted it over the cattle-gate, and then pedaled up the dirt feeder road to the barn. Tom’s bike lay on the dirt fill outside. He hadn’t even bothered to put the kickstand down. Nick would have chalked this up to simple forgetfulness if he hadn’t seen Tom use the kickstand several times before. He’s scared right out of what little mind he has, Nick thought.
   His own uneasiness made him take one last look over his shoulder, and what he saw coming froze him coldly in his tracks.
   A horrible darkness was coming out of the west. It was not a cloud; it was more like a total absence of light. It was in the shape of a funnel, and at first glance it looked a thousand feet high. It was wider at the top than at the bottom; the bottom was not quite touching the earth. At its summit, the very clouds seemed to be fleeing from it, as if it possessed some mysterious power of repulsion.
   As Nick watched, it touched down about three quarters of a mile away and a long blue building with a roof made of corrugated metal—an auto supply place, or perhaps a lumber storage shed—exploded with a loud bang. He could not hear this, of course, but the vibration struck him, rocking him back on his feet. And the building seemed to explode inward, as if the funnel had sucked all the air out of it. The next moment the tin roof broke in two. The sections whirled upward, spinning and spinning like a top gone insane. Fascinated, Nick craned his neck to follow their progress.
   I am looking at whatever it is in my worst dreams, Nick thought, and it is not a man at all, although it may sometimes look like a man. What it really is is a tornado. One almighty big black twister ripping out of the west, sucking up anything and everything unlucky enough to be in its path. It’s —
   Then he was grabbed by both arms and literally jerked off his feet and into the barn. He looked around at Tom Cullen and was momentarily surprised to see him. In his fascination with the storm, he had quite forgotten that Tom Cullen existed.
   “Downstairs!” Tom panted. “Quick! Quick! Oh my laws, yes! Tornado! Tornado! ”
   At last Nick was fully, consciously afraid, ripped out of the half-entranced state he had been in and aware again of where he was and who he was with. As he let Tom lead him to the stairs going down into the barn’s storm cellar, he became aware of a strange, thrumming vibration. It was the closest thing to sound he had ever experienced. It was like a nagging ache in the center of his brain. Then, as he went down the stairs behind Tom, he saw something he would never forget: the plank siding of the barn being pulled out board by board, pulled out and whirled up into the cloudy air, like rotted brown teeth being pulled out by invisible forceps. The hay littered on the floor began to rise and whirl in a dozen miniature tornado funnels, nodding and dipping and skipping. That thrumming vibration grew ever more persistent.
   Then Tom was pushing open a heavy wooden door, thrusting him through. Nick smelled wet mold and decay. In the last instant of light he saw they were sharing the storm cellar with a family of rat-gnawed corpses. Then Tom slammed the door shut and they were in perfect darkness. The vibration lessened but did not cease completely even then.
   Panic crept up on him with its cloak open and gathered him in. The blackness reduced his senses to touch and smell, and neither of them sent messages which were comforting. He could feel the constant vibration of the boards beneath his feet, and the smell was death.
   Tom clutched his hand blindly and Nick drew the retarded man next to him. He could feel Tom trembling, and he wondered if Tom was crying, or perhaps trying to speak to him. The thought eased some of his own fear and he slung an arm about Tom’s shoulders. Tom reciprocated and they stood bolt upright in the dark, clinging to each other.
   The vibration grew stronger under Nick’s feet; even the air seemed to be trembling lightly against his face. Tom held him more tightly still. Blind and deaf, he waited for what might happen next and reflected that if Ray Booth had gotten his other eye, all of life would be like this. If that had happened, he believed he would have shot himself in the head days ago and had done with it.
   Later he would be almost unable to believe his watch, which insisted that they had spent only fifteen minutes in the darkness of the storm cellar, although logic told him that since the watch was still running, it must be so. Never before in his life had he understood how subjective, how plastic, time really is. It seemed that it must have been at least an hour, probably two or three. And as the time passed, he became convinced that he and Tom were not alone in the storm cellar. Oh, there were the bodies—some poor guy had brought his family down here near the end, perhaps on the fevered assumption that, since they had weathered other natural disasters down here, they could weather this here one, too—but it wasn’t the bodies that he meant. To Nick’s mind, a corpse was just a thing, no different than a chair or a typewriter or a rug. A corpse was just an inanimate thing which filled space. What he felt was the presence of another being, and he became more and more convinced who—or what—it was.
   It was the dark man, the man who came to life in his dreams, the creature whose spirit he had sensed in the black heart of the cyclone.
   Somewhere… over in the corner or perhaps right behind them… he was watching them. And waiting. At the right moment he would touch them and they would both… what? Go mad with fear, of course. Just that. He could see them. Nick was sure he could see them. He had eyes which could see in the dark like a cat’s eyes, or those of some weird alien creature. Like the one in that movie, Predator, perhaps. Yes—like that. The dark man could see tones of the spectrum that human eyes could never attain to, and to him everything would look slow and red, as if the whole world had been tie-dyed in a vat of gore.
   At first Nick was able to divide this fantasy from reality, but as time passed, he became more and more sure that the fantasy was reality. He fancied he could feel the dark man’s breath on the back of his neck.
   He was about to make a lunge at the door, open it and flee upstairs no matter what, when Tom did it for him. The arm around Nick’s shoulders was suddenly gone. The next instant the door of the storm cellar banged open, letting in a flood of dazzling white light that made Nick raise a hand to shield his good eye. He caught just a ghostly, wavering glimpse of Tom Cullen staggering and stumbling up the stairs, and then he followed, groping his way in the dazzle. By the time he got to the top, his eye had adjusted.
   He thought that the light hadn’t been so bright when they went down, and saw why immediately. The roof had been torn off the barn. It seemed to have been almost surgically removed; the job was so clean that there were no splinters and hardly any litter lying on the floor it had once sheltered. Three roofbeams hung down from the sides of the loft, and almost all the boards had been stripped off the sides. Standing here was like standing inside the picked skeleton of a prehistoric monster.
   Tom had not stopped to inventory the damage. He was fleeing the barn as if the devil himself was at his heels. He looked back just once, his eyes huge and almost comically terrified. Nick could not resist a look back over his shoulder and into the storm cellar. The stairs pitched and yawed downward into shadow, old wood, splintered and sunken in the center of each riser. He could see littered straw on the floor and two sets of hands protruding from the shadow. The fingers had been stripped down to the bone by rats.
   If there was anyone else down there, Nick did not see him.
   Nor did he want to.
   He followed Tom outside.
   Tom was standing by his bicycle, shivering. Nick was momentarily bemused by the freaky choosiness of the tornado, which had taken most of the barn but had disdained their bikes, when he saw that Tom was weeping. Nick went over to him and put an arm about his shoulders. Tom was staring, wide-eyed, at the sagging double doors of the barn. Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle. Tom’s eyes dropped to this briefly, but the smile Nick had hoped for did not surface on Tom’s face. He simply went back to staring at the barn. His eyes had a vacant, fixated cast Nick didn’t like at all.
   

 “Someone was in there,” Tom said abruptly.
   Nick smiled, but the smile felt cold on his lips. He had no idea how good the imitation looked, but it felt crappy. He pointed to Tom, to himself, and then made a sharp cutting gesture through the air with the side of his hand.
   “No,” Tom said. “Not just us. Someone else. Someone who came out of the twister.”
   Nick shrugged.
   “Can we go now? Please?”
   Nick nodded.
   They trundled their bicycles back to the highway, using the path of uprooted grass and torn soil that the tornado had made. It had touched down on the west side of Rosston, had cut across US 283 on a west-to-east course, throwing guardrails and connecting cable into the air like piano wire, had skirted the barn to their left and ploughed directly through the house which stood—had stood—in front of it. Four hundred yards farther along, its track through the field abruptly ceased. Now the clouds had begun to break up (although it was still showering, lightly and refreshingly) and birds were singing unconcernedly.
   Nick watched the hefty muscles under Tom’s shirt work as he lifted his bike over the jumble of guardrail cable on the verge of the highway. That guy saved my life, he thought. I never saw a twister in my life before today. If I’d left him behind back there in May like I thought about doing, I’d be as dead as a doornail right about now.
   He lifted his bike over the frayed cables and clapped Tom on the back and smiled at him.
   We’ve got to find somebody else, Nick thought. We’ve got to, just so I can tell him thanks. And my name. He doesn’t even know my name, because he can’t read.
   He stood there for a moment, bemused by this, and then they mounted their bikes and rode away.
   They camped that night in left field of the Rosston Jaycees’ Little League ballfield. The evening was cloudless and starry. Nick’s sleep came quickly and was dreamless. He woke up at dawn the next morning, thinking how good it was to be with someone again, what a difference it made.
   There really was a Polk County, Nebraska. At first that had given him a start, but he had traveled all over the last few years. He must have talked to somebody who mentioned Polk County, or who had come from Polk County, and his conscious mind had just forgotten it. There was a Route 30, too. But he couldn’t really believe, at least not in the bright day of this early morning, that they were actually going to find an old Negro woman sitting on her porch in the middle of a field of corn and accompanying herself on a guitar while she sang hymns. He didn’t believe in precognition or in visions. But it seemed important to go somewhere, to look for people. In a way he shared Fran Goldsmith’s and Stu Redman’s urge to regroup. Until that could be done, everything would remain alien and out of joint. There was danger everywhere. You couldn’t see it but you could feel it, the way he thought he had felt the presence of the dark man in that cellar yesterday. You felt that danger was everywhere, inside the houses, around the next bend in the highway, maybe even hiding beneath the cars and trucks littered all over the main roads. And if it wasn’t there, it was in the calendar, hidden just two or three leaves down. Danger, every particle of his being seemed to whisper it. BRIDGE OUT. FORTY MILES OF BAD ROAD. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR PERSONS PROCEEDING BEYOND THIS POINT.
   Part of it was the tremendous, walloping psychological shock of the empty countryside. As long as he had been in Shoyo, he had been partially protected from it. It didn’t matter if Shoyo was empty, at least not too much, because Shoyo was so small in the scheme of things. But when you got moving, it was as if… well, he remembered a Walt Disney movie he had seen as a kid, a nature thing. Filling the screen was this tulip, this one tulip, so beautiful it just made you want to hold your breath. Then the camera pulled back with dizzying suddenness and you saw a whole field filled with tulips. It knocked you flat. It produced total sensory overload and some internal circuit breaker fell with a sizzle, cutting off the input. It was too much. And that was how this trip had been. Shoyo was empty and he could adjust to that. But McNab was empty, too, and Texarkana, and Spencerville; Ardmore had burned right to the ground. He had come north on Highway 81 and had only seen deer. Twice he had seen what were probably signs of living people: a campfire perhaps two days old, and a deer that had been shot and neatly cleaned out. But no people. It was enough to screw you all up, because the enormity of it was steadily creeping up on you. It wasn’t just Shoyo or McNab or Texarkana; it was America, lying here like a huge discarded tin can with a few forgotten peas rolling around in the bottom. And beyond America was the whole world, and thinking of that made Nick feel so dizzy and sick that he had to give up.
   He bent over the atlas instead. If they kept rolling, maybe they would be like a snowball going downhill, getting bigger. With any luck they would pick up a few more people between here and Nebraska (or be picked up themselves, if they met a larger group). After Nebraska he supposed they would go somewhere else. It was like a quest with no object in view at the end of it—no Grail, no sword plunged into an anvil.
   We’ll cut northeast, he thought, up into Kansas. Highway 35 would take them to another version of 81, and 81 would take them all the way to Swedeholm, Nebraska, where it intersected Nebraska Route 92 at a perfect right angle. Another highway, Route 30, connected the two, the hypotenuse of a right triangle. And somewhere in that triangle was the country of his dream.
   Thinking about it gave him a queer, anticipatory thrill.
   Movement at the top of his vision made him look up. Tom was sitting, both fists screwed into his eyes. A cavernous yawn seemed to make the whole bottom half of his face disappear. Nick grinned at him and Tom grinned back.
   “We gonna ride some more today?” Tom asked, and Nick nodded. “Gee, that’s good. I like to ride my bike. Laws, yes! I hope we never stop!”
   Putting the atlas away Nick thought: And who knows? You may get your wish.
   They turned east that morning and ate their lunch at a crossroads not far from the Oklahoma-Kansas border. It was July 7, and hot.
   Shortly before they stopped to eat, Tom brought his bike to its customary skidding halt. He was staring at a signpost which had been sunk into a cement plug half-buried in the soft shoulder at the side of the road. Nick looked at it. The sign said: YOU ARE LEAVING HARPER COUNTY, OKLAHOMA—YOU ARE ENTERING WOODS COUNTY, OKLAHOMA.
   “I can read that,” Tom said, and if Nick had been able to hear, he would have been partly amused and partly touched by the way Tom’s voice climbed into a high, reedy, and declamatory register: “You are now going out of Harper County. You are now going into Woods County.” He turned to Nick. “You know what, mister?”
