In a heart. With an arrow.
   I believe, Sergeant, that the bloke must have been in love.
   “Good for you, Harold,” Larry said, and left the barn.
   The cycle shop in Wells was a Honda dealership, and from the way the showroom bikes were lined up, Larry deduced that two of them were missing. He was more proud of a second find—a crumpled candy wrapper near one of the wastebaskets. A chocolate Payday. It looked as if someone—lovesick Harold Lauder probably—had finished his candy bar while deciding which bikes he and his inamorata would be happiest with. He had balled up his wrapper and shot it at the wastebasket. And missed.
   Nadine thought his deductions were good, but she was not as fetched by them as Larry was. She was eyeing the remaining bikes, in a fever to be off. Joe sat on the showroom’s front step, playing the Gibson twelve-string and hooting contentedly.
   “Listen,” Larry said, “it’s five o’clock now, Nadine. There’s absolutely no way to get going until tomorrow.”
   “But there’s three hours of daylight left! We can’t just sit around! We might miss them!”
   “If we miss them, that’s that,” he said. “Harold Lauder left instructions once, right down to the roads they were going to take. If they move on, he’ll probably do it again.”
   “But—”
   “I know you’re anxious,” he said, and put his hands on her shoulders. He could feel the old impatience building up and forced himself to control it. “But you’ve never been on a motorcycle before.”
   “I can ride a bike, though. And I know how to use a clutch, I told you that. Please, Larry. If we don’t waste time we can camp in New Hampshire tonight and be halfway there by tomorrow night. We—”
   “It’s not like a bike, goddammit!” he burst out, and the guitar came to a jangling stop behind him. He could see Joe looking back at them over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed and instantly distrustful. Gee, I sure do have a way with people, Larry thought. That made him even angrier.
   Nadine said mildly: “You’re hurting me.”
   He looked and saw that his fingers were buried in the soft flesh of her shoulders, and his anger collapsed into dull shame. “I’m sorry,” he said.
   Joe was still looking at him, and Larry recognized that he had just lost half the ground he had gained with the boy. Maybe more. Nadine had said something.
   “What?”
   “I said, tell me why it’s not like a bike.”
   His first impulse was to shout at her, If you know so much, go on and try it. See how you like looking at the world with your head on backward. He controlled that, thinking it wasn’t only the boy he had lost ground with. He’d lost some with himself. Maybe he had come out the other side, but some of the old childish Larry had come out with him, tagging along at his heels like a shadow which has shrunk in the noonday sun but has not entirely disappeared.
   “They’re heavier,” he said. “If you overbalance, you can’t get rebalanced as easily as you can with a bicycle. One of these 360s goes three hundred and fifty pounds. You get used to controlling that extra weight very quickly, but it does take some getting used to. In a standard shift car, you operate the gearshift with your hand and the throttle with your foot. On a cycle it’s reversed: the gearshift is foot-operated, the throttle hand-operated, and that takes a lot of getting used to. There are two brakes instead of one. Your right foot brakes the rear wheel, your right hand brakes the front wheel. If you forget and just use the hand-brake, you’re apt to fly right over the handlebars. And you’re going to have to get used to your passenger.”
   “Joe? But I thought he’d ride with you!”
   “I’d be glad to take him,” Larry said. “But right now I don’t think he’d have me. Do you?”
   Nadine looked at Joe for a long, troubled time. “No,” she said, and then sighed. “He may not even want to ride with me. It may scare him.”
   “If he does, you’re going to be responsible for him. And I’m responsible for both of you. I don’t want to see you spill.”
   “Did that happen to you, Larry? Were you with someone?”
   “I was,” Larry said, “and I took a spill. But by then the lady I was with was already dead.”
   “She crashed her motorcycle?” Nadine’s face was very still.
   “No. What happened, I’d say it was seventy percent accident and thirty percent suicide. Whatever she needed from me… friendship, understanding, help, I don’t know… she wasn’t getting enough.” He was upset now, his temples pounding thickly, his throat tight, the tears close. “Her name was Rita. Rita Blakemoor. I’d like to do better by you that’s all. You and Joe.”
   “Larry, why didn’t you tell me before?”
   “Because it hurts to talk about it,” he said simply. “It hurts a lot.” That was the truth, but not the whole truth. There were the dreams. He found himself wondering if Nadine had bad dreams—last night he had awakened briefly and she had been tossing restlessly and muttering. But she had said nothing today. And Joe. Did Joe have bad dreams? Well, he didn’t know about them, but fearless Inspector Underwood of Scotland Yard was afraid of the dreams… and if Nadine took a spill on the motorcycle, they might come back.
   “We’ll go tomorrow, then,” she said. “Teach me how tonight.”
   But first there was the matter of getting the two small bikes Larry had picked out gassed up. The dealership had a pump, but without electricity it wouldn’t run. He found another candy wrapper by the plate covering the underground tank and deduced that it had recently been pried up by the ever-resourceful Harold Lauder. Lovesick or no, Payday freak or not, Larry had gained a lot of respect for Harold, almost a liking in advance. He had already developed his own mental picture of Harold. Probably in his mid-thirties, a farmer maybe, tall and suntanned, skinny, not too bright in the book sense, maybe, but plenty canny. He grinned. Building up a mental picture of someone you had never seen was a fool’s game, because they were never the way you had imagined. Everybody knows the one about the three-hundred-pound disc jockey with the whipcord-thin voice.
   While Nadine got a cold supper together, Larry prowled around the side of the dealership. There he found a large steel wastecan. Leaning against it was a crowbar and curling over the top was a piece of rubber tubing.
   I’ve found you again, Harold! Take a look at this, Sergeant Briggs. Our man siphoned some gas from the underground tank to get going. I’m surprised he didn’t take his hose with him.
   Perhaps he cut off a piece and that’s what’s left, Inspector Underwood—begging your pardon, but it is in the wastecan.
   By jove, Sergeant, you’re right. I’m going to write you up for a promotion.
   He took the crowbar and rubber hose back around to the plate covering the tank.
   “Joe, can you come here for a minute and help me?”
   The boy looked up from the cheese and crackers he was eating and gazed distrustfully at Larry.
   “Go on, now, that’s all right,” Nadine said quietly.
   Joe came over, his feet dragging a little.
   Larry slipped the crowbar into the plate’s slot. “Throw your weight on that and let’s see if we can get it up,” he said.
   For a moment he thought the boy either didn’t understand him or didn’t want to do it. Then he grasped the far end of the crowbar and pushed on it. His arms were thin but belted with a scrawny sort of muscle, the kind of muscle that working men from poor families always seem to have. The plate tilted a little but didn’t come up enough for Larry to get his fingers under.
   “Lay over it,” he said.
   Those half-savage, uptilted eyes studied him coolly for a moment and then Joe balanced on the crowbar, his feet coming off the ground as his whole weight was thrown onto the lever.
   The plate came up a little farther than before, enough so that Larry could squirm his fingers under it. While he was struggling for purchase he happened to think that if the boy still didn’t like him, this was the best chance he could have to show it. If Joe took his weight off the crowbar the plate would come down with a crash and he’d lose everything on his hands but the thumbs. Nadine had realized this, Larry saw. She had been peering at one of the bikes but now had turned to watch, her body angled into a posture of tension. Her dark eyes went from Larry, down on one knee, to Joe, who was watching Larry as he leaned his weight on the bar. Those seawater eyes were inscrutable. And still Larry couldn’t find purchase.
   “Need help?” Nadine asked, her normally calm voice now just a little highpitched.
   Sweat ran into one eye and he blinked it away. Still no joy. He could smell gasoline.
   “I think we can handle it,” Larry said, looking directly at her.
   A moment later his fingers slipped into a short groove on the underside of the plate. He threw his shoulders into it and the plate came up and crashed over on the tarmac with a dull clang. He heard Nadine sigh, and the crowbar fall to the pavement. He wiped his perspiring brow and looked back at the boy.
   “That’s good work, Joe,” he said. “If you’d let that thing slip, I would’ve spent the rest of my life zipping my fly with my teeth. Thank you.”
   He expected no response (except perhaps an uninterpretable hoot as Joe walked back to inspect the motorcycles again), but Joe said in a rusty, struggling voice: “Weck-come.”
   Larry flashed a glance at Nadine, who stared back at him and then at Joe. Her face was surprised and pleased, yet somehow she looked—he couldn’t have said just how—as if she had expected this. It was an expression he had seen before, but not one he could put his finger on right away. “Joe,” he said, “did you say ‘welcome’?”
   Joe nodded vigorously. “Weck-come. You weck-come.”
   Nadine was holding her arms out, smiling. “That’s good, Joe. Very, very good.” Joe trotted to her and allowed himself to be hugged for a moment or two. Then he began to peer at the bikes again, hooting and chuckling to himself.
   “He can talk,” Larry said.
   “I knew he wasn’t mute,” Nadine answered. “But it’s wonderful to know he can recover. I think he needed two of us. Two halves. He… oh, I don’t know.”
   He saw that she was blushing and thought he knew why. He began to slip the length of rubber hose into the hole in the cement, and suddenly realized that what he was doing could easily be interpreted as a symbolic (and rather crude) bit of dumbshow. He looked up at her, sharply. She turned away quickly, but not before he had seen how intently she was watching what he was doing, and the high color in her cheeks.
   The nasty fear rose in his chest and he called: “For Chrissake, Nadine, look out! ” She was concentrating on the hand controls, not looking where she was going, and she was going to drive the Honda directly into a pine tree at a wobbling five miles an hour.
   She looked up and he heard her say “Oh! ” in a startled voice. Then she swerved, much too sharply, and fell off the bike. The Honda stalled.
   He ran to her, his heart in his throat. “Are you all right? Nadine! Are you—”
   Then she was picking herself up shakily, looking at her scraped hands. “Yes, I’m fine. Stupid me, not looking where I was going. Did I hurt the motorcycle?”
   “Never mind the goddamn motorcycle, let me take a look at your hands.”
   She held them out and he took a plastic bottle of Bactine from his pants pocket and sprayed them.
   “You’re shaking,” she said.
   “Never mind that either,” Larry answered, more roughly than he had intended. “Listen, maybe we had better just stick to the bicycles. This is dangerous—”
   “So is breathing,” she answered calmly. “And I think Joe should ride with you, at least at first.”
   “He won’t—”
   “I think he will,” Nadine said, looking into his face. “And so do you.”
   “Well, let’s stop for tonight. It’s almost too dark to see.”
   “Once more. Haven’t I read that if your horse throws you, you should get right back on?”
   Joe strolled by, munching blueberries from a motorcycle helmet. He had found a number of wild blueberry bushes behind the dealership and had been picking them while Nadine had her first lesson.
   “I guess so,” Larry said, defeated. “But will you please watch where you’re going?”
   “Yes, sir. Right, sir.” She saluted and then smiled at him. She had a beautiful slow smile that lit up her whole face. Larry smiled back; there was nothing else to do. When Nadine smiled, even Joe smiled back.
   This time she putted around the lot twice and then turned out into the road, swinging over too sharply, bringing Larry’s heart into his mouth again. But she brought her foot down smartly as he had shown her, and went up the hill and out of sight. He saw her switch carefully up to second gear, and heard her switch to third as she dropped behind the first rise. Then the bike’s engine faded to a drone that melted away to nothing. He stood anxiously in the twilight, absently slapping at an occasional mosquito.
   Joe strolled by again, his mouth blue. “Weck-come,” he said, and grinned. Larry managed a strained smile in return. If she didn’t come back soon, he would go after her. Visions of finding her lying in a ditch with a broken neck danced blackly in his head.
   He was just walking over to the other cycle, debating whether or not to take Joe with him, when the droning hum came to his ears again and swelled to the sound of the Honda’s engine, clocking smoothly along in fourth. He relaxed… a little. Dismally he realized he would never be able to relax completely while she was riding that thing.
   She came back into sight, the cycle’s headlamp now on, and pulled up beside him.
   “Pretty good, huh?” She switched off.
   “I was getting ready to come after you. I thought you’d had an accident.”
   “I sort of did.” She saw the way he stiffened and added, “I went too slow turning around and forgot to push the clutch in. I stalled.”
   “Oh. Enough for tonight, huh?”
   “Yes,” she said. “My tailbone hurts.”
   He lay in his blankets that night wondering if she might come to him when Joe was asleep, or if he should go to her. He wanted her and thought, from the way she had looked at the absurd little pantomime with the rubber hose earlier, that she wanted him. At last he fell asleep.
   He dreamed he was in a field of corn, lost there. But there was music, guitar music. Joe playing the guitar. If he found Joe he would be all right. So he followed the sound, breaking through one row of corn to the next when he had to, at last coming out in a ragged clearing. There was a small house there, more of a shack really, the porch held up with rusty old jacklifters. It wasn’t Joe playing the guitar, how could it have been? Joe was holding his left hand and Nadine his right. They were with him. An old woman was playing the guitar, a jazzy sort of spiritual that had Joe smiling. The old woman was black, and she was sitting on the porch, and Larry guessed she was just about the oldest woman he had ever seen in his life. But there was something about her that made him feel good… good in the way his mother had once made him feel good when he was very little and she would suddenly hug him and say, Here’s the best boy, here’s Alice Underwood’s all-time best boy.
   The old woman stopped playing and looked up at them.
   Well say, I got me comp’ny. Step on out where I can see you, my peepers ain’t what they once was.
   So they came closer, the three of them hand in hand, and Joe reached out and set a bald old tire swing to slow pendulum movement as they passed it. The tire’s doughnut-shaped shadow slipped back and forth on the weedy ground. They were in a small clearing, an island in a sea of corn. To the north, a dirt road stretched away to a point.
   You like to have a swing on this old box o mine? she asked Joe, and Joe came forward eagerly and took the old guitar from her gnarled hands. He began to play the tune they had followed through the corn, but better and faster than the old woman.
   Bless im, he plays good. Me, I’m too old. Cain’t make my fingers go that fast now. It’s the rheumatiz. But in 1902 I played at the County Hall. I was the first Negro to ever play there, the very first.
   Nadine asked who she was. They were in a kind of forever place where the sun seemed to stand still one hour from darkness and the shadow of the swing Joe had set in motion would always travel back and forth across the weedy yard. Larry wished he could stay here forever, he and his family. This was a good place. The man with no face could never get him here, or Joe, or Nadine.
   Mother Abagail is what they call me. I’m the oldest woman in eastern Nebraska, I guess, and I still make my own biscuits. You come see me as quick as you can. We got to go before he gets wind of us.
   A cloud came over the sun. The swing’s arc had decreased to nothing. Joe stopped playing with a jangling rattle of strings, and Larry felt the hackles rise on the back of his neck. The old woman seemed not to notice.
   Before who gets wind of us? Nadine asked, and Larry wished he could speak, cry out for her to take the question back before it could leap free and hurt them.
   That black man. That servant of the devil. We got the Rockies between us n him, praise God, but they won’t keep him black. That’s why we got to knit together. In Colorado. God come to me in a dream and showed me where. But we got to be quick, quick as we can, anyway. So you come see me. There’s others coming, too.
   No, Nadine said in a cold and fearful voice. We’re going to Vermont, that’s all. Only to Vermont—just a short trip.
   Your trip will be longer than ours, if’n you don’t fight off his power, the old woman in Larry’s dream replied. She was looking at Nadine with great sadness. This could be a good man you got here, woman. He wants to make something out of himself. Why don’t you cleave to him instead of using him?
   No! We’re going to Vermont, to VERMONT!
   The old woman looked at Nadine pityingly. You’ll go straight to hell if you don’t watch close, daughter of Eve. And when you get there, you are gonna find that hell is cold.
   The dream broke up then, splitting into cracks of darkness that swallowed him. But something in that darkness was stalking him. It was cold and merciless, and soon he would see its grinning teeth.
   But before that could happen he was awake. It was half an hour after dawn, and the world was swaddled in a thick white ground fog that would burn off when the sun got up a little more. Now the motorcycle dealership rose out of it like some strange ship’s prow constructed of cinderblock instead of wood.
   Someone was next to him, and he saw that it wasn’t Nadine who had joined him in the night, but Joe. The boy lay next to him, thumb corked in his mouth, shivering in his sleep, as if his own nightmare had gripped him. Larry wondered if Joe’s dreams were so different from his own… and he lay on his back, staring up into the white fog and thinking about that until the others woke up an hour later.
   The fog had burned off enough to travel by the time they had finished breakfast and packed their things on the cycles. As Nadine had said, Joe showed no qualms about riding behind Larry; in fact, he climbed on Larry’s cycle without having to be asked.
   “Slow,” Larry said for the fourth time. “We’re not going to hurry and have an accident.”
   “Fine,” Nadine said. “I’m really excited. It’s like being on a quest!”
   She smiled at him, but Larry could not smile back. Rita Blakemoor had said something very much like that when they were leaving New York City. Two days before she died, she had said it.
   They stopped for lunch in Epsom, eating fried ham from a can and drinking orange soda under the tree where Larry had fallen asleep and Joe had stood over him with the knife. Larry was relieved to find that riding the motorcycles wasn’t as bad as he had thought it would be; in most of the places they could make fairly decent time, and even going through the villages it was only necessary to putt along the sidewalks at walking speed. Nadine was being extremely careful about slowing down on blind curves, and even on the open road she did not urge Larry to go any faster than the steady thirty-five-miles-an-hour pace he was setting. He thought that, barring bad weather, they could be in Stovington by the nineteenth.
   They stopped for supper west of Concord, where Nadine said they could save time on Lauder and Goldsmith’s route by going directly northwest on the thruway, I-89.
   “There will be a lot of stalled traffic,” Larry said doubtfully.
   “We can weave in and out,” she said with confidence, “and use the breakdown lane when we have to. The worst that can happen is we’ll have to backtrack to an exit and go around on a secondary road.”
   They tried it for two hours after supper, and did indeed come upon a blockage from one side of the northbound lanes to the other. Just beyond Warner a car-and-housetrailer combo had jackknifed; the driver and his wife, weeks dead, lay like grainsacks in the front seat of their Electra.
   The three of them, working together, were able to hoist the bikes over the buckled hitch between the car and the trailer. Afterward they were too tired to go any farther, and that night Larry didn’t ponder whether or not to go to Nadine, who had taken her blankets ten feet farther down from where he had spread his (the boy was between them). That night he was too tired to do anything but fall asleep.
   The next afternoon they came upon a block they couldn’t get around. A trailer truck had overturned and half a dozen cars had crashed behind it. Luckily, they were only two miles beyond the Enfield exit. They went back, took the exit ramp, and then, feeling tired and discouraged, stopped in the Enfield town park for a twenty-minute rest.
   “What did you do before, Nadine?” Larry asked. He had been thinking about the expression in her eyes when Joe had finally spoken (the boy had added “Larry, Nadine, fanks,” and “Go baffroom” to his working vocabulary), and now he made a guess based on that. “Were you a teacher?”
   She looked at him with surprise. “Yes. That’s a good guess.”
   “Little kids?”
   “That’s right. First and second graders.”
   That explained something about her complete unwillingness to leave Joe behind. In mind at least, the boy had regressed to a seven-year-old age level.
   “How did you guess?”
   “A long time ago I used to date a speech therapist from Long Island,” Larry said. “I know that sounds like the start of one of those involved New York jokes, but it’s the truth. She worked for the Ocean View school system. Younger grades. Kids with speech impediments, cleft palates, harelips, deaf kids. She used to say that correcting speech defects in children was just showing them an alternative way of getting the right sounds. Show them, say the word. Show them, say the word. Over and over until something in the kid’s head clicked. And when she talked about that click happening, she looked the way you did when Joe said ‘You’re welcome.’”
   “Did I?” She smiled a little wistfully. “I loved the little ones. Some of them were bruised, but none of them at that age are irrevocably spoiled. The little ones are the only good human beings.”
   “Kind of a romantic idea, isn’t it?”
   She shrugged. “Children are good. And if you work with them, you get to be a romantic. That’s not so bad. Wasn’t your speech therapist friend happy in her work?”
   “Yeah, she liked it,” Larry agreed. “Were you married? Before?” There it was again—that simple, ubiquitous word. Before. It was only two syllables, but it had become all-encompassing.
   “Married? No. Never married.” She began to look nervous again. “I’m the original old maid schoolteacher, younger than I look but older than I feel. Thirty-seven.” His eyes had moved to her hair before he could stop them and she nodded as if he had spoken out loud. “It’s premature,” she said matter-of-factly. “My grandmother’s hair was totally white by the time she was forty. I think I’m going to last at least five years longer.”
   “Where did you teach?”
   “A small private school in Pittsfield. Very exclusive. Ivy-covered walls, all the newest playground equipment. Damn the recession, full speed ahead. The car pool consisted of two Thunderbirds, three Mercedes-Benzes, a couple of Lincolns, and a Chrysler Imperial.”
   “You must have been very good.”
   “Yes, I think I was,” she said artlessly, then smiled. “Doesn’t matter much now.”
   He put an arm around her. She started a little and he felt her stiffen. Her hand and shoulder were warm.
   “I wish you wouldn’t,” she said uncomfortably.
   “You don’t want me to?”
   “No. I don’t.”
   He drew his arm back, baffled. She did want him to that was the thing; he could feel her wanting coming off her in mild but clearly receivable waves. Her color was very high now, and she was looking desperately down at her hands, which were fiddling together in her lap like a couple of hurt spiders. Her eyes were shiny, as if she might be on the verge of tears.
   “Nadine—”
   (honey, is that you?)
   She looked up at him and he saw she was past the verge of tears. She was about to speak when Joe strolled up, carrying his guitar case in one hand. They looked at him guiltily, as if he had found them doing something rather more personal than talking.
   “Lady,” Joe said conversationally.
   “What?” Larry asked, startled and not tracking very well.
   “Lady!” Joe said again, and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder.
   Larry and Nadine looked at each other.
   Suddenly there was a fourth voice, highpitched and choking with emotion, as startling as the voice of God.
   “Thank heaven!” it cried. “Oh thank heaven!”
   They stood up and looked at the woman who was now half running up the street toward them. She was smiling and crying at the same time.
   “Glad to see you,” she said. “I’m so glad to see you, thank heaven—”
   She swayed and might have fainted if Larry hadn’t been there to steady her until her dizziness passed. He guessed her age at about twenty-five. She was dressed in bluejeans and a plain white cotton blouse. Her face was pale, her blue eyes unnaturally fixed. Those eyes stared at Larry as if trying to convince the brain behind them that this was not a hallucination, that the three people she saw were really here.
   “I’m Larry Underwood,” he said. “The lady is Nadine Cross. The boy is Joe. We’re very happy to meet you.”
   The woman continued to stare at him wordlessly for a moment, and then walked slowly away from him and toward Nadine.
   “I’m so pleased…” she began, “… so pleased to meet you.” She stumbled a little. “Oh my God, are you really people?”
   “Yes,” Nadine said.
   The woman put her arms around Nadine and sobbed. Nadine held her. Joe stood in the street by a stalled pickup truck, his guitar case in one hand, his free thumb in his mouth. At last he went to Larry and looked up at him. Larry held his hand. The two of them stood that way and watched the women solemnly. And that was how they met Lucy Swann.
   She was eager to go with them when they told her where they were headed, and that they had reason to believe there were at least two other people there, and possibly more. Larry found a medium-sized knapsack for her in the Enfield Sporting Goods, and Nadine went down to her house on the outskirts of town to help her pack… two changes of clothes, some underwear, an extra pair of shoes, a raincoat. And pictures of her late husband and daughter.
   They camped that night in a town called Quechee, now over the state line and into Vermont. Lucy Swann told a tale which was short and simple and not much different from the others they would hear. The grief came built-in, and the shock, which had driven her at least within hailing distance of madness.
   Her husband had sickened on the twenty-fifth of June, her daughter the next day. She had nursed them as well as she had been able, fully expecting to come down with the rales, as they were calling the sickness in her corner of New England, herself. By the twenty-seventh, when her husband had gone into a coma, Enfield was pretty much cut off from the outside world. Television reception had become spotty and queer. People were dying like flies. During the previous week they had seen extraordinary movements of army troops along the turnpike, but none of them had business in such a little place as Enfield, New Hampshire. In the early morning hours of June twenty-eighth, her husband had died. Her daughter had seemed a little bit better for a while on the twenty-ninth, and then had taken an abrupt turn for the worst that evening. She had died around eleven o’clock. By July 3, everyone in Enfield except her and an old man named Bill Dadds had died. Bill had been sick, Lucy said, but he seemed to have thrown it off entirely. Then, on the morning of Independence Day, she had found Bill dead on Main Street, swollen up and black, like everyone else.
   “So I buried my people, and Bill too,” she said as they sat around the crackling fire. “It took all of one day, but I put them to rest. And then I thought that I better go on down to Concord, where my mother and father live. But I just… never got around to it.” She looked at them appealingly. “Was it so wrong? Do you think they would have been alive?”
   “No,” Larry said. “The immunity sure wasn’t hereditary in any direct way. My mother…” He looked into the fire.
   “Wes and me, we had to get married,” Lucy said. “That was the summer after I graduated high school—1984. My mom and dad didn’t want me to marry him. They wanted me to go away to have the baby and just give her up. But I wouldn’t. My mom said it would end in divorce. My dad said Wes was a no-account man and he’d always be shiftless. I just said, ‘That may be, but we’ll see what happens.’ I just wanted to take the chance. You know?”
   “Yes,” Nadine said. She was sitting next to Lucy, looking at her with great compassion.
   “We had a nice little home, and I sure never thought it would end like this,” Lucy said with a sigh that was half a sob. “We settled down real good, the three of us. It was more Marcy than me that settled Wes down. He thought the sun rose and set on that baby. He thought…”
   “Don’t,” Nadine said. “All that was before.”
   That word again, Larry thought. That little two-syllable word.
   “Yes. It’s gone now. And I guess I could have gotten along. I was, anyway, until I started to have all those bad dreams.”
   Larry’s head jerked up. “Dreams?”
   Nadine was looking at Joe. A moment before, the boy had been nodding out in front of the fire. Now he was staring at Lucy, his eyes gleaming.
   “Bad dreams, nightmares,” Lucy said. “They’re not always the same. Mostly it’s a man chasing me, and I can never see exactly what he looks like because he’s all wrapped up in a, what do you call it, a cloak. And he stays in the shadows and alleys.” She shivered. “I got so I was afraid to go to sleep. But now maybe I’ll—”
   “Brrr-ack man!” Joe cried suddenly, so fiercely they all jumped. He leaped to his feet and held his arms out like a miniature Bela Lugosi, his fingers hooked into claws. “Brrack man! Bad dreams! Chases! Chases me! ‘Cares me!” And he shrank against Nadine and stared untrustingly into the darkness.
   A little silence fell among them.
   “This is crazy,” Larry said, and then stopped. They were all looking at him. Suddenly the darkness seemed very dark indeed, and Lucy looked frightened again.
   He forced himself to go on. “Lucy, do you ever dream about… well, about a place in Nebraska?”
   “I had a dream one night about an old Negro woman,” Lucy said, “but it didn’t last very long. She said something like, ‘You come see me.’ Then I was back in Enfield and that… that scary guy was chasing me. Then I woke up.”
   Larry looked at her so long that she colored and dropped her eyes.
   He looked at Joe. “Joe, do you ever dream about… uh, corn? An old woman? A guitar?” Joe only looked at him from Nadine’s encircling arm.
   “Leave him alone, you’ll upset him more,” Nadine said, but she was the one who sounded upset.
   Larry thought. “A house, Joe? A little house with a porch up on jacks?”
   He thought he saw a gleam in Joe’s eyes.
   “Stop it, Larry!” Nadine said.
   “A swing, Joe? A swing made out of a tire?”
   Joe suddenly jerked in Nadine’s arms. His thumb came out of his mouth. Nadine tried to hold him, but Joe broke through.
   “The swing!” Joe said exultantly. “The swing! The swing!” He whirled away from them and pointed first at Nadine, then at Larry. “Her! You! Lots!”
   “Lots?” Larry asked, but Joe had subsided again.
   Lucy Swann looked stunned. “The swing,” she said. “I remember that, too.” She looked at Larry. “Why are we all having the same dreams? Is somebody using a ray on us?”
   “I don’t know.” He looked at Nadine. “Have you had them, too?”
   “I don’t dream,” she said sharply, and immediately dropped her eyes. He thought: You’re lying. But why?
   “Nadine, if you—” he began.
   “I told you I don’t dream! ” Nadine cried sharply, almost hysterically. “Can’t you just leave me alone? Do you have to badger me?”
   She stood up and left the fire, almost running.
   Lucy looked after her uncertainly for a moment and then stood up. “I’ll go after her.”
   “Yes, you better. Joe, stay with me, okay?”
   “Kay,” Joe said, and began to unsnap the guitar case.
   Lucy came back with Nadine ten minutes later. They had both been crying, Larry saw, but they seemed to be on good terms now.
   “I’m sorry,” Nadine said to Larry. “It’s just that I’m always upset. It comes out in funny ways.”
   “Its all right.”
   The subject did not come up again. They sat and listened to Joe run through his repertoire. He was getting very good indeed now, and in with the hootings and grunts, fragments of the lyrics were coming through.
   At last they slept, Larry on one end, Nadine on the other, Joe and Lucy between.
   Larry dreamed first of the black man on the high place, and then of the old black woman sitting on her porch. Only in this dream he knew the black man was coming, striding through the corn, knocking his own twisted swathe through the corn, his terrible hot grin spot-welded to his face, coming toward them, closer and closer.
   Larry woke up in the middle of the night, out of breath, his chest constricted with terror. The others slept like stones. Somehow, in that dream he had known. The black man had not been coming empty handed. In his arms, borne like an offering as he strode through the corn, he held the decaying body of Rita Blakemore, now stiff and swollen, the flesh ripped by woodchucks and weasels. A mute accusation to be thrown at his feet to scream his guilt at the others, to silently proclaim that he wasn’t no nice guy, that something had been left out of him, that he was a loser, that he was a taker.
   At last he slept again, and until he woke up the next morning at seven, stiff, cold, hungry, and needing to go to the bathroom, his sleep was dreamless.
   “Oh God,” Nadine said emptily. Larry looked at her and saw a disappointment too deep for tears. Her face was pale, her remarkable eyes clouded and dull.
   It was quarter past seven, July 19, and the shadows were drawing long. They had ridden all day, their few rest stops only five minutes long, their lunch break, which they had taken in Randolph, only half an hour. None of them had complained, although after six hours on a cycle Larry’s whole body felt numb and achy and full of pins.
   Now they stood together in a line outside a wrought-iron fence. Below and behind them lay the town of Stovington, not much changed from the way Stu Redman had seen it on his last couple of days in this institution. Beyond the fence and a lawn that had once been well kept but which was now shaggy and littered by sticks and leaves that had blown onto it during afternoon thunderstorms, was the institution itself, three stories high, more of it buried underground, Larry surmised.
   The place was deserted, silent, empty.
   In the center of the lawn was a sign which read:
   STOVINGTON PLAGUE CONTROL CENTER
   THIS IS A GOVERNMENT INSTALLATION!
   VISITORS MUST CHECK IN AT MAIN DESK
   Beside it was a second sign, and this was what they were looking at.


