by neetha Napew
The suggestion was greeted with general delight, and Henderson McGill felt much better as he eventually slipped into sleep in his narrow bunk that night.
IT WAS TRULY a heaven of sunrise.
The turnoff overlooked a broad valley, dotted with the blackened corpses of ten thousand trees. But the steady fall of snow had gentled their stark outlines, softening the grim landscape.
It looked as though the vid special-effects men and women had labored to produce an unbelievable view of classical beauty.
Most of the hills were gentle, but a quarter mile to their left there was a much steeper slope, banked with deep, drifted snow, bare rock showing through, glittering with outcrops of quartz.
"Isn't it marvelous, Dad?" said Jocelyn, her small gloved fingers in his.
Yeah, and have you ever thought, honey, that we're all going to die? The words had appeared all unbidden in his brain, but Mac had just enough presence of mind to censor them before they reached his lips.
Instead, he said, "Yeah, and it's all free and ours. No lining up for lifts or equipment hire."
That was much better.
One by one the rest of the family emerged, boots crunching in the frozen, powdery snow, exclaiming at the untouched dome of cloudless blue and the bright sun.
"No chance of hitting the road," said Paul, shaking his head at the blocked highway.
"Not today, son. But there's tomorrow. If Jim and the rest are in Muir Woods, they'll likely wait a couple of days. And they'll manage to leave us a message about where they've gone. Don't worry—" he punched his son lightly on the arm. "—not a day for doing any worrying."
Pamela joined them in a quilted suit, her breath frosting the air around her mouth. "Cold as charity," she said. "What're we going to do about guarding the vehicles?"
Mac bit his lip. There it was again. He should have thought of that, not just been ready to go off into the gentle slopes around them for a fun time on skis. Could be any number of thugs and killers around waiting for the chance to get their hands on the vehicles and the gas. And the guns.
And the women.
"Shit, I'll stay and keep watch," he said quickly. "Not that good on skis. Brings out my old knee trouble."
With only mild argument, the rest of the family left Mac to guard the vehicles while they went skiing. There was a good pair of binoculars in the well-equipped Phantasm. Henderson McGill heated himself a mug of chamomile tea and sat in the driver's seat, watching through the glasses.
Even at seven, little Jocelyn was already showing signs of becoming an excellent skier, cutting her way down the gentle incline to the right of the blocked road. The rest of the family were all with her, etching patterns in the virgin snow. Mac wound down the driver's window, smiling at the echoing laughter that came rippling toward him.
There was no sign of any other human life.
Once he spotted a pair of elks, picking their delicate way through the deep carpet of white, a mile or more away across the valley. Not long after that, he was raking the skyline with the binoculars and saw what he figured was a small pack of hunting wolves, moving fast on the trail of the elk.
Far, far away, to the north and east, Mac thought he could pick up a faint smudge of what might have been smoke rising vertically into the calm morning sky.
It was becoming warmer, and he could see a tiny thread of water inching along the side of the highway where the snow was beginning to thaw. If that kept up throughout the rest of the day, it might mean a chance of their getting moving again within forty-eight hours or so.
Angel attracted his attention, waving her arms, the silvered ski poles shimmering in the bright sunlight.
"Hey, dumb ass!"
"What?"
"Want me to spell you on watch?"
Mac shook his head. "No. Thanks, lover, but I don't mind. I'll heat up some soup in a half hour or so."
She was less than a hundred yards away from him, her blond hair tangled by her exertion. Her cheeks were flushed, and Mac thought how beautiful she looked. And remembered again why he'd married her.
"You enjoying it?" he shouted.
"Too easy. You see Sukie giving it a good shot? Hope this Aurora turns out to be somewhere with some decent snow in winter. That'd be real good."
"Who knows?" he responded, shrugging his shoulders. For a moment it crossed his mind to ask her to slip back into the RV with him just for a little while. The idea of hugging and cuddling Angel seemed a real good one, but the kids would be back soon and he hated being interrupted in lovemaking.
"I'm going there!" she yelled, pointing to the left and the steep, craggy slope.
Mac nodded, half his mind still on the idea of getting Angel into bed with him. "Sure," he said, mostly to himself. "But you take care."
She shook her head, pointing to her muffled ears. "Can't hear you, love."
"Said to take care," he called out, louder this time.
Angel waved and set off across the face of the gentle hillside, working her way with effortless skill toward the top of the farther, angled slope.
Mac stood and reached for a catering-size can of soup from one of the capacious storage closets on the RV. He glanced through the ingredients, noting the amazing range of additives and coloring agents and flavoring agents and preserving agents that the soup contained.
With the effects of Earthblood still leaching their way through the planet's ecostructure, he guessed that it would be a long, long while before any fresh canned food became available. If ever. And when it did, there wasn't likely to be a string of coded letters and numbers packed into it.
The way that green shoots were grudgingly beginning to appear here and there through the dried crimson blight made it seem a possibility that one day the tiny number of survivors might be able to eat fresh fruit and vegetables again.
"One day," he said, putting the glutinous contents of the can into the large enameled pan and placing it carefully onto low heat.