   Nick shook his head.
   “I never been out of Harper County in my life, laws, no, not Tom Cullen. But once my daddy took me out here and showed me this sign. He told me if he ever caught me t’other side of it, he’d whale the tar out of me. I sure hope he don’t catch us over there in Woods County. You think he will?”
   Nick shook his head emphatically.
   “Is Kansas City in Woods County?”
   Nick shook his head again.
   “But we’re going into Woods County before we go anyplace else, ain’t we?”
   Nick nodded.
   Tom’s eyes gleamed. “Is it the world?”
   Nick didn’t understand. He frowned… raised his eyebrows… shrugged.
   “The world is the place I mean,” Tom said. “Are we going into the world, mister?” Tom hesitated and then asked with hesitant gravity: “Is Woods the word for world?”
   Slowly, Nick nodded his head.
   “Okay,” Tom said. He looked at the sign for a moment, then wiped his right eye, from which a single tear had trickled. Then he hopped back onto his bike. “Okay, let’s go.” He biked over the county line without another word, and Nick followed.
   They crossed into Kansas just before it got too dark to ride any farther. Tom had turned sulky and tired after supper; he wanted to play with his garage. He wanted to watch TV. He didn’t want to ride anymore because his bum hurt from the seat. He had no conception of state lines and felt none of the lift Nick did when they passed another sign, this one saying YOU ARE NOW ENTERING KANSAS. By then the dusk was so thick that the white letters seemed to float inches above the brown sign, like spirits.
   They camped a quarter of a mile over the line, beneath a water tower standing on tall steel legs like an H.G. Wells Martian. Tom was asleep as soon as he crawled into his sleeping bag. Nick sat awhile, watching the stars come out. The land was utterly dark, and for him, utterly still. Shortly before crawling in himself, a crow fluttered down to a fencepost nearby and seemed to be watching him. Its small black eyes were rimmed with half-circles of blood—reflection from a bloated orange summer moon that had risen silently. There was something about the crow Nick didn’t like; it made him uneasy. He found a big dirt-clod and pegged it at the crow. It fluttered its wings, seemed to fix him with a baleful glare, and was gone into the night.
   That night he dreamed of the man with no face standing on the high roof, his hands stretched out to the east, and then of the corn—corn higher than his head—and the sound of the music. Only this time he knew it was music and this time he knew it was a guitar. He awoke near dawn with a painfully full bladder and her words ringing in his ears: Mother Abagail is what they call me… you come see me anytime.
   Late that afternoon, moving east through Comanche County on Highway 160, they sat astride their bikes in amazement, watching a small herd of buffalo—a dozen in all, perhaps—walking calmly back and forth across the road in search of good graze. There had been a barbed wire fence on the north side of the road, but it appeared the buffalo had butted it down.
   “What are they?” Tom asked fearfully. “Those ain’t cows!”
   And because Nick couldn’t talk and Tom couldn’t read, Nick couldn’t tell him. That day was July 8, 1990, and they slept that night in flat open farm country forty miles west of Deerhead.
   It was July 9, and they were eating their lunch in the shade of an old, graceful elm in the front yard of a farmhouse which had partially burned down. Tom was eating sausages from a tin with one hand and driving a car in and out of his service station with the other. And singing the refrain of a popular song over and over again. Nick knew the shape it made on Tom’s lips by heart: “Baby, can you dig your man—he’s a raht-eous ma-yun—baby, can you dig your man?”
   Nick was depressed and slightly overawed by the size of the country; never before had he realized how easy it was to stick out your thumb, knowing that sooner or later the law of averages was going to favor you. A car was going to stop, usually with a man driving, and with a can of beer resting comfortably in the fork of his crotch more often than not. He would want to know how far you were going and you would hand him a slip of paper which you’d kept handy in your breast pocket, a slip of paper which read: “Hello, my name is Nick Andros. I’m a deaf-mute. Sorry about that. I’m going to—. Thanks very much for the ride. I can read lips.” And that would be that. Unless the guy had a thing about deaf-mutes (and some people did, although they were a minority), you hopped in and the car took you where you wanted to go, or a good piece in that direction. The car ate road and blew miles out its tailpipe. The car was a form of teleportation. The car defeated the map. But now there was no car, although on many of these roads a car would have been a practical mode of transportation for seventy or eighty miles at a stretch, if you were careful. And when you were finally blocked, you would only have to abandon your vehicle, walk for a while, and then take another. With no car, they were like ants crawling across the chest of a fallen giant, ants trundling endlessly from one nipple to the other. And so Nick half wished, half daydreamed, that when they finally did meet someone else (always assuming that would happen), it would be as it had been in those mostly carefree days of hitchhiking: there would be that familiar twinkle of chrome rising over the top of the next hill, that sunflare which simultaneously dazzled and pleased the eye. It would be some perfectly ordinary American car, a Chevy Biscayne or a Pontiac Tempest, sweet old Detroit rolling iron. In his dreams it was never a Honda or Mazda or Yugo. That American beauty would pull over and he would see a man behind the wheel, a man with a sunburned elbow cocked cockily out the window. This man would be smiling and he would say, “Holy Joe, boys! Ain’t I some glad sumbitch to see you guys! Hop in here! Hop in and let’s us see where we’re goin!”
   But they saw no one that day, and on the tenth it was Julie Lawry they ran across.
   The day was another scorcher. They had pedaled most of the afternoon with their shirts tied around their waists, and both of them were getting brown as Indians. They hadn’t been making very good time, not today, because of the apples. The green apples.
   They had found them growing on an old apple tree in a farmyard, green and small and sour, but they had both been deprived of fresh fruit for a long time, and they tasted ambrosial. Nick made himself stop after two, but Tom ate six, greedily, one after the other, right down to the cores. He had ignored Nick’s motions that he should stop; when he got an idea in his head, Tom Cullen could be every bit as attractive as a wayward child of four.
   So, beginning around eleven in the morning and continuing through the rest of the afternoon, Tom had the squats. Sweat ran off him in small creeks. He groaned. He had to get off his bike and walk it up even shallow hills. Despite his irritation at the poor time they were making, Nick couldn’t help a certain rueful amusement.
   When they reached the town of Pratt around 4 P.M., Nick decided that was it for the day. Tom collapsed gratefully on a bus-stop bench in the shade and dozed off at once. Nick left him there and went along the deserted business section in search of a drugstore. He would get some Pepto-Bismol and force Tom to drink it when he woke up, whether Tom wanted to or not. If it took a whole bottle to cork Tom up, so be it. Nick wanted to make up some time tomorrow.
   He found a Rexall between the Pratt Theater and the local Norge. He slipped in through the open door, and stood for a moment smelling the familiar hot, unaired, stale smell. There were other odors mixed in, strong and cloying. Perfume was the strongest. Perhaps some of the bottles had burst in the heat.
   Nick glanced around, looking for the stomach medicines, trying to remember if Pepto-Bismol went over in the heat. Well, the label would say. His eyes slipped past a mannequin and two rows to the right he saw what he wanted. He had taken two steps that way when he realized that he had never before seen a mannequin in a drugstore.
   He looked back and what he saw was Julie Lawry.
   She was standing perfectly still, a bottle of perfume in one hand, the small glass wand you used to daub the stuff on in the other. Her china-blue eyes were wide in stunned, disbelieving surprise. Her brown hair was drawn back and tied with a brilliant silk scarf that hung halfway down her back. She was wearing a pink middy sweater and bluejeans shorts that were almost abbreviated enough to be mistaken for panties. There was a rash of pimples on her forehead and a hell of a good one right in the middle of her chin.
   She and Nick stared at each other across half the length of the deserted drugstore, both frozen now. Then the bottle of perfume dropped from her fingers, shattered like a bomb, and a hothouse reek filled the store, making it smell like a funeral parlor.
   “Jesus, are you real?” she asked in a trembling voice.
   Nick’s heart had begun to race, and he could feel his blood thudding crazily in his temples. Even his eyesight had begun to wham in and out a little, making dots of light race across his field of vision.
   He nodded.
   “You ain’t a ghost?”
   He shook his head.
   “Then say somethin. If you ain’t a ghost, say somethin.”
   Nick put a hand across his mouth, then on his throat.
   “What’s that s’posed to mean?” Her voice had taken on a slightly hysterical tone. Nick couldn’t hear it… but he could sense it, see it on her face. He was afraid to step toward her, because if he did, she would run. He didn’t think she was afraid of seeing another person; what she was afraid of was that she was seeing a hallucination, and she was cracking up. Again, he felt that wave of frustration. If he could only talk —
   Instead, he went through his pantomime again. It was, after all, the only thing he could do. This time understanding dawned.
   “You can’t talk? You’re a mute?”
   Nick nodded.
   She gave a high laugh that was mostly frustration. “You mean somebody finally showed up and it’s a mute guy?”
   Nick shrugged and gave a slanting smile.
   “Well,” she said, coming down the aisle to him, “you ain’t bad-looking. That’s something.” She put a hand on his arm, and the swell of her breasts almost touched his arm. He could smell at least three different kinds of perfume, and under all of them the unlovely aroma of her sweat.
   “My name’s Julie,” she said. “Julie Lawry. What’s yours?” She giggled a little. “You can’t tell me, can you? Poor you.” She leaned a little closer, and her breasts brushed him. He began to feel very warm. What the hell, he thought uneasily, she’s only a kid.
   He broke away from her, took the pad from his pocket, and began to write. A line or so into his message she leaned over his shoulder to see what he was writing. No bra. Jesus. She had sure gotten over her scare quick. His writing became a little uneven.
   “Oh, wow,” she said as he wrote—it was as if he was a monkey capable of doing a particularly sophisticated trick. Nick was looking down at his pad and didn’t “read” her words, but he could feel the tickling warmth of her breath.
   “I’m Nick Andros. I’m a deaf-mute. I’m traveling with a man named Tom Cullen, who is lightly retarded. He can’t read or understand many of the things I can act out unless they’re very simple. We’re on our way to Nebraska because I think there might be people there. Come with us, if you want.”
   “Sure,” she said immediately, and then, remembering that he was deaf and shaping her words very carefully, she asked, “Can you read lips?”
   Nick nodded.
   “Okay,” she said. “I’m so glad to see someone, who cares if it’s a deaf-mute and a retard. Spooky here. I can hardly sleep nights since the power went off.” Her face set in martyred lines of grief more appropriate to a soap opera heroine than a real person. “My mom and dad died two weeks ago, you know. Everybody died but me. I’ve been so lonely.” With a sob she threw herself into Nick’s arms and began to undulate against him in an obscene parody of grief.
   When she drew back from him, her eyes were dry and shiny.
   “Hey, let’s make it,” she said. “You’re sort of cute.”
   Nick gawped at her. I can’t believe this, he thought.
   But it was real enough. She was tugging at his belt. “Come on. I’m on the pill. It’s safe.” She paused for a moment. “You can, can’t you? I mean, just because you can’t talk, that doesn’t mean you can’t—”
   He put his hands out, perhaps meaning to take her by the shoulders, but he found her breasts instead. That was the end of any resistance he might have had. Coherent thought left his mind as well. He lowered her to the floor and had her.
   Afterwards he went to the door and looked out as he buckled his belt again, checking on Tom. He was still on the park bench, dead to the world. Julie joined him, fiddling with a fresh bottle of perfume.
   “That the retard?” she asked.
   Nick nodded, not liking the word. It seemed like a cruel word.
   She began to talk about herself, and Nick discovered to his relief that she was seventeen, not much younger than he was. Her mamma and her friends had always called her Angel-Face or just Angel for short, she said, because she looked so young. She told him a great deal more in the following hour, and Nick found it next to impossible to separate the truth from the lies… or the wish-fulfillment, if you preferred. She might have been waiting for someone like him, who could never interrupt the endless flow of her monologue, all her life. Nick’s eyes got tired just watching her pink lips push out the shapes of words. But if his eyes wandered for more than just a moment, to check on Tom or to consider the crashed-out plate-glass window of the dress shop across the street, her hand would touch his cheek, bringing his eyes back to her mouth. She wanted him to “hear” everything, ignore nothing. He was annoyed with her at first, then bored with her. In the space of an hour, incredibly, he found himself wishing he hadn’t found her in the first place, or that she would change her mind about coming with them.
   She was “into” rock music and marijuana and had a taste for what she called “Colombian short rounds” and “fry-daddies.” She’d had a boyfriend, but he’d gotten so pissed off at the “establishment system” running the local high school that he had quit to join the Marines last April. She hadn’t seen him since then, but still wrote him every week. She and her two girlfriends, Ruth Honinger and Mary Beth Gooch, went to all the rock concerts in Wichita and had hitched all the way to Kansas City last September to see Van Halen and the Monsters of Heavy Metal in concert. She claimed to have “made it” with the Dokken bassist, and said it had been “the most bitchin-groovy experience of my life”; she had just “cried and cried” after the deaths of her mother and father within twenty-four hours of each other, even though her mother was a “bitchy prude” and her father “had a stick up his ass” about Ronnie, her boyfriend who had left town to join the Marines; she had plans to become either a beautician in Wichita when she graduated high school, or to “truck on out to Hollywood and get a job with one of those companies that do the homes of the stars, I’m bitchin-groovy at interior decoration, and Mary Beth said she’d come with me.”