   ROUTE 7 TO RUTLAND
   ROUTE 4 TO SCHUYLERVILLE
   ROUTE 29 TO I-87
   I-87 SOUTH TO I-90
   I-90 WEST
   EVERYONE HERE IS DEAD
   WE ARE MOVING WEST TO NEBRASKA
   STAY ON OUR ROUTE
   WATCH FOR SIGNS

   HAROLD EMERY LAUDER
   FRANCES GOLDSMITH
   STUART REDMAN
   GLENDON PEQUOD BATEMAN
   JULY 8, 1990
   “Harold, my man,” Larry murmured. “Can’t wait to shake your hand and buy you a beer… or a Payday.”
   “Larry!” Lucy said sharply.
   Nadine had fainted.

Chapter 45
   
She tottered out onto her porch at twenty to eleven on the morning of July 20, carrying her coffee and her toast with her as she did every day that the Coca-Cola thermometer outside the sink window read over fifty degrees. It was high summer, the finest summer Mother Abagail could recollect since 1955 the year her mother had died at the goodish age of ninety-three. Too bad there ain’t more folks around to enjoy it, she thought as she sat carefully down in her armless rocking chair. But did they ever enjoy it? Some did, of course; young folks in love did, and old folks whose bones remembered so clearly what the death-clutch of winter was. Now most of the young folks and old folks were gone, and most of those in between. God had brought down a harsh judgment on the human race.
   Some might argue with such a harsh judgment, but Mother Abagail was not among their number. He had done it once with water, and sometime further along, He would do it with fire. Her place was not to judge God, although she wished He hadn’t seen fit to set the cup before her lips that He had. But when it came to matters of judgment, she was satisfied with the answer God had given Moses from the burning bush when Moses had seen fit to question. Who are you? Mose asks, and God comes back from that bush just as pert as you like: I Am, Who I AM. In other words, Mose, stop beatin around this here bush and get your old ass in gear.
   She wheezed laughter and nodded her head and dipped her toast into the wide mouth of her coffee cup until it was soft enough to chew. It had been sixteen years since she had bid hail and farewell to her last tooth. Toothless she had come from her mother’s womb, and toothless she would go into her own grave. Molly, her great-granddaughter, and her husband had given her a set of false teeth for Mother’s Day just a year later, the year she herself had been ninety-three, but they hurt her gums and now she only wore them when she knew Molly and Jim were coming. Then she would take them from the box in the drawer and rinse them off good and stick them in. And if she had time before Molly and Jim came, she would make faces at herself in the spotty kitchen mirror and growl through all those big white fake teeth and laugh fit to split. She looked like an old black Everglades gator.
   She was old and feeble, but her mind was pretty much in order. Abagail Freemantle was her name born in 1882 and with the birth certificate to prove it. She’d seen a heap during her time on the earth, but nothing to match the goings-on of the last month or so. No, there never had been such a thing, and now her time was coming to be a part of it and she hated it. She was old. She wanted to rest and enjoy the cycle of the seasons between now and whenever God got tired of watching her make her daily round and decided to call her home to Glory. But what happened when you questioned God? The answer you got was I Am, Who I AM, and that was the end. When His own Son prayed that the cup be taken from His lips, God never even answered… and she wasn’t up to that snuff, no how, no way. Just an ordinary sinner was all she was, and at night when the wind came up and blew through the corn it frightened her to think that God had looked down at a little baby girl poking out between her mother’s legs back in early 1882 and had said to Himself: I got to keep her around a goodish time. She’s got work in 1990, on the other side of a whole heap of calendar pages.
   Her time here in Hemingford Home was coming to an end, and her final season of work lay ahead of her in the West, near the Rocky Mountains. He had sent Moses to mountain-climbing and Noah to boatbuilding; He had seen His own Son nailed up on a Tree. What did He care how miserably afraid Abby Freemantle was of the man with no face, he who stalked her dreams?
   She never saw him; she didn’t have to see him. He was a shadow passing through the corn at noon, a cold pocket of air, a gore-crew peering down at you from the phone lines. His voice called to her in all the sounds that had ever frightened her—spoken soft, it was the tick of a deathwatch beetle under the stairs, telling that someone loved would soon pass over; spoken loud it was the afternoon thunder rolling amid the clouds that came out of the west like boiling Armageddon. And sometimes there was no sound at all but the lonely rustle of the nightwind in the corn but she would know he was there and that was the worst of all, because then the man with no face seemed only a little less than God Himself; at those times it seemed that she was within touching distance of the dark angel that had flown silently over Egypt, killing the firstborn of every house where the door post wasn’t daubed with blood. That frightened her most of all. She became a child again in her fear and knew that while others knew of him and were frightened by him, only she had been given a clear vision of his terrible power.
   “Welladay,” she said, and popped the last bite of toast into her mouth. She rocked back and forth, drinking her coffee. This was a bright, fine day, and no part of her body was giving her particular misery, and she offered up a brief prayer of thanksgiving for what she had got. God is great, God is good; the littlest child could learn those words, and they encompassed the whole world and all the world held, good and evil.
   “God is great,” Mother Abagail said, “God is good. Thank You for the sunshine. For the coffee. For the fine BM I had last night, You was right, those dates turned the trick, but my God, they taste nasty to me. Ain’t I the one? God is great…”
   Her coffee was about gone. She set the cup down and rocked, her face turned up to the sun like some strange living rockface, seamed with veins of coal. She dozed, then slept. Her heart, its walls now almost as thin as tissue paper, beat on and on as it had every minute for the last 39,630 days. Like a baby in a crib, you would have had to put your hand on her chest to assure yourself that she was breathing at all.
   But the smile stayed on.
   Things had surely changed in all the years since she had been a girl. The Freemantles had come to Nebraska as freed slaves, and Abagail’s own great-granddaughter Molly laughed in a nasty, cynical way and suggested the money Abby’s father had used to buy the home place—money paid to him by Sam Freemantle of Lewis, South Carolina, as wages for the eight years her daddy and his brothers had stayed on after the States War had ended—had been “conscience money.” Abagail had held her tongue when Molly said that—Molly and Jim and the others were young and didn’t understand anything but the veriest good and the veriest bad—but inside she had rolled her eyes and said to herself: Conscience money? Well, is there any money cleaner than that?
   So the Freemantles had settled in Hemingford Home and Abby, the last of Daddy and Mamma’s children, had been born right here on the home place. Her father had bested those who would not buy from niggers and those who would not sell to them; he had bought land a little smidge at a time so as not to alarm those who were worried about “those black bastards over Columbus way”; he had been the first man in Polk County to try crop rotation; the first man to try chemical fertilizer; and in March of 1902 Gary Sites had come to the house to tell John Freemantle that he had been voted into the Grange. He was the first black man to belong to the Grange in the whole state of Nebraska. That year had been a topper.
   She reckoned that anyone, looking back over her life, could pick out one year and say, “That was the best.” It seemed that, for everyone, there was one spell of seasons when everything came together, smooth and glorious and full of wonder. It was only later on that you might wonder why it had happened that way. It was like putting ten different savory things in the cold-pantry all at once, so each took on a bit of the others’ flavors; the mushrooms had a taste of ham and the ham of mushrooms; the venison had the slightest wild taste of partridge and the partridge had the tiniest hint of cucumbers. Later on in life, you might wish that the good things which all befell in your one special year had spread themselves out a little more, that you could maybe take one of the golden things and kind of transplant it right down in the middle of a three-year stretch you couldn’t remember a blessed good thing about, or even a bad one, and so you knew that things had just gone on the way they were supposed to in the world God had created and Adam and Eve had half uncreated—the washing had gone out, the floors had been scrubbed, the babies had been cared for, the clothes had been mended; three years with nothing to break up the gray even flow of time but Easter and the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving and Christmas. But there was no answering the ways God set about His wonders to perform, and for Abby Freemantle as well as her father, ‘02 had been a topper.
   Abby thought she was the only one in the family—other than her daddy, that was—that understood what a great, nearly unprecedented thing it was to be invited into the Grange. He would be the first Negro Granger in Nebraska, and very possibly the first Negro Granger in the United States. He had no illusions about the price he and his family would pay in the form of crude jokes and racial slurs from those men—Ben Conveigh chief among them—who were set against the idea. But he also saw that Gary Sites was handing him something more than a chance at survival: Gary was giving him a chance to prosper with the rest of the corn belt.
   As a member of the Grange, his problems buying good seed would end. The necessity of taking his crops all the way to Omaha to find a buyer would likewise end. It might mean the end of the water-rights squabble he had been having with Ben Conveigh, who was rabid on the subjects of niggers like John Freemantle and nigger-lovers like Gary Sites. It might even mean that the county tax assessor would stop his endless gouging. So John Freemantle accepted the invitation, and the vote went his way (by quite a comfortable margin, too), and there were nasty cracks, and jokes about how a coon had got caught in the Grange Hall loft, and about how when a nigger-baby went to heaven and got its little black wings you called it a bat instead of an angel, and Ben Conveigh went around for a while telling people that the only reason the Mystic Tie Grange had voted John Freemantle in was because the Children’s Fair was coming up pretty soon and they needed a nigger to play the African orangutan. John Freemantle pretended not to hear these things, and at home he would quote from the Bible—“A soft answer turneth away wrath” and “Brethren, as ye reap so shalt ye surely sow” and his favorite, spoken not in humility but in grim expectation: “The meek shall inherit the earth.”
   And little by little he had brought his neighbors around. Not all of them, not the rabid ones like Ben Conveigh and his half-brother George, not the Arnolds and the Deacons, but all the others. In 1903 they had taken dinner with Gary Sites and his family, right in the parlor, just as good as white.
   And in 1902 Abagail had played her guitar at the Grange Hall, and not in the minstrel show, either; she had played in the white folks’ talent show at the end of the year. Her mother had been deadset against that; it was one of the few times in her life when she let her opposition to one of her husband’s ideas out in front of the children (except by then the boys were damned near middle-aged and John himself had a good deal more than a touch of snow on the mountain).
   “I know how it was,” she said, weeping. “You and Sites and that Frank Fenner, you whipped this up together. That’s fine for them, John Freemantle, but what’s got into your head? They’re white! You go hunker down with them in the backyard and talk about plowin! You can even go downtown and have a spot of beer with them, if that Nate Jackson will let you into his saloon. Fine! I know what you’ve been through these last years—none better. I know you’ve kep a smile on your face when it must have hurt like a grassfire in your heart. But this is different! This is your own daughter! What you gonna say if she gets up there in her pretty white dress and they laughs at her? What you gonna do if they throws rotten tomatas at her like they did at Brick Sullivan when he tried to sing in the minstrel show? And what are you going to say if she comes to you with those tomatas all over the front of her dress and asks, ‘Why, Daddy? Why did they do it, and why did you let them do it?’”
   “Well, Rebecca,” John had answered, “I guess we better leave it up to her and David.”
   David had been her first husband; in 1902 Abagail Freemantle had become Abagail Trotts. David Trotts was a black farmhand from over Valparaiso way, and he had come pretty nearly thirty miles one way to court her. John Freemantle had once said to Rebecca that the bear had caught ole Davy right and proper, and he had been Trotting plenty. There were plenty who had laughed at her first husband and said things like, “I guess I know who wears the pants in that family.”
   But David had not been a weakling, only quiet and thoughtful. When he told John and Rebecca Freemantle, “Whatever Abagail thinks is right, why, I reckon that’s what’s to do,” she had blessed him for it and told her mother and father she intended to go ahead.
   So on December 27, 1902, already three months gone with her first, she had mounted the Grange Hall stage in the dead silence that had ensued when the master of ceremonies had announced her name. Just before her Gretchen Tilyons had been on and had done a racy French dance, showing her ankles and petticoats to the raucous whistles, cheers, and stamping feet of the men in the audience.
   She stood in the thick silence, knowing how black her face and neck must look in her new white dress, and her heart was thudding terribly in her chest and she was thinking, I’ve forgot every word, every single word, I promised Daddy I wouldn’t cry no matter what, I wouldn’t cry, but Ben Conveigh’s out there and when Ben Conveigh yells NIGGER, then I guess I’ll cry, oh why did I ever get into this? Mamma was right, I’ve got above my place and I’ll pay for it —
   The hall was filled with white faces turned up to look at her. Every chair was filled and there were two rows of standees at the back of the hall. Kerosene lanterns glowed and flared. The red velvet curtains were pulled back in swoops of cloth and tied with gold ropes.
   And she thought: I’m Abagail Freemantle Trotts, I play well and I sing well; I do not know these things because anyone told me.
   And so she began to sing “The Old Rugged Cross” into the moveless silence, her fingers picking melody. Then picking up a strum, the slightly stronger melody of “How I Love My Jesus,” and then stronger still, “Camp Meeting in Georgia.” Now people were swaying back and forth almost in spite of themselves. Some were grinning and tapping their knees.
   She sang a medley of Civil War songs: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Marching Through Georgia,” and “Goober Peas” (more smiles at that one; many of these men, Grand Army of the Republic veterans, had eaten more than a few goober peas during their time in the service). She finished with “Tenting Tonight on the Old Campground,” and as the last chord floated away into a silence that was now thoughtful and sad, she thought: Now if you want to throw your tomatas or whatever, you go on and do it. I played and sang my best, and I was real fine.
   When the last chord floated into silence, that silence held for a long, almost enchanted instant, as though the people in those seats and the others standing at the back of the hall had been taken far away, so far they could not find their way back all at once. Then the applause broke and rolled over her in a wave, long and sustained, making her blush, making her feel confused, hot and shivery all over. She saw her mother, weeping openly, and her father, and David, beaming at her.
   She had tried to leave the stage then, but cries of “Encore! Encore! ” broke out, and so, smiling, she played “Digging My Potatoes.” That song was just a tiny bit risky, but Abby guessed that if Gretchen Tilyons could show her ankles in public, then she could sing a song that was the teeniest bit bawdy. She was, after all, a married woman.
   Someone’s been diggin my potatoes
   They’ve left em in my bin,
   And now that someone’s gone
   And see the trouble I’ve got in.
   There were six more verses like that (some even worse) and she sang every one, and at the last line of each the roar of approval was louder. And later she thought that if she had done anything wrong that night, it was singing that song, which was exactly the kind of song they probably expected to hear a nigger sing.
   She finished to another thunderous ovation and fresh cries of “Encore! ” She remounted the stage, and when the crowd had quietened, she said: “Thank you all very much. I hope you won’t think I am bein forward if I ask to sing just one more song, which I have learned special but never ever expected to sing here. But it is just about the best song I know, on account of what President Lincoln and this country did for me and mine, even before I was born.”
   They were very quiet now, listening closely. Her family sat stock still, all together near the left aisle, like a spot of blackberry jam on a white handkerchief.
   “On account of what happened back in the middle of the States War,” she went steadily on, “my family was able to come here and live with the fine neighbors that we have.”
   Then she played and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and everyone stood up and listened, and some of the handkerchiefs came out again, and when she had finished, they applauded fit to raise the roof.
   That was the proudest day of her life.
   She stirred awake a little after noon and sat up, blinking in the sunlight, an old woman of a hundred and eight. She had slept wrong on her back and it was a pure misery to her. Would be all day, if she knew anything about it.
   “Welladay,” she said, and stood up carefully. She began to go down the porch steps, holding carefully to the rickety railing, wincing at the daggers of pain in her back and the prickles in her legs. Her circulation was not what it had once been… why should it be? Time after time she had warned herself about the consequences of falling asleep in that rocker. She would doze off and all the old times would come back and that was wonderful, oh yes it was, better than watching a play on the television, but there was hell to pay when she woke up. She could lecture herself all she liked, but she was like an old dog that splays itself out by a fireplace. If she sat in the sun, she went to sleep, that was all. She no longer had a say in the matter.
   She reached the bottom of the steps, paused to “let her legs catch up with her,” then hawked up a goodish gob of snot and spat it into the dirt. When she felt about as usual (except for the misery in her back), she walked slowly around to the privy her grandson Victor had put behind the house in 1931. She went inside, primly shut the door and put the hook through the eye just as if there was a whole crowd of folks out there instead of a few blackbirds, and sat down. A moment later she began to make water and sighed contentedly. Here was another thing about being old no one ever thought to tell you (or was it just that you never listened?)—you stopped knowing when you had to make water. Seemed like you lost all the feeling down there in your bladder, and if you weren’t careful, first thing you knew you had to be changing your clothes. It wasn’t like her to be dirty, and so she came out here to squat six or seven times a day, and at night she kept the chamberpot beside the bed. Molly’s Jim told her once that she was like a dog that couldn’t pass a fireplug without at least lifting one leg to salute it, and that had made her laugh until tears spouted from her eyes and streamed down her cheeks. Molly’s Jim was an advertising executive in Chicago and getting along a right smart… had been, anyway. She supposed he was gone with the rest of them. Molly too. Bless their hearts, they were with Jesus now.
   The last year or so, Molly and Jim were about the only ones who came out to the place to see her anymore. The rest seemed to have forgot she was alive, but she could understand that. She had lived past her time. She was like a dinosaur which had no business still wearing its flesh over its bones, a thing whose proper place was in a museum (or a graveyard). She could understand them not wanting to come see her, but what she couldn’t understand was why they didn’t want to come back and see the land. There wasn’t much left, no; just a matter of acres out of the original large freehold. It was still theirs, however; still their land. But black folks didn’t seem to care so much about land anymore. There were, in fact, those that actually seemed ashamed of it. They had gone off to make their way in the cities, and most of them, like Jim, came along real well… but how it made her heart ache, to think of all those black folks with their faces set away from the land!
   Molly and Jim had wanted to put in a flushing toilet for her the year before last, and had been hurt when she refused. She tried to explain so they could understand, but all Molly had been able to say, over and over again was, “Mother Abagail, you are a hundred and six years old. How do you think I feel, knowing you are going out there to squat down some days when it’s only ten degrees above zero? Don’t you know that the shock of the cold could do your heart in?”
   “When the Lord wants me, the Lord will take me,” Abagail said, and she was knitting, and so of course they thought that was what she was looking at and couldn’t see the way they rolled their eyes at each other.
   Some things you couldn’t let go of. It seemed like that was another thing the young people didn’t know. Now, back in ‘82, when she had turned a hundred, Cathy and David had offered her a TV set and she had taken them up on that one. The TV was a marvelous machine for passing the time when you were by your onesome. But when Christopher and Susy came and said they wanted to get her on the city water, she had turned them down just as she had turned down Molly and Jim on their kind offer of a flushing toilet. They had argued that her dug well was shallow, and it could go dry if there was another summer like 1988, when the drought came. It was true, but she just went on saying no. They thought she had flipped her wig, of course, that she was taking coat after coat of senility the way a floor takes varnish, but she herself believed her mind was pretty nigh as good as it had ever been.