There was a flurry of fresh snow when he looked out of the window, but the trickle of water was wider and the temperature was obviously still rising.
There was a snowball fight going on between his children, with Jeanne favoring the two young girls against Paul and Pamela. Mac took up the binoculars once more and adjusted the focus with the milled black plastic wheel, bringing the faraway contest into sharp detail.
Jocelyn was laughing her head off, mouth open wide with delight, the distance turning the fight into a mime. She had just hit Paul flush in the face with a handful of packed snow, making him look like an enraged Santa Claus.
That thought made Henderson McGill wonder again about the rapid approach of Christmas.
The last family ceremony had been Pamela's birthday on November 18. The warm, caring ritual full of happiness and emotion that in an instant had turned the white Victorian house up on Melville Avenue to a charnel house of death and bare-bones violence.
Mac shook his head and laid down the glasses, getting up to check the soup. It was just beginning to bubble gently around the edges. He took a ladle out of the cutlery drawer and stirred it for a few moments, worried about the chance of it sticking. There was a row of spice jars in a neat rosewood rack, and he added a few pinches of turmeric and some cumin to give the bland soup some extra flavoring.
He tasted it. "Not bad. Maybe I'll take up cooking for real when we get to Aurora," he said.
A noise outside made him start. Quickly he wiped condensation from the window and peered into the bright sunlight. The sound was repeated, but this time he saw what was happening. The warmth of the day was melting the snow, sending it tumbling off the low branches of the dead trees in great wet clumps.
"Could be on the move in a day or so," he said, then tutted at the realization that he seemed to be talking to himself a lot recently, wondering if this was the male menopause that he'd read about in a magazine only a couple of days before blasting off into space in the Aquila.
Another bunch of snow fell heavily, landing o
n the domed top of the fuel tank with a hollow ringing noise. The melt was gathering momentum.
A sudden thought struck Mac, and he looked around for the binoculars. "Place is turning into a dump," he muttered.
Finally he spotted it on the bench seat, half-hidden by Sukie's favorite doll, a droopy trollop that rejoiced in the name of Mournful Megg. He took up the glasses and went to the window that gave the best view of the steep, overhung cliff where Angel had said she was going to ski.
Now he was aware of the melodious tinkling of water, running musically off the roof of the RV, down onto the rutted ice of the highway.
The glass was steamed up from the simmering pan of soup, and again he wiped it with a shirtsleeve, finding that his fingers were trembling when he lifted the binoculars. The lenses were clouded with condensation.
"There," he breathed, finally aiming them toward where he'd last seen her, twisting the control until he located the twin trails of her skis vanishing among the trees, heading upward.
He found them again, higher, much higher.
He scanned the slope until he finally picked up a darting, twisting figure, cutting her own piste with a skillful agility that took his breath.
Mac watched Angel, his peripheral vision picking up the monstrous slab of undercut snow that toppled soundlessly above her. Frozen in disbelief, he saw it race down in a surging cloud of immense destruction, snapping off trees like matchwood.
Overwhelming and burying her.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The chief of the Hunters of the Sun sat waiting patiently in her office, contentedly turning the thin pages of the old nineteenth-century novel. Pride and Prejudice was one of her true all-time favorites.
It was a book that she always enjoyed reading just before going into an interrogation, particularly if it promised to be something a little special.
And Jeff Thomas, ex-journalist, accomplished liar and one-time crew member of the USSV Aquila, looked as though he might be real interesting.
The name of the chief, though hardly any of the subordinates knew it, was Margaret Tabor. She was twenty-seven years old and had been the mistress and associate of the man called Flagg. Not even she knew what his real name had been.
But she knew how important names were. Her degree in socio-psychology at UCLA had brought her few friends, but it had brought one young man, named Owen Johnson, who had discovered while hacking into the college's personal files that she had a middle name. One that came from way back on her mother's side. Dildow. Owen had told this fascinating bit of information to four of his close companions, and they'd begun to make her life intolerable with their sneers and scurrilous jokes.
By an extraordinary coincidence all five young men died in bizarre accidents within eleven days of each other. And their sneering died with them. The middle name of Margaret Tabor also vanished forever, disappearing from all of the computer files overnight.
Flagg had contacts at some colleges, and when he came to hear about the strange deaths, he made some connections. That led to a meeting and then to a strangely conventional sexual liaison between himself and the younger woman.
Now Flagg was dead… and she had work to do.
By now her assistant should be over in the farthest wing of the large quasimilitary complex that held Jeff Thomas, along with several other itinerant prisoners. Soon she would be talking to him about Aurora.
And other things.
JOE ENJOYED HIS WORK.
Before Earthblood he'd been happy in a slaughterhouse in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Death fascinated him, and the power of inflicting it gave him a profoundly sexual pleasure. But stupid sheep and cows and spavined mares had gotten to be boring.
Now, once he'd been enlisted into the Hunters of the Sun, Joe was dealing with people. Admittedly most of them were half-starved crips, but it was still better.
There was something about this one—Veronica Poole was the name chalked on the board outside her cell—that was sort of special. Admittedly she was gut-churningly antique and wrinkled, but her body was like that of a woman twenty years younger. The idea of having a little sport with Ms. Poole before letting her dangle off the hook had been a bright one.