   At this point she suddenly remembered Mary Beth Gooch was dead, and that her opportunity to become a beautician or an interior decorator to the stars had passed with her… and everyone and everything else. This seemed to strike her with a more genuine sort of grief. It was not a storm, however, but only a brief squall.
   When the flow of words had begun to dry up a little—at least for the time being—she wanted to “do it” (as she so coyly put it) again. Nick shook his head and she pouted briefly. “Maybe I don’t want to go with you after all,” she said.
   Nick shrugged.
   “Dummy-dummy-dummy,” she said with sudden sharp viciousness. Her eyes shone with spite. Then she smiled. “I didn’t mean that. I was just kidding.”
   Nick looked at her, expressionless. He had been called worse names, but there was something in her that he very much did not like. Some restless instability. If she got angry with you, she wouldn’t yell or slap your face; not this one. This one would claw you. It came to him with sudden surety that she had lied about her age. She wasn’t seventeen, or fourteen, or twenty-one. She was any age you wanted her to be… as long as you wanted her more than she wanted you, needed her more than she needed you. She came across as a sexual creature, but Nick thought that her sexuality was only a manifestation of something else in her personality… a symptom. Symptom was a word you used for someone who was sick, though, wasn’t it? Did he think she was sick? In a way he did, and he was suddenly afraid of the effect she might have on Tom.
   “Hey, your friend’s waking up!” Julie said.
   Nick looked around. Yes—Tom was now sitting on the park bench, scratching his crow’s-nest hair and goggling around pallidly. Nick suddenly remembered the Pepto-Bismol.
   “Hi, y’all!” Julie trilled, and ran down the street toward Tom, her breasts bouncing sweetly under her tight middy top. Tom’s goggle had been big to begin with; now it grew bigger still.
   “Hi?” he said-asked slowly, and looked at Nick for confirmation and/or explanation.
   Masking his own unease, Nick shrugged and nodded.
   “I’m Julie,” she said. “How you doin, cutie-pie?”
   Deep in thought—and unease—Nick went back into the drugstore to get what Tom needed.
   “Uh-uh,” Tom said, shaking his head and backing away. “Uh-uh, I ain’t gonna. Tom Cullen doesn’t like medicine, laws no, tastes bad.”
   Nick looked at him with frustration and disgust, holding the three-sided bottle of Pepto-Bismol in one hand. He looked to Julie and she caught his gaze, but in it he saw that same teasing light as when she had called him dummy—it was not a twinkle but a hard mirthless shine. It is the look that a person with no essential sense of humor gets in his or her eye when he or she is getting ready to tease.
   “That’s right, Tom,” she said. “Don’t drink it, it’s poison.”
   Nick gaped at her. She grinned back, hands on hips, challenging him to convince Tom otherwise. This was her petty revenge, perhaps; for having her second offer of sex turned down.
   He looked back at Tom and swigged from the Pepto-Bismol bottle himself. He could feel the dull pressure of anger at his temples. He held the bottle out to Tom, but Tom was not convinced.
   “No, uh-uh, Tom Cullen doesn’t drink poison,” he said, and with rising fury at the girl Nick saw that Tom was terrified. “Daddy said don’t. Daddy said if it’ll kill the rats in the barn, it’ll kill Tom! No poison!”
   Nick suddenly half turned to Julie, unable to bear her smug grin. He hit her open-handed, hit her hard. Tom stared, eyes wide and scared.
   “You…” she began, and for a moment she couldn’t find the words. Her face flushed thinly, and she suddenly looked scrawny and spoiled and vicious. “You dummy freak bastard! It was just a joke, you shithead! You can’t hit me! You can’t hit me, goddamn you! ”
   She lunged at him and he pushed her backward. She fell on the seat of her denim shorts and stared up at him, lips pulled back in a snarl. “I’ll tear your balls off,” she breathed. “You can’t do that.”
   Hands trembling, head pounding now, Nick took his pen out and scrawled a note out in large, jagged letters. He tore it off and held it out to her. Eyes glaring and furious, she batted it aside. He picked it up, grabbed the back of her neck, and shoved the note into her face. Tom had withdrawn, whimpering.
   She screamed: “All right! I’ll read it! I’ll read your crappy note!”
   It was four words: “We don’t need you.”
   “Fuck you!” she cried, tearing herself out of his grasp. She backed several steps down the sidewalk. Her eyes were as wide and blue as they had been in the drugstore when he almost literally stumbled over her, but now they were spitting with hate. Nick felt tired. Of all the possible people, why her?
   “I’m not staying here,” Julie Lawry said. “I’m coming. And you can’t stop me.”
   But he could. Didn’t she realize that yet? No, Nick thought, she didn’t. To her all of this was some sort of Hollywood scenario, a living disaster movie in which she had the starring part. It was a movie where Julie Lawry, also known as Angel-Face, always got what she wanted.
   He drew the revolver from its holster and pointed it at her feet. She became very still, and the flush evaporated from her face. Her eyes changed, and she looked very different, somehow real for the first time. Something had entered her world that she could not, at least in her own mind, manipulate to her advantage. A gun. Nick suddenly felt sick as well as tired.
   “I didn’t mean it,” she said rapidly. “I’ll do anything you want, honest to God.”
   He motioned her away with the gun.
   She turned and began to walk, looking back over her shoulder. She walked faster and faster, then broke into a run. She turned the corner a block up and was gone. Nick holstered the gun. He was trembling. He felt soiled and depressed, as if Julie Lawry had been something inhuman, more kin to the trundling and coldblooded beetles you find under dead trees than to other human beings.
   He turned around, looking for Tom, but Tom wasn’t in sight.
   He trotted back down the sunstruck street, his head pounding monstrously, the eye Ray Booth had gouged throbbing. It took him almost twenty minutes to find Tom. He was crouched on a back porch two streets down from the business section. He was sitting on a rusty porch glider, his Fisher-Price garage cradled to his chest. When he saw Nick he began to cry.
   “Please don’t make me drink it, please don’t make Tom Cullen drink poison, laws no, Daddy said if it would kill the rats it would kill me… pleeease! ”
   Nick saw that he was still holding the bottle of Pepto-Bismol. He threw it away and spread his empty hands in front of Tom. His diarrhea would just have to run its course. Thanks a lot, Julie.
   Tom came down the porch steps, blubbering. “I’m sorry,” he said over and over. “I’m sorry, Tom Cullen’s sorry.”
   They walked back to Main Street together… and came to a halt, staring. Both bikes were overturned. The tires had been slashed. The contents of their packs had been strewn from one side of the street to the other.
   Just then something passed at high speed close to Nick’s face—he felt it—and Tom shrieked and began to run. Nick stood puzzled for a moment, looking around, and happened to be looking in the right direction to see the muzzle-flash of the second shot. It came from a second-story window of the Pratt Hotel. Something like a high-speed darning needle tugged at the fabric of his shirt collar.
   He turned and ran after Tom.
   He had no way of knowing if Julie fired again; all he knew for sure when he caught up to Tom was that neither of them had been shot. At least we’re shut of that hellion, he thought, but that turned out to be only half-true.
   They slept in a barn three miles north of Pratt that evening, and Tom kept waking up with nightmares and then waking Nick to be reassured. They reached Iuka the next morning around eleven, and found two good bicycles in a shop called Sport and Cycle World. Nick, who was beginning to recover at last from the encounter with Julie, thought they could finish re-outfitting themselves in Great Bend, which they should reach by the fourteenth at the latest.
   But at just about quarter to three on the afternoon of July 12, he saw a twinkle in the rearview mirror mounted near his left handgrip. He stopped (Tom, who was riding behind him and woolgathering, ran over his foot but Nick barely noticed) and looked back over his shoulder. The twinkle that had risen over the hill directly behind them like a daystar pleased and dazzled his eye—he could hardly believe it. It was a Chevy pickup of an ancient vintage, good old Detroit rolling iron, picking its way slowly, slaloming from one lane of US 281 to the other, avoiding a scatter of stalled vehicles.
   It pulled up beside them (Tom was waving wildly, but Nick could only stand with his legs apart and his bike’s crossbar between them, frozen) and came to a stop. Nick’s last thought before the driver’s head appeared was that it would be Julie Lawry, smiling her vicious, triumphant smile. She would have the gun with which she had tried to kill them before, and at a range this close, there would be no chance she would miss. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
   But the face that appeared belonged to a fortyish man wearing a straw hat with a feather cocked into the blue velvet band at a rakish angle, and when he grinned, his face became a dry-wash of agreeable sunwrinkles.
   And what he said was: “Holy Christ on a carousel, am I glad to see you boys? I guess I am. Climb on up here and let’s see where we’re going.”
   That was how Nick and Tom met Ralph Brentner.

Chapter 44
 
   He was cracking up—baby, don’t you just know it?
 
   That was a line from Huey “Piano” Smith, now that he thought of it. Went way back. A blast from the past. Huey “Piano” Smith, remember how that one went? Ah-ah-ah-ah, daaaay-o… gooba-gooba-gooba-gooba… ah-ah-ah-ah. Et cetera. The wit, wisdom, and social commentary of Huey “Piano” Smith.
   “Fuck the social commentary,” he said. “Huey Piano Smith was before my time.”
   Years later Johnny Rivers had recorded one of Huey’s songs, “Rockin Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu.” Larry Underwood could remember that one very clearly, and he thought it very appropriate to the situation. Good old Johnny Rivers. Good old Huey “Piano” Smith.
   “Fuck it,” Larry opined once again. He looked terrible—a pale, frail phantom stumbling up a New England highway. “Gimme the sixties.”
   Sure, the sixties, those were the days. Mid-sixties, late sixties. Flower Power. Getting clean for Gene. Andy Warhol with his pink-rimmed glasses and his fucking Brillo boxes. Velvet Underground. The Return of the Creature from Yorba Linda. Norman Spinrad, Norman Mailer, Norman Thomas, Norman Rockwell, and good old Norman Bates of the Bates Motel, heh-heh-heh. Dylan broke his neck. Barry McGuire croaked “The Eve of Destruction.” Diana Ross raised the consciousness of every white kid in America. All those wonderful groups, Larry thought dazedly, give me the sixties and cram the eighties up your ass. When it came to rock and roll, the sixties had been the Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde. Cream. Rascals. Spoonful. Airplane with Grace Slick on vocals, Norman Mailer on lead guitar, and good old Norman Bates on drums. Beatles. Who. Dead—
   He fell over and hit his head.
   The world swam away blackly and then came back in bright fragments. He wiped his hand across his temple and it came away with a thin foam of blood on it. Didn’t even matter. Whafuck, as they used to say back in the bright and glorious mid-sixties. What was falling down and hitting your head when he had spent the last week unable to sleep without waking up from nightmares, and the good nights were the nights when the scream got no farther than the middle of his throat? If you screamed out loud and woke up to that, you scared yourself even worse.
   Dreams of being back in the Lincoln Tunnel. There was somebody behind him, only in the dreams it wasn’t Rita. It was the devil, and he was stalking Larry with a lightless grin frozen on his face. The black man wasn’t the walking dead; he was worse than the walking dead. Larry ran with the slow sludgy panic of bad dreams, tripping over unseen corpses, knowing they were staring at him with the glassy eyes of stuffed trophies from the crypts of their cars, which had stalled inside the frozen traffic even though they had some other place to be, he ran, but what good was running when the black devil man, the black magic man, could see in the dark with eyes like snooperscopes? And after a while the dark man would begin to croon to him: Come on, Laarry, come on, we’ll get it togeeeether Laaarry —
   He would feel the black man’s breath on his very shoulder and that was when he would struggle up from sleep, escaping sleep, and the scream would be stuck in his throat like a hot bone or actually escaping his lips, loud enough to wake the dead.
   Daytimes, the vision of the dark man would recede. The dark man strictly worked the night shift. Daytimes, it was the Big Alone that went to work on him, gnawing its way into his brain with the sharp teeth of some tireless rodent—a rat, or a weasel, maybe. During the days, his thoughts would dwell on Rita. Lovely Rita, meter-maid. Over and over in his mind he would turn her over and over, seeing those slitted eyes, like the eyes of an animal which has died in surprise and pain, that mouth he had kissed now filled with stale green puke. She had died so easy, in the night, in the same fucking sleeping bag, and now he was…
   Well, cracking up. That was it, wasn’t it? That was what was happening to him. He was cracking up.
   “Cracking,” he moaned. “Oh Jeez, I’m going out of my mind.”
