by neetha Napew
"Get closer!" The barrel of the rifle had disappeared, and Jim could make out the blurred shape of a man's head and shoulders behind the glass of the attic. "Just one of you. The one with the baby. Unwrap her for a second so's I can… Fine. I'm only letting the mother and child in first. Rest of you back off. Including you, Captain."
"Cold and wet out here, Dalton," said Jim.
"Been like that a spell. Guess you're part used to it by now. Another half hour won't harm you. Not if you lived clean and thought clean."
There was no point in arguing. Jim went to Jeanne and stood close while she covered Sukie up again with the blanket. "You got the .32?"
"Under my coat."
"Use it if you have to."
"Maybe I could take him out anyway, once I'm in. Might be safest for us all."
Jim realized in that moment how Jeanne McGill's longer exposure to the post-Earthblood world had changed and hardened her more than he'd known.
"No," he said. "Only if you have to do it."
"Sure."
EVERYONE STOOD together on the slope of the hill, looking down at the silent building.
"Pretty farm," said Carrie. "Must've been something when it was running properly."
Henderson McGill kept kicking at bunches of snow, exposing the mud below. "How long?" he said with a vicious calm. "How long before we kick the bastard door in?"
"There hasn't been any shooting inside," said Nanci Simms reassuringly. "No screams."
"Could be more than just him. Could be a whole bastard family of chainsaw-waving crazies. How do we know?"
Jim took him by the arm. "Mac, just simmer on down, will you? 'Course we don't know. We know Sukie's dying. Got that? Your baby is dying. There's a slim chance that Cole Dalton might have the right drugs. Slim but realistic. You want to just piss that away and Sukie's life with it?"
"No."
"Give me the rifle, Paul," said Nanci.
Jim turned. "Why?"
"Take out his eye if he appears and things aren't right. Get it done."
The smoke still filtered from the chimney, and the blank windows still reflected the dull sky and the few ragged clouds that raced across it.
Jim looked at the house, just over a hundred yards away from him. It was built of red brick, probably around the latter half of the previous century. There were white frame additions, including the second story, under a shingled roof. It wasn't well insulated, as virtually all of the lying snow had melted off it. There was a veranda to the right, with a swing seat rusting away on it. A large pond, frozen over, dusted with white, and the double doors of a big storm cellar were visible on the left of the building.
"There," said Jocelyn, pointing at the front door, which was slowly opening.
Nanci dropped to one knee, bringing the Krieghoff up to her shoulder.
"It's Jeanne," said Mac. "And she's waving to us. Shouting something."
The woman's voice, weakened by the easterly wind, barely reached the listeners. But it was loud enough for them to catch what she was saying.
"All right… It's all right.... Come on down.... It's all all right."
COLE DALTON SHOWED Nanci and Carrie his own stores of drugs. "Got some of most everything," he said. "Didn't help when my wife died, and then…" His voice broke.
"How did you get all this stuff?" asked Nanci. "Raid the local pharmacy?"
"Right on," he replied. "Earthblood started, and I saw where it was leading. Ignored the tarryhooting bullshit from our leaders. Knew that martial law and panic and evacuation were on the way. I got the dozer and blocked off the road up here. Went into Weitchpec, cross-country in the pickup. Me and Maria," he added, patting the butt of his Remington Model 700 Mountain rifle, chambered for a murderous Magnum round.
"Raided the pharmacy?"
"Yeah, Carrie. That's the name, isn't it? Carrie? Yeah. Didn't go like I planned. Knew the druggist. Name of Dee, Dee Vassan. Sweetest, nicest man. Tried to stop me. Said what I was doing wasn't right and had I thought about all the other folks. So I shot him. One round through the throat. Thing I regret most about… And took everything I could carry. Prescription and nonprescription stuff. What was it you was looking for, Carrie? For little Sukie?"
"Chloromycetin," said Carrie. "Chloramphenicol. You got these jars and boxes and bottles in any kind of order?"
"Alphabetical," he replied. "Didn't know enough to do them any other way."