And she sure was eager, thought Joe, grinning to himself. Very eager, since she thought that it just might save her miserable old life.
Now she was kneeling in front of him, hands reaching imploringly for him. The marks of his fingers were bright across her cheek. The guard's eye was caught by a flicker of movement across the corridor. That limp-dick little bastard, trying to peek out through the grille on his door.
"Move the hell away, Thomas!" he shouted, making the cringing woman start in surprise. "You don't get off watching me getting blown."
Now she was touching him, rubbing him gently. Joe put one hamlike hand on the back of her skull and roughly jerked her closer.
He laughed again, feeling the tension already rising in expectation of a surging orgasm.
But instead of the beginnings of pleasure he was hit by pain so appalling that his mind simply refused to admit it.
Joe's eyes closed and his mouth jerked open, blood worming out from where he'd just bitten the end clear off his tongue. His arms spread wide as if he'd been suddenly crucified. But he didn't make a sound, couldn't make a sound.
His entire body was paralyzed by the violence of the white agony centered at his groin.
Nanci was up off her knees, her lips peeled back from her teeth in a terrifying rictus of hatred. Her right hand was clamped around the guard's testicles, nails digging in with appalling ferocity, twisting the scrotal sac, grinding it up against the sharp point of the pubic bone.
Her left hand reached up toward Joe's shuttered eyes.
He felt no more pain, his brain already overloaded, but a tiny part of his mind was aware of a jagged intrusion beneath his eyelids. Probing and tearing. Warm liquid soaked his cheeks, and an infinite blackness was hovering about him.
Then he seemed to be floating. For a moment he thought of something really important that he wanted to say, but the words slithered away from him like a hand filled to overflowing with buttery maggots.
The floating stopped…and his breathing stopped.
The pain in his lower abdomen seemed to have eased, but now there was a terrible cutting agony in his throat. He struggled to draw breath, but his mouth was filled with the hot iron taste of blood.
Nanci took the Port Royale from his shoulder, one of her Heckler & Koch handguns from his belt. She moved away as the dying man's heels began to drum against the wall in the neural spasm that preceded his slow passing from life.
In his cell Jeff heard the sound of a scuffle, but he didn't dare to go again and peer through the narrow slit in his door. He sat on his bunk, head in his hands, mind racing over what was going to happen to him. He tried to concentrate on the lies he'd already told his inquisitors and the new ones that he might soon have to come up with.
He was aware of the smell of excrement drifting in, but he ignored it. Jeff had been in that part of the prison complex long enough to be used to it. Most of the victims of the wire-and-hook technique fouled themselves in their lingering agony.
Nanci was standing still, waiting and listening.
A doctor would have found that her pulse and respiration were only fractionally above normal.
"Thomas," she breathed. If it really was the long-lost Jeff Thomas in that room across the passage, then it might be a delightful and unexpected bonus. It would be nice to see good old Jeff again, remind him how he'd walked away and left her to die out in the desert.
Her grip tightened for a moment on the butt of the 15-round automatic.
Behind her Ed unlocked the door and walked through, hopeful of getting himself a piece of the action before the woman got strung up on the wall.
He found himself looking straight down the railroad-tunnel muzzle of a big handgun.
"Close the door," she whispered so that the tall guard could barely hear her. "Slo
w and easy. Or I spill your guts on the floor. Now."
Ed was staring at the blood-drenched corpse of his friend, face swollen and disfigured as he hung from the hook. The smell of excrement and death filled the corridor.
"You… how d'you… who helped you?"
"Nobody." She stepped close to him. "Close the door, slow and easy now." She was watching him, listening to hear the lock click shut. "Good. You're going to get to live awhile. That other door leads to the outside, does it?"
"Yeah, it do."
"Excellent. You may go to the top of the class. One more question. Where is the motor pool?"
"I'm sorry," he said, concentrating on squeezing his buttocks together to stop losing control. "Don't know what…"
"Where are the vehicles kept? I believe that it might be in a compound just beyond this outer door. We came in that way, unless my sense of direction had departed from me. So, am I correct in locating the trucks and cars?"
"Why, yes, ma'am." He was sweating so much it was running in his eyes, but the man didn't dare even blink. Never in his life had anything terrified him as much as this sixty-year-old teacher lady.
"The bolts do the door?"
"Sure do. Chief don't like too many keys. Cells and all bolt on the outside. That one on the inside. Door behind me needs a key to get in."
Nanci smiled at him. "That is wonderful. You can be the blackboard monitor for all of next week."
"Thank you, lady." He was so relieved that she didn't appear to be angry with him that he wasn't even listening to what the woman was actually saying to him.
"Lie down."
"Sorry?"
She pointed with the muzzle of the gun. "On the floor, on your stomach."
"Why?" He looked puzzled.
"Because my friends Mr. Koch and Mr. Heckler here say so."
The man got to his hands and knees, looking up at Nanci to make sure he was doing good. He really wanted to do good. When she nodded approvingly at him, the man lay right down, rolling onto his belly, resting the side of his cheek against the rough concrete floor, trying not to weep with fear.