   A part of him that still retained a measure of rationality asserted that that might be true, but what he was suffering from right this minute was heat prostration. After what had happened to Rita, he hadn’t been able to ride the motorcycle anymore. He just hadn’t been able to; it was like a mental block. He kept seeing himself smeared all over the highway. So finally he had ditched it. Since then he had been walking—how many days? four? eight? nine? He didn’t know. It had been in the nineties since ten this morning, it was now nearly four, the sun was right behind him, and he wasn’t wearing a hat.
   He couldn’t remember how many days ago he had ditched the motorcycle. Not yesterday, and probably not the day before (maybe, but probably not), and what did it matter? He had gotten off it, snapped it into gear, twisted the throttle, and let go of the clutch. It had torn itself out of his trembling, sick hands like a dervish and had gone plunging and rearing over the embankment of US 9 somewhere just east of Concord. He thought the name of the town in which he had murdered his motorcycle might have been Gossville, although that didn’t matter much, either. The fact was, the bike had been no more good to him. He hadn’t dared drive it over fifteen miles an hour, and even at fifteen he would have nightmare visions of being thrown over the handlebars and fracturing his skull or going around a blind corner and slamming into an overturned truck and going up in a fireball. And after a while the motherfucking overheat light had come on, of course it had, and it seemed he could almost read the word COWARD printed in small no-nonsense letters on the plastic housing over the little red bulb. Had there been a time when he had not only taken the cycle for granted but had actually enjoyed it, the sensation of speed as the wind rushed by on both sides of his face, the pavement blurring by six cold inches below the footposts? Yes. When Rita had been with him, before Rita had turned into nothing but a mouthful of green puke and a pair of slitted eyes, he had enjoyed it.
   So he’d sent the motorcycle crashing over the embankment and into a weed-choked gully and then he had peered at it with a kind of cautious terror, as if it could somehow rise up and smite him. Come on, he had thought, come on and stall out, ya sucker. But for a long time, the motorcycle wouldn’t. For a long time it raved and bellowed down there in that gully, the rear wheel spinning fruitlessly, the hungry chain gobbling up last fall’s leaves and spitting out clouds of brown, bitter-smelling dust. Blue smoke belched from the chromed exhaust pipe. And even then he had been far enough gone to think there was something supernatural about it, that the cycle would right itself, rise out of its grave, and chew him up… either that or he would look back one afternoon at the rising sound of an engine and see his cycle, this damned cycle which wouldn’t just stall out and die decently, roaring straight down the highway at him, doing eighty, and bent over the handlebars would be that dark man, that hardcase, and riding pillion behind him, with her white silk deckpants rippling in the breeze, would be Rita Blakemoor, her face chalk white, her eyes slitted, her hair as dry and dead as a cornpatch in the wintertime. Then, at last, the cycle began to spit and chug and seizure and misfire, and when it finally stopped he had looked down at it and felt sad, as if it had been some part of himself he had killed. Without the cycle there was no way in which he could mount a serious assault on the silence, and the silence was, in a way, worse than his fears of dying or being seriously hurt in an accident. Since then he had been walking. He had gone through several small towns along Route 9 which had cycle shops, showroom models with the keys hanging right in them, but if he looked at them too long, the visions of himself lying beside the road in a pool of blood would rise up in vivid, unhealthy Technicolor, like something from one of those awful but somehow fascinating Charles Band horror movies, the ones where people kept dying under the wheels of large trucks or as a consequence of large, nameless bugs which had bred and grown in their warm vitals and finally burst free in a gut-busting display of flying flesh, and he would pass by, enduring the silence, pallid, shivering. He would pass by with exquisite little clusters of perspiration growing on his upper lip and in the hollows of his temples.
   He had lost weight—why not? He walked all day long, every day, from sunrise to sunset. He wasn’t sleeping. The nightmares would wake him up by four and he would light his Coleman lamp and crouch by it, waiting for the sun to come up enough so he dared to walk. And he would go on walking until it was almost too dark to see and then make camp with the sneaky, urgent speed of a chain-gang fugitive. With camp made he would lie awake late, feeling like a man with about two grams of cocaine chasing itself through his system. Oh baby, shake, rattle, and roll. Also like a heavy coke user, he wasn’t eating much; he never felt hungry. Cocaine does not enhance the appetite, and neither does terror. Larry hadn’t touched coke since the long-ago party in California, but he was terrified all the time. The squawk of a bird in the woods made him twitch. The deathcry of some small animal as a larger one took it made him almost jump out of his skin. He had passed through slimness and skinniness, had traveled through scrawniness. He was now poised on some metaphoric (or metabolic) fence between scrawniness and emaciation. He had grown a beard and it was actually rather striking, a tawny red-gold two shades lighter than his hair. His eyes were sunken deep in his face; they glittered out of their sockets like small, desperate animals that had been trapped in twin pit-snares.
   “Cracking up,” he moaned again. The broken desperation in this splintery whine horrified him. Had it gotten that bad? Once there had been a Larry Underwood who’d had a moderate hit record, who had visions of becoming the Elton John of his time… oh my dear, how Jerry Garcia would laugh at that … and now that fellow had been transmuted into this broken thing crawling on the black hottop of Route 9 somewhere in southeastern New Hampshire, crawling, just a crawling kingsnake, that was him. That other Larry Underwood could surely bear no relation to this crawling cheapskate… this…
   He tried to get up and couldn’t.
   “Oh this is so ridiculous,” he said, half laughing and half weeping.
   Across the road on a hill two hundred yards away, glimmering like a beautiful mirage, was a white and rambling New England farmhouse. It had green siding, green trim, and a green shingled roof. Rolling down from it was a green lawn just beginning to look shaggy. At the foot of the lawn, a small rill of brook ran; he could hear it gurgling and chuckling, an entrancing sound. A rock wall meandered along beside it, probably marking the edge of the property, and leaning over the wall at spaced intervals were big, shady elms. He would just do his World-Famous Crawling Cheapskate Wriggle over there and sit in the shade for a while, that’s what he would do. And when he felt a little better about… about things in general… he would make it to his feet and go down to the brook and have a drink and a wash-up. Probably he smelled bad. Who cared, though? Who was there to smell him now that Rita was dead?
   Was she still lying there in that tent? he wondered morbidly. Swelling up? Gathering flies? Looking more and more like the black sweet treat in the comfort station on Transverse Number One? Where the hell else would she be? Golfing at Palm Springs with Bob Hope?
   “Christ, that’s horrible,” he whispered, and crawled across the road. Once he was in the shade he felt sure he could get to his feet, but it seemed like too much effort. He did spare enough energy, however, to glance slyly back the way he had come to make sure his cycle wasn’t bearing down on him.
   It was at least fifteen degrees cooler in the shade, and Larry let out his breath in a long sigh of pleasure and relief. He put a hand to the back of his neck where the sun had been beating most of the day and pulled it back with a little hiss of pain. Sunburn pain? Get Xylocaine. And all that good shit. Get these men out of the hot sun. Burn, baby, burn. Watts. Remember Watts? Another blast from the past. The whole human race, just one big heavy blast from the past, a great big golden gasser.
   “Man, you’re sick,” he said, and leaned his head against the rough trunk of the elm tree and closed his eyes. Sun-dappled shade made moving patterns of red and black on the inside of his eyelids. The sound of water, chuckling and gurgling, was sweet and soothing. In a minute he would go down there and get a drink of water and wash up. In just a minute.
   He dozed.
   The minutes flowed by and his doze deepened into his first deep and dreamless sleep in days. His hands rested limply in his lap. His thin chest rose and fell, and his beard made his face look even thinner, the troubled face of a lone refugee who had escaped from a terrible slaughter none would believe. Little by little, the lines carved in his sunbaked face began to smooth out. He spiraled down to the deepest levels of unconsciousness and rested there like a small river creature dreamily estivating the summer away in cool mud. The sun moved lower in the sky.
   Near the creek’s edge, the luxuriant screen of bushes rattled a little as something moved stealthily through them, paused, moved again. After a time, a boy emerged. He was perhaps thirteen, perhaps ten and tall for his age. He was naked except for Fruit of the Loom shorts. His body was tanned an even mahogany, except for the startling white band that began just above the waistband of his shorts. His skin was covered with the bumps of mosquito and chigger bites, some new, mostly old. In his right hand he held a butcher knife. The blade was a foot long, the edge serrated. It glittered hotly in the sun.
   Softly, bent forward slightly at the waist, he approached the elm and the rock wall until he stood right behind Larry. His eyes were greenish blue, a seawater color, slightly turned up at the corners, giving him a Chinese look. They were expressionless eyes, mildly savage. He raised the knife.
   A woman’s voice, soft but firm, said: “No.”
   He turned to her, head cocked and listening, the knife still raised. His attitude was both questioning and disappointed.
   “We’ll watch and see,” the woman’s voice said.
   The boy paused, looking from the knife to Larry and then back to the knife again with a clear expression of longing, and then he retreated back the way he had come.
   Larry slept on.
   When he woke up, the first thing Larry was aware of was that he felt good. The second thing was that he felt hungry. The third thing was that the sun was wrong—it seemed to have traveled backward across the sky. The fourth thing was that he had to, you should pardon the expression, piss like a racehorse.
   Standing and listening to the delicious crackle of his tendons as he stretched, he realized that he had not just napped; he had slept all night. He looked down at his watch and saw why the sun was wrong. It was nine-twenty in the morning. Hungry. There would be food in the big white house. Canned soup, maybe corned beef. His stomach rumbled.
   Before going up he knelt by the stream with his clothes off and splashed water all over himself. He noticed how scrawny he was getting—that was no way to run a railroad. He stood up, dried himself with his shirt, and pulled his trousers back on. A couple of stones poked their wet black backs out of the stream and he used them to cross. On the far side he suddenly froze and gazed toward the thick stand of bushes. The fear, which had been dormant in him ever since waking up, suddenly blazed up like an exploding pine knot and then subsided just as quickly. It had been a squirrel or a wood chuck that he had heard, possibly a fox. Nothing else. He turned away indifferently and began to walk up the lawn toward the big white house.
   Halfway there a thought rose to the surface of his mind like a bubble and popped. It happened casually, with no fanfare, but the implications brought him to a dead halt.
   The thought was: Why haven’t you been riding a bicycle?
   He stood in the middle of the lawn, equidistant from the stream and the house, flabbergasted by the simplicity of it. He had been walking ever since he had ditched the Harley. Walking, wearing himself out, finally collapsing with sunstroke or something so close to it that it made no difference. And he could have been pedaling along, doing no more than a fast run if that’s what he felt like, and he would probably be on the coast now, picking out his summer house and stocking it.
   He began to laugh, gently at first, a little bit spooked by the sound of it in all the quiet. Laughing when there was no one else around to laugh with was just another sign that you were taking a one-way trip to that fabled land of bananas. But the laughter sounded so real and hearty, so goddamned healthy, and so much like the old Larry Underwood that he just let it come. He stood with his hands on his hips and cocked his head back to the sky and just bellowed with laughter at his own amazing foolishness.
   Behind him, where the screening bushes by the creek were thickest, greenish-blue eyes watched all of this, and they watched as Larry at last continued up the lawn to the house, still laughing a little and shaking his head. They watched as he climbed the porch and tried the front door, and found it open. They watched as he disappeared inside. Then the bushes began to shake and make the rattling sound that Larry had heard and dismissed. The boy forced his way through, still naked except for his shorts, brandishing the butcher knife.
   Another hand appeared and caressed his shoulder. The boy stopped immediately. The woman came out—she was tall and imposing, but seemed not to move the bushes at all. Her hair was a thick, luxuriant black streaked with thick blazes of purest white; attractive, startling hair. It was twisted into a cable that hung over one shoulder and trailed away only as it reached the swell of her breast. When you looked at this woman you first noticed how tall she was, and then your eyes would be dragged away to that hair and you would consider it, you would think how you could almost feel its rough yet oily texture with your eyes. And if you were a man, you would find yourself wondering what she would look like with that hair unpinned, freed, spread over a pillow in a spill of moonlight. You would wonder what she would be like in bed. But she had never taken a man into herself. She was pure. She was waiting. There had been dreams. Once, in college, there had been the Ouija board. And she wondered again if this man might be the one.
   “Wait,” she told the boy.
   She turned his agonized face up to her calm one. She knew what the trouble was.
   “The house will be all right. Why would he hurt the house, Joe?”
   He turned back and looked at the house, longingly, worriedly.
   “When he goes, we’ll follow him.”
   He shook his head viciously.
   “Yes; we have to. I have to.” And she felt that strongly. He was not the one, perhaps, but even if he was not, he was a link in a chain she had followed for years, a chain that was now nearing its end.
   Joe—that was not really his name—raised the knife wildly, as if to plunge it into her. She made no move to protect herself or to flee, and he lowered it slowly. He turned toward the house and jabbed the knife at it.
