by neetha Napew
Sister Stephanie stooped over her rucksack and straightened, holding a sawed-down scattergun. "Comes in 16-gauge, does the utterance of the Almighty, you sacrilegious slut."
"KEEP THEM SPREAD, and keep them still." The voice had a slow, menacing drawl to it, like a redneck lawman's from rural Mississippi.
Jeff had never seen the patrol. Fatigue had closed down his senses, though he'd never seen himself as much of a backwoods survivalist. His previous idea of a hard time had been getting stuck with the table by the rest rooms at Tante Elizabeth's exclusive eatery in San Francisco.
There'd been a blinding light from a clump of dead saguaros, and then the quiet, deathly voice telling him what to do. Assume the position, flat on the cold tarmac, arms and legs wide, like a stranded starfish on a flat beach.
Helpless.
There were polished boots an inch from his nose, giving Jeff a sudden frisson of remembered excitement. Nanci wouldn't have blundered heavy eyed into a trap.
But Nanci was dead.
The cold tip of a rifle barrel poked him in the back of the neck. "You got some nice hardware, boy. Port Royale, and that looks like a big old S&W there. Why don't you stand up slow and easy and let the guns drop on the highway."
The butt of a rifle grated by his face. Jeff had no expertise with weaponry and he had no idea what sort of gun it was. But he could see that someone had taken the trouble to mark the wooden butt with a sort of brand, neatly burned in the shape of a circle pierced with an arrow.
IT TOOK FIVE ROUNDS from the Heckler & Koch to kill the Good Samaritans, making Nanci even more aware of how kitten-weak she was from loss of blood.
It was difficult to even hold the P-111 9 mm automatic steady and a struggle to squeeze the narrow trigger.
The first bullet had been aimed at Sister Stephanie's midriff, intended to put her down and out of the action and to give time for Nanci to turn her attention to the unarmed man.
But the bullet had struck the stock of the shotgun, tearing it apart into splinters of white wood. The full-metal-jacket round, mangled and distorted, had angled off and clipped the woman on the outer edge of her right hip, snapping a sliver of bone from the pelvis. The force had spun her around, and she'd dropped the ruined gun.
The indrawn breath hadn't yet released her scream before Nanci fired a second round, this time at the paralyzed Brother Edward.
The shot had completely missed him, and the spent round howled off into the blackness.
Then the scream was out and running.
"Shit," Nanci Simms had hissed through clenched teeth, gasping with the cramping pain that was burning at her stomach.
"Die, satanic bitch," Brother Edward had proclaimed in his rich, preacher's voice as he'd pulled a little .32-caliber hideaway from the sleeve of his gray parka.
Nanci had fired the Heckler & Koch a third time, whooping in exultation as she saw the bullet hit the man through the left cheek, blowing away most of the back of his skull, spilling his brains into the dry sand.
Stephanie had tried to run away, one hand holding the bleeding wound on her hip. The fourth round had only nipped at her, taking a strip of bloodied skin delicately away under her ribs on the left side.
It had made her stagger, but she'd kept running, barely visible in the watery moonlight. In another few paces she'd be out of sight.
"Gently, Miss Simms, gently." Nanci had sighted along the barrel at the fleeing figure. "Imagine the trigger is your own clitoris, Miss Simms." She'd remembered the leering grin on the face of the armed-combat instructor at the large complex of buildings in rural Virginia.
She'd squeezed the trigger.
She hadn't risked going for a kill shot. Safety first. Center of the back, presenting the broadest target with the biggest margin for error. High and you hit the head. Low and you still hit the spine. Left or right and there was heart and liver and kidneys and lungs.
It was dead center.
Dead in the center.
Dead.
THERE WERE a number of ringbolts welded to the sides of the open truck. Jeff Thomas was handcuffed to one of them, trying to keep his balance as the vehicle roared along a dirt road, bouncing over ruts, occasionally hitting patches of rippled sand, hard as concrete. The old-fashioned chromed-steel cuffs were so tight that his fingers had gone numb, and he could see a thread of blood, black in the fading moonlight, leaking from beneath the nails.