Carrie was already raking her eyes along the packed shelves, reading off names to herself, lips moving silently. "Here," she said. "Chloromycetin succinate." She took it down and peered closely at it in the poorly lit room. "Suitable for injections. You got syringes, Dalton?"
"Yeah. Along the end."
"And there's chloramphenicol. Says the dose is by mouth, up to three grams a day, divided into three or four. Sukie's real little, Nanci."
"Yeah, and she's also real ill. Chloramphenicol is a dangerous drug. We'll give her a quarter dose of the injection first, to get the health ball rolling. Then the oral medicine after, and we'll try to adjust the dose based on her weight. Come on, Carrie, let's go."
Once the first injection had been given to the unconscious Sukie, in the soft flesh of her thigh, Carrie and Nanci worked together to prepare a course of treatment. Jim had mentioned to them the caution about intense personal hygiene, so they'd also taken a half-dozen containers of antiseptic soap.
Cole Dalton was tall and lean, with long hair and a straggling beard that showed a rich seam of silver. He wore faded overalls in blue denim, and unlaced working boots. Jim guessed that he was around fifty.
"Want to know how old I am, Captain?" He and Jim were together in the kitchen, cooking up a mess of canned vegetables and dried pork in a large orange casserole.
"Around the middle forties, I'd guess. But I'm not too good at it."
"Sure as shit not," he said, followed by the now-familiar hyena laugh. The laugh was repeated so often that Jim was already doubting the man's bedrock sanity. "I'm thirty-two next February. See myself in the mirror. Look like my old man did when he was around fifty. Doesn't do much for you when you lose all your loved ones, Captain. Know what I mean?"
"I lost my wife and one of my twin daughters," said Jim. "Much like you. Cholera took them."
"Least you got little Heather as a comfort. I got all those drugs in ready for sickness. Filled the barns with cans of food and drink and supplies of gas for cooking. I figured that we could easy hold out here at least five years on what I raided. All those drugs...."
"Couldn't save your wife and girl?"
Cole stopped stirring the thick stew and sighed. He rubbed his sleeve across his eyes. "We haven't had Christmas yet, have we? I figure it's about the twenty-third." Jim nodded. "It was May 7. Marie got up early. Smothered little Buffy with her Andromeda Aliens pillow. Then she took down the 12-gauge and blew off the top of her head. Never left me a note or nothing. Sound of the shot woke me and I found…in the end room down the hall. Kept it locked ever since."
Jim looked around the kitchen, seeing the dirt and the neglect. He also saw a man who was sliding slowly down a hill. He would likely go faster and faster until he plunged into an abyss that would open to receive him and then close over him as though he'd never been.
"Want to come along with us, Cole?" he said.
The man sniffed, nodding at Jim. "Kind of you. You figure I'm lost, don't you? Sure, you do. I hear myself talking when I'm all alone. No, Jim. Take all the food you can carry. Truly. Any drugs or anything you want. Might come in useful when you get where it is you're headed. All I'll be needing, when I'm ready, is the shotgun and one round. That's all."
BY TWO in the afternoon, they were ready to leave the isolated house.
Sukie didn't seem to be any better, but they now had a thermometer to check the progress of the fever, and her temperature had dropped a point and a half since the first injection. The main thing was that she didn't seem to be any worse.
Jim had tried again to pe
rsuade Cole Dalton to ride along with them, but the hermit had refused him, smiling and patting him on the arm.
"Like they say… Thanks but no thanks. I pay my own price to live here, Jim. Price'll get too high one day, and I'll just settle the account." He laughed, but this time the madness wasn't there. Just a sound of infinite melancholy.
"Take care, then." The two men shook hands.
"And you, too."
ON THE WAY OUT, Paul McGill took the lead, with Carrie driving the second tractor. Jim Hilton stood in the rattling horse trailer, looking out of the back window at the lonely figure, beard blowing in the wind, waving once to the disappearing convoy.
"Sad guy," he said as they crested the rise, heading back toward the highway.