   “No, you won’t,” she said. “Because he’s a human being, and he’ll lead us to…” She fell silent. Other human beings, she had meant to finish. He’s a human being, and he’ll lead us to other human beings. But she was not sure that was what she meant, or even if it was, that it was all she meant. Already she felt pulled two ways at once, and she began to wish they had never seen Larry. She tried to caress the boy again but he jerked away angrily. He looked up at the big white house and his eyes were burning and jealous. After a while he slipped back into the bushes, glaring at her reproachfully. She followed him to make sure he would be all right. He lay down and curled up in a fetal position, cradling the knife to his chest. He put his thumb in his mouth and closed his eyes.
   Nadine went back to where the brook had made a small pool and knelt down. She drank from cupped hands, then settled in to watch the house. Her eyes were calm, her face very nearly that of a Raphael Madonna.
   Late that afternoon, as Larry biked along a tree-lined section of Route 9, a green reflectorized sign loomed ahead and he stopped to read it, slightly amazed. The sign said he was entering MAINE, VACATIONLAND. He could hardly believe it; he must have walked an incredible distance in his semidaze of fear. Either that or he had lost a couple of days somewhere. He was about to start riding again when something—a noise in the woods or perhaps only in his head—made him look sharply back over his shoulder. There was nothing, only Route 9 running back into New Hampshire, deserted.
   Since the big white house, where he had breakfasted on dry cereal and cheese spread from an aerosol can squeezed onto slightly stale Ritz crackers, he had several times had the strong feeling that he was being watched and followed. He was hearing things, perhaps even seeing things out of the corners of his eyes. His powers of observation, just starting to come fully to life in this strange situation, kept triggering at stimuli so slight as to be subliminal, nagging his nerve-endings with things so small that even in the aggregate they only formed a vague hunch, a feeling of “watched-ness.” This feeling didn’t frighten him as the others had. It had no feeling of hallucination or delirium about it. If someone was watching him and just lying back, it was probably because they were scared of him. And if they were scared of poor old skinny Larry Underwood, who was now too chicken even to go putting along on a motorcycle at twenty-five miles an hour, they were probably nothing to worry about.

Now, standing astride the bike he had taken from a sporting goods shop some four miles east of the big white house, he called out clearly: “If someone’s there, why don’t you come on out? I won’t hurt you.”
   There was no answer. He stood on the road by the sign marking the border, watching and waiting. A bird twittered and then swooped across the sky. Nothing else moved. After a while he pushed on.
   By six o’clock that evening he had reached the little town of North Berwick, at the junction of Routes 9 and 4. He decided to camp there and push on to the seacoast in the morning.
   There was a small store at the North Berwick crossroads of 9 and 4, and inside he took a six-pack of beer from the dead cooler. It was Black Label, a brand he had never tried before—a regional beer, presumably. He also took a large bag of Humpty Dumpty Salt ‘n Vinegar potato chips, and two cans of Dinty Moore Beef. Stew. He put these goods in his pack and went back out the door.
   Across the street was a restaurant, and for just a moment he thought he saw two long shadows trailing back behind it and out of sight. It might have been his eyes playing him tricks, but he didn’t think so. He considered running across the highway and seeing if he could surprise them out of hiding: Allee-allee-in-free, game’s over, kids. He decided not to. He knew what fear was.
   He walked a little way down the highway instead, pushing his bike with the loaded knapsack swinging from the handlebars. He saw a large brick school with a stand of trees behind it. He gathered enough wood from the grove to make a fire of decent size and built it in the middle of the school’s asphalt-paved playground. There was a creek nearby, flowing past a textile mill and under the highway. He cooled his beer in the water and cooked one of the cans of beef stew in its tin. He ate it from his Boy Scout messkit, sitting on one of the playground swings and rocking slowly back and forth with his shadow trailing out long across the faded lines of the basketball court.
   It occurred to him to wonder why he was so little afraid of the people who were following him—because he was sure now that there were people following him, at least two, maybe more. As a corollary, it occurred to him to wonder why he had felt so good all day long, as if some black poison had leaked out of his system during his long sleep the previous afternoon. Was it just that he had needed rest? That, and nothing more? It seemed too simple.
   He supposed, looking at it logically, that if the followers had meant to do him harm, they would have already tried to do it. They would have shot at him from ambush or at least covered him with their weapons and forced him to surrender his. They would have taken what they wanted… but again thinking logically (it was good to think logically, too, because for the last few days all the thinking he had done had been etched in a corrosive acid-bath of terror), what could he possibly have that anybody would want? As far as worldly goods went, there was now plenty for everybody, because there were precious few everybodies left. Why go to the trouble of stealing and killing and risking your life when everything you’d ever dreamed of having as you sat in the shithouse with the Sears catalogue in your lap was now available behind every shop window in America? Just break the glass, walk in, and take it.
   Everything, that was, except the companionship of your fellows. That was at a premium, as Larry knew very well. And the real reason he didn’t feel afraid was because he thought that was what these people must want. Sooner or later their desire would overcome their fear. He would wait until it did. He wasn’t going to flush them out like a covey of quail; that would only make things worse. Two days ago, he would probably have done a fade himself if he had seen someone. Just too freaked to do anything else. So he could wait. But, man, he really wanted to see somebody again. He really did.
   He walked back to the stream and rinsed out his messkit. He fished the six-pack out of the water and went back to his swing. He snapped the top on the first one and held the can up in the direction of the restaurant where he had seen the shadows.
   “Your very good health,” Larry said, and drank half the can at a draught. Talk about going down smooth!
   By the time he had finished the six-pack it was after seven o’clock and the sun was getting ready to go down. He kicked the last few embers of the campfire apart and gathered his stuff together. Then, half-drunk and feeling pleasant, he rode up Route 9 a quarter of a mile and found a house with a screened-in porch. He parked the bike on the lawn, took his sleeping bag, and forced the porch door with a screwdriver.
   He looked around once more, hoping to see him or her or them—they were still keeping up with him, he felt it—but the street was quiet and empty. He went inside with a shrug.
   It was still early and he expected to lie restless for a while at least, but apparently he still had some sleep to catch up on. Fifteen minutes after lying down he was out, breathing slowly and evenly, his rifle close by his right hand.
   Nadine was tired. This now seemed like the longest day of her life. Twice she felt sure they had been spotted, once near Strafford, and again at the Maine–New Hampshire state line, when he had looked back over his shoulder and called out. For herself, she didn’t care if they were spotted or not. This man wasn’t crazy, like the man who had passed by the big white house ten days ago. That man had been a soldier loaded down with guns and grenades and bandoliers of ammunition. He had been laughing and crying and threatening to blow the balls off someone named Lieutenant Morton. Lieutenant Morton had been nowhere in sight, which was probably a good thing for him, if he was still alive. Joe had been frightened of the soldier, too, and in that case it was probably a very good thing.
   “Joe?”
   She looked around.
   Joe was gone.
   And she had been on the edge of sleep and slipping over. She pushed the single blanket back and stood up, wincing at a hundred different aches. How long had it been since she had spent so much time on a bicycle? Never, probably. And then there was the constant, nerve-wracking effort to find the golden mean. If they got too close, he would see them and that would upset Joe. If they dropped back too far, he might leave Route 9 for another road and they would lose him. That would upset her. It had never occurred to her that Larry might circle back and get behind them. Luckily (for Joe, at least), it had never occurred to Larry, either.
   She kept telling herself that Joe would get used to the idea that they needed him… and not just him. They could not be alone. If they stayed alone, they would die alone. Joe would get used to the idea; he had not lived his previous life in a vacuum any more than she had. Other people got to be a habit.
   “Joe,” she called again, softly.
   He could be as quiet as a Viet Cong guerrilla creeping through the bush, but her ears had gotten attuned to him over the last three weeks, and tonight, as a bonus, there was a moon. She heard a faint scrape and clatter of gravel, and she knew where he was going. Ignoring her aches, she followed. It was quarter after ten.
   They had made camp (if you wanted to call two blankets in the grass “camp”) behind the North Berwick Grille across from the general store, storing the bikes in a shed behind the restaurant. The man they were following had eaten in the school playground across the street (“If we went over there, I’ll bet he would give us some of his supper, Joe,” she had said tactfully. “It’s hot… and doesn’t it smell nice? I’ll bet it’s lots nicer than this bologna.” Joe’s eyes had gone wide, showing a lot of the white, and he shook his knife balefully in Larry’s direction) and then he had gone up the road to a house with a screened-in porch. She thought from the way he was steering his bike that he was maybe a little drunk. He was now asleep on the porch of the house he had chosen.
   She went faster, wincing as random pebbles bit into the balls of her feet. There were houses on the left and she crossed to their lawns, which were now growing into fields. The grass, heavy with dew and smelling sweet, came all the way to her bare shins. It made her think of a time she had run with a boy through grass like this, under a moon that had been full, instead of waning like this one was. There had been a hot sweet ball of excitement in her lower belly, and she had been very conscious of her breasts as sexual things, full and ripe and standing out from her chest. The moon had made her feel drunk, and so had the grass, wetting her legs with its night moisture. She had known that if the boy caught her she would let the boy have her maidenhead. She had run like an Indian through the corn. Had he caught her? What did it matter now?
   She ran faster, leaping a cement driveway that glimmered like ice in the darkness.
   And there was Joe, standing at the edge of the screened porch where the man slept. His white underpants were the brightest thing in the darkness; in fact, the boy’s skin was so dark that at first glance you almost thought the underpants were there alone, suspended in space, or else worn by H.G. Wells’s invisible man.
   Joe was from Epsom, she knew that, because that was where she had found him. Nadine was from South Barnstead, a town fifteen miles northeast of Epsom. She had been searching methodically for other healthy people, reluctant to leave her own house in her own hometown. She worked in concentric circles which grew larger and larger. She had found only Joe, delirious and fevered from some sort of animal bite… rat or squirrel, from the size of it. He had been sitting on the lawn of a house in Epsom naked except for his underpants, butcher knife clutched in his hand like an old Stone Age savage or a dying but still vicious pygmy. She had had experience with infections before. She had carried him into the house. Had it been his own? She thought it likely, but would never be sure unless Joe told her. There had been dead people in the house, a lot of them: mother, father, three other children, the oldest about fifteen. She had found a doctor’s office where there was disinfectant and antibiotics and bandages. She was not sure which antibiotics would be right, and she knew she might kill him if she chose wrongly, but if she did nothing he would die anyway. The bite was on the ankle, which had puffed to the size of an innertube. Fortune was with her. In three days the ankle was down to normal size and the fever was gone. The boy trusted her. No one else, apparently, but her. She would wake up mornings and he would be clinging to her. They had gone to the big white house. She called him Joe. It wasn’t his name, but in her life as a teacher, any little girl whose name she hadn’t known had always been a Jane, any little boy a Joe. The soldier had come by, laughing and crying and cursing Lieutenant Morton. Joe had wanted to rush out and kill him with the knife. Now this man. She was afraid to take the knife away from him, because it was Joe’s talisman. Attempting to do that might be the one thing that could make him turn on her. He slept with it clutched in his hand, and the one night she had attempted to pull it free, more to see if it could actually be done than to actually remove it for good, he had been awake instantly, with no movement. One moment fast asleep. The next, those unsettling blue-gray eyes with their Chinese shape had been staring at her with mild savagery. He had pulled the knife back with a low growl. He didn’t talk.
   Now he was raising the knife, lowering it, raising it again. Making those low growling noises in his throat and jabbing the knife at the screen. Working himself up to actually rushing in the door, perhaps.
   She came up behind him, not making any special effort to be quiet, but he didn’t hear her; Joe was lost in his own world. In an instant, unaware that she was going to do it, she clapped her hand over his wrist and twisted it violently in an anticlockwise direction.
   Joe uttered a hissing gasp and Larry Underwood stirred a little in his sleep, turned over, and was quiet again. The knife fell to the grass between them, its serrated blade holding splintered reflections of the silver moon. They looked like luminous snowflakes.
   He stared at her with angry, reproachful, and distrusting eyes. Nadine stared back uncompromisingly. She pointed back the way they had come. Joe shook his head viciously. He pointed at the screen and the dark lump in the sleeping bag beyond the screen. He made a horribly explicit gesture, drawing his thumb across his throat at the Adam’s apple. Then he grinned. Nadine had never seen him grin before and it chilled her. It could not have been more savage if those gleaming white teeth had been filed to points.
   “No” she said softly. “Or I’ll wake him up now.”
   Joe looked alarmed. He shook his head rapidly.
   “Then come back with me. Sleep.”
   He looked down at the knife, then up at her again. The savagery, for now at least, was gone. He was only a lost little boy who wanted his teddy, or the scratchy blanket which had graduated with him from the crib. Nadine recognized vaguely that this might be the time to make him leave the knife, to just shake her head firmly “No.” But then what? Would he scream? He had screamed after the lunatic soldier had passed out of sight. Screamed and screamed, huge, inarticulate sounds of terror and rage. Did she want to meet the man in the sleeping bag at night, and with such screams ringing in her ears and his?