She hoisted herself off the privy’s seat, dusted lime down through the hole, and slowly let herself out into the sunlight again. She kept her privy sweet, but they were dank old places no matter how sweet they smelled.
   It was as if the voice of God had been whispering in her ear when Chris and Susy offered to see that she was put on the city water… the voice of God even way back when. Molly and Jim wanted to get her that china throne with the flush-lever on the side. God did speak to folks; hadn’t He talked to Noah about the ark, telling him how many cubits long and how many deep and how many wide? Yes. And she believed He had spoken to her as well, not from a burning bush or out of a pillar of fire, but in a still, small voice that said: Abby, you are going to need your hand-pump. You enjoy your lectricity all you want, Abby, but you keep those oil-lamps of yours full and keep the wicks trimmed. You keep the cold-pantry just the way your mother kept it before you. And mind you don’t let any of the young folks talk you into anything you know to be against My will, Abby. They are your kin, but I am your Father.
   She paused in the middle of the yard, looking out at the sea of corn, broken only by the dirt road going north toward Duncan and Columbus. Three miles up from her house it went to tar. The corn was going to be fine this year, and it was such a shame that no one would be around to harvest it but the rooks. It was sad to think that the big red harvesting machines were going to stay in their barns this September, sad to think there would be no husking bees and barn dances. Sad to think that, for the first time in the last one hundred and eight years, she would not be here in Hemingford Home to see the time of the change as summer gave in to pagan, jocund autumn. She would love this summer all the more because it was to be her last—she felt that clearly. And she would not be laid to rest here but farther west, in a strange country. It was bitter.
   She shuffled over to the tire swing and set it to moving. It was an old tractor tire that her brother Lucas had hung here in 1922. The rope had been changed many times between then and now, but never the tire. Now the canvas showed through in many places, and on the inside rim there was a deep depression where generations of young buttocks had set themselves down. Below the tire was a deep and dusty groove in the earth where the grass had long since given up trying to grow, and on the limb where the rope was tied, the bark had been rubbed away to show the branch’s white bone. The rope creaked slowly and this time she spoke aloud.
   “Please, my Lord, my Lord, not unless I have to, I’d have you take this cup from my lips if You can. I’m old and I’m scared and mostly I’d just like to lie right here on the home place. I’m ready to go right now if You want me. Thy will be done, my Lord, but Abb’s one tired shufflin old black woman. Thy will be done.”
   No sound but the creak of the rope against the branch and the crows off in the corn. She put her old seamed forehead against the old seamed bark of the apple tree her father had planted so long ago and she wept bitterly.
   That night she dreamed she was mounting the steps to the Grange Hall stage again, a young and pretty Abagail, three months quick with child, a dusky Ethiopian jewel in her white dress, holding her guitar by the neck, climbing, climbing into that stillness, her thoughts a millrace, yet holding above all to one thought: I am Abagail Freemantle Trotts, and I play well and I sing well. I do not know these things because anyone told me.
   In the dream she turned slowly, facing those white faces turned up to her like moons, faced the hall so richly alight with its lamps and the mellow glow thrown back from the darkened, slightly steamed windows and the red velvet swags with their gold ropes.
   She held firmly to that one thought and began to play “Rock of Ages.” She played and her voice came out, not nervous and restrained, but exactly as it had come out when she had been practicing, rich and mellow, like the yellow lamplight itself, and she thought: I am going to win them. With the help of God I am going to win them over. Oh my people, if you are thirsty, will I not bring water from the rock? I will win them over, and I will make David proud of me and Mamma and Daddy proud of me, I will make myself proud of myself, I will bring music from the air and water from the rock —
   And that was when she saw him for the first time. He was standing far back in the corner, behind all the seats, his arms folded across his chest. He was wearing jeans and a denim jacket with buttons on the pockets. He was wearing dusty black boots with rundown heels, boots that looked as if they had walked many a dark and dusty mile. His forehead was white as gaslight, his cheeks red with jolly blood, his eyes blazing blue diamond chips, sparkling with infernal good cheer, as if the Imp of Satan had taken over the job of Kris Kringle. A hot and fleering grin had pulled his lips back from his teeth into something close to a snarl. The teeth were white and sharp and neat, like the teeth of a weasel.
   He raised his hands out from his body. Both of them were curled into fists, as tight and hard as knots on an apple tree. His grin remained, jolly and utterly hideous. Drops of blood began to fall from his fists.
   The words dried up in her mind. Her fingers forgot how to play; there was a final discordant jangle and then silence.
   God! God! she cried, but God had turned His face away.
   Then Ben Conveigh was standing up, his face red and flaming, his small pig’s eyes glittering. Nigger bitch! he shouted. What’s that nigger bitch doing up on our stage? No nigger bitch ever brought music from the air! No nigger bitch ever brought water from the rock!
   Answering cries of savage agreement. People surging forward. She saw her husband stand up and attempt to mount the stage. A fist hit him in the mouth, bowling him over backward.
   Get those dirty coons in the back of the hall! Bill Arnold hollered, and somebody pushed Rebecca Freemantle into the wall. Someone else—Chet Deacon, by the looks—wrapped one of the red velvet window curtains around Rebecca and then tied her in with one of the gold ropes. He was yelling: Looka here! Dressed coon! Dressed coon!
   Others rushed over to where Chet Deacon was, and they all began to punch and pummel the struggling woman under the velvet drape.
   Mamma! Abby screamed.
   The guitar was plucked from her nerveless fingers and smashed to strips and strings on the edge of the stage.
   She looked wildly for the dark man at the back of the hall, but his engine had been set in motion and was running sweet and hot; he had gone on to some other place.
   Mamma! she screamed again, and then rough hands were hauling her from the stage, they were under her dress, pawing her, tweaking her, pinching her bottom. Her hand was pulled sharply by someone, yanking her arm in her socket. It was put against something hard and hot.
   Ben Conveigh’s voice in her ear: How do you like MY rock of ages, you nigger slut?
   The room was whirling. She saw her father struggling to get at the limp form of her mother, and she saw a white hand holding a bottle come down on the back of a folding camp chair. There was a rattle and a smash, and then the jagged neck of the bottle, twinkling in the warm glow of all those lamps, was thrust into her father’s face. She saw his staring, bulging eyes pop like grapes.
   She screamed and the force of her cry seemed to break the room apart, to let in darkness, and she was Mother Abagail again one hundred and eight years old, too old, my Lord, too old (but let Thy will be done), and she was walking in the corn, the mystic corn that was rooted shallow in the earth but wide, lost in the corn that was silver with moonglow and black with shadow; she could hear the summer nightwind rustling gently through it, she could smell its growing, wholly alive smell as she had smelled it all her long, long life (and she had thought many times that this was the plant closest to all life, the corn, and its smell was the smell of life itself, the start of life, oh she had married and buried three husbands, David Trotts, Henry Hardesty, and Nate Brooks, and she had had three men in bed, had welcomed them as a woman must welcome a man, by giving way before him, and there had always been the yearning pleasure, the thought Oh my God how I love to be sexy with my man and how I love him to be sexy with me when he gets me what he gets me what he shoots in me and sometimes at the instant of her climax she would think of the corn, the bland corn with its roots planted not deep but wide, she would think of flesh and then the corn, when it was all over and her husband lay beside her the sex smell would be in the room, the smell of the spunk the man had shot into her, the smell of the juices she made to smooth his way, and it was a smell like husked corn, mild and sweet, a goodish smell).
   And yet she was afraid, ashamed of this very intimacy with soil and summer and growing things, because she was not alone. He was here with her, two rows to the right or left, trailing just behind or ranging just ahead. The dark man was here, his dusty boots digging into the meat of the soil and throwing it away in clouts, grinning in the night like a stormlamp.
   Then he spoke, for the first time he spoke aloud, and she could see his moonshadow, tall and hunched and grotesque, falling into the row she was walking. His voice was like the night wind that begins to moan through the old and fleshless cornstalks in October, like the very rattling of those old white infertile cornstalks themselves as they seem to speak of their end. It was a soft voice. It was the voice of doom.
   It said: I have your blood in my fists, old Mother. If you pray to God, pray He takes you before you ever hear my feet coming up your steps. It was not you who brought music from the air, not you who brought water from the rock, and your blood is in my fists.
   Then she was awake, awake in the hour before dawn, and at first she thought she had peed the bed, but it was only a night sweat, heavy as May dew. Her thin body was shuddering helplessly, and every part of her ached for rest.
   My Lord, my Lord, take this cup from my lips.
   Her Lord did not answer. There was only the light knocking of the early morning wind at the windowpanes, which were loose and rattling and in need of fresh putty. At last she got up and poked up the fire in her old woodburning stove and put on the coffee.
   She had a great deal to do in the next few days, because she was going to have company. Dreams or not, tired or not, she had never been one to slight company and she didn’t intend to start now. But she would have to go very slowly or she would get forgetting things—she forgot a lot these days—and misplacing things until she ended up chasing her own tail.
   The first thing was to get down to Addie Richardson’s henhouse, and that was a goodish way, four or five miles. She found herself wondering if the Lord was going to send her an eagle to fly her those four miles, or send Elijah in his fiery chariot to give her a lift.
   “Blasphemy,” she told herself complacently. “The Lord provides strength, not taxicabs.”
   When her few dishes were washed, she put on her heavy shoes and took her cane. Even now she rarely used the cane, but today she would need it. Four miles going, four miles coming back. At sixteen she could have dashed one way and trotted the other, but sixteen was far behind her now.
   She set off at eight o’clock in the morning, hoping to reach the Richardson farm by noon and sleep through the hottest part of the day. In the late afternoon she would kill her chickens and then come home in the gloaming. She wouldn’t arrive until after dark, and that made her think of her dream of the night before, but that man was still far away. Her company was much closer.
   She walked very slowly, even more slowly than she felt she had to, because even at eight-thirty the sun was fat and powerful. She didn’t sweat much—there wasn’t enough excess flesh on her bones to wring the sweat out of—but by the time she’d reached the Goodells’ mailbox, she had to rest a bit. She sat in the shade of their pepper tree and ate a few fig bars. Not an eagle or a taxicab in sight, either. She cackled a little at that, got up, brushed the crumbs off her dress, and went on. Nope, no taxicabs. The Lord helped those that helped themselves. All the same, she could feel all of her joints tuning up; tonight there would be a concert.
   She hunched more and more over her cane as she went, even though her wrists began to be a misery to her. Her brogans with the yellow rawhide lacings shuffled in the dust. The sun beat down on her, and as the time passed, her shadow got shorter and shorter. She saw more wild animals that morning than she had seen since the twenties: fox, coon, porcupine, fisher. Crows were everywhere, squalling and cawing and circling in the sky. If she had been around to hear Stu Redman and Glen Bateman discussing the capricious—it had seemed capricious to them, anyhow—way the superflu had taken some animals while leaving others alone, she would have laughed. It had taken the domestic animals and left the wild ones alone, it was as simple as that. A few species of domestics had been spared, but as a general rule, the plague had taken man and man’s best friends. It had taken the dogs but left the wolves, because the wolves were wild and the dogs weren’t.
   A red-hot sparkplug of pain had settled deep into each of her hips, behind each knee, in her ankles, in the wrists she was using to support herself on the cane. She walked and she talked to her God, sometimes silently, sometimes aloud, unaware of any difference between the two. And she fell to thinking about her own past again. 1902 had been the best year, all right. After that it seemed that time sped up, the pages of some big fat calendar ruffling over and over, hardly ever pausing. A body’s life went by so fast… how was it a body could get so tired of living it?
   She’d had five children by Davy Trotts; one of them, Maybelle, had choked to death on a piece of apple in the back yard of the Old Place. Abby had been hanging clothes and she had turned around to see the baby lying on her back, clawing at her throat and turning purple. She had gotten the chunk of apple out at last, but by then little Maybelle had been still and cold, the only girl she had ever borne and the only one of her many children to die an accidental death.
   Now she sat in the shade of an elm just inside the Nauglers’ fence, and two hundred yards up the road she could see where dirt gave way to tar—this was the place where Freemantle Road became Polk County Road. The heat of the day made a shimmer over the tar, and at the horizon was quicksilver, shining like water in a dream. On a hot day you always saw that quicksilver just at the end of where your eye could see, but you never quite caught up to it. Or at least she never had…
   David had died in 1913, of an influenza not so very different from this one, which had wiped out so many. In 1916, when she had been thirty-four, she had married Henry Hardesty, a black farmer from Wheeler County up north. He had come to court her special. Henry was a widower with seven children, all but two of them grown up and gone away. He was seven years older than Abagail. He had given her two boys before his tractor turned turtle on him and killed him in the late summer of 1925.
   A year after that she had married Nate Brooks, and people had talked—oh yes, people talk, how people do love to talk, sometimes it seemed that was all they had to do. Nate had been Henry Hardesty’s hired man, and he had been a good husband to her. Not as sweet as David, perhaps, and surely not as tenacious as Henry, but a good man who had pretty much done as she had told him. When a woman began to get a trifle along in years, it was a comfort to know who had the upper hand.
   Her six boys had produced a crop of thirty-two grandchildren for her. Her thirty-two grandchildren had produced ninety-one great-grandchildren that she knew of, and at the time of the superflu, she had had three great-great-grandchildren. Would have had more, if not for the pills the girls took these days to keep the babies away. It seemed like for them, being sexy was just another playground to be in. Abagail felt sorry for them in their modern ways, but she never spoke of it. It was up to God to judge whether or not they were sinning by taking those pills (and not to that baldheaded old fart in Rome—Mother Abagail had been a Methodist all her life, and she was damned proud of not having any truck with those mackerel-snapping Catholics), but Abagail knew what they were missing: the ecstasy which comes when you stand on the lip of the Valley of the Shadow, the ecstasy that comes when you gave yourself up to your man and your God, when you say thy will be done and Thy will be done; the final ecstasy of sex in the sight of the Lord, when a man and a woman relive the old sin of Adam and Eve, only now washed and sanctified in the Blood of the Lamb.
   Ah, welladay…
   She wanted a drink of water, she wanted to be home in her rocker, she wanted to be left alone. Now she could see the sun glinting off the henhouse roof ahead to her left. A mile, no more. It was quarter past ten, and she wasn’t doing too badly for an old gal. She would let herself in and sleep until the cool of the evening. No sin in that. Not at her age. She shuffled along the shoulder, her heavy shoes now coated with road-dust.
   Well, she had had a lot of kin to bless her in her old age, and that was something. There were some, like Linda and that no-account salesman she had married, who didn’t care to come calling, but there were the good ones like Molly and Jim and David and Cathy, enough to make up for a thousand Lindas and no-account salesmen who went door to door selling waterless cookware. The last of her brothers, Luke, had died in 1949, at the age of eightysomething, and the last of her children, Samuel, in 1974, at the age of fifty-four. She had outlived all of her children, and that was not the way it was supposed to be, but it seemed like the Lord had special plans for her.
   In 1982, when she had turned one hundred, her picture had been in the Omaha paper and they had sent out a TV reporter to do a story on her. “To what do you attribute your great age?” the young man had asked her, and he had looked disappointed at her brief, almost curt answer: “To God.” They wanted to hear about how she ate beeswax, or stayed away from fried pork, or how she kept her legs up when she slept. But she did none of those things, and was she to lie? God gives life and He takes it away when He wants.
   Cathy and David had given her her TV so she could watch herself on the news, and she got a letter from President Reagan (no spring chicken himself) congratulating her on her “advanced age” and the fact that she had voted Republican for as long as she’d had a vote to cast. Well, who else would she vote for? Roosevelt and his crowd had all been Communists. And when she turned the century, the town of Hemingford Home had repealed her taxes “in perpetuity” because of that same advanced age Ronald Reagan had congratulated her for. She got a paper certifying her as the oldest living person in Nebraska, as if that was something little children grew up hoping to be. It was a good thing about the taxes, though, even if the rest of it had been purest foolishness—if they hadn’t done that, she would have lost what little land she still had. Most of it had been long gone anyway; the Freemantle holdings and the power of the Grange had both reached high water in that magic year of 1902 and had been declining ever since. Four acres was all that was left. The rest had either been taken for taxes or sold off for cash over the years… and most of the selling had been done by her own sons, she was ashamed to say.
   Last year she had been sent a paper by some New York combination that called itself the American Geriatrics Society. The paper said she was the sixth-oldest human being in the United States, and the third-oldest woman. The oldest of them all was a fellow in Santa Rosa, California. The fellow in Santa Rosa was a hundred and twenty-two. She had gotten Jim to put that letter in a frame for her and hang it beside the letter from the President. Jim hadn’t got around to doing that until this February. Now that she thought about it, that had been the last time she saw Molly and Jim.
   She had reached the Richardson farm. Almost completely exhausted, she leaned for a moment against the fencepost closest to the barn and looked longingly at the house. It would be cool inside there, cool and nice. She felt she could sleep an age. Yet before she could do that, there was one more thing she had to do. A lot of animals had died with this disease—horses, dogs, and rats—and she had to know if chickens were among them. It would be a bitter laugh on her to discover she had come all this way to find only dead chicken.
   She shuffled toward the henhouse, which was attached to the barn, and stopped when she could hear them cackling inside. A moment later a cock crowed irritably.
   “All right,” she muttered. “That’s good, then.”
   She was turning around when she saw the body sprawled by the woodpile, one hand thrown over his face. It was Bill Richardson, Addie’s brother-in-law. He had been well picked over by foraging animals.
   “Poor man,” Abagail said. “Poor, poor man. Flights of angels sing you to y’rest, Billy Richardson.”
   She turned back to the cool, inviting house. It seemed miles away, although in reality it was only across the dooryard. She wasn’t sure she could make it that far; she was utterly exhausted.
   “Lord’s will be done,” she said, and began to walk.
   The sun was shining in the window of the guest bedroom, where she had lain down and fallen asleep as soon as her brogans were off. For along time she couldn’t understand why the light was so bright; it was much the feeling Larry Underwood had had upon awakening beside the rock wall in New Hampshire.
   She sat up, every strained muscle and fragile bone in her body crying out. “God A’mighty, done slep the afternoon and the whole night through!”
   If that was so, she must have been tired indeed. She was so lamed up now that it took her almost ten minutes to get out of bed and go down the hall to the bathroom; another ten to get her shoes on her feet. Walking was agony, but she knew she must walk. If she didn’t, that stiffness would settle in like iron.
   Limping and hobbling, she crossed to the henhouse and went inside, wincing at the explosive hotness, the smell of fowls, and the inevitable smell of decomposition. The water supply was automatic, fed from the Richardsons’ artesian well by a gravity pump, but most of the feed had been used up and the heat itself had killed many of the birds. The weakest had long ago been starved or pecked to death, and they lay around the feed– and droppings-spotted floor like small drifts of sadly melting snow.
   Most of the remaining chickens fled before her approach with a great flapping of wings, but those that were broody only sat and blinked at her slow, shuffling approach with their stupid eyes. There were so many diseases that killed chickens that she had been afraid that the flu might have carried them off, but these looked all right. The Lord had provided.
   She took three of the plumpest and made them stick their heads under their wings. They went immediately to sleep. She bundled them into a sack and then found she was too stiff to actually lift it. She had to drag it along the floor.
   The other chickens watched her cautiously from their high vantage points until the old woman was gone, then went back to their vicious squabbling over the diminishing feed.
   It was now close to nine in the morning. She sat down on the bench that ran in a circle around the Richardsons’ dooryard oak to think. It seemed to her that her original idea, to go home in the cool of dusk, was still best. She had lost a day, but her company was still coming. She could use this day to take care of the chickens and rest.
   Her muscles were already riding a little easier against her bones, and there was an unfamiliar but rather pleasant gnawing sensation below her breastbone. It took her several moments to realize what it was… she was hungry! This morning she was actually hungry, praise God, and how long had it been since she had eaten for any reason other than force of habit? She’d been like a locomotive fireman stoking coal, no more. But when she had parted these three chickens from their heads, she would see what Addie had left in her pantry, and by the blessed Lord, she would enjoy what she found. You see? she lectured herself. The Lord knows best. Blessed assurance, Abagail, blessed assurance.
   Grunting and puffing, she dragged her towsack around to the chopping block that stood between the barn and the woodshed. Just inside the woodshed door she found Billy Richardson’s Son House hanging on a couple of pegs, its rubber glove snugged neatly down over the blade. She took it and went back out.
   “Now Lord,” she said, standing over the towsack in her dusty yellow workshoes and looking up at the cloudless midsummer sky, “You have given me the strength to walk up here, and I’m believin You’ll give me the strength to walk back. Your prophet Isaiah says that if a man or woman believes in the Lord God of Hosts, he shall mount up with wings as eagles. I don’t know nothin much about eagles, my Lord, except they are mostly ugly-natured birds who can see a long ways, but I got three broilers in this bag and I should like to whack off their heads and not m’own hand. Thy will be done, amen.”
   She picked up the towsack, opened it, and peered down. One of the hens still had her head under her wing, fast asleep. The other two had squashed against each other, not moving much. It was dark in the sack and the hens thought it was nighttime. The only thing dumber than a broody hen was a New York Democrat.
   Abagail plucked one out and laid it across the block before it knew what was happening. She brought the hatchet down hard, wincing as she always had at the final mortal thud of the blade biting through to wood. The head fell into the dust on one side of the chopping block. The headless chicken strutted off into the Richardsons’ dooryard, blood spouting, wings fluttering. After a bit it found out it was dead and lay down decently. Broody hens and New York Democrats, my Lord, my Lord.
   Then the job was done and all her worrying that she might botch it or hurt herself doing it had been for nothing. God had heard her prayer. Three good chickens, and now all she had to do was get home with them.
   She put the birds back into the towsack and then hung Billy Richardson’s Son House hatchet back up. Then she went into the farmhouse again to see what there might be to eat.

She napped during the early part of the afternoon and dreamed that her company was getting closer now; they were just south of York, coming along in an old pickup truck. There were six of them, one of them a boy who was deaf and dumb. But a powerful boy, all the same. He was one of the ones she would have to talk to.
   She woke around three-thirty, a little stiff but otherwise feeling rested and refreshed. For the next two and a half hours she plucked the chickens, resting when the work put too much misery into her arthritic fingers, then going on. She sang hymns while she worked—“Seven Gates to the City (My Lord Hallelu’),” “Trust and Obey,” and her own favorite, “In the Garden.”
   When she finished the last chicken, each of her fingers had a migraine headache and the daylight had begun to take on that still and golden hue that means twilight’s outrider has arrived. Late July now, and the days were shortening down again.
   She went inside and had another bite. The bread was stale but not moldy—no mold would ever dare show its green face in Addie Richardson’s kitchen—and she found a half-used jar of smooth peanut butter. She ate a peanut butter sandwich and made up another, which she put in her dress pocket in case she got hungry later.
   It was now twenty to seven. She went back out again, gathered up her towsack, and went carefully down the porch steps. She had plucked neatly into another sack, but a few feathers had escaped and now fluttered from the Richardsons’ hedge, which was drying for lack of water.
   Abagail sighed heavily and said: “I’m off, Lord. Headed home. I’ll be going slow, don’t reckon to get there until midnight or so, but the Book says fear neither the terror of night nor that which flieth at noonday. I’m in the way of doing Your will as best I know it. Walk with me, please. Jesus’ sake, amen.”
   By the time she reached the place where the tar stopped and the road went to dirt, it was full dark. Crickets sang and frogs croaked down in some wet place, probably Cal Goodell’s cowpond. There was going to be a moon, a big red one, the color of blood until it got up in the sky a ways.
   She sat down to rest and eat half of her peanut butter sandwich (and what she would have done for some nice black-currant jelly to cut that sticky taste, but Addie kept her preserves down cellar and that was just too many stairs). The towsack was beside her. She ached again and her strength seemed just about gone with two and a half miles before her still to walk… but she felt strangely exhilarated. How long since she had been out after dark, under the canopy of the stars? They shone just as bright as ever, and if her luck was in she might see a falling star to wish on. A warm night like this, the stars, the summer moon just peeking his red lover’s face over the horizon, it made her remember her girlhood again with all its strange fits and starts, its heats, its gorgeous vulnerability as it stood on the edge of the Mystery. Oh, she had been a girl. There were those who would not believe it, just as they were unable to believe that the giant sequoia had ever been a green sprout. But she had been a girl, and in those times the childhood fears of the night had faded a little and the adult fears that came in the night when everything is silent and you can hear the voice of your eternal soul, those fears were yet down the road. In that brief time between, the night had been a fragrant puzzle, a time when, looking up at the star-strewn sky and listening to the breeze that brought such intoxicating smells, you felt close to the heartbeat of the universe, to love and life. It seemed you would be forever young and that—
   Your blood is in my fists.
   There was a sudden sharp tug at her sack, making her heart jump.
   “Hi!” she shrieked in her cracked and startled old woman’s voice. She yanked the bag back to her with a small rip in the bottom.
   There was a low growling sound. Crouched on the verge of the road, between the gravel shoulder and the corn, was a large brown weasel. Its eyes rolled at her, picking up red glints of moonlight. It was joined by another. And another. And another.
   She looked at the other side of the road and saw that it was lined with them, their mean eyes speculative. They were smelling the chickens in the bag. How could so many of them have crept around her? she wondered with mounting fear. She had been bitten by a weasel once; she had reached under the porch of the Big House to get a red rubber ball that had rolled under there, and something which felt like a mouthful of needles had fastened on her forearm. The unexpected viciousness of it, agony jumping red-hot and vital out of the humdrum order of things, had made her shriek as much as the actual pain. She had drawn her arm back and the weasel had been hanging from it with her blood beaded on its smooth brown fur, its body whipping back and forth in the air like a snake’s body. She had screamed and waved her arm, but the weasel had not let go; it seemed to have become a part of her.
   Her brothers Micah and Matthew had been in the yard; her father had been on the porch, looking at a mail-order catalogue. They had all come running and for a moment they had been struck frozen by the sight of Abagail, then just twelve, tearing around the clearing where the barn was to shortly go up, the brown weasel hanging down from her arm like a stole with its back paws digging for purchase in the thin air. Blood had fallen onto her dress, legs, end shoes in a pattering shower.
   It was her father who had acted first. John Freemantle had picked up a chunk of stovewood from beside the chopping block and had bawled: “Stand still, Abby! ” His voice, which had been the voice of ultimate command ever since her babyhood, had cut through the yatter and babble of panic in her mind when probably nothing else could have done. She stood still and the stovelength came whistling down and a jolting agony went all the way up to her shoulder (she had thought her arm was broken for sure) and then the brown Thing which had caused her such agony and surprise—in the horrid heat of those few moments the two feelings had been completely interchangeable—was lying on the ground, its fur streaked and matted with her blood and then Micah jumped straight up into the air and came down on it with both feet and there was a horrid final crunching sound like the sound hard candy made in your head when you crunched it between your teeth and if it hadn’t been dead before, it surely was then. Abagail had not fainted, but she had gone into sobbing, screaming hysterics.
   By then Richard, the oldest son, had come running, his face pale and scared. He and his father exchanged a sober, frightened glance.
   “I never saw a weasel do nothing like that in all my life,” John Freemantle said, holding his sobbing daughter by the shoulders. “Thank God your mother was up the road with them beans.”
   “Maybe it was r—” Richard began.
   “You hesh your mouth,” his father rode in before Richard could go any further. His voice had been cold and furious and frightened all at the same time. And Richard did hesh his mouth—closed it so fast and hard, in fact, that Abby had heard it snap shut. Then her father said to her, “Let’s take you on over to the pump, Abagail, honey, and wash that mess out.”
   It was a year later that Luke told her what their father hadn’t wanted Richard to say right out loud: that the weasel must almost surely have been rabid to do a thing like that, and if it had been, she would have died one of the most horrible deaths, aside from outright torture, of which men knew. But the weasel had not been rabid; the wound had healed clean. All the same, she had been terrified of the creatures from that day to this, terrified in the way some people are terrified of rats and spiders. If only the plague had taken them instead of the dogs! But it hadn’t, and she was—
   Your blood is in my fists.
   One of them darted forward and tore at the rough hem of the towsack.
   “Hi! ” she screamed at it. The weasel darted away, seeming to grin, a thread of the bag hanging from its chops.
   He had sent them—the dark man.
   Terror engulfed her. There were hundreds of them now, gray ones, brown ones, black ones, all of them smelling chicken. They lined both sides of the road, squirming over each other in their eagerness to get at some of what they smelled.
   I got to give it to them. It was all for nothing. If I don’t give it to them, they’ll rip me to pieces to get it. All for nothing.
   In the darkness of her mind she could see the dark man’s grin, she could see his fists held out and the blood dripping from them.
   Another tug at the bag. And another.
   The weasels on the far side of the road were now squirming across toward her, low, their bellies in the dust. Their little savage eyes glinted like icepicks in the moonlight.
   But whosoever believeth on Me, behold, he shall not perish… for I have put My sign on him and no thing shall touch him… he is Mine, saith the Lord…
   She stood up, still terrified, but now sure of what she must do. “Get out!” she cried. “It’s chicken, all right, but it’s for my company! Now you all git! ”
   They drew back. Their little eyes seemed to fill with unease. And suddenly they were gone like drifting smoke. A miracle, she thought, and exultation and praise for the Lord filled her. Then, suddenly, she was cold.
   Somewhere, far to the west, beyond the Rockies that were not even visible on the horizon, she felt an eye—some glittering Eye—suddenly open wide and turn toward her, searching. As clearly as if the words had been spoken aloud she heard him: Who’s there? Is it you, old woman?
   “He knows I’m here,” she whispered in the night. “Oh help me, Lord. Help me now, help all of us.”
   Dragging the towsack, she began to walk home again.