He'd already learned that there wasn't much use in protesting to the man who called himself Sergeant Sullivan or to any of the taciturn men with him. They all wore dark blue pants and jackets, with the insignia of the silver sun pierced with a golden arrow.
"Just stay where y'are and keep quiet. Your name showed on one of our lists, boy."
Jeff was already regretting giving them his real name. But he hadn't been sure just how efficient their identity filing might be, and Sullivan wasn't the kind of a person who looked as if he'd welcome being told a lie.
He'd been chewing tobacco and had spat it all over Jeff's trainers, standing so close that the ex-journalist couldn't avoid the stink of rancid sweat.
"Now we got your guns and you, too, sonny. Shame that Flagg's no longer with us. That was a dude that sure enjoyed asking questions. 'Specially to folks that didn't know the replies."
"Who's in charge of you now?"
"What d'you do with a door swung open on a frosty day, boy?"
"Shut it."
The man had smiled at him from behind the mirrored glasses. "Then do it."
NANCI SAT on the narrow iron bunk, looking again at the cell. Six feet six inches long and four feet nine inches in width with walls of concrete blocks, painted a pale green. Very recently painted, as there was no graffiti or dirt on them. The door was steel, colored bright, sunburst yellow. There was a small grille in its center, bolted from the outside. The cell had no window.
They'd kept her locked in for nearly forty minutes, and nobody had come to see her. Nanci wasn't that surprised. She'd been taught enough about techniques to break a prisoner, and initial social deprivation was the simplest and most common. Now it couldn't be that far off dawn. Maybe someone might come to interrogate her before noon.
The patrol that had picked her up must have been waiting up on a ridge above the highway, in the darkness, simply watching.
They had come down on her with two four-wheel-drive pickups, each with three armed men, flashing their lights to warn her to pull over in the little green Volvo that had belonged to the dead brother and sister. She'd only gone a quarter mile, and one of the men had backtracked her, finding the two corpses, as well as the bodies of the group that had attacked her and Jeff.
She'd told the men, having noticed their sun-and-arrow flashes, that her name was Veronica Poole and that she was a retired English literature teacher from Fort Worth.
But there were simply too many dead for them to believe her story, so they'd brought her in. They'd been polite and distant, giving her no chances to find out anything.
Nanci had tried to ask where she was and why. And who was the Man? Was it Flagg?
But they wouldn't tell her a thing, though the driver of the truck that brought her in had said that she was obviously a killer.
"And murderers don't live long. They get to be hung real quick."
The cell was temperature controlled, around seventy degrees. All Nanci had seen as she was brought in was a largish building that looked as if it might once have been a high school. With a lot of armed men around it.
She lay down on the plastic-covered mattress, trying to recover some of her strength, feeling the stitches already tugging painfully at the wound in her thigh.
It crossed her mind to wonder just how far Jeff Thomas had got by now.
"I'll bet he's already five hundred miles away from here," she said to herself.
Though they'd searched her, taking away her gun and knife, they hadn't made her remove her polished boots. Inside the right one, snug in a specially constructed sheath, was a
slim razor with an inlaid ivory hilt.
It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing.
With that thought in her mind, the sixty-year-old woman closed her startlingly pale blue eyes and slipped easily into sleep.
LESS THAN a hundred yards away, Jeff Thomas found that sleep wouldn't come. The guards left him on his own, though the observation slit opened every fifteen minutes or so and a shadowed face peered in.
But whoever was out there wouldn't respond to anything Jeff said.
Outside, the sun had risen for a bright new day.
Chapter Nineteen
"I still feel bad about Steve."
"It was just real bad luck, Carrie. Could've been any of us."
"I know, Kyle. But to leave his body out there… I don't think I'd feel so bad if we could just have buried him decently."
It was November 27, 2040.