   “Will you come back with me?”
   Joe nodded.
   “All right,” she said quietly. He bent quickly and picked it up.
   They went back together, and he crawled next to her trustingly, the interloper forgotten, at least temporarily. Wrapped his arms around her and went to sleep. She felt the old familiar ache in her belly, the one so much deeper and all-pervading than those caused by the exercise. It was a womanache, and nothing could be done about it. She fell asleep.
   She woke up sometime in the early hours of the morning—she wore no watch—cold and stiff and terrified, afraid suddenly that Joe had cunningly waited until she was asleep to creep back to the house and cut the man’s throat in his sleep. Joe’s arms were no longer around her. She felt responsible for the boy, she had always felt responsible for the little ones who had not asked to be in the world, but if he had done that, she would cut him adrift. To take life when so much had been lost was the one unpardonable sin. And she could not be alone with Joe much longer without help; being with him was like being in a cage with a temperamental lion. Like a lion, Joe could not (or would not) speak; he could only roar in his lost little boy’s voice.
   She sat up and saw that the boy was still with her. In his sleep he had drawn away from her a little, that was all. He had curled up like a fetus, his thumb in his mouth, his hand wrapped around the shaft of the knife.
   Mostly asleep again already, she walked to the grass, urinated, and went back to her blanket. The next morning she was not sure if she had really awakened in the night or only dreamed she had.
   If I dreamed, Larry thought, they must have been good dreams. He couldn’t remember any of them. He felt like his old self, and he thought today would be a good day. He would see the ocean today. He rolled up his sleeping bag, tied it to the bike-carrier, went back to get his pack… and stopped.
   A cement path led up to the porch steps, and on both sides the grass was long and violently green. To the right, close by the porch itself, the dewy grass was beaten down. When the dew evaporated, the grass would spring back up, but now it held the shape of footprints. He was a city boy and no kind of woodsman (he had been more into Hunter Thompson than James Fenimore Cooper), but you would have to be blind, he thought, not to see by the tracks that there had been two of them: a big one and a small one. Sometime during the night they had come up to the screen and looked in at him. It gave him a chill. It was the stealth he didn’t like, and he liked the first touch of returning fear even less.
   If they don’t show themselves pretty quick, he thought, I’m going to try and flush them out. Just the thought that he could do that brought most of his self-confidence back. He slipped into his pack and got going.
   By noon he had reached US 1 in Wells. He flipped a coin and it came up tails. He turned south on 1, leaving the coin to gleam indifferently up from the dust. Joe found it twenty minutes later and stared at it as if it were a hypnotist’s crystal. He put it in his mouth and Nadine made him spit it out.
   Two miles down the road Larry saw it for the first time, the huge blue animal, lazy and slow this day. It was completely different from the Pacific or the Atlantic that lay off Long Island. That part of the ocean looked complacent, somehow, almost tame. This water was a darker blue, nearly cobalt, and it came up to the land in one rushing swell after another and bit at the rocks. Spume as thick as eggwhite jumped into the air and then splattered back. The waves made a constant growling boom against the shore.
   Larry parked his bike and walked toward the ocean, feeling a deep excitement that he couldn’t explain. He was here, he had made it to the place where the sea took over. This was the end of east. This was land’s end.
   He crossed a marshy field, his shoes squishing through water standing around hummocks and clumps of reeds. There was a rich and fecund tidal smell. As he, drew closer to the headland, the thin skin of earth was peeled away and the naked bone of granite poked through—granite, Maine’s final truth. Gulls rose, clean white against the blue sky, crying and wailing. He had never seen so many birds in one place before. It occurred to him that, despite their white beauty, gulls were carrion eaters. The thought that followed was nearly unspeakable, but it had formed fully in his mind before he could push it away: The pickings must be real good just lately.
   He began to walk again, his shoes now clicking and scraping on sun-dried rock which would always be wet in its many seams from the spray. There were barnacles growing in those cracks, and scattered here and there like shrapnel bursts of bone were the shells the gulls had dropped to get at the soft meat inside.
   A moment later he stood upon the naked headland. The seawind struck him full force, lifting his heavy growth of hair back from his forehead. He lifted his face into it, into the harsh-clean salt-smell of the blue animal. The combers, glassy blue-green, moved slowly in, their slopes becoming more pronounced as the bottom shallowed up beneath them, their peaks gaining first a curl of foam, then a curdly topping. Then they crashed suicidally against the rocks as they had since the beginning of time, destroying themselves, destroying an infinitesimal bit of the land at the same time. There was a ramming, coughing boom as water was forced deep into some half-submerged channel of rock that had been carved out over the millennia.
   He turned first left, then right, and saw the same thing happening in each direction, as far as he could see… combers, waves, spray, most of all an endless glut of color that took his breath away.
   He was at land’s end.
   He sat down with his feet dangling over the edge, feeling a little overcome. He sat there for half an hour or better. The seabreeze honed his appetite and he rummaged in his pack for lunch. He ate heartily. Thrown spray had turned the legs of his bluejeans black. He felt cleaned out, fresh.
   He walked back across the marsh, still so full of his own thoughts that he first supposed the rising scream to be the gulls again. He had even started to look up at the sky before he realized with a nasty jolt of fear that it was a human scream. A warcry.
   His eyes jerked downward again and he saw a young boy running across the road toward him, muscular legs pumping. In one hand he held a long butcher knife. He was naked except for underpants and his legs were crisscrossed with bramble welts. Behind him, just coming out of the brush and nettles on the far side of the highway, was a woman. She looked pale, and there were circles of weariness under her eyes.
   “Joe! ” she called, and then began to run as if it hurt her to do so.
   Joe came on, never heeding, his bare feet splashing up thin sheets of marsh water. His entire face was drawn back in a tight and murderous grin. The butcher knife was high over his head, catching the sun.
   He’s coming to kill me, Larry thought, entirely poleaxed by the idea. This boy… what did I ever do to him?
   “Joe! ” the woman screamed, this time in a high, weary, despairing voice. Joe ran on, closing the distance.
   Larry had time to realize he had left his rifle with his bike, and then the screaming boy was upon him.
   As he brought the butcher knife down in a long, sweeping arc, Larry’s paralysis broke. He stepped aside and, not even thinking, brought his right foot up and sent the wet yellow workboot it was wearing into the boy’s midriff. And what he felt was pity: there was nothing to the kid—he went over like a candlepin. He looked fierce but was no heavyweight.
   “Joe!” Nadine called. She tripped over a hummock and fell to her knees, splashing her white blouse with brown mud. “Don’t hurt him! He’s only a little boy! Please, don’t hurt him!” She got to her feet and struggled on.
   Joe had fallen flat on his back. He was splayed out like an x, his arms making a v, his open legs making a second, inverted v. Larry took a step forward and tromped on his right wrist, pinning the hand holding the knife to the muddy ground.
   “Let go of the sticker, kid.”
   The boy hissed and then made a grunting, gobbling sound like a turkey. His upper lip drew back from his teeth. His Chinese eyes glared into Larry’s. Keeping his foot on the boy’s wrist was like standing on a wounded but still vicious snake. He could feel the boy trying to yank his hand free, and never mind if it was at the expense of skin, flesh, or even a broken bone. He jerked into a half-sitting position and tried to bite Larry’s leg through the heavy wet denim of his jeans. Larry stepped down even harder on the thin wrist and Joe uttered a cry—not of pain but defiance.
   “Let it go, kid.”
   Joe continued to struggle.
   The stalemate would have continued until Joe got the knife free or until Larry broke his wrist if Nadine had not finally arrived, muddy, breathless, and staggering with weariness.
   Without looking at Larry she dropped to her knees. “Let it go!” she said quietly but with great firmness. Her face was sweaty but calm. She held it only inches above Joe’s contorted, twisting features. He snapped at her like a dog and continued to struggle. Grimly, Larry strove to keep his balance. If the boy got free now, he would probably strike at the woman first.
   “Let… it… go!” Nadine said.
   The boy growled. Spit leaked between his clenched teeth. There was a smear of mud in the shape of a question mark on his right cheek.
   “We’ll leave you, Joe. I’ll leave you. I’ll go with him. Unless you’re good.”
   Larry felt a further tensing of the arm under his foot, then a loosening. But the boy was looking at her grievingly, accusingly, reproachfully. When he shifted his gaze slightly to look at Larry, Larry could read the hot jealousy in those eyes. Even with the sweat running off him in buckets, Larry felt cold under that stare.
   She continued to speak calmly. No one would hurt him. No one would leave him. If he let go of the knife, everyone could be friends.
   Gradually Larry became aware that the hand under his shoe had relaxed and let go. The boy lay dormant, staring up at the sky. He had opted out. Larry took his foot off Joe’s wrist, bent quickly, and picked up the knife. He turned and scaled it up and out toward the headland. The blade whirled and whirled, throwing off spears of sunlight. Joe’s strange eyes followed its course and he gave one long, hooting wail of pain. The knife bounced on the rocks with a thin clatter and skittered over the edge.
   Larry turned back and regarded them. The woman was looking at Joe’s right forearm where the waffled shape of Larry’s boot was deeply embedded and turning an angry, exclamatory red. Her dark eyes looked up from that to Larry’s face. They were full of sorrow.
   Larry felt the old defensive and self-serving words rise—I had to do it, it wasn’t my fault, listen lady, he wanted to kill me —because he thought he could read the judgment in those sorrowing eyes: You ain’t no nice guy.
   But in the end he said nothing. The situation was what the situation was, and his actions had been forced by the kid’s. Looking at the boy, who had now curled himself up desolately over his own knees and put a thumb in his mouth, he doubted if the boy himself had initiated the situation. And it could have ended in a worse way, with one of them cut or even killed.
   So he said nothing, and he met the woman’s soft gaze and thought: I think I’ve changed. Somehow. I don’t know how much. He found himself thinking of something Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L.A., a guy named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent. Once, Barry had said, Jory Baker had been the driving wheel of a group called Sparx, a group everybody seemed to think that year’s Most Likely to Succeed. They had a sound something like early Creedence: hard solid guitar rock and roll. Jory Baker had done most of the writing and all of the vocals. Then a car accident, broken bones, lots of dope in the hospital. He had come out, as the John Prine song says, with a steel plate in his head and a monkey on his back. He progressed from Demerol to heroin. Got busted a couple of times. After a while he was just another street-druggie with fumble fingers, spare-changing down at the Greyhound station and hanging out on the strip. Then, somehow, over a period of eighteen months, he had gotten clean, and stayed clean. A lot of him was gone. He was no longer the driving wheel of any group, Most Likely to Succeed or otherwise, but he was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. He didn’t talk much, but the needle highway on his left arm had disappeared. And Barry Grieg had said: He’s come out the other side. That was all. No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just… come out the other side.
   Or you don’t.
   I’ve changed somehow, Larry thought dimly. I’ve come out the other side, too.
   She said: “I’m Nadine Cross. This is Joe. I’m happy to meet you.”
   “Larry Underwood.”
   They shook hands, both smiling faintly at the absurdity.
   “Let’s walk back to the road,” Nadine said.
   They started off side by side, and after a few steps Larry looked back over his shoulder at Joe, who was still sitting over his knees and sucking his thumb, apparently unaware they were gone.
   “He’ll come,” she said quietly.
   “Are you sure?”
   “Quite sure.”
   As they came to the highway’s gravel shoulder she stumbled and Larry took her arm. She looked at him gratefully.
   “Can we sit down?” she asked.
   “Sure.”
   So they sat down on the pavement, facing each other. After a little bit Joe got up and plodded toward them, looking down at his bare feet. He sat a little way apart from them. Larry looked at him warily, then back at Nadine Cross.
   “You were the two following me.”
   “You knew? Yes. I thought you did.”
   “How long?”
   “Two days now,” Nadine said. “We were staying in the big house at Epsom.” Seeing his puzzled expression she added: “By the creek. You fell asleep by the rock wall.”
   He nodded. “And last night the two of you came to peek at me while I was sleeping on that porch. Maybe to see if I had horns or a long red tail.”
   “That was Joe,” she said quietly. “I came after him when I found he was gone. How did you know?”
   “You left tracks in the dew.”
   “Oh.” She looked at him closely, examining him, and although he wanted to, Larry didn’t drop his eyes. “I don’t want you to be angry with us. I suppose that sounds ridiculous after Joe just tried to kill you, but Joe isn’t responsible.”
   “Is that his real name?”
   “No, just what I call him.”
   “He’s like a savage in a National Geographic TV show.”
   “Yes, just like that. I found him on the lawn of a house—his house, maybe, the name was Rockway—sick from a bite. A rat bite, maybe. He doesn’t talk. He growls and grunts. Until this morning I’ve been able to control him. But I… I’m tired, you see… and…” She shrugged. Marsh-mud was drying on her blouse in what could have been a series of Chinese ideograms. “I dressed him at first. He took everything off but his underpants. Eventually I got tired of trying. The minges and mosquitoes don’t seem to bother him.” She paused. “I want us to come with you. I guess there is no way to be coy about it, under the circumstances.”