They showed up two days later, on July 24. She hadn’t got as much done as she would have liked in the way of preparations; once again she was lame and almost laid up, able to hobble from one place to another only with the aid of her cane and hardly able to pump water up from the well. The day after killing the chickens and standing off the weasels, she had fallen asleep for a long time in the afternoon, exhausted. She dreamed she was in some high cold pass in the middle of the Rockies, west of the Continental Divide. Highway 6 stretched and twisted between high rock walls that shaded this gap all day long, except from about eleven forty-five in the morning until about twelve-fifty in the afternoon. It was not daylight in her dream but full, moonless dark. Somewhere, wolves were howling. And suddenly an Eye had opened in all that darkness, rolling horribly from one side to the other while the wind moved lonesomely through the pines and the blue mountain spruce. It was him, and he was looking for her.
   She had awakened from that long, heavy nap feeling less rested than she had when she lay down, and again she prayed to God to let her off, or at least change the direction He wanted her to go in.
   North, south, or east, Lord, and I’ll leave Hemingford Home singing Your praises. But not west, not toward that dark man. The Rockies ain’t enough to have between him and us. The Andes wouldn’t be enough.
   But it didn’t matter. Sooner or later, when that man felt he was strong enough, he would come looking for those who would stand against him. If not this year, then next. The dogs were gone, carried off by the plague, but the wolves remained in the high mountain country, ready to serve the Imp of Satan.
   And it was not just the wolves that would serve him.
   On the morning of the day her company finally arrived she had begun at seven, lugging wood two sticks at a time until the stove was hot and her woodbox full. God had favored her with a cool, cloudy day, the first in weeks. By nightfall there might be rain. The hip she’d broken in 1958 said so, anyway.
   She baked her pies first, using the canned fillings from the shelves in her pantry and the fresh rhubarb and strawberries from the garden. The strawberries had just come on, praise God, and it was good to know they weren’t going to go to waste. Just the act of cooking made her feel better, because cooking was life. A blueberry pie, two strawberry-rhubarb, and one apple. The smell of them filled the morning kitchen. She set them on the kitchen windowsills to cool as she had all her life.
   She made the best batter she could, although it was hard going with no fresh eggs—there she’d been, right in the henhouse, and she had no one to blame but herself. Eggs or no, by early afternoon the small kitchen with its hilly floor and faded linoleum was filled with the smell of frying chicken. It had gotten pretty toasty inside and so she hobbled out to the porch to read her daily lesson, using her dog-eared last copy of The Upper Room to fan her face.
   The chicken came out just as light and nice as you could want. One of those fellows could go out and pick her two dozen butter-and-sugar ears of corn, and they would have themselves a good sit-down feed outside.
   After the chicken was put on paper towels, she went on out to the back porch with her guitar, sat down, and began to play. She sang all her favorite hymns, her high and quivering voice drifting into the still air.
   Have we trials and temptations,
   Are we cumbered with a load of care?
   We must never be discouraged,
   Take it to the Lord in prayer.
   The music sounded so fine to her (even though her ear had failed to a degree where she could never be sure her old git was in tune) that she played another hymn, and another, and another.
   She was settling down to “We Are Marching to Zion” when she heard the sound of an engine off to the north, coming down County Road toward her. She stopped singing but her fingers continued to twiddle absently on the strings as she cocked her head and listened. Coming, yes Lord, they found their way just fine, and now she could see the spume of dust the truck was throwing as it left the tar and came onto the dirt track that stopped in her dooryard. A great, welcoming excitement filled her and she was glad she had put on her for-best. She put her git between her knees and shaded her eyes, although there was still no sun.
   Now the engine sound was much louder and in a moment, where the corn gave way for Cal Goodell’s cattle wade—
   Yes, she could see it, an old Chevrolet farm truck, moving slow. The cab was full; four people crammed in there by the looks (there was nothing wrong with her long vision, even at a hundred and eight), and three more in the truckbed, standing up and looking over the cab. She could see a thinnish blond man, a girl with red hair, and in the middle… yes, that was him, a boy who was just finishing up learning about being a man. Dark hair, narrow face, high forehead. He saw her sitting on her porch and began to wave frantically. A moment later the blond man copied him. The redheaded girl just looked. Mother Abagail raised her own hand and waved back.
   “Praise God for bringin em through,” she muttered hoarsely. Tears coursed warmly down her cheeks. “My Lord, I thank You so.”
   The pickup, rattling and jouncing, turned into the yard. The man behind the wheel was wearing a straw hat with a blue velvet band and a big feather tucked into it.
   “Yeeeeee-haw! ” he shouted, and waved. “Hi there, Mother! Nick said he thought you might be here and here you be! Yeeeeee-haw! ” He laid on the horn. Sitting with him in the cab was a man of about fifty, a woman of the same age, and a little girl in a red corduroy jumper. The little girl waved shyly with one hand; the thumb of the other was corked securely in her mouth.
   The young man with the eyepatch and the dark hair—Nick—jumped over the side of the truck even before it had stopped. He caught his balance and then walked slowly toward her. His face was solemn, but his eye was alight with joy. He stopped at the porch steps and then looked around wonderingly… at the yard, the house, the old tree with its tire swing. Most of all at her.
   “Hello, Nick,” she said. “I’m glad to see you. God bless.”
   He smiled, now beginning to shed his own tears. He came up the steps toward her and took her hands. She turned her wrinkled cheek toward him and he kissed it gently. Behind him, the truck had stopped and everyone got out. The man who had been driving was holding the girl in the red jumper, who had a cast on her right leg. Her arms were linked firmly around the driver’s sunburned neck. Next to him stood the fiftyish woman, next to her the redhead and the blond boy with the beard. No, not a boy, Mother Abagail thought; he’s feeble. Last in line stood the other man who had been riding in the cab. He was polishing the lenses of his steel-rimmed eyeglasses.
   Nick was looking at her urgently, and she nodded.
   “You done just right,” she said. “The Lord has brought you and Mother Abagail is going to feed you.
   “You’re all welcome here!” she added, raising her voice. “We can’t stay long, but before we do any moving on, we’ll rest, and break bread together, and have some fellowship one with the other.”
   The little girl piped up from the safety of the driver’s arms: “Are you the oldest lady in the world?”
   The fiftyish woman said: “Shhhh, Gina!”
   But Mother Abagail only put a hand on her hip and laughed. “Mayhap I am, child. Mayhap I am.”
   She got them to spread her red-checked tablecloth on the far side of the apple tree and the two women, Olivia and June, spread the picnic lunch while the men went off to pick corn. It was short work to boil it up, and while there was no real butter, she had plenty of oleo and salt.
   There was little talk during the meal—mostly the sound of chomping jaws and little grunts of pleasure. It did her heart good to see folks dig into a meal, and these folks were doing her spread full justice. It made her walk to Richardsons’ and her tussle with those weasels seem more than worthwhile. It wasn’t that they were hungry, exactly, but when you’ve spent a month eating almost nothing that hasn’t come out of a can, you get a powerful hunger for something fresh and just cooked special. She herself put away three pieces of chicken, an ear of cons, and a little smidge of that strawberry-rhubarb pie. When it was all gone, she felt as full as a bedtick in a mattress.
   When they got settled and the coffee was poured, the driver, a pleasant, open-faced man named Ralph Brentner, told her: “That was one dilly of a meal, ma’am. I can’t remember when anything hit the spot so good. Thanks are in order.”
   The others murmured agreement. Nick smiled and nodded.
   The little girl said, “Can I come and sit with you, grammylady?”
   “I think you’d be too heavy, honey,” the older woman, Olivia Walker, said.
   “Nonsense,” Abagail said. “The day I can’t take a little one on my lap for a spell will be the day they wind me in my shroud. Come on over, Gina.”
   Ralph carried her over and set her down. “When she gets too heavy, you just tell me.” He tickled Gina’s face with the feather in his hatband. She put up her hands and giggled. “Don’t tickle me, Ralph! Don’t you dare tickle me!”
   “Don’t worry,” Ralph said, relenting. “I’m too full to tickle anyone for long.” He sat down again.
   “What happened to your leg, Gina?” Abagail asked.
   “I broke it when I fell out of the barn,” Gina said. “Dick fixed it. Ralph says Dick saved my life.” She blew a kiss to the man with the steel-rimmed glasses, who blushed a bit, coughed, and smiled.
   Nick, Tom Cullen, and Ralph had happened on Dick Ellis halfway across Kansas, walking along the side of the road with a pack on his back and a hiking staff in one hand. He was a veterinarian. The next day, passing through the small town of Lindsborg, they had stopped for lunch and heard weak cries coming from the south side of town. If the wind had been blowing the other way, they never would have heard the cries at all.
   “God’s mercy,” Abby said complacently, stroking the little girl’s hair.
   Gina had been on her own for three weeks. She’d been playing in the hayloft of her uncle’s barn a day or two before when the rotted flooring gave way, spilling her forty feet into the lower haymow. There had been hay in it to break her fall, but she had cartwheeled off it and broken her leg. At first Dick Ellis had been pessimistic about her chances. He gave her a local anesthetic to set the leg; she had lost so much weight and her overall physical condition was so poor he had been afraid a general would kill her (the key words in this conversation were spelled out while Gina McCone played unconcernedly with the buttons on Mother Abagail’s dress).
   Gina had bounced back with a speed that had surprised them all. She had formed an instant attachment for Ralph and his jaunty hat. Speaking in a low, diffident voice, Ellis said he suspected that a lot of her problem had been crushing loneliness.
   “Course it was,” Abagail said. “If you’d missed her, she would have just pined away.”
   Gina yawned. Her eyes were large and glassy.
   “I’ll take her now,” Olivia Walker said.
   “Put her in the little room at the end of the hall,” Abby said. “You can sleep with her, if that’s what you want. This other girl… what did you say your name was, honey? It’s slipped my mind for sure.”
   “June Brinkmeyer,” the redhead said.
   “Well, you c’n sleep with me, June, unless you’ve some other mind. The bed ain’t big enough for two, and I don’t think you’d want to sleep with an old bundle of sticks like me even if it was, but there’s a mattress put away overhead that should do you if the bugs ain’t got into it. One of these big men will get it down for you, I guess.”
   “Sure,” Ralph said.
   Olivia carried Gina, who had already fallen asleep, away to bed. The kitchen, now more populated than it had been for years, was filling up with dusk. Grunting, Mother Abagail got to her feet and lit three oil-lamps, one for the table, one which she set on the stove (the cast-iron Blackwood was now cooling and ticking contentedly to itself), and one for the porch windowsill. The darkness was pushed back.
   “Maybe the old ways are best,” Dick said abruptly, and they all looked at him. He blushed and coughed again, but Abagail only chuckled.
   “I mean,” Dick went on a little defensively, “that’s the first home-cooked meal I’ve had since… well, since June thirtieth, I guess. The day the power went off. And I cooked that myself. What I do could hardly be called home cooking. My wife, now… she was one hell of a good cook. She…” He trailed off blankly.
   Olivia came back in. “Fast asleep,” she said. “That was a tired girl.”
   “Do you bake your own bread?” Dick asked Mother Abagail.
   “Course I do. Always have. Of course, it ain’t yeast bread; ail the yeast has gone over. But there’s other kinds.”
   “I crave bread,” he said simply. “Helen… my wife… used to make bread twice a week. Just lately it seems to be all I want. Give me three slices of bread and some strawberry jam and I think I could die happy.”
   “Tom Cullen’s tired,” Tom said abruptly. “M-O-O-N, that spells tired.” He yawned bone-crackingly.
   “You can bed down in the shed,” Abagail said. “It smells a bit musty, but it’s dry.”
   For a moment they listened to the steady rustle of the rain, which had been falling for almost an hour now. Alone, it would have been a desolate sound. In company it was a pleasant, secret sound, closing them in together. It gurgled from the galvanized tin gutters and plopped in the rain barrel Abby still kept on the far side of the house. Thunder muttered far away, back over Iowa.
   “I guess you got your campin gear?” she asked them.
   “All kinds,” Ralph said. “We’ll be fine. Come on, Tom.” He stood up.
   “I wonder,” Abagail said, “if you and Nick would stay a bit, Ralph.”
   Nick had been sitting at the table through all of this, on the far side of the room from her rocking chair. You would think, she mused, that if a man couldn’t talk he would get lost in a roomful of people, that he would just sink from view. But something about Nick kept that from happening. He sat perfectly still, following the conversation as it traveled around the room, his face reacting to whatever was being said. That face was open and intelligent, but careworn for one so young. Several times as the talk went on she saw people look at him, as if Nick could confirm what he or she was saying. They were very much aware of him, too. And several times she had seen him looking out the window into the dark, his expression troubled.
   “Could you get me that mattress?” June asked softly.
   “Nick and I will get it,” Ralph said, standing up.
   “I don’t want to go out in that back shed all by myself,” Tom said. “Laws, no!”
   “I’ll go out with you, hoss,” Dick said. “We’ll light the Coleman lamp and bed down.” He rose. “Thanks again, ma’am. Can’t tell you how good all this has been.”
   The others echoed his thanks. Nick and Ralph got the mattress, which proved to be bug-free. Tom and Dick—needing only a Harry to fill em up, Abagail thought—went out to the shed, where the Coleman lantern soon flared. Not long after, Nick, Ralph, and Mother Abagail were left alone in the kitchen.
   “Mind if I smoke, ma’am?” Ralph asked.
   “Not so long as you don’t tap ashes on the floor. There’s an ashtray in that cupboard right behind you.”
   Ralph got up to get it, and Abby was left looking at Nick. He was wearing a khaki shirt, bluejeans, and a faded drill vest. There was something about him that made her feel she had known him before, or had always been meant to know him. Looking at him, she felt a quiet sense of knowledge and completion, as if this moment had been simple fate. As if, at one end of her life there had been her father, John Freemantle, tall and black and proud, and this man at the other end, young, white, and mute, with that one brilliant, expressive eye looking at her from that careworn face.
   She looked out the window and saw the glow of the Coleman battery lamp drifting out of the shed window and lighting a little piece of her dooryard. She wondered if that shed still smelled of cow; she hadn’t been out there for close on to three years. No need to. Her last cow, Daisy, had been sold in 1975, but in 1987 the shed had still smelled of cow. Probably did to this day. No matter; there were worse smells.
   “Ma’am?”
   She looked back. Ralph was sitting next to Nick now, holding a sheet of notepaper and squinting at it in the lamplight. On his lap, Nick was holding a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen. He was still looking at her closely.
   “Nick says…” Ralph cleared his throat, embarrassed.
   “Go ahead.”
   “His note says it’s hard to read your lips because—”
   “I guess I know why,” she said. “No fear.”
   She got up and shuffled over to the bureau. On the second shelf above it was a plastic jar, and in it two denture plates floated in cloudy liquid like a medical exhibit.
   She fished them out and rinsed them with a dipper of water.
   “Lord God I have suffered,” Mother Abagail said balefully, and popped the plates in.
   “We got to talk,” she said. “You two are the head ones, and we got some things to sort out.”
   “Well,” Ralph said, “it ain’t me. I was never much more than a full-time factory worker and a part-time farmer. I’ve raised a helluva lot more calluses than idears in my time. Nick, I guess he’s in charge.”
   “Is that right?” she asked, looking at Nick.
   Nick wrote briefly and Ralph read it aloud, as he continued to do.
   “It was my idea to come up this way, yes. About being in charge, I don’t know.”
   “We met June and Olivia about ninety miles south of here,” Ralph said. “Day before yesterday, wasn’t it, Nick?”
   Nick nodded.
   “We was on our way to you even then, Mother. The women were headed north, too. So was Dick. We all just threw in together.”
   “Have you seen any other folks?” she asked.
   “No,” Nick wrote. “But I’ve had a feeling—Ralph has, too—that there are other people hiding, watching us. Afraid, I guess. Still getting over the shock of what’s happened.”
   She nodded.
   “Dick said that the day before he joined us, he heard a motorcycle somewhere south. So there are other people around. I think what scares them is seeing a fairly big group all together.”
   “Why did you come here?” Her eyes, caught in their nets of wrinkles, stared at him keenly.
   Nick wrote: “I have dreamed of you. Dick Ellis says he has once. And the little girl, Gina, was calling you ‘grammylady’ long before we got here. She described your place. The tire swing.”
   “Bless the child,” Mother Abagail said absently. She looked at Ralph. “You?”
   “Once or twice, ma’am,” Ralph said. He wet his lips. “Mostly what I dreamed about was just… just that other fella.”
   “What other fella?”
   Nick wrote. Circled what he had written. Handed it to her directly. Her eyes were not much good for close work without her specs or the lighted magnifying glass she’d gotten in Hemingford Center last year, but she could read this. It was writ large, like the writing God had put on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace. Circled, it gave her a cold chill just looking at it. She thought of weasels squirming across the road on their bellies, yanking at her towsack with their needle-sharp killers’ teeth. She thought of a single red eye opening, disclosing itself in the darkness, looking, searching, now not just for an old woman but a whole party of men and women… and one little girl.
   The two circled words were: dark man.
   “I’ve been told,” she said, folding the paper, straightening it, then folding it again, for the time being unmindful of the misery of her arthritis, “that we’re to go west. I’ve been told in a dream, by the Lord God. I didn’t want to listen. I’m an old woman, and all I want to do is die on this little piece of land. It’s been my family’s freehold for a hundred and twelve years, but I wasn’t meant to die here any more than Moses was meant to go over into Canaan with the Children of Israel.”
   She paused. The two men watched her soberly in the lamplight, and outside the rain continued to fall, slow and ceaseless. There was no more thunder. Lord, she thought, these dentures hurt my mouth. I want to take them out and go to bed.
   “I started having dreams two years before this plague ever fell. I’ve always dreamed, and sometimes my dreams have come true. Prophecy is the gift of God and everyone has a smidge of it. My own grandmother used to call it the shining lamp of God, sometimes just the shine. In my dreams I saw myself going west. At first with just a few people, then a few more, then a few more. West, always west, until I could see the Rocky Mountains. It got so there was a whole caravan of us, two hundred or more. And there would be signs… no, not signs from God but regular road-signs, and every one of them saying things like BOULDER, COLORADO, 609 MILES or THIS WAY TO BOULDER.”
   She paused.
   “Those dreams, they scared me. I never told a soul I was havin em, that’s how scared I was. I felt the way I guess Job must have felt when God spoke to him out of the whirlwind. I even tried to pretend they was just dreams, foolish old woman runnin from God the way Jonah did. But the big fish has swallowed us up just the same, you see! And if God says to Abby, You got to tell, then tell I must. And I always felt like someone would come to me, someone special, and that’s how I’d be in the way of knowin the time had come.”
   She looked at Nick, who sat at the table and regarded her solemnly with his good eye through the haze of Ralph Brentner’s cigarette smoke.
   “I knew when I saw you,” she said. “It’s you, Nick. God has put His finger on your heart. But he has more fingers than one, and there’s others out there, still comin on, praise God, and He’s got a finger on them, too. I dream of him, how he’s lookin for us even now, and God forgive my sick spirit, I curse him in my heart.” She began to weep and got up to have a drink of water and a splash. Her tears were the human part of her, weak and flagging.
   When she turned back, Nick was writing. At last he ripped the page off his pad and handed it to Ralph.
   “I don’t know about the God part, but I know something is working here. Everyone we’ve met has been moving north. As if you had the answer. Have you dreamed about any of the others? Dick? June or Olivia? Maybe the little girl?”
   “Not any of these others. A man who doesn’t talk much. A woman who is with child. A man of about your age who comes to me with a guitar of his own. And you, Nick.”
   “And you think going to Boulder is the right thing?”
   Mother Abagail said, “It’s what we’re meant to do.”
   Nick doodled aimlessly on his pad for a moment and then wrote, “How much do you know about the dark man? Do you know who he is?”
   “I know what he’s about but not who he is. He’s the purest evil left in the world. The rest of the bad is little evil. Shoplifters and sexfiends and people who like to use their fists. But he’ll call them. He’s started already. He’s getting them together a lot faster than we are. Before he’s ready to make his move, I guess he’ll have a lot more. Not just the evil ones that are like him, but the weak ones… the lonely ones… and the ones that have left God out of their hearts.”
   “Maybe he’s not real,” Nick wrote. “Maybe he’s just…” He had to nibble at the top of his pen and think. At last he added: “… the scared, bad part of all of us. Maybe we are dreaming of the things we’re afraid we might do.”
   Ralph frowned over this as he read it aloud, but Abby grasped what Nick meant right off. It wasn’t much different from the talk of the new preachers who had got on the land in the last twenty years or so. There wasn’t really any Satan, that was their gospel. There was evil, and it probably came from original sin, but it was in all of us and getting it out was as impossible as getting an egg out of its shell without cracking it. According to the way these new preachers had it, Satan was like a jigsaw puzzle—and every man, woman, and child on earth added his or her little piece to make up the whole. Yes, all that had a good modern sound to it; the trouble with it was that it wasn’t true. And if Nick was allowed to go on thinking that, the dark man would eat him for dinner.
   She said: “You dreamed of me. Ain’t I real?”
   Nick nodded.
   “And I dreamed you. Ain’t you real? Praise God, you’re sittin right over there with a pad o paper on your knee. This other man, Nick, he’s as real as you are.” Yes, he was real. She thought of the weasels, and of the red eye opening in the darkness. And when she spoke up again, her voice was husky. “He ain’t Satan,” she said, “but he and Satan know of each other and have kept their councils together of old.
   “The Bible, it don’t say what happened to Noah and his family after the flood went down. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some awful tussle for the souls of those few people—for their souls, their bodies, their way of thinking. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that was what was on for us.
   “He’s west of the Rockies now. Sooner or later he’ll come east. Maybe not this year, no, but when he’s ready. And it’s our lot to deal with him.”
   Nick was shaking his head, disturbed.
   “Yes,” she said quietly. “You’ll see. There’s bitter days ahead. Death and terror, betrayal and tears. And not all of us will be alive to see how it ends.”
   “I don’t like any of this,” Ralph muttered. “Aren’t things hard enough without this guy you and Nick are talkin about? Ain’t we got enough problems, with no doctors or electricity or nothing? Why did we have to get stuck with this damn doorprize?”
   “I don’t know. It’s God’s way. He don’t explain to the likes of Abby Freemantle.”
   “If this is His way,” Ralph said, “why, I wish He’d retire and let somebody younger take over.”
   “If the dark man is west,” Nick wrote, “maybe we ought to pick up stakes and move east.”
   She shook her head patiently. “Nick, all things serve the Lord. Don’t you think this black man serves Him, too? He does, no matter how mysterious His purpose may be. The black man will follow you no matter where you run, because he serves the purpose of God, and God wants you to treat with him. It don’t do no good to run from the will of the Lord God of Hosts. A man or woman who tries that only ends up in the belly of the beast.”
   Nick wrote briefly. Ralph studied the note, rubbed the side of his nose, and wished he didn’t have to read it. Old ladies like this didn’t cotton to stuff like what Nick had just written. She’d likely call it a blasphemy, and shout it loud enough to wake everyone in the place, too.
   “What’s he say?” Abagail asked.
   “He says…” Ralph cleared his throat; the feather stuck in the band of his hat jiggled. “He says that he don’t believe in God.” The message relayed, he looked unhappily down at his shoes and waited for the explosion.
   But she only chuckled, got up, and walked across to Nick. She took one of his hands and patted it. “Bless you, Nick, but that don’t matter. He believes in you.”
   They stayed at Abby Freemantle’s place the next day, and it was the best day any of them could remember since the superflu had drawn away, like the waters going down from Mount Ararat. The rain had stopped sometime during the early hours of the morning, and by nine o’clock the sky was a pleasant Midwest mural of sun and broken clouds. The corn twinkled away in all directions like a ransom of emeralds. It was cooler than it had been for weeks.
   Tom Cullen spent the morning running up and down the rows of corn, his arms outstretched, scaring up droves of crows. Gina McCone sat contentedly in the dirt by the tire swing, playing with a large number of paper dolls Abagail had found at the bottom of a trunk in her bedroom closet. A little earlier, she and Tom had had a pleasant game of cars and trucks around the Fisher-Price garage Tom had taken from the five-and-dime in May, Oklahoma. Tom did what Gina wanted him to do willingly enough.
   Dick Ellis, the vet, came diffidently to Mother Abagail and asked her if anyone in the area had kept pigs.
   “Why, the Stoners always had pigs,” she said. She was sitting on the porch in her rocker, chording her guitar and watching Gina at play in the yard, her broken leg in its cast stuck out stiffly in front of her.
   “Think any of them might still be alive?”
   “You’d have to go see. Might be. Might be they’ve bust down their pens and gone hogwild.” Her eyes gleamed. “Might also be I know a fella who dreamed about pork chops last night.”
   “Could be you do,” Dick said.
   “You ever slaughtered a hog?”
   “No, ma’am,” he said, grinning broadly now. “Wormed a few, but haven’t slaughtered ary hog. I was always what you’d call nonviolent.”
   “Do you think you and Ralph there could stand a woman foreman?”
   “Could be,” he said.
   Twenty minutes later the three of them were off, Abagail riding between the two men in the Chevy’s cab with her cane planted regally between her knees. At the Stoners’ they found two yearling pigs in the back pen, healthy and full of beans. It appeared that, when the feed had given out, they had taken to dining on their weaker and less fortunate pen-mates.
   Ralph set up Reg Stoner’s chainfall in the barn, and at Abagail’s direction, Dick was finally able to get a rope firmly around the back leg of one of the yearlings. Squealing and thrashing, it was yanked into the barn and hung upside down from the chainfall.
   Ralph came out of the house with a butcher knife three feet long—That ain’t a knife, that’s a regular bayernet, praise God, Abby thought.
   “You know, I don’t know if I can do this,” he said.
   “Well, give her here, then,” Abagail said, and then held out her hand. Ralph looked doubtfully at Dick. Dick shrugged. Ralph handed the knife over.
   “Lord,” Abagail said, “we thank Thee for the gift we are about to receive from Thy bounty. Bless this pig that it might nourish us, amen. Stand clear, boys, she’s gonna go a gusher.”
   She cut the pig’s throat with one practiced sweep of the knife—some things you never forgot, no matter how old you got—and then stepped back as quick as she could.
   “You got that fire going under the kettle?” she asked Dick. “Nice hot fire out there in the dooryard?”
   “Yes, ma’am,” Dick said respectfully, unable to take his eyes from the pig.
   “You got those brushes?” she asked Ralph.
   Ralph displayed two big scrub brushes with stiff yellow bristles.
   “Well then, you want to haul him over and dump him in. After he’s boiled awhile, those bristles will scrub right off. After that you can peel old Mr. Hog just like a banana.”
   They both looked a trifle green at the prospect.
   “Lively,” she said. “You can’t eat him with his jacket on. Got to get him undressed first.”
   Ralph and Dick Ellis looked at each other, gulped, and began to lower the pig from the chainfall. They were done by three that afternoon, back at Abagail’s by four with a truckload of meat, and there were fresh pork chops for dinner. Neither of the men ate very well, but Abagail put away two chops all by herself, relishing the way the crisp fat crackled between her dentures. There was nothing like fresh meat you’d seen to yourself.
   It was sometime after nine o’clock. Gina was asleep, and Tom Cullen had dozed off in Mother Abagail’s rocker on the porch. Soundless lightning flickered against the sky far to the west. The other adults were gathered in the kitchen, except for Nick, who had gone for a walk. Abagail knew what the boy was wrestling with, and her heart went out to him.
   “Say, you’re not really a hundred and eight, are you?” Ralph asked, remembering something she had said that morning as they set out on the hog-slaughtering expedition.
   “You wait right there,” Abagail said. “I’ve got something to show you, Mister Man.” She went into the bedroom and got her framed letter from President Reagan out of the top drawer of her bureau. She brought it back to Ralph and put it in his lap. “Read that, sonny,” she said pridefully.
   Ralph read it. “… occasion of your one hundredth birthday… one of seventy-two proven centenarians in the United States of America… fifth oldest registered Republican in the United States of America… greetings and congratulations from President Ronald Reagan, January 14, 1982.” He looked up at her with wide eyes. “Well, I’ll be dipped in sh—” He stopped, blushing and in confusion. “Pardon me, ma’am.”
   “All the things you must have seen!” Olivia marveled.
   “None of it’s very much compared to what I’ve seen in the last month or so.” She sighed. “Or what I expect to see.”
   The door opened and Nick came in—conversation broke off as if they had all been marking time, waiting for him. She could see in his face that he had made his decision, and she thought she knew what it was. He handed her a note that he had written out on the porch, standing by Tom. She held the note at arm’s length to read it.
   “We’d better start for Boulder tomorrow,” Nick had written.
   She looked from the note to Nick’s face and nodded slowly. She passed the note on to June Brinkmeyer, who passed it to Olivia. “I guess we had,” Abagail said. “I don’t want to any more than you, but I guess we had better. What made up your mind?”
   He shrugged almost angrily and pointed at her.
   “So be it,” Abagail said. “My faith’s in the Lord.”
   Nick thought: I wish mine was.
   The next morning, July 26, after a brief conference, Dick and Ralph set off for Columbus in Ralph’s truck. “I hate to trade her in,” Ralph said, “but if it’s the way you say it is, Nick, okay.”
   Nick wrote, “Be back as soon as you can.”
   Ralph uttered a short laugh and looked around the yard. June and Olivia were washing clothes in a large tub with a scrub board stuck in one end. Tom was in the corn, scaring crows—an occupation he seemed to find endlessly diverting. Gina was playing with his Corgi cars and his garage. The old woman sat dozing in her rocker, dozing and snoring.
   “You’re in one tearin hurry to stick your head in the lion’s mouth, Nicky.”
   Nick wrote: “Have we got anyplace better to go to?”
   “That’s true. It’s no good just wandering around. It makes you feel kind of worthless. A person don’t hardly feel right unless he’s lookin forward, you ever notice that?”
   Nick nodded.
   “Okay.” Ralph clapped Nick on the shoulder and turned away. “Dick, you ready to take a ride?”
   Tom Cullen came running out of the corn, silk clinging to his shirt and pants and long blond hair. “Me too! Tom Cullen wants to go on the ride, too! Laws, yes!”
   “Come on, then,” Ralph said. “Here, lookit you, cornsilk from top to bottom and fore to aft. And you ain’t caught a crow yet! Better let me brush you off.”
   Grinning vacantly, Tom allowed Ralph to brush off his shirt and pants. For Tom, Nick reflected, these last two weeks had probably been the happiest of his life. He was with people who accepted and wanted him. Why shouldn’t they? He might be feeble, but he was still a comparative rarity in this new world, a living human being.
   “See you, Nicky,” Ralph said, and climbed up behind the wheel of the Chevy.
   “See you, Nicky,” Tom Cullen echoed, still grinning.
   Nick watched the truck out of sight, then went into the shed and found an old crate and a can of paint. He broke out one of the crate’s panels and nailed a long piece of picket fence to it. He took the sign and the paint out into the yard and carefully daubed on it while Gina looked over his shoulder with interest.
   “What does it say?” she asked.
   “It says, ‘We have gone to Boulder, Colorado. We are taking secondary roads to avoid traffic jams. Citizen’s Band Channel 14,’” Olivia read.
   “What does that mean?” June asked, coming over. She picked Gina up and they both watched as Nick carefully planted the sign so that it faced the area where the dirt road became Mother Abagail’s driveway. He buried the bottom three feet of the picket. Nothing but a big wind would knock it over now. Of course there were big winds out in this part of the world; he thought of the one which had almost carried him and Tom away, and of the scare they’d had in the cellar.
   He wrote a note and handed it to June.
   “One of the things Dick and Ralph are supposed to get in Columbus is a CB radio. Someone will have to monitor Channel 14 all the time.”
   “Oh,” Olivia said. “Smart.”
   Nick tapped his forehead gravely, then smiled.
   The two women went back to hang their clothes. Gina returned to the toy cars, hopping nimbly on one leg. Nick walked across the yard, mounted the porch steps, and sat down next to the dozing old woman. He looked out over the corn and wondered what was going to become of them.
   If that’s the way you say it is, Nick, okay.
   They had turned him into a leader. They had done that and he couldn’t even begin to understand why. You couldn’t take orders from a deaf-mute; it was like a bad joke. Dick should have been their leader. His own place was as spear-carrier, third from the left, no lines, recognized only by his mother. But from the time they had met Ralph Brentner pottering up the road in his truck, not really going anywhere, that business of saying something and then glancing quickly at Nick, as if for confirmation, had begun. A fog of nostalgia had already begun to creep over those few days between Shoyo and May, before Tom and responsibility. It was easy to forget how lonely he had been, the fear that the constant bad dreams might mean he was going crazy. Easy to remember how there had been only yourself to look out for, a spear-carrier, third from the left, a bit player in this terrible play.
   I knew when I saw you. It’s you, Nick. God has put His finger on your heart…
   No, I don’t accept that. I don’t accept God either, for that matter. Let the old woman have her God, God was as necessary for old women as enemas and Lipton tea bags. He would concentrate on one thing at a time, planting one foot ahead of the other. Get them to Boulder, then see what came next. The old woman said the dark man was a real man, not just a psychological symbol, and he didn’t want to believe that, either… but in his heart he did. In his heart he believed everything she had said, and it scared him. He didn’t want to be their leader.
   It’s you, Nick.
   A hand squeezed his shoulder and he jumped with surprise, then turned around. If she had been dozing, she wasn’t anymore. She was smiling down at him from her armless rocker.
   “I was just sittin here and thinkin on the Great Depression,” she said. “Do you know my daddy once owned all this land for miles around? It’s true. No small trick for a black man. And I played my guitar and sang down at the Grange Hall in nineteen and oh-two. Long ago, Nick. Long, long ago.”
   Nick nodded.
   “Those were good days, Nick—most of em were, anyway. But nothin lasts, I guess. Only the love of the Lord. My daddy died, and the land was split between his sons with a piece for my first husband, sixty acres, not much. This house stands on part o that sixty, you know. Four acres, that’s all that’s left. Oh, I guess now I could lay claim to all of it again, but t’wouldn’t be the same, somehow.”
   Nick patted her scrawny hand and she sighed deeply.
   “Brothers don’t always work so well together; they almost always fall to squabblin. Look at Cain n Abel! Everyone wanted to be a foreman and nobody wanted to be a fielhand! Comes 1931, and the bank called its paper home. Then they all pulled together, but by then it was most too late. By 1945 everything was gone but my sixty and forty or fifty more where the Goodell place is now.”
   She fumbled her handkerchief from her dress pocket and wiped her eyes with it, slowly and thoughtfully.
   “Finally there was only me left, with no money nor nothing. And each year when tax-time came round, they’d take a little more to pay it off, and I’d come out here to look at the part that wasn’t my own anymore, and I’d cry over it like I’m crying now. A little more each year for taxes, that’s how it happened. A whack here, a whack there. I rented out what was left, but it was never enough to cover what they had to have for their cussed taxes. Then, when I got to be a hundred years old, they remanded the taxes in perpetuity. Yes, they give it over after they’d taken everything but this little piece o scratch that’s here. Big o them, wa’n’t it?”
   He squeezed her hand lightly and looked at her.
   “Oh, Nick,” Mother Abagail said, “I have harbored hate of the Lord in my heart. Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He’s a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He’s apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy. I do His will, but the human part o me has cursed Him in my heart. ‘Abby,’ the Lord says to me, ‘there’s work for you far up ahead. So I’ll let you live an live, until your flesh is bitter on your bones. I’ll let you see all your children die ahead of you and still you’ll walk the earth. I’ll let you see your daddy’s lan taken away piece by piece. And in the end, your reward will be to go away with strangers from all the things you love best and you’ll die in a strange land with the work not yet finished. That’s My will, Abby,’ says He, and ‘Yes, Lord,’ says I. ‘Thy will be done,’ and in my heart I curse Him and ask, ‘Why, why, why?’ and the only answer I get is ‘Where were you when I made the world?’”
   Now her tears came in a bitter flood, running down her cheeks and wetting the bodice of her dress, and Nick marveled that there could be so many tears in such an old woman, who seemed as dry and thin as a dead twig.
   “Help me along, Nick,” she said. “I only want to do what’s right.”
   He held her hands tightly. Behind them Gina giggled and held one of the toy cars up to the sky for the sun to shine and sparkle on.
   Dick and Ralph came back at noon, Dick behind the wheel of a new Dodge van and Ralph driving a red wrecker truck with a pushboard on the front and the crane and hook dangling from the back. Tom stood in the rear, waving grandly. They pulled up by the porch and Dick got out of the van.
   “There’s a helluva nice CB in that wrecker,” he told Nick. “Forty-channel job. I think Ralph’s in love with it.”
   Nick grinned. The women had come over and were looking at the trucks. Abagail’s eyes noted the way Ralph squired June over to the wrecker so she could look at the radio equipment, and approved. The woman had a good set of hips on her, there would be a fine porch door down there between them. She could have just about as many little ones as she wanted.
   “So when do we go?” Ralph asked.
   Nick scribbled, “Soon as we eat. Did you try the CB?”
   “Yeah,” Ralph said. “I had it on all the way back. Horrible static; there’s a squelch button, but it doesn’t seem to work very well. But you know, I swear I did hear something, static or no static. Far off. Might not have been voices at all. But I’ll say the truth, Nicky, I didn’t care for it much. Like those dreams.”
   A silence fell among them.
   “Well,” Olivia said, breaking it. “I’ll get something cooking. Hope nobody minds pork two days in a row.”
   No one did. And by one o’clock the camping things—and Abagail’s rocker and guitar—had been stowed in the van and they were off, the wrecker now lumbering ahead to move anything blocking the road. Abagail sat up front in the van as they drove westbound on Route 30. She did not cry. Her cane was planted between her legs. Crying was done. She was set in the center of the Lord’s will and His will would be done. The Lord’s will would be done, but she thought of that red Eye opening in the dark heart of the night and she was afraid.