They were near Devil's Gate Pass, over seven and a half thousand feet up in the Sweetwater Mountains, camped a quarter mile off the side of Highway 395, with a light snow falling around them. Kyle had lit a bright fire of pinon branches, and they had erected their three one-man tents under the flank of a steep granite cliff, giving them some shelter from the blizzard.
Sly Romero was sleeping peacefully, clutching a small wooden manikin that Kyle had whittled for him, naming it "Steve."
They'd explained to the boy that his father had gone away on a really long journey but he'd taken with him a special pair of glasses that allowed him to always keep a watch over Sly and what he was doing.
To all their surprise, the story had been accepted. Sly's only question had been whether "Me speak and Dad hear?" Carrie had told him that he should whisper what had happened during the day, and Steve would be able to hear it all, though he couldn't speak back to his son.
That evening, as in the other nights since his father's death by electrocution, the teenager had infallibly remembered to do as they'd suggested.
They'd eaten their supper of beans and stew, scavenged from an isolated cabin they'd found the previous day. And Sly had climbed cheerfully into his sleeping bag, leaving the flap on his tent wide open so that he could watch the dancing flames of the scented fire.
"And me see feathers from the sky. Dad tell me they feathers from great big bird."
Carrie and Kyle sat close together, huddled inside their parkas against the Sierra cold, listening to the mumbled diary of what had happened to them that day, filtered through Sly's occasional confusion.
"Dad hello Dad. Me had a good time. Pickup went well and me saw lots of not-sleeping dead ones today. Still good gas in cans and me had beans again. That's two times two times today." He giggled. "Me farted lots… and Carrie and Kyle. Not Jim and…can't remember the little girl. They gone off and me see them soon. Me saw wolfs today. Cold, Dad." A note of excitement crept into his voice. "And feathers, Dad. Like you told me. Me saw them. They really called snow. Me know that. But feathers is pretty, Dad, today. Now lay me to sleep and pray me soul to keep. If me die before wake, then pray soul to take. Goodnight, Dad. Miss you."
Carrie looked across at Kyle, the firelight glittering off the tears that streaked her cheeks. "Son of a bitch always gets me every night."
"Yeah. He's holding up well."
"You've never regretted us looking after him? When we split from Heather and the captain?"
"Not for a moment. Honestly. Wonder where they've reached."
"Depends on what kind of transport they found, I guess."
Once they'd made their getaway from the mysterious hydroponics establishment, leaving Steve Romero's charred corpse behind in the scorched brush, the three adults had sat together in urgent discussion.
They had agreed that they should split up to try to increase their chances of locating Zelig and the almost-mythical base Aurora.
The division had been unarguable. Jim would obviously care for his own daughter, but whoever looked after Sly would need some assistance, which meant it had to be Kyle and Carrie.
They'd stayed together for a half day until they reached a fork in the road. One highway carried on roughly northward, while the other struck out toward the west and the ocean. That was the route that Jim Hilton had selected for himself and Heather.
They parted with the agreement that they'd all come together in Muir Woods on December 5.
"There or thereabouts," Jim had said, getting a smile from Carrie and from the tall, muscular black. It had been one of his favorite sayings on board the old Aquila.
Now there was only a week to go before the date for the meeting, and Kyle, Carrie and Sly were around one hundred and fifty miles away from Muir Woods, as the crow flies. However, they'd all noticed that there didn't seem to be that many crows flying around the leaden, overcast skies.
Next morning, the twenty-eighth, the wind had risen, blowing the snow cover in powdery heaps, bringing drifts at the sides of the highway.
Sly had trouble taking his tent down, but he stubbornly insisted on battling the flying material himself, refusing Kyle's offer of help.
"Me do it on my own," he said, smiling broadly as he finally managed to get the tent stuffed into its waterproof bag.
"Throw it in the back, Sly, and we'll get rolling on north again."
The boy clapped his hands. "Rolling and rolling and rolling we all gotta roar 'Hide.' "
"Very nearly," laughed Carrie, patting him on the arm.
THEY'D SEEN virtually no hard evidence in all of their journeying that General Zelig was anywhere out there.