Nanci was sitting on the blankets, surrounded by the boxes of food that Cole had insisted they take. "You know about the locked bedroom?" she said.
"Sure. Told me how his wife suffocated their little girl and then shot herself. I got the impression Cole was keeping it as a kind of shrine."
"Nope. I picked the lock.... Don't look like that, Jim. Knowledge is life and ignorance can be death. There were two bodies on the bed, badly decomposed, but you could still see how they'd died. Little girl had her throat slit from ear to ear."
"He could've made a mistake."
Nanci ignored him. "And the woman had died from a shotgun blast. Fired from about twenty feet away in the middle of the back."
Jim turned away and watched the snow beginning to fall more heavily.
Chapter Twenty-Six
"It's the night before Christmas, Dad."
Jim Hilton blinked his eyes open, rubbing at the sleep that crusted their corners. The horse trailers had no heating at all, but their stout walls and roofs kept most of the cold easterly wind at bay. Everyone in the party had either sleeping bags or blankets. Or both. He sniffed and looked across at his daughter.
Heather was sitting up, cocooned in bedding, only her tousled head protruding from the top. She was grinning at her father. For a moment he glimpsed his dead wife, Lori, in Heather's bright face, and a pang of loss knifed through his heart.
"You going to tell me all about the mice stirring, are you?" he said.
"Mice?" Sly's deep voice woke everyone. "Me heard about mice, Heather. Mice not nice on ice not nice twice."
Carrie laughed. "What's this about mice, Sly?"
"Jim said mice was furry."
"Stirring, Sly. Means they're moving around. Only I didn't mean there were mice here in our roller-home." Which was what Sly had christened the horse trailer.
Nanci yawned. "Night before Christmas, is it? Well, everyone's stirring all through our house. Might as well break our fasts and get the show on the road again. The woods are silent, dark and dead, and we've got miles to go before we can rest our heads."
BREAKFAST FOR the McGills was more or less the same as for Jim and his group.
The contents of Cole Dalton's larder had made a crucial difference to their journey northward. Their supplies had been right down onto the borderline, sinking deep into the red. Now they had enough from the packed shelves of what was almost a warehouse of convenience foods to keep them going for weeks.
Much of it was dehydrated meat and fruit and vegetables, sealed in a syrup that kept them fresh for years. All that had to be done was to open a half-pint can of something like chili prawns with bamboo shoots and add a half-pint of water. And the dried edibles swelled up miraculously to provide a meal that would have filled a two-pint bowl.
This way of preserving food was something that had only been developed in the Far East during the 2020s, and it had changed shopping habits throughout the world.
Jeanne selected oatmeal with sugar sub and cream sub already added, just putting in a canful or two of fresh snow and stirring it over the tiny camping stove. Then came some reconstituted hash browns with scrambled eggs and meatloaf.
The smell filled the trailer, waking Sukie. During the previous afternoon and evening, she'd begun to show encouraging signs of recovery. Her temperature had dropped when Jocelyn checked it last thing at night. But the best news was that it had stayed low throughout the hours of darkness, and now she was waking up from the period of coma.
"Thirsty," she said.
THEY'D PARKED for the night at the back of a burned-out community center, out of sight of the highway. Though they hadn't seen a single living soul all the day, apart from Cole Dalton, Jim wasn't about to take any chances.
The snow had been falling off and on during the light hours, but it had become more intermittent. There had even been a rare glimpse—the first in ages—of a watery sun breaking through from the west in the late afternoon.
The moon had risen, bright and clear, but it had swiftly vanished behind a swelling bank of dark cloud from the east. It had become bitingly cold with a rising wind that had whistled through the slits in the walls of the horse trailers, until they'd been blocked with bundles of clothes and spare blankets.
Jim Hilton came knocking loudly on the double door at the back of the McGill trailer just as they were finishing off the delicious meal with mugs of hot, sweet coffee. Paul opened the door, closing it quickly again behind Jim.
"Morning, Skipper," said Mac.
"How's Sukie?"
"Better. Ask her yourself."