   Larry wondered what she would think if he told her about the last woman who had wanted to come with him. Not that he ever would; that episode was deeply buried, even if the woman in question was not. He was no more anxious to bring up Rita than a murderer would be to drag his victim’s name into parlor conversation.
   “I don’t know where I’m going,” he said. “I came up from New York City, the long way around, I guess. The plan was to find a nice house on the coast and just lie up there until October or so. But the longer I go, the more I want other people. The longer I go, the more all of this seems to hit me.”
   He was expressing himself badly and didn’t seem to be able to do better without bringing up Rita or his bad dreams about the dark man. “I’ve been scared a lot of the time,” he said carefully, “because I’m on my own. Pretty paranoid. It’s like I expected Indians to just swoop down and scalp me.”
   “In other words, you’ve stopped looking for houses and started looking for people.”
   “Yes, maybe.”
   “You’ve found us. That’s a start.”
   “I do believe you found me. And that boy worries me, Nadine. I have to be up front about that. His knife’s gone, but the world is full of knives just lying around waiting to be picked up.”
   “Yes.”
   “I don’t want to sound brutal…” He trailed off, hoping she would say it for him, but she said nothing at all, only looked at him with those dark eyes.
   “Would you consider leaving him?” There it was, spat out like a lump of rock, and he still didn’t sound like much of a nice guy… but was it right, was it fair to either of them, to make a bad situation worse by burdening themselves with a ten-year-old psychopath? He had told her he was going to sound brutal, and he supposed he had. But they were in a brutal world now.
   Meanwhile, Joe’s odd seawater-colored eyes bored into him.
   “I couldn’t do that,” Nadine said calmly. “I understand the danger, and I understand that the danger would be primarily to you. He’s jealous. He’s afraid that you might become more important to me than he is. He might very well try to… try to get at you again unless you can make friends with him or at least convince him you don’t mean to…” She trailed off, leaving that part vague. “But if I left him, that would be the same as murder. And I won’t be a party to that. Too many have died to kill more.”
   “If he cuts my throat in the middle of the night, you’ll be a party to that.”
   She bowed her head.
   Speaking so quietly that only she could hear (he didn’t know if Joe, who was watching them, understood what they were talking about or not), Larry said, “He probably would have done it last night if you hadn’t come after him. Isn’t that the truth?”
   Softly she replied: “Those are things that might be.”
   Larry laughed. “The Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come?”
   She looked up. “I want to come with you, Larry, but I can’t leave Joe. You will have to decide.”
   “You don’t make it easy.”
   “These days it’s no easy life.”
   He thought about it. Joe sat on the soft shoulder of the road, watching them with his seawater eyes. Behind them, the real sea moved restlessly against the rocks, booming in its secret channels where it had infiltrated the land.
   “All right,” he said. “I think you’re being dangerously softhearted, but… all right.”
   “Thank you,” Nadine said. “I will be responsible for his actions.”
   “That will be a great comfort if he kills me.”
   “That would be on my heart for the rest of my life,” Nadine said, and a sudden certainty that all her words about the sanctity of life would someday not too distant rise up to mock her swept her like a cold wind, and she shuddered. No, she told herself. I’ll not kill. Not that. Never that.
   They camped that night on the soft white sand of the Wells public beach. Larry built a large fire above the strand of kelp that marked the last high tide and Joe sat on the other side, away from him and Nadine, feeding small sticks into the blaze. Occasionally he would hold a bigger stick into the flames until it caught like a torch and then tear away down the sand, holding it aloft like a single flaming birthday candle. They were able to see him until he was beyond the thirty-foot glow of the fire and then only his moving torch, drawn back in the wind manufactured by his wild sprinting. The seabreeze had come up a little, and it was cooler than it had been for days. Vaguely, Larry remembered the spell of rain that had occurred the afternoon he had found his mother dying, just before the superflu had hit New York like a highballing freight train. Remembered the thunderstorm and the white curtains blowing wildly into the apartment. He shivered a little, and the wind danced a spiral of fire out of the fire and up toward the black starshot sky. Embers cycloned up even higher and flickered out. He thought of fall, still distant but not so far as it had been on that day in June when he had discovered his mother lying on the floor, delirious. He shivered a little. North, far down on the beach, Joe’s torch bobbed up and down. It made him feel lonely and all the colder—that single light flickering in the large and silent darkness. The surf rolled and boomed.

“Do you play?”
   He jumped a little at her voice and looked at the guitar case lying beside them on the sand. It had been leaning against a Steinway piano in the music room of the big house they had broken into to get their supper. He had loaded his pack with enough cans to replace what they had eaten this day, and had taken the guitar on impulse, not even looking inside the case to see what it was—coming from a house like that, it was probably a good un. He hadn’t played since that crazy Malibu party, and that had been six weeks ago. In another life.
   “Yeah, I do,” he said, and discovered that he wanted to play, not for her but because sometimes it felt good to play, it eased your mind. And when you had a bonfire on the beach, someone was supposed to play the guitar. That was practically graven in stone.
   “Let’s see what we got here,” he said, and unsnapped the catches.
   He had expected something good, but what lay inside the case was still a happy surprise. It was a Gibson twelve-string, a beautiful instrument, perhaps even custom-made. Larry wasn’t enough of a judge of guitars to be sure. He did know that the fretboard inlays were real mother-of-pearl, catching reddish-orange glints from the fire and waxing them into prisms of light.
   “It’s beautiful,” she said.
   “It sure is.”
   He strummed it and liked the sound it made, even open and not quite in tune. The sound was fuller and richer than the sound you got from a six-string. A harmonic sound, but tough. That was the good thing about a steel-string guitar, you got a nice tough sound. And the strings were Black Diamonds, wrapped and a little hokey, but you got an honest sound, a trifle rough when you changed chords—zing! He smiled a little, remembering Barry Grieg’s contempt for the smooth flat guitar strings. He had always called them “dollar slicks.” Good old Barry, who wanted to be Steve Miller when he grew up.
   “What are you smiling about?” Nadine asked.
   “Old times,” he said, and felt a little sad.
   He tuned by ear, getting it just right, still thinking about Barry and Johnny McCall and Wayne Stukey. As he was finishing she tapped him lightly on the shoulder and he looked up.
   Joe was standing by the fire, a burned-out stick held forgotten in one hand. Those strange eyes were staring at him with frank fascination, and his mouth was open.
   Very quietly, so quietly that it might have been a thought in his own head, Nadine said: “Music hath charms…”
   Larry began to pick out a rough melody on the guitar, an old blues he had picked up off an Elektra folk album as a teenager. Something originally done by Koerner, Ray, and Glover, he thought. When he thought he had the melody right, he let it walk off down the beach and then sang… his singing was always going to be better than his playing.
   Well you see me comin baby from a long ways away
   I will turn the night mamma right into day
   Cause I’m here
   A long ways from my home
   But you can hear me comin baby
   By the slappin on my black cat bone.
   The boy was grinning now, grinning in the amazed way of someone who has discovered a glad secret. Larry thought he looked like someone who had been suffering from an unreachable itch between his shoulderblades for a long, long time and had finally found someone who knew exactly where to scratch. He scruffed through long-unused archives of memory, hunting a second verse, and found one.
   I can do some things mamma that other men can’t do
   They can’t find the numbers baby, can’t work the
   Conqueror root
   But I can, cause I’m a long way from my home
   And you know you’ll hear me comin
   By the whackin on my black cat bone.
   The boy’s open, delighted grin lit those eyes up, made them into something, Larry realized, that would be apt to make the muscles in any young girl’s thighs loosen a little. He reached for an instrumental bridge and fumbled through it, not too badly, either. His fingers wrung the right sounds out of the guitar: hard, flashy, a little bit tawdry, like a display of junk jewelry, probably stolen, sold out of a paper bag on a street corner. He made it swagger a little and then retreated quickly to a good old three-finger E before he could fuck it all up. He couldn’t remember all of the last verse, something about a railroad track, so he repeated the first verse again and quit.
   When the silence hit again, Nadine laughed and clapped her hands. Joe threw his stick away and jumped up and down on the sand, making fierce hooting sounds of joy. Larry couldn’t believe the change in the kid, and had to caution himself not to make too much of it. To do so would be to risk disappointment.
   Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.
   He found himself wondering with unwilling distrust if it could be something as simple as that. Joe was gesturing at him and Nadine said: “He wants you to play something else. Would you? That was wonderful. It makes me feel better. So much better.”
   So he played Geoff Muldaur’s “Goin Downtown” and his own “Sally’s Fresno Blues”; he played “The Springhill Mine Disaster” and Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mamma.” He switched to primitive rock and roll—“Milk Cow Blues,” “Jim Dandy,” “Twenty Flight Rock” (doing the boogie-woogie rhythm of the chorus as well as he could, although his fingers were getting slow and numb and painful by now), and finally a song he had always liked, “Endless Sleep,” originally done by Jody Reynolds.
   “I can’t play anymore,” he said to Joe, who had stood without moving through this entire recital. “My fingers.” He held them out, showing the deep grooves the strings had made in his fingers, and the chips in his nails.
   The boy held out his own hands.
   Larry paused for a moment, then shrugged inside. He handed the guitar to the boy neck first. “It takes a lot of practice,” he said.
   But what followed was the most amazing thing he had ever heard in his life. The boy struck up “Jim Dandy” almost flawlessly, hooting at the words rather than singing them, as if his tongue was plastered to the roof of his mouth. At the same time it was perfectly obvious that he had never played a guitar in his life before; he couldn’t bear down hard enough on the strings to make them ring out properly and his chord changes were slurred and sloppy. The sound that came out was muted and ghostly—as if Joe was playing a guitar stuffed full of cotton—but otherwise it was a perfect carbon copy of the way Larry had played the tune.
   When he had finished, Joe looked curiously down at his own fingers, as if trying to understand why they could make the substance of the music Larry had played but not the sharp sounds themselves.
   Numbly, as if from a distance, Larry heard himself say: “You’re not bearing down hard enough, that’s all. You have to build up calluses—hard spots—on the ends of your fingers. And the muscles in your left hand, too.”
   Joe looked at him closely as he spoke, but Larry didn’t know if the boy really understood or not. He turned to Nadine. “Did you know he could do that?”
   “No. I’m as surprised as you are. It’s as if he is a prodigy or something, isn’t it?”
   Larry nodded. The boy ran through “That’s All Right, Mamma,” again getting almost every nuance of the way Larry had played it. But the strings sometimes thudded like wood as Joe’s fingers blocked the vibration of the strings rather than making it come true.
   “Let me show you,” Larry said, and held out his hands for the guitar. Joe’s eyes immediately slanted down with distrust. Larry thought he was remembering the knife going down into the sea. He backed away, holding the guitar tightly. “All right,” Larry said. “All yours. When you want a lesson, come see me.”
   The boy made a hooting sound and ran off along the beach, holding the guitar high over his head like a sacrificial offering.
   “He’s going to smash it to hell,” Larry said.
   “No,” Nadine answered, “I don’t think he is.”
   Larry woke up sometime in the night and propped himself up on one elbow. Nadine was only a vaguely female shape wrapped up in three blankets a quarter of the way around the dead fire. Directly across from Larry was Joe. He was also under several blankets, but his head stuck out. His thumb was corked securely in his mouth. His legs were drawn up and between them was the body of the Gibson twelve-string. His free hand was wrapped loosely around the guitar’s neck. Larry stared at him, fascinated. He had taken the boy’s knife and thrown it away; the boy had adopted the guitar. Fine. Let him have it. You couldn’t stab anybody to death with a guitar, although, Larry supposed, it would make a pretty fair blunt instrument. He dropped off to sleep again.
   When he woke up the next morning, Joe was sitting on a rock with the guitar on his lap and his bare feet in the run of the surf, playing “Sally’s Fresno Blues.” He had gotten better. Nadine woke up twenty minutes later, and smiled at him radiantly. It occurred to Larry that she was a lovely woman, and a snatch of song occurred to him, something by Chuck Berry: Nadine, honey is that you?
   Aloud, he said: “Let’s see what we’ve got for breakfast.”
   He built up the fire and the three of them sat close to it, working the nightchill out of their bones. Nadine made oatmeal with powdered milk and they drank strong tea brewed in a can, hobo fashion. Joe ate with the Gibson across his lap. And twice Larry found himself smiling at the boy and thinking you couldn’t not like someone who liked the guitar.
   They cycled south on US 1. Joe rode his bike straight down the white line, sometimes ranging as far as a mile ahead. Once they caught up to him placidly walking his bike along the verge of the road and eating blackberries in an amusing way—he would toss each berry into the air, unerringly catching them in his mouth as they came down. An hour after that, they found him seated on a historic Revolutionary War marker and playing “Jim Dandy” on the guitar.