Chapter 46
 
 It was late evening, July 27. They were camped on what the sign, now half-demolished by summer storms, proclaimed to be the Kunkle Fairgrounds. Kunkle itself, Kunkle, Ohio, was south of them. There had been some sort of fire there, and most of Kunkle was gone. Stu said it had probably been lightning. Harold had of course disputed that. These days if Stu Redman said a firetruck was red, Harold Lauder would produce facts and figures proving that most of them these days were green.
   She sighed and rolled over. Couldn’t sleep. She was afraid of the dream.
   To her left the five motorcycles stood in a row, heeled over on their kickstands, moonlight twinkling along their chromed exhaust pipes and fittings. As if a band of Hell’s Angels had picked this particular spot to crash for the night. Not that the Angels ever would have ridden such a pussycat bunch of bikes as these Hondas and Yamahas, she supposed. They had driven “hogs”… or was that just something she had picked up from the old American-International bike epic she’d seen on TV? The Wild Angels. The Devil’s Angels. Hell’s Angels on Wheels. The bike pictures had been very big at the drive-ins when she had been in high school, Wells Drive-In, Sanford Drive-In, South Portland Twin, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Now kaput, all the drive-ins were kaput, not to mention the Hell’s Angels and good old American-International Pictures.
   Put it in your diary, Frannie, she told herself, and rolled over on her other side. Not tonight. Tonight she was going to sleep, dreams or no dreams.
   Twenty paces from where she was lying, she could see the others, zonked out in their sleeping bags like Hell’s Angels after a big beer party, the one where everybody in the picture got laid except for Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra. Harold, Stu, Glen Bateman, Mark Braddock, Perion McCarthy. Take Sominex tonight and sleep …
   It wasn’t Sominex they were on but half a grain of Veronal apiece. It had been Stu’s idea when the dreams got really bad and they all began to get flaky and hard to live with. He had taken Harold aside before mentioning it to the rest of them because the way to flatter Harold was to soberly ask his opinion and also because Harold knew things. It was good that he did, but it was also rather spooky, as if they had a fifth-rate god traveling with them—more or less omniscient, but emotionally unstable and likely to fragment at any time. Harold had picked up a second gun in Albany, where they had met Mark and Perion, and now he wore the two pistols crisscrossed low on his hips like a latterday Johnny Ringo. She felt badly for Harold, but Harold had also begun to frighten her. She had begun to wonder if Harold might not just go crackers some night and start blazing away with his two pistols. She often found herself remembering the day she had come upon Harold in his back yard, all his emotional defenses demolished, mowing the lawn in his bathing suit and crying.
   She knew just how Stu would have put it to him, very quietly, almost conspiratorially: Harold, these dreams are a problem. I’ve got an idea, but I don’t know exactly how to carry it out… a mild sedative… but it would have to be just the right dose. Too much and nobody would wake up if there was trouble. What do you suggest?
   Harold had suggested they try a whole grain of Veronal, available at any drugstore, and if that interrupted the dream-cycle, that they cut back to three quarters of a grain, and if that worked to half. Stu had gone privately to Glen, had gotten a concurring opinion, and the experiment had been tried. At a quarter grain the dreams had begun to creep back in, so they held the dosage at a half.
   At least for the others.
   Frannie accepted her drug each night, but palmed it. She didn’t know if Veronal would hurt the baby or not, but she was taking no chances. They said that even aspirin could break the chromosome chain. So she suffered the dreams—suffered, that was the right word. One of them predominated; if the others were different, they would sooner or later blend into this one. She was in her Ogunquit house, and the dark man was chasing her. Up and down shadowy corridors, through her mother’s parlor where the clock continued to tick off seasons in a dry age… she could get away from him, she knew, if she didn’t have to carry the body. It was her father’s body, wrapped in a bedsheet, and if she dropped it the dark man would do something to it, perform some awful desecration on it. So she ran, knowing that he was getting closer and closer, and at last his hand would fall on her shoulder, his hot and sickening hand. She would go boneless and weak, her father’s shrouded corpse would slither out of her arms, she would turn, ready to say: Take him, do anything, I don’t care, just don’t chase me anymore.
   And there he would be, dressed in some dark stuff like a hooded monk’s robe, nothing visible of his features save his huge and happy grin. And in one hand he held the bent and twisted coathanger. That was when the horror struck her like a padded fist and she struggled up from sleep, her skin clammy with sweat, her heart thudding, wanting never to sleep again.
   Because it wasn’t the dead body of her father he wanted; it was the living child in her womb.
   She rolled over again. If she didn’t go to sleep soon she really would take her diary out and write in it. She had been keeping the journal since July 5. In a way she was keeping it for the baby. It was an act of faith—faith that the baby would live. She wanted it to know what it had been like. How the plague had come to a place called Ogunquit, how she and Harold had escaped, what became of them. She wanted the child to know how things had been.
   The moonlight was strong enough to write by, and two or three pages of diary were always enough to make her feel snoozy. Didn’t say much for her literary talents, she supposed. She would give sleep one more fair chance first, though.
   She closed her eyes.
   And went on thinking of Harold.
   The situation might have eased with the coming of Mark and Perion if the two of them hadn’t already been committed to each other. Perion was thirty-three, eleven years older than Mark, but in this world such things made little difference. They had found each other, they had been looking out for each other, and they were content to stick together. Perion had confided to Frannie that they were trying to make a baby. Thank God I was on the pill and didn’t have a loop, Peri said. How in God’s name would I ever have gotten it out?
   Frannie had almost told her about the baby she was carrying (she was over a third of the way along now) but something held her back. She was afraid it might make a bad situation even worse.
   So now there were six of them instead of four (Glen refused utterly to try driving a motorcycle and always rode pillion behind Stu or Harold), but the situation hadn’t changed with the addition of another woman.
   What about you, Frannie? What do you want?
   If she had to exist in a world like this, she thought, with a biological clock inside her set to go off in six months, she wanted someone like Stu Redman to be her man—no, not someone like. She wanted him. There it was, stated with complete baldness.
   With civilization gone, all the chrome and geegaws had been stripped from the engine of human society. Glen Bateman held forth on this theme often, and it always seemed to please Harold inordinately.
   Women’s lib, Frannie had decided (thinking that if she was going to be bald, she might as well go totally bald), was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn’t get with child, but a woman could—every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath. Liberation —that one word said it all. Before civilization, with its careful and merciful system of protections, women had been slaves. Let us not gild the lily; slaves was what we were, Fran thought. Then the evil days ended. And the Women’s Credo, which should have been hung in the offices of Ms. magazine, preferably in needlepoint, was just this: Thank you, Men, for the railroads. Thank you, Men, for inventing the automobile and killing the red Indians who thought it might be nice to hold on to America for a while longer, since they were here first. Thank you, Men, for the hospitals, the police, the schools. Now I’d like to vote, please, and have the right to set my own course and make my own destiny. Once I was chattel, but now that is obsolete. My days of slavery must be over; I need to be a slave no more than I need to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny boat with sails. Jet planes are safer and quicker than little boats with sails and freedom makes more sense than slavery. I am not afraid of flying. Thank you, Men.
   And what was there to say? Nothing. The rednecks could grunt about burning bras, the reactionaries could play intellectual little games, but the truth only smiles. Now all that had changed, in a matter of weeks it had changed—how much only time would tell. But lying here in the night, she knew that she needed a man. Oh God, she badly needed a man.
   Nor was it all a matter of preserving herself and her baby, of looking out for number one (and, she supposed, number two). Stu attracted her, especially after Jess Rider. Stu was calm, capable, and most of all he was not what her father would have called “twenty pounds of bullshit in a ten-pound bag.”
   He was attracted to her as well. She knew that perfectly well, had known it since that first lunch together on the Fourth of July in that deserted restaurant. For a moment—just one moment—their eyes had met and there had been that instant of heat, like a power surge when all the needles swing over to overload. She guessed Stu knew how things were, too, but he was waiting on her, letting her make her decision in her own time. She had been with Harold first, therefore she was Harold’s chattel. A stinking macho idea, but she was afraid this was going to be a stinking macho world again, at least for a while.
   If only there was someone else, someone for Harold, but there wasn’t, and she was afraid she could not wait long. She thought of the day Harold, in his clumsy way, had tried to make love to her, to make his claim of ownership irrevocable. How long ago? Two weeks? It seemed longer. All the past seemed longer now. It had pulled out like warm Bonomo’s Turkish taffy. Between her worry of what to do about Harold—and her fears of what he might do if she did go to Stuart—and her fears of the dreams, she would never get to sleep.
   So thinking, she drifted off.
   When she woke up, it was still dark. Someone was shaking her.
   She muttered some protest—her sleep had been restful and without dreams for the first time in a week—and then came reluctantly out of it, thinking that it must be morning, and time to get going. But why would they want to get going in the dark? As she sat up, she saw that even the moon was down.
   It was Harold shaking her, and Harold looked scared.
   “Harold? Is something wrong?”
   Stu was also up, she saw. And Glen Bateman. Perion was kneeling on the far side of the place where their small fire had been.
   “It’s Mark,” Harold said. “He’s sick.”
   “Sick?” she said, and then a low moan came from the other side of the campfire’s ashes, where Perion was kneeling and the two men were standing. Frannie felt dread rise up inside her like a black column. Sickness was the thing they were all most afraid of.
   “It isn’t… the flu, is it, Harold?” Because if Mark came down with a belated case of Captain Trips, that meant any of them could. Perhaps the germ was still hanging around. Perhaps it had even mutated. The better to feed on you, my dear.
   “No, it’s not the flu. It’s nothing like the flu. Fran, did you eat any of the canned oysters tonight? Or maybe when we stopped for lunch?”
   She tried to think, her mind still fuzzy with sleep. “Yes, I had some both times,” she said. “They tasted fine. I love oysters. Is it food poisoning? Is that what it is?”
   “Fran, I’m just asking. None of us know what it is. There isn’t a doctor in the house. How do you feel? Do you feel all right?”
   “Fine, just sleepy.” But she wasn’t. Not anymore. Another groan floated over from the other side of the camp, as if Mark were accusing her of feeling well while he did not.
   Harold said, “Glen thinks it might be his appendix.”
   “What? ”
   Harold only grinned sickly and nodded.
   Fran got up and walked across to where the others were gathered. Harold trailed her like an unhappy shadow.
   “We’ve got to help him,” Perion said. She spoke mechanically, as if she had said it many times before. Her eyes went from one of them to the next relentlessly, eyes so full of terror and helplessness that Frannie once again felt accused. Her thoughts went selfishly to the baby she was carrying and she tried to push the thoughts away. Inappropriate or not, they wouldn’t go. Get away from him, part of her screamed at the rest of her. You get away from him right now, he might be catching. She looked at Glen, who was pale and old-looking in the steady glow of the Coleman lantern.
   “Harold says you think it’s his appendix?” she asked.
   “I don’t know,” Glen said, sounding upset and scared. “He’s got the symptoms, certainly; he’s feverish, his belly is hard and swelled, painful to touch—”
   “We’ve got to help him,” Perion said again, and burst into tears.
   Glen touched Mark’s belly and Mark’s eyes, which had been half-lidded and glazed, opened wide. He screamed. Glen jerked his hand away as if he had put it on a hot stove and looked from Stu to Harold and then back to Stu again with barely concealed panic. “What would you two gentlemen suggest?”
   Harold stood with his throat working convulsively, as if something was stuck in there, and choking him. At last he blurted, “Give him some aspirin.”
   Perion, who had been gazing down at Mark through her tears, now whirled to look at Harold. “Aspirin?” she asked. Her tone was one of furious astonishment. “Aspirin? ” This time she shrieked it. “Is that the best you can do with all your big-talk smartassery? Aspirin? ”
   Harold stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked at her miserably, accepting the rebuke.
   Stu said very quietly, “But Harold’s right, Perion. For now, aspirin’s just about the best we can do. What time is it?”
   “You don’t know what to do!” she screamed at them. “Why don’t you just admit it?”
   “It’s quarter of three,” Frannie said.
   “What if he dies?” Peri pushed a sheaf of dark auburn hair away from her face, which was puffed from crying.
   “Leave them alone, Peri,” Mark said in a dull, tired voice. It startled them all. “They’ll do what they can. If it goes on hurting as bad as this, I think I’d father be dead anyway. Give me some aspirin. Anything.”
   “I’ll get it,” Harold said, eager to be away. “There’s some in my knapsack. Extra Strength Excedrin,” he added, as if hoping for their approval, and then he went for it nearly scuttling in his hurry.
   “We’ve got to help him,” Perion said, returning to her old scripture.
   Stu drew Glen and Frannie off to one side.
   “Any ideas on what to do about this?” he asked them quietly. “I don’t have any, I can tell you. She was mad at Harold, but his aspirin idea was just about twice as good as any I’ve had.”
   “She’s upset, that’s all,” Fran said.
   Glen sighed. “Maybe it’s just his bowels. Too much roughage. Maybe he’ll have a good movement and it’ll clear up.”
   Frannie was shaking her head. “I don’t think that’s it. He wouldn’t be running a fever if it was his bowels. And I don’t think his belly would have swelled up that way, either.” It had almost looked as if a tumor had swelled up there overnight. It made her feel ill to think about it. She could not remember when (except for when she was dreaming the dreams) she had been so badly frightened. What was it Harold had said? There’s no doctor in the house. How true it was. How horribly true. God, it was all coming at her at once, crashing down all around her. How horribly alone they were. How horribly far out on the wire they were, and somebody had forgotten the safety net. She looked from Glen’s strained face to Stu’s. She saw deep concern in both of them, but no answers in either of them.
   Behind them, Mark screamed again, and Perion echoed his cry as if she felt his pain. In a way, Frannie supposed that she did.
   “What are we going to do?” Frannie asked helplessly.
   She was thinking of the baby, and over and over again the question which dinned its way into her mind was: What if it has to be cesarean? What if it has to be cesarean? What if —
   Behind her, Mark screamed again like some horrible prophet, and she hated him.
   They looked at each other in the trembling dark.
   From Fran Goldsmith’s Diary
   July 6, 1990
   After some persuasion Mr. Bateman has agreed to come along with us. He sez that after all his articles (“I write them in big words so no one will really know how simpleminded they are,” he sez) and boring twenty years of students to death in SY-1 and SY-2, not to mention the Sociology of Deviant Behavior and Rural Sociology, he has decided he can’t afford to turn down this opportunity.
   Stu wanted to know what opportunity he meant.
   “I should think that would be clear,” sez Harold in that INSUFFERABLY SNOTTY way of his (sometimes Harold can be a dear but he can also be a real boogersnot and tonight he was being the latter). “Mr. Bateman—”
   “Please call me Glen,” sez he, very quietly, but the way Harold glared at him, you would have thought he had accused Harold of having some social disease.
   “Glen, as a sociologist, sees the opportunity to study the formation of a society first-hand, I believe. He wants to see how fact compares with theory.”
   Well, to make a long story short, Glen (which I will call him from now on, since that’s what he likes) agreed that was mostly it but added: “I also have certain theories which I’ve written down and hope to prove or disprove. I don’t believe that man arising from the ashes of the superflu is going to be anything like man arising from the cradle of the Nile with a bone in his nose and a woman by the hair. That’s one of the theories.”
   Stu said, in that quiet way he has, “Because everything is lying around, waiting to be picked up again.” He looked so grim when he said it that I was surprised, and even Harold looked at him sort of funny.
   But Glen just nodded and said, “That’s right. The technological society has walked off the court, so to speak, but they’ve left all the basketballs behind. Someone will come along who remembers the game and teach it to the rest again. That’s rather neat, isn’t it? I ought to write it down later.”
   note 6
   So then Harold sez, “You sound as if you believe the whole thing will start up again—the arms race, the pollution, and so on. Is that another of your theories? Or a corollary to the first one?”
   “Not exactly,” Glen started to say, but before he could go any further, Harold burst in with his own chicken-bone to pick. I can’t put it down word for word, because when he gets excited Harold talks fast, but what he said amounted to how, even though he had a pretty low opinion of people in general, he didn’t think they could be that stupid. He said he thought that this time around, certain laws would be made. One would be no fiddling around with badass stuff like nuclear fission and fleurocarbon (probably spelled that one wrong, oh well) sprays and stuff like that. I do remember one thing he said, because it was a very vivid image. “Just because the Gordian knot has been cut for us is no reason for us to go to work and tie it back up.”
   I could see he was just spoiling for an argument—one of the things that makes Harold hard to like is how eager he is to show off how much he knows (and he sure does know a lot, I can’t take that away from him, Harold is superbright)—but all Glen said was, “Time will tell, won’t it?”
   That all finished up about an hour ago, and now I am in an upstairs bedroom with Kojak lying on the floor beside me. Good dog! It is all rawther cozy, reminds me of home, but I am trying not to think about home too much because it makes me weepy. I know this must sound awful but I really wish I had someone to help me warm this bed. I even have a candidate in mind.
   Put it out of your mind, Frannie!
   So tomorrow we’re off for Stovington and I know Stu doesn’t like the idea much. He’s scared of that place. I like Stu very much, only wish Harold liked him more. Harold is making everything very hard, but I suppose he can’t help his nature.
   Glen has decided to leave Kojak behind. He is sorry to have to do that, even though Kojak will have no trouble finding forage. Still there is nothing else for it unless we could find a motorcycle with a sidecar, and even then poor Kojak might get scared and jump out. Hurt or kill himself.
   Anyway tomorrow we’ll be going.
   Things to Remember: The Texas Rangers (baseball team) had a pitcher named Nolan Ryan who pitched all kinds of no-hitters and things with his famous fastball, and a no-hitter is very good. There were TV comedies with laugh-tracks, and a laugh-track was people on tape laughing at the funny parts, and they were supposed to make you have a better time watching. You used to be able to get frozen cakes and pies at the supermarket and just thaw them out and eat them. Sara Lee strawberry cheesecake was my personal favorite.
   July 7, 1990
   Can’t write long. Cycled all day. My fanny feels like hamburger & my back feels like there’s a rock in it. I had that bad dream again last night. Harold has also been dreaming about that ?man? and it upsets the hell out of him because he can’t explain how both of us can be having what is essentially the same dream.
   Stu sez he is still having that dream about Nebraska and the old black woman there. She keeps saying he should come and see her anytime. Stu thinks she lives in a town called Holland Home or Hometown or something like that. Sez he thinks he could find it. Harold sneered at him and went into a long spiel about how dreams were psycho-Freudian manifestations of things we didn’t dare think about when we were awake. Stu was angry, I think, but kept his temper. I’m so afraid that the bad feeling between them may break out into the open, I WISH IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!
   Anyway, Stu said, “So how come you and Frannie are having the same dream?” Harold muttered something about coincidence and just stalked off.
   Stu told Glen and I that he would like us to go to Nebraska after Stovington. Glen shrugged and said, “Why not? We have to go somewhere.”
   Harold, of course, will object on general principles. Damn you, Harold, grow up!
   Things to Remember: There were gasoline shortages in the early 80s because everybody in America was driving something and we had used up most of our oil supplies and the Arabs had us by the short hairs. The Arabs had so much money they literally couldn’t spend it. There was a rock and roll group called The Who that sometimes used to finish their live performances by smashing their guitars and amplifiers. This was known as “conspicuous consumption.”
   July 8, 1990
   It’s late and I’m tired again but I should try to get as much down as I possibly can before my eyelids just SLAM SHUT. Harold finished his sign about an hour ago (with much bad grace I must say) and put it on the front lawn of the Stovington installation. Stu helped him put it up and held his peace in spite of all Harold’s mean little jibes.
   I had tried to prepare myself for the disappointment. I never believed Stu was lying, and I really don’t think Harold believed he was, either. So I was sure everybody was dead, but still it was an upsetting experience and I cried. I couldn’t help myself.
   But I wasn’t the only one who was upset. When Stu saw the place he turned almost dead white. He had on a short-sleeved shirt, and I could see he had goosebumps all up and down his arms. His eyes are normally blue but they had gone a slaty color, like the ocean on a gray day.
   He pointed up to the third floor and said, “That was my room.”
   Harold turned toward him, and I could see him getting ready with one of his patented Harold Lauder Smartass Comments, but then he saw Stu’s face and shut up. I think that was very wise of him, actually.
   So after a little while Harold sez, “Well, let’s go in and look around.”
   “What would you want to do that for?” Stu answers, and he sounded almost hysterical, but keeping it under a tight rein. It scared me, more so because he is usually as cool as icewater. Witness what little success Harold has had getting under his skin.
   “Stuart—” Glen starts, but Stu interrupts with,
   “What for? Can’t you see it’s a dead place? No brass bands, no soldiers, no nothing. Believe it,” he says, “if they were here they’d be all over us by now. We’d be up in those white rooms like a bunch of fucking guinea pigs.” Then he looks at me and says, “Sorry, Fran—I didn’t mean to talk that way. I guess I’m upset.”
   “Well, I’m going in,” Harold sez, “who’s coming with me?” But I could see that even though Harold was trying to be BIG & BOLD, he was really scared himself.
   Glen said he would, and Stu said: “You go in, too, Fran. Have a look. Satisfy yourself.”
   I wanted to say I’d stay outside with him, because he looked so uptight (and because I really didn’t want to go in, either, you know), but that would have made more trouble with Harold, so I said okay.
   If we—Glen and I—had really had any doubts about Stu’s story, we could have dropped them as soon as we opened the door. It was the smell. You can smell the same thing in any of the fair-sized towns we’ve traveled thru, it’s a smell like decayed tomatoes, and oh God I’m crying again, but is it right for people not just to die but then to stink like
   Wait