Jim knelt down, marveling at the change in the little girl's appearance. She still looked tired and thin, dark shadows beneath the big blue eyes. But now there was a sparkiness in her face. "How is it, kitten?"
"My back bottom's sore, Jim. And my stomach feels like a mule danced on it."
"Not surprised. You were very ill, Sukie."
"I know, Dad and Jeanne told me. And Jocelyn. She said I nearly went to sing with the angels. Did I, Jim?"
"Yeah, kitten. I guess you did." He straightened. "Soon as you're ready, we'll get going. Looks like it might be a good day for making some progress."
MARGARET TABOR was humming along with the beautiful line about white lace and promises on her Carpenters disc. Her eyes were closed, and her body was swaying gently from side to side.
The pup tent that had been erected for her rippled in the wind, and hail dashed against the water-proofed canvas. It was ten in the morning and it was already clear that this wasn't going to be a very good day for making any kind of progress.
It was the twenty-fourth of December, and the two Chinooks and their complement of fuel, supplies and men had still only made it one hundred and fifty miles north of Sacramento. They were closer to Red Bluff than Redding, putting down finally on the edges of what the map showed as the Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness. The young female navigator of the Chief's chopper had found the name vaguely amusing until a few words from Margaret Tabor had driven all the blood from her cheeks and made her realize that becoming stranded on a mission of such prime importance to the organization really wasn't all that amusing at all.
The weather had been miserable ever since they took off from the Hunters' base in the desert. High wind veered out of the canyons and passes of the Sierras, making the choppers dangerous and difficult to handle.
But Margaret Tabor had insisted on pushing on.
Then there had been the drizzle, turning into sleet, eventually becoming the driving walls of snow that had made the engines cough and falter.
Even then they had still made what progress they could in between the showers.
But the clouds had bottomed out around Sacramento, giving ten-tenths cover and, finally, zero visibility. With no reliable radio communication and no air-traffic controllers to give helpful advice, even Margaret Tabor had to concede defeat, agreeing that they would have to put down.
Which they'd done the evening before, coming in low over the South Fork of the Cottonwood, its waters swollen by the heavy rain and snow of the past weeks.
Now they waited.
The disc was coming to an end.
She switched it off on the trim black-and-silver unit at her belt and rolled from he
r narrow bed to crawl across the floor of the tent to peer out at the morning.
She let out a stream of vile invective as calmly delivered as an elderly grade-school teacher commenting to parents on the excellent progress of their child.
What she wanted at that precise moment was someone whom she could hurt. Someone weak and helpless, preferably naked and bound, so that she could use one of her slim-bladed knives on their skin and flesh and organs and exorcise the anger that was surging through her veins.
But they were out on a mission of supreme importance. The gray suits that waited back at base would be nothing without her and the top-stream armed men with her.
It would be goodbye to the Hunters of the Sun if both the big helicopters and their contents were to be destroyed in a pointless crash.
She returned to her bed and lay on her back, secure in the certain knowledge that none of her men would dare to enter her tent without calling and waiting.
She closed her eyes and entertained her mind with a mixture of lethal memories, and the plans she had for Zelig if she caught up with him. It put her into a better frame of mind immediately, and it passed the waiting time.
AWAY TO THE NORTH, General John Kennedy Zelig sat in one of the stalled M113s and wondered what he could find to do to pass the waiting time.
Scouts had gone on both ahead and behind when their route was blocked by an earth fall, crowned with fresh piled snow. Their task was to recon on both sides of the blacktop for a few miles and report back to Zelig if they found any hope of an alternative route around the obstacle.
He didn't remember having seen any potentially usable side trails for several miles.
Time was snaking away from him. Zelig liked the idea of control. Control over his men. Over Aurora. Over Operation Tempest.
Over himself.
But he hated the fact that he had no control at all over the hostile ticking of the clocks.
"Care for a hand of cards, General?"
The young former Marine sitting opposite Zelig looked at him with a mixture of apprehension and expectation. The general had a reputation for jumping when you least looked for it.