   Just before eleven o’clock they came to a bizarre roadblock at the town line of a place called Ogunquit. Three bright orange town dump trucks were driven across the road, blocking it from shoulder to shoulder. Sprawled in the back of one of the dump-bins was the crow-picked body of what had once been a man. The last ten days of solid heat had done their work. Where the body was not clothed, a fever of maggots boiled.
   Nadine turned away. “Where’s Joe?” she asked.
   “I don’t know. Somewhere up ahead.”
   “I wish he hadn’t seen that. Do you think he did?”
   “Probably,” Larry said. He had been thinking that, for a main artery, Route 1 had been awfully deserted ever since they left Wells, with no more than two dozen stalled cars along the way. Now he understood why. They had blocked the road. There would probably be hundreds, maybe thousands, of cars stacked up on the far side of this town. He knew how she felt about Joe. It would have been good to spare the boy this.
   “Why did they block the road?” she asked him. “Why would they do that?”
   “They must have tried to quarantine their town. I imagine we’ll find another roadblock on the other end.”
   “Are there other bodies?”
   Larry put his bike on its stand and looked. “Three,” he said.
   “All right. I’m not going to look at them.”
   He nodded. They wheeled their bikes past the trucks and then rode on. The highway had turned close to the sea again and it was cooler. Summer cottages were jammed together in long and sordid rows. People took their vacations in those tenements? Larry wondered. Why not just go to Harlem and let your kids play under the hydrant spray?
   “Not very pretty, are they?” Nadine asked. On either side of them the essence of honky-tonk beach resort had now enclosed them: gas stations, fried clam stands, Dairy Treets, motels painted in feverish pastel colors, mini-golf.
   Larry was drawn two painful ways by these things. Part of him clamored at their sad and blatant ugliness and at the ugliness of the minds that had turned this section of a magnificent, savage coastline into one long highway amusement park for families in station wagons. But there was a more subtle, deeper part of him that whispered of the people who had filled these places and this road during other summers. Ladies in sunhats and shorts too tight for their large behinds. College boys in red-and-black-striped rugby shirts. Girls in beach shifts and thong sandals. Small screaming children with ice cream spread over their faces. They were American people and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups—never mind if the group was in an Aspen ski lodge or performing their prosaic-arcane rites of summer along US 1 in Maine. And now all those Americans were gone. A thunderstorm had ripped a branch from a tree and it had knocked the gigantic plastic Dairy Treet sign into the ice cream stand’s parking lot, where it lay on its side like a pallid duncecap. The grass was starting to get long on the mini-golf course. This stretch of highway between Portland and Portsmouth had once been a seventy-mile amusement park and now it was only a haunted funhouse where all the clockwork had run down.
   “Not very pretty, no,” he said, “but once it was ours, Nadine. Once it was ours, even though we were never here before. Now it’s gone.”
   “But not forever,” she said calmly, and he looked at her, her clean and shining face. Her forehead, from which her amazing white-streaked hair was drawn back, glowed like a lamp. “I am not a religious person, but if I was I would call what has happened a judgment of God. In a hundred years, maybe two hundred, it will be ours again.”
   “Those trucks won’t be gone in two hundred years.”
   “No, but the road will be. The trucks will be standing in the middle of a field or a forest, and there will be lousewort and ladies’ slipper growing where their tires used to be. They won’t really be trucks anymore. They will be artifacts.”
   “I think you’re wrong.”
   “How can I be wrong?”
   “Because we’re looking for other people,” Larry said. “Now why do you think we’re doing that?”
   She gazed at him, troubled. “Well… because it’s the right thing to do,” she said. “People need other people. Didn’t you feel that? When you were alone?”
   “Yes,” Larry said. “If we don’t have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness. When we get together we build miles of summer cottages and kill each other in the bars on Saturday night.” He laughed. It was a cold and unhappy sound with no humor in it at all. It hung on the deserted air for a long time. “There’s no answer. It’s like being stuck inside an egg. Come on—Joe’ll be way ahead of us.”
   She stood astride her bike a moment longer, her troubled gaze on Larry’s back as it pulled away. Then she rode after him. He couldn’t be right. Couldn’t be. If such a monstrous thing as this had happened for no good reason at all, what sense did anything make? Why were they even still alive?
   Joe wasn’t so far ahead after all. They came upon him sitting on the back bumper of a blue Ford parked in a driveway. He was looking at a girlie magazine he had found somewhere, and Larry observed uncomfortably that the boy had an erection. He shot a glance at Nadine, but she was looking elsewhere—perhaps on purpose.
   When they reached the driveway Larry asked, “Coming?”
   Joe put the magazine aside and instead of standing up made a guttural interrogative sound and pointed up in the air. Larry glanced up wildly, for a moment thinking the boy had seen an airplane. Then Nadine cried: “Not the sky, the barn!” Her voice was close and tight with excitement. “On the barn! Thank God for you, Joe! We never would have seen it!”
   She went to Joe, put her arms around him, and hugged him. Larry turned to the barn, where white letters stood out clearly on the faded shingle roof:
   HAVE GONE TO STOVINGTON, VT. PLAGUE CENTER
   Below that were a series of road directions. And at the bottom:
   LEAVING OGUNQUIT JULY 2, 1990
   HAROLD EMERY LAUDER
   FRANCES GOLDSMITH
   “Jesus Christ, his ass must have been out to the wind when he put that last line on,” Larry said.
   “The plague center!” Nadine said, ignoring him. “Why didn’t I think of it? I read an article about it in the Sunday supplement magazine not three months ago! They’ve gone there!”
   “If they’re still alive.”
   “Still alive? Of course they are. The plague was over by July second. And if they could climb up on that barn roof, they surely weren’t feeling sick.”
   “One of them was surely feeling pretty frisky,” Larry agreed, feeling a half-reluctant excitement building in his own stomach. “And to think I came right across Vermont.”
   “Stovington is north of Highway 9 by quite a ways,” Nadine said absently, still looking up at the barn. “Still, they must be there by now. July second was two weeks ago today.” Her eyes were alight. “Do you think there might be others at that plague center, Larry? There might be, don’t you think? Since they know all about quarantines and sterile clothing? They would have been working on a cure, wouldn’t they?”
   “I don’t know,” Larry said cautiously.
   “Of course they would,” she said impatiently and a trifle wildly. Larry had never seen her so excited, not even when Joe performed his amazing feat of mimicry on the guitar. “I’ll bet Harold and Frances have found dozens of people, maybe hundreds. We’ll go right away. The quickest route—”
   “Wait a minute,” Larry said, taking her by the shoulder.
   “What do you mean, wait? Do you realize—”
   “I realize that sign’s waited two weeks for us to come by, and this can wait a little longer. In the meantime, let’s have some lunch. And ole Joe the Guitar-Picking Fool is falling asleep on his feet.”
   She glanced around. Joe was looking at the girlie magazine again, but he had started to nod and blink over it in a glassy way. There were circles under his eyes.
   “You said he just got over an infection,” Larry said. “And you’ve done a lot of hard traveling, too… not to mention Stalking the Blue-Eyed Guitar-Player.”
   “You’re right… I never thought.”
   “All he needs is a good meal and a good nap.”
   “Of course. Joe, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
   Joe made a sleepy and mostly disinterested grunt.
   Larry felt a lump of residual fear rise up in him at what he had to say next, but it ought to be said. If he didn’t, Nadine would as soon as she had a chance to think… and besides, it was time, maybe, to find out if he had changed as much as he thought.
   “Nadine, can you drive?”
   “Drive? Do you mean do I have a license? Yes; but a car really isn’t that practical with all the stalls in the road, is it? I mean—”
   “I wasn’t thinking about a car,” he said, and the image of Rita riding pillion behind the mysterious black man (his mind’s symbolic representation of death, he supposed) suddenly rose up behind his eyes, the two of them dark and pale, bearing down on him astride a monstrous Harley hog like weird horsemen of the apocalypse. The thought dried out the moisture in his mouth and made his temples pound, but when he went on, his voice was steady. If there was a break in it Nadine did not seem to notice. Oddly, it was Joe who looked up at him out of his half-doze, seeming to notice some change.
   “I was thinking about motorbikes of some kind. We could make better time with less effort and walk them around any… well, any messes in the road. Like we walked our bikes around those town trucks back there.”
   Dawning excitement in her eyes. “Yes, we could do that. I’ve never driven one, but you could show me what to do, couldn’t you?”
   At the words I’ve never driven one, Larry’s dread intensified. “Yes,” he said. “But most of what I’d teach you would be to drive slowly until you get the hang of it. Very slowly. A motorcycle—even a little motorbike—doesn’t forgive human error, and I can’t take you to a doctor if you get wrecked up on the highway.”
   “Then that’s what we’ll do. We’ll… Larry, were you riding a cycle before we came across you? You must have been, to make it up here from New York City so quickly.”
   “I ditched it,” he said steadily. “I got nervous about riding alone.”
   “Well, you won’t be alone anymore,” Nadine said, almost gaily. She whirled to Joe. “We’re going to Vermont, Joe! We’re going to see some other people! Isn’t it nice? Isn’t it just great?”
   Joe yawned.
   Nadine said she was too excited to sleep but she would lie down with Joe until he was under. Larry rode into Ogunquit to look for a motorcycle dealership. There was none, but he thought that he had seen a cycle shop on their way out of Wells. He went back to tell Nadine and found them both asleep in the shade of the blue Ford where Joe had been perusing Gallery.
   He lay down a little way from them but couldn’t sleep. At last he crossed the highway and made his way through the knee-high timothy grass to the barn where the sign was painted. Thousands of grasshoppers jumped wildly to get out of his way as he walked toward them, and Larry thought: I’m their plague. I’m their dark man.
   Near the barn’s wide double doors he spotted two empty Pepsi cans and a crust of sandwich. In more normal times the gulls would have had the remains of sandwich long ago, but times had changed and the gulls were no doubt used to richer food. He toed the crust, then one of the cans.
   Get these right down to the crime lab, Sergeant Briggs. I think our killer has finally made a mistake.
   Right-o, Inspector Underwood. The day Scotland Yard decided to send you was a lucky day for Squinchly-on-the-Green.
   Don’t mention it, Sergeant. All part of the job.
   Larry went inside—it was dark, hot, and alive with the softly whirring wings of the barnswallows. The smell of hay was sweet. There were no animals in the stalls; the owner must have let them out to live or die with the superflu rather than face certain starvation.
   Mark that down for the coroner’s inquest, Sergeant.
   I will indeed, Inspector Underwood.
   He glanced down at the floor and saw a candy wrapper. He picked it up. A chocolate Payday candy bar had once been stowed inside it. The signpainter had had guts, maybe. Good taste, no. Anyone with a taste for chocolate Paydays had been spending too much time in the hot sun.
   Steps leading to the loft were nailed to one of the loft’s supporting beams. Greasy with sweat already, not even knowing why he was here, Larry climbed up. In the center of the loft (he was walking slowly and keeping an eye out for rats), a more conventional flight of stairs went up to the cupola, and these stairs were splattered with drips of white paint.
   We’ve stumbled on another find, I believe, Sergeant.
   Inspector, I stand amazed—your deductive acumen is exceeded only by your good looks and the extraordinary length of your reproductive organ.
   Don’t mention it, Sergeant.
   He went up to the cupola. It was even hotter up here, explosively so, and Larry reflected that if Frances and Harold had left their paint up here when the job was done, the barn would have burned merrily to the ground a week ago. The windows were dusty and festooned with decaying cobwebs which had no doubt been freshly spun when Gerald Ford was President. One of these windows had been forced up, and when Larry leaned out, he had a breathtaking view of the country for miles around.
   This side of the barn faced east, and he was high enough for the roadside concessions, which seemed so monstrously ugly when seen at ground level, to look as inconsequential as a little strewing of roadside litter. Beyond the highway, magnificent, was the ocean, with the incoming waves neatly broken in two by the breakwater stretching out from the northern side of the harbor. The land was an oil painting depicting high summer, all green and gold, wrapped in a still haze of afternoon. He could smell salt and brine. And looking down along the slope of the roof, he could read Harold’s sign, upside down.
   Just the thought of crawling around on that roof, so high above the ground, made Larry’s guts feel dauncy. And he really must have hung his legs right over the raingutter to get the girl’s name on.
   Why did he go to the trouble, Sergeant? That, I think, is one of the questions to which we must address ourselves.
   If you say so, Inspector Underwood.
   He went back down the stairs, going slowly and watching his footing. This was no time for a broken leg. At the bottom, something else caught his eye, something carved into one of the support beams, startlingly white and fresh and in direct contrast to all the rest of the barn’s old dusty darkness. He went over to the beam and peered at the carving, then ran the ball of his thumb over it, part in amusement, part in wonder that another human being had done it on the day he and Rita had been trekking north. He ran his nail along the carved letters again.