(later)
   There, I’ve had my second GOOD CRY of the day, whatever can be happening to L’il Fran Goldsmith, Our Gal Sal, who used to be able to chew up nails and spit out carpet tacks, ha-ha, as the old saying goes. Well, no more tears tonite, and that’s a promise.
   We went inside anyway, morbid curiosity, I guess. I don’t know about the others, but I kind of wanted to see the room where Stu was held prisoner. Anyway, it wasn’t just the smell, you know, but how cool the place was after the outside. A lot of granite and marble and probably really fantastic insulation. It was warmer on the top 2 floors, but down below was that smell… and the cool… it was like a tomb. YUCK.
   It was also spooky, like a haunted house—the three of us were all huddled together like sheep, and I was glad I had my rifle, even if it is only a .22. Our footsteps kept echoing back to us as if there was someone creeping along, following us, you know, and I started thinking about that dream again, the one starring the man in the black robe. No wonder Stu didn’t want to come with us.
   We wandered around to the elevators at last and went up to the 2nd floor. Nothing there but offices… and several bodies. The 3rd floor was made up like a hospital, but all the rooms had airlock doors (both Harold and Glen said that’s what they were) and special viewing windows. There were lots of bodies up there, in the rooms and in the hallways, too. Very few women. Did they try to evacuate them at the end, I wonder? There’s so much we’ll never know. But then, why would we want to?
   Anyway, at the end of the hall leading down from the main corridor where the elevator core was, we found a room with its airlock door open. There was a dead man in there, but he wasn’t a patient (they were all wearing white hospital johnnies) and he sure didn’t die of the flu. He was lying in a big pool of dried blood, and he looked like he’d been trying to crawl out of the room when he died. There was a broken chair, and things were all messed up, as if there’d been a fight.
   Glen looked around for a long time and then said, “I don’t think we’d better say anything about this room to Stu. I believe he came very close to dying in here.”
   I looked at that sprawled body and felt creepier than ever.
   “What do you mean?” Harold asked, and even he sounded hushed. It was one of the few times I ever heard Harold talk as if what he was saying wasn’t going out on a public address system.
   “I believe that gentleman came in here to kill Stuart,” Glen said, “and that Stu somehow got the better of him.”
   “But why?” I asked. “Why would they want to kill Stu if he was immune? It doesn’t make any sense!”
   He looked at me, and his eyes were scary. His eyes looked almost dead, like a mackerel’s eyes.
   “That doesn’t matter, Fran,” he said. “Sense didn’t have much to do with this place, from the way it looks. There is a certain mentality that believes in covering up. They believe in it with the sincerity and fanaticism that members of some religious groups believe in the divinity of Jesus. Because, for some people, the necessity to continue covering up even after the damage is done is all-important. It makes me wonder how many immunes they killed in Atlanta and San Francisco and the Topeka Viral Center before the plague finally killed them and made an end to their butchery. This asshole? I’m glad he’s dead. I’m only sorry for Stu, who’ll probably spend the rest of his life having nightmares about him.”
   And do you know what Glen Bateman did then? That nice man who paints the horrible pictures? He went over and kicked that dead man in the face. Harold made a muffled sort of grunt, as if he was the one who had been kicked. Then Glen drew his foot back again.
   “No!” Harold yells, but Glen kicked the dead man again just the same. Then he turned around and he was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, but at least his eyes had lost that awful dead-fish look.
   “Come on,” he sez, “let’s get out of here. Stu was right. It’s a dead place.”
   So we went out, and Stu was sitting with his back to the iron gate in the high wall that ran around the place, and I wanted to… oh go ahead, Frannie, if you can’t tell your diary, who can you tell? I wanted to run to him and kiss him and tell him I was ashamed for all of us not believing him. And ashamed of how all of us had gone on about what a hard time we’d had when the plague was on, and him hardly saying anything when all the time that man had almost killed him.
   Oh dear, I’m falling in love with him, I think I’ve got the world’s most crushable crush, if only it wasn’t for Harold I’d take my damn chances!
   Anyway (there’s always an anyway, even tho by now my fingers are so numb they are just about falling off), that was when Stu told us for the first time that he wanted to go to Nebraska, that he wanted to check out his dream. He had a stubborn, sort of embarrassed look on his face, as if he knew he was going to have to take some more patronizing shit from Harold, but Harold was too unnerved from our “tour” of the Stovington facility to offer more than token resistance. And even that stopped when Glen said, in a very reticent way, that he had also dreamed of the old woman the night before.
   “Of course, it might only be because Stu told us about his dream,” he said, kind of red in the face, “but it was remarkably similar.”
   Harold said that of course that was it, but Stu said, “Wait a minute, Harold—I’ve got an idea.”
   His idea was that we all take a sheet of paper and write down everything we could remember of our dreams over the last week, then compare notes. This was just scientific enough so that Harold couldn’t grumble too much.
   Well, the only dream I’ve had is the one I’ve already written down, and I won’t repeat it. I’ll just say I wrote it down, leaving in the part about my father but leaving out the part about the baby and the coathanger he always has.
   The results when we compared our papers were rather amazing.
   Harold, Stu, and I had all dreamed about “the dark man,” as I call him. Both Stu & I visualized him as a man in a monk’s robe with no visible features—his face is always in a shadow. Harold’s paper said that he was always standing in a dark doorway, beckoning to him “like a pimp.” Sometimes he could just see his feet and the shine of his eyes “like weasel’s eyes” is how he put it.
   Stu and Glen’s dreams of the old woman are very similar. The points of similarity are almost too many to go into (which is my “literary” way of saying my fingers are going numb). Anyway, they both agree she is in Polk County, Nebraska, altho they couldn’t get together on the actual name of the town—Stu says Hollingford Home, Glen says Hemingway Home. Close either way. They both seemed to feel they could find it. (Note Well, diary: My guess is “Hemingford Home.”)
   Glen said, “This is really remarkable. We all seem to be sharing an authentic psychic experience.” Harold pooh-poohed, of course, but he looked like he’d been given lots of food for thought. He would only agree to go on the basis of “we have to go somewhere.” We leave in the morning. I’m scared, excited, and mostly happy to be leaving Stovington, which is a death-place. And I’ll take that old woman over the dark man anytime.
   Things to Remember: “Hang loose” meant don’t get upset. “Rad” and “gnarly” were ways of saying a thing was good. “No sweat” meant you weren’t worried. To “boogie down” was to have a good time, and lots of people wore T-shirts which said SHIT HAPPENS, which it certainly did… and still does. “I got grease” was a pretty current expression (I first heard it just this year) that meant everything was going well. “Digs,” an old British expression, was just replacing “pad” or “crashpad” as an expression for the place you were living in before the superflu hit. It was very cool to say “I dig your digs.” Stupid, huh? But that was life.
   It was just after twelve noon.
   Perion had fallen into an exhausted sleep beside Mark, who they had moved carefully into the shade two hours earlier. He was in and out of consciousness, and it was easier on all of them when he was out. He had held against the pain for the remainder of the night, but after daybreak he had finally given in to it and when he was conscious, his screams curdled their blood. They stood looking at each other, helpless. No one had wanted any lunch.
   “It’s his appendix,” Glen said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.”
   “Maybe we ought to try… well, operating on him,” Harold said. He was looking at Glen. “I don’t suppose you…”
   “We’d kill him,” Glen said flatly. “You know that, Harold. If we could open him up without having him bleed to death, which we couldn’t, we wouldn’t know his appendix from his pancreas. The stuff in there isn’t labeled, you know.”
   “We’ll kill him if we don’t,” Harold said.
   “Do you want to try?” Glen asked waspishly. “Sometimes I wonder about you, Harold.”
   “I don’t see that you’re being much help in our current situation, either,” Harold said, flushing.
   “No, stop, come on,” Stu said. “What good are either of you doing? Unless one of you plans to saw him open with a jackknife, it’s out of the question, anyway.”
   “Stu! ” Frannie almost gasped.
   “Well?” he asked, and shrugged. “The nearest hospital would be back in Maumee. We could never get him there. I don’t even think we could get him back to the turnpike.”
   “You’re right, of course,” Glen muttered, and ran a hand over his sandpapery cheek. “Harold, I apologize. I’m very upset. I knew this sort of thing could happen—pardon me, would happen—but I guess I only knew it in an academic way. This is a lot different than sitting in the old study, blue-skying things.”
   Harold muttered an ungrateful acknowledgment and walked off with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets. He looked like a sulky, overgrown ten-year-old.
   “Why can’t we move him?” Fran asked desperately, looking from Stu to Glen.
   “Because of how much his appendix must have swelled by now,” Glen said. “If it bursts, it’s going to dump enough poison into his system to kill ten men.”
   Stu nodded. “Peritonitis.”
   Frannie’s head whirled. Appendicitis? That was nothing these days. Nothing. Why sometimes, if you were in the hospital for gallstones or something, they would just lift out your appendix on general principles while they still had you open. She remembered that one of her grammar school friends, a boy named Charley Biggers whom everyone had called Biggy, had had his appendix out during the summer between fifth and sixth grades. He was only in the hospital for two or three days. Having your appendix out was just nothing, medically speaking.
   Just like having a baby was nothing, medically speaking.
   “But if you leave him alone,” she asked, “won’t it burst anyway?”
   Stu and Glen looked at each other uncomfortably and said nothing.
   “Then you’re just as bad as Harold says!” she burst out wildly. “You’ve got to do something, even if it is with a jackknife! You’ve got to!”
   “Why us?” Glen asked angrily. “Why not you? We don’t even have a medical book, for Christ’s sweet sake!”
   “But you… he… it can’t happen this way! Having your appendix out is supposed to be nothing! ”
   “Well, maybe not in the old days, but it’s sure something now,” Glen said, but by then she had blundered off, crying.
   She came back around three o’clock, ashamed of herself and ready to apologize. But neither Glen nor Stu was in camp. Harold was sitting dejectedly on the trunk of a fallen tree. Perion was sitting crosslegged by Mark, sponging his face with a cloth. She looked pale but composed.
   “Frannie!” Harold said, looking up and brightening visibly.
   “Hi, Harold.” She went on to Peri. “How is he?”
   “Sleeping,” Perion said, but he wasn’t sleeping; even Fran could see that. He was unconscious.
   “Where have the others gone, Peri? Do you know?”
   It was Harold who answered her. He had come up behind her, and Fran could feel him wanting to touch her hair or put a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t want him to. Harold had begun to make her acutely uncomfortable almost all of the time.
   “They’ve gone to Kunkle. To look for a doctor’s office.”
   “They thought they could get some books,” Peri said. “And some… some instruments.” She swallowed and her throat made an audible click. She went on cooling Mark’s face, occasionally dipping her cloth into one of the canteens and wringing it out.
   “We’re really sorry,” Harold said uncomfortably. “I guess that doesn’t sound like jack-shit, but we really are.”
   Peri looked up and offered Harold a strained, sweet smile. “I know that,” she said. “Thank you. This is no one’s fault. Unless there’s a God, of course. If there’s a God, then it’s His fault. And when I see Him, I intend to kick Him in the balls.”
   She had a horsey sort of face and a thick peasant’s body. Fran, who saw everyone’s best features long before she saw the less fortunate ones (Harold, for instance, had a lovely pair of hands for a boy), noticed that Peri’s hair, a soft auburn shade, was almost gorgeous, and that her dark indigo eyes were fine and intelligent. She had taught anthropology at NYU, she had told them, and she had also been active in a number of political causes, including women’s rights and equal treatment under the law for AIDS victims. She had never been married. Mark, she told Frannie once, had been better to her than she had ever expected a man to be. The others she had known had either ignored her or lumped her in with other girls as a “pig” or a “scag.” She admitted Mark might have been in the group which had always just ignored her if conditions had been normal, but they hadn’t been. They had met each other in Albany, where Perion had been summering with her parents, on the last day of June, and after some talk they had decided to get out of the city before all the germs incubating in all the decomposing bodies could do to them what the superflu hadn’t been able to do.
   So they had left, and the next night they had become lovers, more out of desperate loneliness than any real attraction (this was girl-talk, and Frannie hadn’t even written it down in her diary). He was good to her, Peri had told Fran in the soft and slightly amazed way of all plain women who have discovered a nice man in a hard world. She began to love him, a little more each day she had begun to love him.
   And now this.
   “It’s funny,” she said. “Everybody here but Stu and Harold are college graduates, and you certainly would have been if things had gone on in their normal course, Harold.”
   “Yes, I guess that’s true,” Harold said.
   Peri turned back to Mark and began to sponge his forehead again, gently, with love. Frannie was reminded of a color plate in their family Bible, a picture that showed three women making the body of Jesus ready for burial—they were anointing him with oils and spices.
   “Frannie was studying English, Glen was a teacher of sociology, Mark was getting his doctorate in American history, Harold, you’d be in English, too, wanting to be a writer. We could sit around and have some wonderful bull sessions. We did, as a matter of fact, didn’t we?”
   “Yes,” Harold agreed. His voice, normally penetrating, was almost too low to hear.
   “A liberal arts education teaches you how to think—I read that somewhere. The hard facts you learn are secondary to that. The big thing you take away from school with you is how to induct and deduct in a constructive way.”
   “That’s good,” Harold said. “I like that.”
   Now his hand did drop on Fran’s shoulder. She didn’t shrug it away, but she was unhappily conscious of its presence.
   “But it isn’t good,” Peri said fiercely, and in his surprise, Harold took his hand off Fran’s shoulder. She felt lighter immediately.
   “No?” he asked, rather timidly.
   “He’s dying!” Peri said, not loudly but in an angry, helpless way. “He’s dying because we’ve all been spending our time learning how to bullshit each other in dorms and the living rooms of cheap apartments in college towns. Oh, I could tell you about the Midi Indians of New Guinea, and Harold could explain the literary technique of the later English poets, but what good does any of that do my Mark?”
   “If we had somebody from med school—” Fran began tentatively.
   “Yes, if we did. But we don’t. We don’t even have a car mechanic with us, or someone who went to ag college and might have at least watched once when a vet was working on a cow or a horse.” She looked at them, her indigo eyes growing even darker. “Much as I like you all, I think at this point I’d trade the whole bunch of you for Mr. Goodwrench. You’re all so afraid to touch him, even though you know what’s going to happen if you don’t. And I’m the same way—I’m not excluding myself.”
   “At least the two…” Fran stopped. She had been about to say At least the two men went, then decided that might be unfortunate phrasing, with Harold still here. “At least Stu and Glen went. That’s something, isn’t it?”
   Peri sighed. “Yes—that’s something. But it was Stu’s decision to go, wasn’t it? The only one of us who finally decided it would be better to try anything than to just stand around wringing our hands.” She looked at Frannie. “Did he tell you what he did for a living before?”
   “He worked in a factory,” Fran said promptly. She did not notice that Harold’s brow clouded at how quickly she was able to come up with this information. “He put circuits in electronic calculators. I guess you could say he was a computer technician.”
   “Ha!” Harold said, and smiled sourly.
   “He’s the only one of us who understands taking things apart,” Peri said. “What he and Mr. Bateman do will kill Mark, I’m almost sure it will, but it’s better that he be killed while somebody is trying to make him well than it would be for him to die while we just stand around watching… as if he were a dog that had been run over in the street.”
   Neither Harold nor Fran could find a reply to that. They only stood behind her and watched Mark’s pale, still face. After a while Harold put his sweaty hand on Fran’s shoulder again. It made her feel like screaming.
   Stu and Glen got back at quarter to four. They had taken one of the cycles. Tied behind it was a doctor’s black bag of instruments and several large black books.
   “We’ll try,” was all Stu said.
   Peri looked up. Her face was white and strained, her voice calm. “Would you? Please. We both want you to,” she said.
   “Stu?” Perion said.
   It was ten minutes past four. Stu was kneeling on a rubber sheet that had been spread under the tree. Sweat was pouring from his face in rivers. His eyes looked bright and haunted and frantic. Frannie was holding a book open in front of him, switching back and forth between two colored plates whenever Stu raised his eyes and nodded at her. Beside him, horribly white, Glen Bateman held a spool of fine white thread. Between them was an open case of stainless steel instruments. The case was now splashed with blood.
   “It’s here!” Stu cried. His voice was suddenly high and hard and exultant. His eyes had narrowed to two points. “Here’s the little bastard! Here! Right here!”
   “Stu?” Perion said.
   “Fran, show me that other plate again! Quick! Quick!”
   “Can you take it out?” Glen asked. “Jesus, East Texas, do you really think you can?”
   Harold was gone. He had left the party early, holding one hand cupped over his mouth. He had been standing in a small grove of trees to the east, his back to them, for the last fifteen minutes. Now he turned back, his large round face hopeful.
   “I don’t know,” Stu said, “but I might. I just might.”
   He stared at the color plate Fran was showing him. He was wearing blood up to his elbows, like scarlet evening gloves.
   “Stu?” Perion said.
   “It’s self-containing above and below,” Stu whispered. His eyes glittered fantastically. “The appendix. It’s its own little unit. It… wipe my forehead, Frannie, Jesus, I’m sweating like a fucking pig… thanks… God, I don’t want to cut his doins any worse than I have to… that’s his everfucking intestines… but Christ, I gotta. I gotta.”
   “Stu?” Perion said.
   “Give me the scissors, Glen. No—not those. The small pair.”
   “Stu.”
   He looked at her at last.
   “You don’t need to.” Her voice was calm, soft. “He’s dead.”
   Stu looked at her, his narrowed eyes slowly widening.
   She nodded. “Almost two minutes ago. But thank you. Thank you for trying.”
   Stu looked at her for a long time. “You’re sure?” he whispered at last.
   She nodded again. Tears were spilling silently down her face.
   Stu turned away from them, dropping the small scalpel he had been holding, and put his hands over his eyes in a gesture of utter despair. Glen had already gotten up and walked off, not looking back, his shoulders hunched, as if from a blow.
   Frannie put her arms around Stu and hugged him.
   “That’s that,” he said. He said it over and over again, speaking in a slow and toneless way that frightened her. “That’s that. All over. That’s that. That’s that.”
   “You did the best you could,” she said, and hugged him even tighter, as if he might fly away.
   “That’s that,” he said again, with dull finality.
   Frannie hugged him. Despite all her thoughts of the last three and a half weeks, despite her “crushable crush,” she had not made a single overt move. She had been almost painfully careful not to show the way she felt. The situation with Harold was just too much on a hair trigger. And she was not showing the true way she felt about Stu even now, not really. It was not a lover’s hug she was bestowing on him. It was simply one survivor clinging to another. Stu seemed to understand this. His hands came up to her shoulders and pressed them firmly, leaving bloody handprints on her khaki shirt, marking her in a way which seemed to make them partners in some unhappy crime. Somewhere a jay cawed harshly, and closer at hand Perion began to weep.
   Harold Lauder, who did not know the difference between the hugs survivors and lovers may bestow on each other, gazed at Frannie and Stu with dawning suspicion and fear. After a long moment he crashed furiously off into the brush and didn’t come back until long after supper.
   She woke up early the next morning. Someone was shaking her. I’ll open my eyes and it’ll be Glen or Harold, she thought sleepily. We’re going to go through it again, and we’ll keep going through it until we get it right. Those who do not learn from history—
   But it was Stu. And it was already daylight of a sort; creeping dawn, muffled in early mist like fresh gold wrapped in thin cotton. The others were sleeping humps.
   “What is it?” she asked, sitting up. “Is something wrong?”
   “I was dreaming again,” he said. “Not the old woman, the… the other one. The dark man. I was scared, so I…”
   “Stop it,” she said, frightened by the look on his face. “Say what you mean, please.”
   “It’s Perion. The Veronal. She got the Veronal out of Glen’s pack.”
   She hissed in breath.
   “Oh boy,” Stu said brokenly. “She’s dead, Frannie. Oh Lord, ain’t this some mess.”
   She tried to speak and found she could not.
   “I guess I’ve got to wake the other two up,” Stu said in an absent sort of way. He rubbed at his cheek, which was sandpapery with beard. Fran could still remember how it had felt against her own cheek yesterday, when she had hugged him. He turned back to her, bewildered. “When does it end?”
   She said softly: “I don’t think it ever will.”
   Their eyes locked in the early dawn.