But they had come across a couple of hopeful clues, and if there were two, then that must mean that there were probably more.
One was painted in black on the vertical wall of a steep bluff. Carrie had been driving, with Sly dozing in the middle of the front seat while Kyle had been fiddling with a broken camera he'd picked up in a wreck-strewn picnic area.
She'd stamped down on the brake, sending the pickup slewing onto the shoulder in a shower of pebbles and sand.
"Look!" she exclaimed, rolling down the window and pointing out to the left.
The message had obviously been daubed in a great hurry, with paint running streakily over the red-orange rocks.
"Rora North. Z."
That was all.
The second message was longer and just a little more explicit. They found it when they detoured up a dirt road, avoiding a tangled mass of blackened vehicles fused together by a cataclysmic fire and totally blocking the highway. Whoever left the message had obviously driven the same way.
They stopped outside the tumbledown remains of what must once have been a beautiful old frame house. Now the outside staircase to the second floor had rotted and fallen, while the windows gaped glassless and menacingly dark.
"Spooky," whispered Sly, hunching his shoulders protectively.
"Nothing to be frightened about," said Kyle, who was at the wheel.
Carrie narrowed her eyes. "Hold it a second," she said. "Just spotted something."
She jumped down and walked across to the front of the faded, weathered building. The exposed joists looked like old bones.
Her keen eye had picked out something hanging from the battered mailbox. A small flag. It would have meant nothing to most people passing by, but she'd recognized it immediately as the insignia of the United States Space Authority—a circle of tiny silver suns set on a maroon background.
There was a piece of paper wrapped around the thin stick that held the little pennant in place in the box.
"What's it say?" shouted Kyle.
She unrolled it, peering at it, then walked over and offered it to him. "Not too easy to make out. See for yourself."
It was typed on what looked like the most ancient manual machine in all the Americas. The letter e was missing, as was the t. The lines were irregular, looking like a mule going up a ladder, and were so pale you had to angle the paper toward the sunlight to read them. It was obvious that the typewriter was also lacking any capital letters.
anyon wan s o know abou aurora should con ac caffs groc ri s in wrigh vill nor h of walk r on 395. will b h r un il nd nov mb r. jk z lig.
They were now within only a dozen miles of Wrightsville, north of Walker, ready to locate Caff's Groceries.
WHEN AT LAST the pickup rolled to a halt, they stared in surprise.
"Christ! It's open for business," Kyle said.
All three of them got out of the cramped cab, their breath frosting in the icy morning air. Sly scampered to the rear of the truck, unzipping himself as he ran. Carrie and Kyle looked thoughtfully at the building that stood across from them.
In many ways it seemed like any grocery store in any town, any state, anywhere. Tar-paper roof, single storied, standing alone, with some fresh snow lining its eastern wall. The sign, Caffs, had obviously once been illuminated with a row of light bulbs, but only the broken stumps remained.
The difference between Caffs Groceries and most other stores, before Earthblood, was that it had been turned into a fortress.
Steel grilles were bolted over windows and the only visible door. Inside them it was possible to make out the sullen glint of armored shutters, giving protection against anything short of a concentrated artillery barrage.
There were gun ports cut in the walls, allowing the occupants a range of fire that covered the entire area around the store.
A professionally painted sign was fired over the door, scarred in one corner by what looked like a shotgun shell.
Caffs is open twenty-four hours and 365 days. Knock and wait. A smile greets genuine traders for all kinds of food, drink and weapons. Death greets any robbers, raiders, pimps, scum, whores, dwellers in urban canyons and publishers.
"Why publishers?" shouted Kyle, startling away a bright-colored jay from the satellite aerial on the roof.
The response confirmed his belief that they were being watched.
"Wrote a book once and got screwed by the publisher. Never forgot it." A hearty laugh accompanied the words. "Truth is, not many publishers came this way since the plants started to bleed. What do you folks want?"
"Shells for a .32 and .357. If you got them."