 From Fran Goldsmith’s Diary
   July 12, 1990
   We’re camped just west of Guilderland (NY) tonight, have finally made it onto the Big Highway, Route 80/90. The excitement of meeting Mark and Perion (don’t you think that’s a pretty name? I do) yesterday afternoon has more or less abated. They have agreed to throw in with us… in fact, they made the suggestion before any of us could.
   Not that I’m sure Harold would have offered. You know how he is. And he was a little put off (I think Glen was, too) by all the hardware they were carrying, including semiautomatic rifles (two). But mostly Harold just had to have his little song and dance… he has to register his presence, you know.
   I guess I have filled up pages and pages with THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAROLD, and if you don’t know him by now, you never will. Underneath his swagger and all those pompous pronouncements, there is a very insecure little boy. He can’t really believe that things have changed. Part of him—quite a large part, I think—has to go on believing that all his high school tormentors are going to rise out of their graves one fine day and start shooting spitballs at him again or maybe calling him Whack-Off Lauder, as Amy said they used to do. Sometimes I think it would have been better for him (and maybe me too) if we hadn’t hooked up back in Ogunquit. I’m part of his old life, I was best friends with his sister once upon a time, and so on and so on. What sums up my weird relationship with Harold is this: strange as it may seem, knowing what I know now, I would probably pick Harold to be friends with instead of Amy, who was mostly dizzy about boys with nice cars and clothes from Sweetie’s, and who was (God forgive me for saying Cruddy Things about the Dead but it’s true) a real Ogunquit Snob, the way only a year-round townie can be one. Harold is, in his own weird way, sort of cool. When he’s not concentrating all his mental energies on being an asshole, that is. But, you see, Harold could never believe that anyone could think he was cool. Part of him has such a huge investment in being square. He is determined to carry all of his problems right along with him into this not-so-brave new world. He might as well have them packed right inside his knapsack along with those chocolate Payday candy bars he likes to eat.
   Oh Harold, jeez, I just don’t know.
   Things to Remember: The Gillette parrot. “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin.” The walking Kool-Aid pitcher that used to say, “Oh… YEAAAAHHH! ” “O.B. Tampons… created by a woman gynecologist.” Converse All-Stars. Night of the Living Dead. Brrrr! That last one hits too close to home. I quit.
   July 14, 1990
   We had a very long and very sober talk about these dreams today at lunch, stopping much longer than we should have, probably. We’re just north of Batavia, New York, by the way.
   Yesterday, Harold very diffidently (for him) suggested we start stocking up on Veronal and hitting ourselves with very light doses to see if we couldn’t “disrupt the dream-cycle,” as he put it. I went along with the idea so no one would start to wonder if something might be wrong with me, but I plan to palm my dose because I don’t know what it might do to the Lone Ranger (I hope he’s Lone; I’m not sure I could face twins).
   With the Veronal proposal adopted, Mark had a comment. “You know,” he sez, “things like this really don’t bear too much thinking about. The next thing you know, we’ll all be thinking we’re Moses or Joseph, getting telephone calls from God.”
   “That dark man isn’t calling from heaven,” Stu sez. “If it’s a toll-call, I think it’s comin from someplace a lot lower down.”
   “Which is Stu’s way of saying Old Scratch is after us,” Frannie pipes up.
   “And that’s as good an explanation as any other,” Glen sez. We all looked at him. “Well,” he went on, a little on the defensive, I think, “if you look at it from a theological point of view, it does rather seem as if we’re the knot in a tug-o-war rope between heaven and hell, doesn’t it? If there are any Jesuit survivors of the superflu, they must be going absolutely bananas.”
   That made Mark laugh his head off. I didn’t really get it, but kept my mouth shut.
   “Well, I think the whole thing is ridiculous,” Harold put in. “You’ll be getting around to Edgar Cayce and the transmigration of souls before we know it.”
   He pronounced Cayce Case, and when I corrected him (you say it like the initials for Kansas City), he gave me a really HORRID HAROLD-FROWN. He isn’t the type of guy who swamps you with gratitude when you point out his little flaws, diary!
   “Whenever something overtly paranormal occurs,” Glen said, “the only explanation that really fits well and holds its interior logic is the theological one. That’s why psychics and religion have always gone hand in hand, right up to your modern-day faith-healers.”
   Harold was grumbling, but Glen went on anyway.
   “My own gut feeling is that everyone’s psychic… and it’s so ingrained a part of us that we very rarely notice it. The talent may be largely preventative, and that keeps it from being noticed, too.”
   “Why?” I asked.
   “Because it’s a negative factor, Fran. Have any of you ever read James D.L. Staunton’s 1958 study of train and airplane crashes? It was originally published in a sociology journal, but the tabloid newspapers rake it up every now and again.”
   We all shook our heads.
   “You ought to,” he said. “James Staunton was what my students of twenty years ago would have called ‘a real good head’—a mild-mannered clinical sociologist who studied the occult as a kind of hobby. He wrote any number of articles on the combined subjects before going over to the other side to do some first-hand research.”
   Harold snorted, but Stu and Mark were grinning. I fear I was, too.
   “So tell us about the planes and trains,” Peri sez.
   “Well, Staunton got the stats on over fifty plane crashes since 1925 and over two hundred train crashes since 1900. He fed all the data into a computer. Basically, he was correlating three factors: those present on any such conveyance that met with disaster, those killed, and the capacity of the vehicle.”
   “Don’t see what he was trying to prove,” Stu said.
   “To see that, you have to understand that he fed a second series of figures into the computer—this time an equal number of planes and trains which didn’t meet with disaster.”
   Mark nodded. “A control group and an experimental group. That seems solid enough.”
   “What he found was simple enough, but staggering in its implications. It’s a shame one has to stagger through sixteen tables to get at the underlying statistical fact.”
   “What fact?” I asked.
   “Full planes and trains rarely crash,” Glen said.
   “Oh fucking BULLSHIT! ” Harold just about screams.
   “Not at all,” Glen sez calmly. “That was Staunton’s theory, and the computer bore him out. In cases where planes or trains crash, the vehicles are running at 61 percent capacity, as regards passenger loads. In cases where they don’t, the vehicles are running at 76 per cent capacity. That’s a difference of 15 percent over a large computer run, and that sort of across-the-board deviation is significant. Staunton points out that, statistically speaking, a 3 percent deviation would be food for thought, and he’s right. It’s an anomaly the size of Texas. Staunton’s deduction was that people know which planes and trains are going to crash… that they are unconsciously predicting the future.
   “Your Aunt Sally gets a bad stomachache just before Flight 61 takes off from Chicago bound for San Diego. And when the plane crashes in the Nevada desert, everyone says, ‘Oh Aunt Sally, that bellyache was really the grace of God.’ But until James Staunton came along, no one had realized that there were really thirty people with bellyaches… or headaches… or just that funny feeling you get in your legs when your body is trying to tell your head that something is getting ready to go way off-course.”
   “I just can’t believe that,” Harold sez, shaking his head rather woefully.
   “Well, you know,” Glen said, “about a week after I finished the Staunton article for the first time, a Majestic Airlines jet crashed at Logan Airport. It killed everyone on board. Well, I called the Majestic office at Logan after things had settled down a bit. I told them I was a reporter from the Manchester Union-Leader —a small lie in a good cause. I said we were getting a sidebar on airline crashes together and asked if they could tell me how many no-shows there were on that flight. The man sounded kind of surprised, because he said the airline personnel had been talking about that. The number was sixteen. Sixteen no-shows. I asked him what the average was on 747 flights from Denver to Boston, and he said it was three.”
   “Three,” Perion sez in a marveling kind of way.
   “Right. But the guy went further. He said they’d also had fifteen cancelations, and the average number is eight. So, although the headlines after the fact screamed LOGAN AIR CRASH KILLS 94, it could just as well have read 31 AVOID DEATH IN LOGAN AIRPORT DISASTER.”
   Well… there was a lot more talk about psychic stuff, but it wandered pretty far afield from the subject of our dreams and whether or not they come from the Big Righteous in the sky. One thing that did come up (this was after Harold had wandered away in utter disgust) was Stu asking Glen, “If we’re all so psychic, then how come we don’t know when a loved one has just died or that our house just blew away in a tornado, or something?”
   “There are cases of exactly that sort of thing,” Glen said, “but I will admit they are nowhere near as common… or as easy to prove with the aid of a computer. It’s an interesting point. I have a theory—”
   (Doesn’t he always, diary?)
   “—that has to do with evolution. You know, once men—or their progenitors—had tails and hair all over their bodies, and much sharper senses than they do now. Why don’t we have them anymore? Quick, Stu! This is your chance to go to the head of the class, mortarboard and all.”
   “Why, for the same reason people don’t wear goggles and dusters when they drive anymore, I guess. Sometimes you outgrow a thing. It gets to a point where you don’t need it anymore.”
   “Exactly. And what is the point of having a psychic sense that’s useless in any practical way? What earthly good would it do you to be working in your office and suddenly know that your wife had been killed in a car-smash coming back from the market? Someone is going to call you on, the telephone and tell you, right? That sense may have atrophied long ago, if we ever had it. It may have gone the way, of our tails and our pelts.
   “What interests me about these dreams,” he went on, “is that they seem to presage some future struggle. We seem to be getting cloudy pictures of a protagonist… and an antagonist. An adversary, if you like. If that’s so, it may be like looking at a plane on which we’re scheduled to fly… and getting a bellyache. We’re being given the means to help shape our own futures, perhaps. A kind of fourth-dimensional free will: the chance to choose in advance of events.”
   “But we don’t know what the dreams mean,” I said.
   “No, we don’t. But we may. I don’t know if a little tickle of psychic ability means we are divine; there are plenty of people who can accept the miracle of eyesight without believing that eyesight proves the existence of God, and I am one of them; but I do believe these dreams are a constructive force in spite of their ability to frighten us. I’m having second thoughts about the Veronal as a result. Taking it is very much like swallowing some Pepto-Bismol to quiet the bellyache, and then getting on the pane anyway.”
   Things to Remember: Recessions, shortages, the prototype Ford Growler that could go sixty miles of highway on a single gallon of gas. Quite the wonder car. That’s all; I quit. If I don’t shorten my entries, this diary will be as long as Gone with the Wind even before the Lone Ranger arrives (although please not on a white horse named Silver). Oh yes, one other Thing to Remember. Edgar Cayce. Can’t forget him. He supposedly saw the future in his dreams.
   July 16, 1990
   Only two notes, both of them relating to the dreams (see entry two days ago). First, Glen Bateman has been very pale and silent these last two days, and tonight I saw him take an extra-large dose of Veronal. My suspicion is that he skipped his last two doses and the result was some VERY bad dreams. That worries me. I wish I knew a way to approach him about it, but can think of nothing.
   Second, my own dreams. Nothing night before last (the night after our discussion); slept like a baby and can’t remember a thing. Last night I dreamed of the old woman for the first time. Have nothing to add beyond what has already been said except to say she seems to exude an aura of NICENESS, of KINDNESS. I think I can understand why Stu was so set on going to Nebraska even in the face of Harold’s sarcasm. I woke up this morning completely refreshed, thinking that if we could just get to that old woman, Mother Abigail, everything would be A-OK. I hope she’s really there. (By the way, I’m quite sure that the name of the town is Hemingford Home.)
   Things to Remember: Mother Abigail!

Chapter 47

   When it happened, it happened fast.

   It was around quarter of ten on July 30, and they had been on the road only an hour. Going was slow because there had been heavy showers the night before and the road was still slippery. There had been little talk among the four of them since yesterday morning, when Stu had awakened first Frannie, then Harold and Glen, to tell them about Perion’s suicide. He was blaming himself, Fran thought miserably, blaming himself for something that was no more his fault than a thunderstorm would have been.
   She would have liked to have told him so, partly because he needed to be scolded for his self-indulgence and partly because she loved him. This latter was a fact she could no longer conceal from herself. She thought she could convince him that Peri’s death wasn’t his fault… but the convincing would entail showing him what her own true feelings were. She thought she would have to pin her heart to her sleeve, where he could see it. Unfortunately, Harold would be able to see it, too. So that was out… but only for the time being. She thought she would have to do it soon, Harold or no Harold. She could only protect him so long. Then he would have to know… and either accept or not accept. She was afraid Harold might opt for the second choice. A decision like that could lead to something horrible. They were, after all, carrying a lot of shooting irons.
   She was mulling these thoughts over when they swept around a curve and saw a large housetrailer overturned in the middle of the road, blocking it from one end to the other. Its pink corrugated side still glistened with last night’s rain. This was surprising enough, but there was more—three cars, all station wagons, and a big auto-wrecker were parked along the sides of the road. There were people standing around, too, at least a dozen of them.
   Fran was so surprised she braked too suddenly. The Honda she was riding skidded on the wet road, and almost dumped her before she was able to get it under control. Then all four of them had stopped, more or less in a line which crossed the road, blinking and more than a little stunned at the sight of so many people who were still alive.
   “Okay, dismount,” one of the men said. He was tall, sandy-bearded, and wearing dark sunglasses. Fran timetraveled for a moment inside her head, back to the Maine Turnpike and being hauled down by a state trooper for speeding.
   Next he’ll ask to see our drivers’ licenses, Fran thought. But this was no lone State Trooper, bagging speeders and writing tickets. There were four men here, three of them standing behind the sandy-bearded man in a short skirmish line. The rest were all women. At least eight of them. They looked pale and scared, clustered around the parked station wagons in little groups.
   The sandy-bearded man was carrying a pistol. The men behind him all had rifles. Two of them were wearing bits and pieces of army kit.
   “Dismount, goddamn you,” the bearded man said, and one of the men behind him levered a round into the breech of his rifle. It was a loud, bitterly imperative sound in the misty morning air.
   Glen and Harold looked puzzled and apprehensive. That, and no more. They’re sitting ducks, Frannie thought with rising panic. She did not fully understand the situation herself yet, but she knew the equation here was all wrong. Four men, eight women, her brain said, and then repeated it, louder, in tones of alarm: Four men! Eight women!
   “Harold,” Stu said in a quiet voice. Something had come up in his eyes. Some realization. “Harold, don’t—” And then everything happened.
   Stu’s rifle was slung over his back. He dropped one shoulder so that the strap slid down his arm, and then the rifle was in his hands.
   “Don’t do it!” the bearded man shouted furiously. “Garvey! Virge! Ronnie! Get them! Save the woman!”
   Harold began to grab for his pistols, at first forgetting they were still strapped into their holsters.
   Glen Bateman still sat behind Harold in stunned surprise.
   “Harold! ” Stu yelled again.
   Frannie began to unsling her own rifle. She felt as if the air around her had suddenly been packed with invisible molasses, treacly stuff she would never be able to struggle through in time. She realized they were probably going to die here.
   One of the girls screamed: “NOW! ”
   Frannie’s gaze switched to this girl even as she continued to struggle with her rifle. Not really a girl; she was at least twenty-five. Her hair, ash-blond, lay against her head in a ragged helmet, as if she had recently lopped it off with a pair of hedge-clippers.
   Not all of the women moved; some of them appeared to be nearly catatonic with fright. But the blond girl and three of the others did.
   All of this happened in the space of seven seconds.
   The bearded man had been pointing his pistol at Stu. When the young blond woman screamed, “Now! ”, the barrel jerked slightly toward her, like a divining rod sensing water. It went off, making a loud noise like a piece of steel being punched through cardboard. Stu fell off his bike and Frannie screamed his name.
   Then Stu was up on both elbows (both were scraped from hitting the road, and the Honda was lying on one of his legs), firing. The bearded man seemed to dance backward like a vaudeville hoofer leaving the stage after his encore. The faded plaid shirt he was wearing puffed and billowed. His pistol, an automatic, jerked up toward the sky and that steel-punching-through-cardboard sound happened four more times. He fell over on his back.
   Two of the three men behind him had jerked around at the blond woman’s cry. One pulled both triggers of the weapon he was holding, an old-fashioned Remington twelve-gauge. The stock of the gun was not resting against anything—he was holding it outside his right hip—and when it went off with a sound like a thunderclap in a small room, it flew backward out of his hands, ripping skin from his fingers as it went. It clattered on the road. The face of one of the women who had not reacted to the blond woman’s shout dissolved in an unbelievable fury of blood, and for a moment Frannie could actually hear blood raining down on the pavement, as if there had been a sudden shower. One eye peered unharmed through the mask of blood this woman now wore. It was dazed and unknowing. Then the woman fell forward onto the road. The Country Squire station wagon behind her was peppered with buckshot. One of the windows was a cataract of milky cracks.
   The blond girl grappled with the second man who had turned toward her. The rifle the man held went off between their bodies. One of the girls scrambled for the lost shotgun.
   The third man, who had not turned toward the women, began to fire at Fran. Frannie sat astride her bike, her rifle in her hands, blinking stupidly at him. He was an olive-skinned man who looked Italian. She felt a bullet drone by her left temple.
   Harold had finally gotten one of his pistols free. He raised it and fired at the olive-skinned man. The distance was about fifteen paces. He missed. A bullet hole appeared in the skin of the pink housetrailer just to the left of the olive-skinned man’s head. The olive-skinned man looked at Harold and said, “Now I gonna keel-a you, you sonnabeesh.”
   “Don’t do that! ” Harold screamed. He dropped his pistol and held out his open hands.
   The olive-skinned man fired three times at Harold. All three shots missed. The third round came the closest to doing damage; it screamed off the exhaust pipe of Harold’s Yamaha. It fell over, spilling Harold and Glen off.
   Now twenty seconds had passed. Harold and Stu lay flat. Glen sat cross-legged on the road, still looking as if he didn’t know exactly where he was, or what was going on. Frannie was trying desperately to shoot the olive-skinned man before he could shoot Harold or Stu, but her gun wouldn’t fire, the trigger wouldn’t even pull, because she had forgotten to thumb the safety catch to its off position. The blond woman continued to struggle with the second man, and the woman who had gone after the dropped shotgun was now fighting with a second woman for possession of it.
   Cursing in a language which was undoubtedly Italian, the olive-skinned man aimed at Harold again and then Stu fired and the olive-skinned man’s forehead caved in and he went down like a sack of potatoes.
   Another woman had now joined the fray over the shotgun. The man who had lost it tried to throw her aside. She reached between his legs, grabbed the crotch of his jeans, and squeezed. Fran saw her hamstrings pop out all the way up her forearm to the elbow. The man screamed. The man lost interest in the shotgun. The man grabbed his privates and stumbled away bent-over.
   Harold crawled to where his dropped pistol lay on the road and pounced on it. He raised it and fired at the man holding his privates. He fired three times and missed every time.
   It’s like Bonnie and Clyde, Frannie thought. Jesus, there’s blood everywhere!
   The blond woman with the ragged hair had lost her struggle for possession of the second man’s rifle. He jerked it free and kicked her, perhaps aiming for her stomach, catching her in the thigh with one of his heavy boots instead. She went quick-stepping backward, whirling her arms for balance, and landed on her fanny with a wet splat.
   Now he’ll shoot her, Frannie thought, but the second man whirled around like a drunken soldier doing an about-face and began to fire rapidly into the group of three women still cringing against the side of the Country Squire.
   “Yaaah! You bitches!” this gentleman screamed. “Yaaaah! You bitches!”
   One of the women fell over and began to flop on the pavement between the station wagon and the overturned trailer like a stabbed fish. The other two women ran. Stu fired at the shooter and missed. The second man fired at one of the running women and did not. She threw her hands up to the sky and fell down. The other buttonhooked left and ran behind the pink trailer.
   The third man, the one who had lost and failed to regain the shotgun, was still staggering around and holding his crotch. One of the women pointed the shotgun at him and pulled both triggers, her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth grimacing in anticipation of that thunder. The thunder didn’t come. The shotgun was dry. She reversed it so she was holding it by the barrels and brought the stock down in a hard arc. She missed his head, but got the place where his neck joined his right shoulder. The man was driven to his knees. He began to crawl away. The woman, who was wearing a blue sweatshirt which said KENT STATE UNIVERSITY and tattered bluejeans, walked along after him, bludgeoning him with the shotgun as she went. The man continued to crawl, blood now running off him in rivers, and the woman in the Kent State sweatshirt continued to whale on him.
   “Yaaaaah, you bitches!” the second man screamed, and fired at a dazed and muttering middle-aged woman. The distance between muzzle and woman was at the most three feet; she could almost have reached out and plugged the barrel with her pinky finger. He missed. He pulled the trigger again, but this time the rifle only dry-fired.
   Harold was now holding his pistol in both hands, as he had seen cops do in the movies. He pulled the trigger and his bullet smashed the second man’s elbow. The second man dropped his rifle and began to dance up and down, making high jabbering noises. To Frannie, he sounded a little like Roger Rabbit saying “P-P-Pleeeeze! ”
   “I got im!” Harold cried ecstatically. “Got im! By God, I got im!”
   Frannie finally remembered the safety catch on her rifle. She thumbed it off just as Stu fired again. The second man fell down, now clutching his stomach instead of his elbow. He went on screaming.
   “My God, my God,” Glen said mildly. He put his face into his hands and began to weep.
   Harold fired his pistol again. The second man’s body jumped. He stopped screaming.
   The woman in the Kent State University sweatshirt brought the stock of the shotgun down again, and this time she connected solidly with the crawling man’s head. It sounded like Jim Rice connecting solidly with a high, hard fastball. The shotgun’s walnut stock and the man’s head both shattered.
   For a moment there was silence. A bird called in it: Whitwhit… whitwhit… whitwhit.
   Then the girl in the sweatshirt stood astride the third man’s body and gave a long, primeval scream of triumph that haunted Fran Goldsmith for the rest of her life.
   The blond girl was Dayna Jurgens, from Xenia, Ohio. The girl in the Kent State sweatshirt was Susan Stern. A third woman, the one who had squeezed Shotgun’s crotch, was Patty Kroger. The other two were quite a bit older. The eldest, Dayna said, was Shirley Hammett. They didn’t know the name of the other woman, who looked to be in her mid-thirties; she had been in shock, wandering, when Al, Garvey, Virge, and Ronnie had picked her up in the town of Archbold, two days before.
   The nine of them got off the highway and camped in a farmhouse somewhere just west of Columbia, now over the Indiana state line. They were all in shock, and Fran thought in later days that their walk across the field from the overturned pink trailer on the turnpike to the farmhouse would have looked to an observer like a fieldtrip sponsored by the local lunatic asylum. The grass, thigh-high and still wet from the previous night’s rain, had soon soaked their pants. White butterflies, sluggish in the air because their wings were still heavy with moisture, swooped toward them and then away in drugged circles and figure-eights. The sun was struggling to break through but hadn’t made it yet; it was a bright smear feebly illuminating a uniform white cloud cover that stretched from horizon to horizon. But cloud cover or no cloud cover, the day was hot already, wringing with humidity, and the air was filled with whirling flocks of crows and their raucous, ugly cries. There are more crows than people now, Fran thought dazedly. If we don’t watch out, they’ll peck us right off the face of the earth. Revenge of the blackbirds. Were crows meat-eaters? She very much feared that they were.
   Below this steady trickle of nonsense, barely visible, like the sun behind the melting cloud cover (but full of power, as the sun was on this awful, humid morning, the thirtieth of July, 1990), the gunbattle played over and over in her mind. The woman’s face disintegrating under the shotgun blast. Stu falling over. The instant of stark terror when she had been sure he was dead. One man crying out Yaaah, you bitches! and then sounding like Roger Rabbit when Harold plugged him. The steel-punching-through-cardboard sound of the bearded man’s pistol. Susan Stern’s primitive cry of victory as she stood astride the body of her enemy while his brains, still warm, leaked out of his cloven skull.
   Glen walked beside her, his thin, rather sardonic face now distraught, his gray hair flying wispily around his head as if in imitation of the butterflies. He held her hand, and he kept patting it compulsively.
   “You mustn’t let it affect you,” he said. “Such horrors… bound to occur. Best protection is in numbers. Society, you know. Society is the keystone of the arch we call civilization, and it is the only real antidote to outlawry. You must take… things… things like this… as a matter of course. This was an isolated occurrence. Think of them as trolls. Yes! Trolls or yogs or affrits. Monsters of a generic sort. I accept that. I hold that truth to be self-evident, a socioconstitutional ethic, one might say. Ha! Ha!”
   His laugh was half moan. She punctuated each of his elliptical sentences with “Yes, Glen,” but he seemed not to hear. Glen smelled a trifle vomitous. The butterflies banged against them and then banged off again on their butterfly errands. They were almost to the farmhouse. The battle had lasted less than a minute. Less than a minute, but she suspected it was going to be held over by popular demand inside her head. Glen patted her hand. She wanted to tell him to please stop doing that, but she was afraid that he might cry if she did. She could stand the patting. She wasn’t sure she could stand to see Glen Bateman weeping.
   Stu was walking with Harold on one side and the blond girl, Dayna Jurgens, on the other. Susan Stern and Patty Kroger flanked the unnamed catatonic woman who had been picked up in Archbold. Shirley Hammett, the woman who had been missed at pointblank range by the man who had imitated Roger Rabbit before he died, walked a little way off to the left, muttering and making the occasional grab at the passing butterflies. The party was walking slowly, but Shirley Hammett was slower. Her gray hair hung untidily about her face, and her dazed eyes peered out at the world like frightened mice peering out of a temporary bolthole.
   Harold looked at Stu uneasily. “We wiped them out, didn’t we, Stu? We blew them up. Scragged their asses.”
   “I guess so, Harold.”
   “Man, but we had to,” Harold said earnestly, as if Stu had suggested things might have been otherwise. “It was them or us!”
   “They would have blown your heads off,” Dayna Jurgens said quietly. “I was with two guys when they hit us. They shot Rich and Damon from ambush. After it was over, they put a round in each of their heads, just to make sure. You had to, all right. By rights you should be dead now.”
   “By rights we should be dead now!” Harold exclaimed to Stu.
   “It’s all right,” Stu said. “Take her easy, Harold.”
   “Sure! Negative perspiration!” Harold said heartily. He fumbled jerkily in his pack, got a chocolate Payday, and almost dropped it while stripping off the wrapper. He cursed it bitterly and then began to gobble it, holding it in both hands like a lollypop.
   They had reached the farmhouse. Harold had to keep touching himself furtively as he ate his candy bar—had to keep making sure he wasn’t hurt. He felt very sick. He was afraid to look down at his crotch. He was pretty sure he had wet himself shortly after the festivities back at the pink trailer got into high gear.
   Dayna and Susan did most of the talking over a distraught brunch which some picked at but none really ate. Patty Kroger, who was seventeen and absolutely beautiful, occasionally added something. The woman with no name scrunched herself into the farthest corner of the dusty farmhouse kitchen. Shirley Hammett sat at a table, ate stale Nabisco Honey Grahams, and muttered.
   Dayna had left Xenia in the company of Richard Darliss and Damon Bracknell. How many others had been alive in Xenia after the flu? Only three that she had seen, a very old man, a woman, and a little girl. Dayna and her friends asked the trio to join them, but the old man waved them off, saying something about “having business in the desert.”
   By the eighth of July, Dayna, Richard, and Damon had begun to suffer bad dreams about a sort of boogeyman. Very scary dreams. Rich had actually gotten the idea that the boogeyman was real, Dayna said, and living in California. He had an idea that this man, if he really was a man, was the business the other three people they’d met had in the desert. She and Damon had begun to fear for Rich’s sanity. He called the dream-man “the hardcase” and said he was getting an army of hardcases together. He said this army would soon sweep out of the west and enslave everyone left alive, first in America, then in the rest of the world. Dayna and Damon had begun to privately discuss the possibility of slipping away from Rich some night, and had begun to believe that their own dreams were the result of Rich Darliss’s powerful delusion.
   In Williamstown, they had come around a curve in the highway to discover a large dump truck lying on its side in the middle of the road. There was a station wagon and a wrecker parked nearby.
   “We assumed it was just another smashup,” Dayna said, crumbling a graham cracker nervously between her fingers, “which was, of course, exactly what we were supposed to think.”
   They got off their cycles in order to trundle them around the dump truck, and that was when the four hardcases—to use Rich’s word—opened up from the ditch. They had murdered Rich and Damon and had taken Dayna prisoner. She was the fourth addition to what they sometimes called “the zoo” and sometimes “the harem.” One of the others had been the muttering Shirley Hammett, who at that time had still been almost normal, although she had been repeatedly raped, sodomized, and forced to perform fellatio on all four. “And once,” Dayna said, “when she couldn’t hold on until it was time for one of them to take her into the bushes, Ronnie wiped her ass with a handful of barbed wire. She bled from her rectum for three days.”
   “Jesus Christ,” Stu said. “Which one was he?”
   “The man with the shotgun,” Susan Stern said. “The one I brained. I wish he was right here, lying on the floor, so I could do it again.”
   The man with the sandy beard and sunglasses they had known only as Doc. He and Virge had been part of an army detachment which had been sent to Akron when the flu broke out. Their job had been “media relations,” which was an army euphemism for “media suppression.” When that job was pretty well in hand, they had gone on to “crowd control,” which was an army euphemism for shooting looters who ran and hanging looters who didn’t. By the twenty-seventh of June, Doc had told them, the chain of command had a lot more holes than it did links. A good many of their own men were too ill to patrol, but by then it didn’t matter anyway, as the citizens of Akron were too weak to read or write the news, let alone loot banks and jewelry stores.
   By June 30, the unit was gone—its members dead, dying, or scattered. Doc and Virge were the only two scatterees, as a matter of fact, and that was when they had begun their new lives as zoo-keepers. Garvey had come along on the first of July, and Ronnie on the third. At that point they had closed their peculiar little club to further memberships.
   “But after a while you must have outnumbered them,” Glen said.
   Unexpectedly, it was Shirley Hammett who spoke to this.
   “Pills,” she said, her trapped-mice eyes staring out at them from behind the fringe of her graying bangs. “Pills every morning to get up, pills every night to go down. Ups and downs.” Her voice had been sinking, and this last was barely audible. She paused, then began to mutter again.
   Susan Stern took up the thread of the story. She and one of the dead women, Rachel Carmody, had been picked up on July 17, outside Columbus. By then the party was traveling in a caravan which consisted of two station wagons and the wrecker. The men used the wrecker to move crashed vehicles out of their way or to roadblock the highway, depending on what opportunities offered. Doc kept the pharmacy tied to his belt in an outsized poke. Heavy downers for bedtime; tranks for travel; reds for recess.
   “I’d get up in the morning, be raped two or three times, and then wait for Doc to hand out the pills,” Susan said matter-of-factly. “The daytime pills, I mean. By the third day I had abrasions on my… well, you know, my vagina, and any sort of normal intercourse was very painful. I used to hope for Ronnie, because all Ronnie ever wanted was a blowjob. But after the pills, you got very calm. Not sleepy, just calm. Things didn’t seem to matter after you got yourself wrapped around a few of those blue pills. All you wanted to do was sit with your hands in your lap and watch the scenery go by or sit with your hands in your lap and watch them use the wrecker to move something out of the way. One day Garvey got mad because this one girl, she couldn’t have been any more than twelve, she wouldn’t do… well, I’m not going to tell you. It was that bad. So Garvey blew her head off. I didn’t even care. I was just… calm. After a while, you almost stopped thinking about escape. What you wanted more than getting away was those blue pills.”
   Dayna and Patty Kroger were nodding.
   But they seemed to recognize eight women as their effective limit, Patty said. When they took her on July 22 after murdering the fiftyish man she had been traveling with, they had killed a very old woman who had been a part of “the zoo” for about a week. When the unnamed girl sitting in the corner had been picked up near Archbold, a sixteen-year-old girl with strabismus had been shot and left in a ditch. “Doc used to joke about it,” Patty said. “He’d say, ‘I don’t walk under ladders, I don’t cross black cats’ paths, and I’m not going to have thirteen people traveling with me.’”
   On the twenty-ninth, they had caught sight of Stu and the others for the first time. The zoo had been camped in a picnic area just off the interstate when the four of them passed by.
   “Garvey was very taken with you,” Susan said, nodding toward Frannie. Frannie shuddered.
   Dayna leaned closer to them and spoke softly. “And they’d made it pretty clear whose place you were going to take.” She nodded her head almost imperceptibly at Shirley Hammett, who was still muttering and eating graham crackers.
   “That poor woman,” Frannie said.
   “It was Dayna who decided you guys might be our best chance,” Patty said. “Or maybe our last chance. There were three men in your party—both she and Helen Roget had seen that. Three armed men. And Doc had gotten just the teeniest bit overconfident about the trailer-overturned-in-the-road bit. Doc would just act like somebody official, and the men in the parties they met—when there were men—just caved in. And got shot. It had been working like a charm.”
   “Dayna asked us to try and palm our pills this morning,” Susan went on. “They’d gotten sort of careless about making sure we really took them, too, and we knew that this morning they’d be busy pulling that big trailer out into the road and tipping it over. We didn’t tell everyone. The only ones in on it were Dayna and Patty and Helen Roget… one of the girls Ronnie shot back there. And me, of course. Helen said, ‘If they catch us trying to spit the pills into our hands, they’re going to kill us.’ And Dayna said they would kill us anyway, sooner or later, and only sooner if we were lucky, and of course we knew that was true. So we did it.”
   “I had to hold mine in my mouth for quite a while,” Patty said. “It was starting to dissolve by the time I got a chance to spit it out.” She looked at Dayna. “I think Helen actually had to swallow hers. I think that’s why she was so slow.”
   Dayna nodded. She was looking at Stu with a clear warmth that made Frannie uneasy. “It still would have worked if you hadn’t gotten wise, big fella.”
   “I didn’t get wise near soon enough, looks like,” Stu said. “Next time I will.” He stood up, went to the window, and looked out. “You know, that’s half of what scares me,” he said. “How wise we’re all getting.”
   Fran cared even less for the sympathetic way Dayna looked after him. She had no right to look sympathetic after all she’d been through. And she’s much prettier than I am, in spite of everything, Fran thought. Also, I doubt if she’s pregnant.
   “It’s a get-wise world, big fella,” Dayna said. “Get wise or die.”
   Stu turned to look at her, really seeing her for the first time, and Fran felt a stab of pure jealous agony. I waited too long, she thought. Oh my God, I went and did it, I went and waited too long.
   She happened to glance at Harold and saw that Harold was smiling in a guarded way, one hand up to his mouth to conceal it. It looked like a smile of relief. She suddenly felt that she would like to stand up, walk casually over to Harold, and hook his eyes out of his head with her fingernails.
   Never, Harold! she would scream as she did it. Never!
   Never?
   From Fran Goldsmith’s Diary
   July 19, 1990
   Oh Lord. The worst has happened. At least in the books when it happens it’s over, something at least changes, but in real life it just seems to go on and on, like a soap opera where nothing ever comes to a head. Maybe I should move to clear things up, take a chance, but I’m so afraid something might happen between them and. You can’t end a sentence with “and,” but I’m afraid to put down what might come after the conjunction.
   Let me tell you everything, dear diary, even though it’s no great treat to write it down. I even hate to think about it.
   Glen and Stu went into town (which happens to be Girard, Ohio, tonight) near dusk to look for some food, hopefully concentrates and freeze-dried stuff. They’re easy to carry and some of the concentrates are really tasty, but as far as I am concerned all the freeze-dried food has the same flavor, namely dried turkey turds. And when have you ever had dried turkey turds to serve as your basis for a comparison? Never mind, diary, some things will never be told, ha-ha.
   They asked Harold and me if we wanted to come, but I said I’d had enough motorcycling for one day if they could do without me, and Harold said no, he would fetch some water and get it boiled up. Probably already laying his plans. Sorry to make him sound so scheming, but the simple fact is, he is.

note 7
   Well, Mark and Perion were off somewhere, supposedly hunting for wild berries to supplement our diet, probably doing something else—they are quite modest about it & bully for them, say I—and so I was first gathering wood for a fire and then getting one going for Harold’s kettle of water… and pretty soon he came back with one (he’d pretty obviously stayed at the stream long enough to have a bath and wash his hair). He hung it on the whatdoyoucallit that goes over the fire. Then he comes & sits down beside me.
   We were sitting on a log, talking about one thing and another, when he suddenly put his arms around me and tried to kiss me. I say tried but he actually succeeded, at least at first, because I was so surprised. Then I jerked away from him—looking back it seems sorta comic altho I’m still sore—and fell backward right off the log. It rucked up the back of my blouse and scraped about a yard of skin off. I let out a yell. Talk about history repeating, that was too much like the time with Jess out on the breakwater when I bit my tongue… too much like it for comfort.
   In a second Harold’s on one knee beside me, asking if I’m all right, blushing right down to the roots of his clean hair. Harold tries sometimes to be so icy, so sophisticated—he always seems to me like a jaded young writer constantly searching for that special Sad Café on the West Bank where he can idle the day away talking about Jean-Paul Sartre and drinking cheap plonk—but underneath, well covered, is a teenager with a far less mature set of fantasies. Or so I believe. Saturday matinee fantasies for the most part: Tyrone Power in Captain from Castile, Humphrey Bogart in Dark Passage, Steve McQueen in Bullitt. In times of stress it’s always this side of him which seems to come out, maybe because he repressed it so severely as a child, I don’t know. Anyway, when he regresses to Bogie, he only succeeds in reminding me of that guy who played Bogie in that Woody Allen movie, Play It Again, Sam.
   So when he knelt beside me and said, “Are you all right, baby?,” I started to giggle. Talk about history repeating itself! But it was more than the humor of the situation, you know. If that had been all, I could have held it in. No, it was more in the line of hysterics. The bad dreams, the worrying about the baby, what to do about my feelings for Stu, the traveling every day, the stiffness, the soreness, losing my parents, everything changed for good… it came out in giggles at first, then in hysterical laughter I just couldn’t stop.
   “What’s so funny?” Harold asked, getting up. I think it was supposed to come out in this terribly righteous voice, but by then I had stopped thinking about Harold and got this crazy image of Donald Duck in my head. Donald Duck waddling through the rains of Western civilization quacking angrily: What’s so funny, hah? What’s so funny? What’s so fucking funny? I put my hands over my face & just giggled & sobbed & giggled until Harold must have thought I’d gone absolutely crackers.
   After a little bit I managed to stop. I wiped the tears off my face and wanted to ask Harold to look at my back and see how badly it was scraped. But I didn’t because I was afraid he might take it as a LIBERTY. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Frannie, oh-ho, that’s not so funny.
   “Fran,” Harold sez, “I find this very hard to say.”
   “Then maybe you better not say it,” I said.
   “I have to,” he answers, and I began to see he wasn’t going to take no for an answer unless it was hollered at him. “Frannie,” he says, “I love you.”
   I guess I knew all along it was just as bald as that. It would be easier if he only wanted to sleep with me. Love’s more dangerous than just balling, and I was in a spot. How, to say no to Harold? I guess there’s only one way, no matter who you have to say it to.
   “I don’t love you, Harold,” is what I said.
   His face cracked all to pieces. “It’s him, isn’t it?” he said, and his face got an ugly grimace on it. “It’s Stu Redman, isn’t it?”
   “I don’t know,” I said. Now I have a temper, which I have not always been able to control—a gift from my mother’s side, I think. But I have struggled womanfully with it as applies to Harold. I could feel it straining its leash, however.
   “I know.” His voice had gotten shrill and self-pitying. “I know, all right. The day we met him, I knew it then. I didn’t want him to come with us, because I knew. And he said…”
   “What did he say?”
   “That he didn’t want you! That you could be mine!”
   “Just like giving you a new pair of shoes, right, Harold?”
   He didn’t answer, maybe realizing he had gone too far. With a little effort I remembered back to that day in Fabyan. Harold’s instant reaction to Stu was the reaction of a dog when a new dog, a strange dog, comes into the first dog’s yard. Into his domain. I could almost see the hackles bristling on the back of Harold’s neck. I understood that what Stu said, he said it to take us out of the class of dogs and put us back in the class of people. And isn’t that what it’s really all about? This hellacious struggle we’re in now, I mean? If it isn’t, why are we even bothering to try and be decent?
   “No one owns me, Harold,” I said.
   He muttered something.
   “What?”
   “I said, you may have to change that idea.”
   A sharp retort came to mind, but I didn’t let it out. Harold’s eyes had gone far away, and his face was very still and open. He said: “I’ve seen that guy before. You better believe it, Frannie. He’s the guy that’s the quarterback on the football team but who just sits there in class throwing spitballs and flipping people the bird because he knows the teacher’s got to pass him with at least a C so he can keep on playing. He’s the guy who goes steady with the prettiest cheerleader and she thinks he’s Jesus Christ with a bullet. The guy who farts when the English teacher asks you to read your composition because it’s the best one in the class.
   “Yeah, I know fuckers like him. Good luck, Fran.”
   Then he just walked off. It wasn’t the GRAND, TRAMPLING EXIT that he’d meant to make, I feel quite sure. It was more like he’d had some secret dream, and I’d just shot it full of holes—the dream being that things had changed, the reality being that nothing really had. I felt terrible for him, God’s truth, because when he walked off he wasn’t playing at jaded cynicism but feeling REAL cynicism, not jaded but as sharp & hurtful as a knife-blade. He was whipped. Oh, but what Harold will never see is that his head has got to change a little first, he’s got to see that the world is going to stay the same as long as he does. He stores up rebuffs the way pirates were supposed to store up treasure…
   Well. Now everyone is back, supper eaten, smokes smoked, Veronal handed out (mine is in my pocket instead of dissolving in my stomach), people settling down Harold and I have gone through a painful confrontation which has left me with the feeling that nothing has really been resolved, except that he is watching Stu and me to see what happens next. It makes me feel sick and pointlessly angry to write that. What right does he have to watch us? What right does he have to complicate this miserable situation we are in?
   Things to Remember: I’m sorry, diary. It must be my state of mind. I can’t remember a single thing.
   When Frannie came upon him, Stu was sitting on a rock and smoking a cigar. He had scraped a small round circle of bare earth with his boot heel and was using it for an ashtray. He was facing west, where the sun was just going down. The clouds had rifted enough to allow the red sun to poke its head through. Although they had met the four women and taken them into their party only yesterday, it already seemed distant. They had gotten one of the station wagons out of the ditch easily enough and now, with the motorcycles, they made quite a caravan as they moved slowly west on the turnpike.
   The smell of his cigar made her think of her father and her father’s pipe. What came with the memory was sorrow that had almost mellowed into nostalgia. I’m getting over losing you, Daddy, she thought. I don’t think you’d mind.
   Stu looked around. “Frannie,” he said with real pleasure. “How are you?”
   She shrugged. “Up and around.”
   “Want to share my rock and watch the sun go down?”
   She joined him, her heartbeat quickening a little. But after all, why else had she come out here? She had known which way he left camp, just as she knew that Harold and Glen and two of the girls had gone into Brighton to look for a CB radio (Glen’s idea instead of Harold’s for a change). Patty Kroger was back in camp babysitting their two combat-fatigue patients. Shirley Hammett showed some signs of coming out of her daze, but she had awakened them all around one this morning, shrieking in her sleep, her hands clawing at the air in warding-off gestures. The other woman, the one with no name, seemed to be going in the other direction. She sat. She would eat if she was fed. She would perform the functions of elimination. She would not answer questions. She only really came alive in her sleep. Even with a heavy dose of Veronal, she often moaned and sometimes shrieked. Frannie thought she knew what the poor woman was dreaming of.
   “It seems like a long way still to go, doesn’t it?” she said.
   He didn’t answer for a moment, and then he said: “It’s further than we thought. That old woman, she’s not in Nebraska anymore.”
   “I know—” she began, and then bit down on her words.
   He glanced at her with a faint grin. “You’ve been skippin your medication, ma’am.”
   “My secret’s out,” she said with a lame smile.
   “We’re not the only ones,” Stu said. “I was talkin to Dayna this afternoon” (she felt that interior dig of jealousy—and fear—at the familiar way he used her name) “and she said neither she nor Susan wanted to take it.”
   Fran nodded. “Why did you stop? Did they drug you… in that place?”
   He tapped ashes into his bare earth ashtray. “Mild sedatives at night, that was all. They didn’t need to drug me. I was locked up nice and tight. No, I stopped three nights ago because I felt… out of touch.” He meditated for a moment and then expanded. “Glen and Harold going to get that CB radio, that was a real good idea. What’s a two-way for? To put you in touch. This buddy of mine back in Arnette, Tony Leominster, he had one in his Scout. Great gadget. You could talk to folks, or you could holler for help if you got in a jam of trouble. These dreams, they’re almost like having a CB in your head, except the transmit seems to be broken and we’re only receiving.”
   “Maybe we are transmitting,” Fran said quietly.
   He looked at her, startled.
   They sat quiet for a while. The sun peered through the clouds, as if to say a quick goodbye before sinking below the horizon. Fran could understand why primitive people worshiped it. As the gigantic quiet of the nearly empty country accumulated on her day by day, imprinting its truth on her brain by its very weight, the sun—the moon, too, for that matter—began to seem bigger and more important. More personal. Those bright skyships began to look to you as they had when you were a child.
   “Anyway, I stopped,” Stu said. “Last night I dreamed about that black man again. It was the worst yet. He’s setting up somewhere out in the desert. Las Vegas, I think. And Frannie… I think he’s crucifying people. The ones who give him trouble.”
   “He’s doing what?”
   “That’s what I dreamed. Lines of crosses along Highway 15 made out of barn-beams and telephone poles. People hanging off them.”
   “Just a dream,” she said uneasily.
   “Maybe.” He smoked and looked west at the red-tinged clouds. “But the other two nights, just before we run on those maniacs holding the women, I dreamed about her—the woman who calls herself Mother Abigail. She was sitting in the cab of an old pickup truck parked on the shoulder of Highway 76. I was standing on the ground with one arm leaning on the window, talking to her just as natural as I’m talking to you. And she says, ‘You got to move em along faster still, Stuart; if an old lady like me can do it, a big tough fella from Texas like you should be able to.’” Stu laughed, threw down his cigar, and crushed it under his heel. In kind of an absent way, as if not knowing what he was doing, he put an arm around Frannie’s shoulders.
   “They’re going to Colorado,” she said.
   “Why, yes, I think they are.”
   “Has… has either Dayna or Susan dreamed of her?”
   “Both. And last night Susan dreamed of the crosses. Just like I did.”
   “There’s a lot of people with that old woman now.”
   Stu agreed. “Twenty, maybe more. You know, we’re passing people nearly every day. They just hunker down and wait for us to go by. They’re scared of us, but her… they’ll come to her, I guess. In their own good time.”
   “Or to the other one,” Frannie said.
   Stu nodded. “Yeah, or to him. Fran, why did you stop taking the Veronal?”
   She uttered a trembling sigh and wondered if she should tell him. She wanted to, but she was afraid of what his reaction might be.
   “There’s no counting on what a woman will do,” she said at last.
   “No,” he agreed. “But there are ways to find out what they’re thinking, maybe.”
   “What—” she began, and he stopped her mouth with a kiss.
   They lay on the grass in the last of the twilight. Flagrant red had given way to cooler purple as they made love, and now Frannie could see stars shining through the last of the clouds. It would be good riding weather tomorrow. With any luck they would be able to get most of the way across Indiana.
   Stu slapped lazily at a mosquito hovering over his chest. His shirt was hung on a nearby bush. Fran’s shirt was on but unbuttoned. Her breasts pushed at the cloth and she thought, I’m getting bigger, just a little right now, but it’s noticeable… at least to me.
   “I’ve wanted you for a pretty long time now,” Stu said without looking directly at her. “I guess you know that.”
   “I wanted to avoid trouble with Harold,” she said. “And there’s something else that—”
   “Harold’s got a ways to go,” Stu said, “but he’s got the makings of a fine man somewhere inside him if he’ll toughen up. You like him, don’t you?”
   “That’s not the right word. There isn’t a word in English for how I feel about Harold.”
   “How do you feel about me?” he asked.
   She looked at him and found she couldn’t say she loved him, couldn’t say it right out, although she wanted to.
   “No,” he said, as if she’d contradicted him, “I just like to get things straight. I guess you’d just as soon not have Harold know anything about this yet. Isn’t that right?”
   “Yes,” she said gratefully.
   “It’s just as well. If we lie low, it may take care of itself. I’ve seen him lookin at Patty. She’s about his age.”
   “I don’t know…”
   “You feel a debt of gratitude to him, don’t you?”
   “I suppose so. We were the only two left in Ogunquit, and—”
   “That was luck, no more, Frannie. You don’t want to let anyone put you in a headhold over something that was pure luck.”
   “I suppose.”
   “I guess I love you,” he said. “That’s not so easy for me to say.”
   “I guess I love you, too. But there’s something else…”
   “I knew that.”
   “You asked me why I stopped taking the pills.” She plucked at her shirt, not daring to look at him. Her lips felt unnaturally dry. “I thought they might be bad for the baby,” she whispered.
   “For the.” He stopped. Then he grasped her and turned her to face him. “You’re pregnant?”
   She nodded.
   “And you didn’t tell anyone?”
   “No.”
   “Harold. Does Harold know?”
   “No one but you.”
   “God-almighty-damn,” he said. He was peering into her face in a concentrated way that scared her. She had imagined one of two things: he would leave her immediately (as Jess undoubtedly would have done if he had discovered she was pregnant with another man’s child) or he would hug her, tell her not to worry, that he would take care of everything. She had never expected this startled, close scrutiny, and she found herself remembering the night she had told her father in the garden. His look had been very much like this one. She wished she had told Stu what her situation was before they had made love. Maybe then they wouldn’t have made love at all, but at least he wouldn’t have been able to feel he had somehow been taken advantage of, that she was… what was the old phrase? Damaged goods. Was he thinking that? She simply could not tell.
   “Stu?” she said in a frightened voice.
   “You didn’t tell anyone,” he repeated.
   “I didn’t know how.” Her tears were close to the surface now.
   “When are you due?”
   “January,” she said, and the tears came.
   He held her and made her know it was all right without saying anything. He didn’t tell her not to worry or that he would take care of everything, but he made love to her again and she thought that she had never been so happy.
   Neither of them saw Harold, as shadowy and as silent as the dark man himself, standing in the bushes and looking at them. Neither of them knew that his eyes squinted down into small, deadly triangles as Fran cried out her pleasure at the end of it, as her good orgasm burst through her.
   By the time they had finished, it was full dark.
   Harold slipped away silently.
   From Fran Goldsmith’s Diary
   August 1, 1990
   No entry last night, too excited, too happy. Stu and I are together.
   He has agreed that I’d better keep the secret of my Lone Ranger as long as possible, hopefully until we are settled. If it’s to be Colorado, that’s okay with me. The way I feel tonight, the mountains of the moon would be okay with me. Do I sound like a dizzy schoolgirl? Well—if a lady can’t sound like a dizzy schoolgirl in her diary, where can she sound like one?
   But I must say one other thing before I drop the subject of the Lone Ranger. It has to do with my “maternal instinct.” Is there such a thing? I think yes. Probably hormonal. I have not felt my old self for some weeks now, but it’s very hard to separate the changes caused by my pregnancy from the changes caused by the terrible disaster which has overtaken the world. But there IS a certain jealous feeling (“jealousy” isn’t really the right word, but it’s the closest I can seem to come to the right word tonight), a feeling that you have moved a little closer to the center of the universe and must protect your position there. That’s why the Veronal seems a greater risk than the bad dreams, although my rational mind believes that Veronal would not hurt the baby at all—not, at least, at the low levels the others have been maintaining. And I suppose that jealous feeling is also a part of the love I feel for Stu Redman. I feel I am loving, as well as eating, for two.
   Otherwise, I must be quick. I need my sleep, no matter what dreams may come. We haven’t made it all the way across Indiana as quickly as we had hoped—a horrible clog of vehicles near the Elkhart interchange slowed us down. A good many of the vehicles were army. There were dead soldiers. Glen, Susan Stern, Dayna, and Stu took as much firepower as they could find—about 2 dozen rifles, some grenades, and—yes, folks, it’s true—a rocket launcher. As I write now, Harold and Stu are trying to figure out the rocket launcher, for which there are 17 or 18 rockets. Please God they don’t blow themselves up.
   Speaking of Harold, I must tell you, dear diary, that he doesn’t SUSPECT A THING (sounds like a line from an old Bette Davis movie, doesn’t it). When we catch up with Mother Abigail’s party I suppose he will have to be told; it would not be fair to hide it any longer, come what may.
   But today he was brighter & more cheerful than I have ever seen him. He grinned so much I thought his face would crack! He was the one who suggested Stu help him with that dangerous rocket launcher, and
   But here they come back now. Will finish later.
   Frannie slept heavily and dreamlessly. So did they all, with the exception of Harold Lauder. Sometime shortly after midnight he rose and walked softly to where Frannie lay, and stood looking down at her. He was not smiling now, although he had smiled all day. At times he had felt that the smile would crack his face right up the middle and spill out his whirling brains. That might have been a relief.
   He stood looking down at her, listening to the chin of summer crickets. We’re in dog days now, he thought. Dog days, from July the twenty-fifth to August twenty-eighth, according to Webster’s. So named because rabid dogs were supposed to be the most common then. He looked down at Fran, sleeping so sweetly, using her sweater for a pillow. Her pack was beside her.
   Every dog has his day, Frannie.
   He knelt, freezing at the gunshots of his bending knees, but no one stirred. He unbuckled her pack, untied the drawstring, and reached inside. He trained a small pencil flash on the pack’s contents. Frannie muttered from deep down in sleep, stiffed, and Harold held his breath. He found what he wanted way at the bottom, behind three clean blouses and a lap-eared pocket road atlas. A Spiral notebook. He pulled it out, opened to the first page, and shone his light on Frannie’s close but extremely legible handwriting.
   July 6, 1990—After some persuasion, Mr. Bateman has agreed to come along with us…
   Harold shut the book and crept back to his sleeping bag with it. He was feeling like the little boy he had once been, the boy with few friends (he had enjoyed a brief period of babyhood beauty until about age three, had been a fat and ugly joke ever since) but many enemies, the boy who had been more or less taken for granted by his parents—their eyes had been trained on Amy as she began her long walk down the Miss America/Atlantic City runway of her life—the boy who had turned to books for solace, the boy who had escaped never being picked for baseball or always being passed over for School Patrol Boy by becoming Long John Silver or Tarzan or Philip Kent… the boy who had become these people late at night under his covers with a flashlight trained on the printed page, his eyes wide with excitement, barely smelling his own bedfarts; this boy now crawled upside down to the bottom of his sleeping bag with Frannie’s diary and his flashlight.
   As he trained its beam on the front cover of the Spiral, there was a moment of sanity. For just a moment part of his mind cried out Harold! Stop! so strongly that he was shaken to his heels. And stop he almost did. For just a moment it seemed possible to stop, to put the diary back where he had found it, to give her up, to let them go their own way before something terrible and irrevocable happened. For that moment it seemed he could put the bitter drink away, pour it out of the cup, and refill it with whatever there was for him in this world. Give it over, Harold, this sane voice begged, but maybe it was already too late.
   At age sixteen he had given up Burroughs and Stevenson and Robert Howard in favor of other fantasies, fantasies that were both well loved and much hated—not of rockets or pirates but of girls in silk see-through pajamas kneeling before him on satin pillows while Harold the Great lolled naked on his throne, ready to chastise them with small leather whips, with silver-headed canes. They were bitter fantasies through which every pretty girl at Ogunquit High School had strolled at one time or another. These daydreams always ended with a gathering expletive in his loins, an explosion of seminal fluid that was more curse than pleasure. And then he would sleep, the sperm drying to a scale on his belly. Every doggy has his day.
   And now it was those bitter fantasies, the old hurts, that he gathered around him like yellowed sheets, the old friends who never died, whose teeth never dulled, whose deadly affection never wavered.
   He turned to that first page, trained his flashlight on the words, and began to read.
   In the hour before dawn, he replaced the diary in Fran’s pack and secured the buckles. He took no special precautions. If she woke, he thought coldly, he would kill her and then run. Run where? West. But he would not stop in Nebraska or even in Colorado, oh no.
   She didn’t wake.
   He went back to his sleeping bag. He masturbated bitterly. When sleep came, it was thin. He dreamed he was dying halfway down a steep grade of tumbled rocks and moonscape boulders. High above, riding the night thermals, were cruising buzzards, waiting for him to make them a meal. There was no moon, no stars—
   And then a frightful red Eye opened in the dark: vulpine, eldritch. The Eye terrified him yet held him.
   The Eye beckoned him.
   To the west, where the shadows were even now gathering, in their twilight dance of death.
   When they made camp at sundown that evening, they were west of Joliet, Illinois. There was a case of beer, good talk, laughter. They felt they had put the rain behind them with Indiana. Everyone remarked specially on Harold, who had never been so cheerful.
   “You know, Harold,” Frannie said later that evening, as the party began to break up, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you feeling so good. What is it?”
   He gave her a jolly wink. “Every dog has his day, Fran.”
   She smiled back at him, a little puzzled. But she supposed it was just Harold, being elliptical. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that things were finally coming right.
   That night Harold began his own journal.