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Sukie."
"How come you know that kind of& ?" Carrie stopped and shook her head. "Forget it,
Nanci. Yeah, I'm sure you're right. All we have to do now is find us some."
The rest of the night was comparatively uneventful, and they were on the move again
before full dawn. Jim drove the first tractor and Mac was at the wheel of the second.
Sukie was still asleep, exhausted by the attacks of the night. She lay in the middle of a
pile of blankets, her head in Jeanne's lap. Carrie traveled with the McGills. The water
supplies had been topped up from the fresh snowfall.
Nanci Simms tugged on the cord after a couple of miles. When they stopped, she climbed
down from the trailer and squeezed herself into the cab next to Jim. Despite all the
hardships, the sixty-year-old woman still contrived to look as smart and clean as though
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she'd just showered in her Nob Hill apartment and was off for a meal at Shang Yuen.
"I think the child will die in the next day or so. Probably slip away during the long hours
of darkness, as she nearly did last night."
Jim was moving on, trying to pick his way between two rutted, frozen patches of deep
snow, and he didn't answer for a couple of minutes. He checked the mirrors to make sure
that Mac had also successfully navigated the obstacle.
"You heard me, Jim?"
"What are you saying, Nanci? I had a friend back in L.A. who'd majored in literary
deconstructionism. Used to talk a whole lot about the pre-essential importance of the
subtext. What's your subtext, Nanci?"
"Mac's near the breaking point. Too many deaths too close to him too quickly."
Jim nodded. "I see that."
"Normally I'd take the view that our progress to Aurora took priority over everything and
everyone else. But the little girl is central to us all."
"What can we do?"
"I suspect that any pharmacy we happened on will have been ravaged by the great
unwashed."
"So?"
"My feeling is that we should look for any isolated dwelling. Anyone shrewd enough to
be still alive and flourishing in this general carnage might be clever enough to have laid
in a stock of useful drugs. That's what I'd have done myself. Keep a good look out for
any side trail that seems as if it might have been in use the last day or so. Probability is
that the sort of place we're after won't even be visible from the highway here."
"I'll keep my eyes open, then," Jim said. From then on he paid special attention to side
trails for any signs of recent passage.
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It was eleven minutes before nine in the morning when he tapped lightly on the brake
pedal three times, warning Mac that he was about to stop.
The miniature convoy halted and everyone got out, except Jeanne and Sukie.
Jim remained in the high cab, allowing the engine to idle, its exhaust barely visible in the
freezing drizzle that had begun to fall.
"I spotted a path," he called. "Bit like you said earlier, Nanci. Off to the right, kind of
hidden behind a drift. I can make out what looks like a single set of prints along it. Goes
up and over the brow of the hill there."
Nanci swung up next to him again, looking where he pointed. "Yeah," she said.
"Should we go up there in the tractors?"
She considered the question. "Anybody there will hear us coming miles away. Then
again, in daylight, approaching over snow, I guess we'd have trouble sneaking in. Used to
be good in the old days when there were trees for camouflage."
Mac wiped the cold rain from his face. "Can we make a decision, Jim?" he said.
"Sure. Everyone back in the trailers and get your guns primed and ready. We'll go in.
Save splitting the force or risking leaving the tractors for someone to come along and
steal." He looked at Nanci questioningly, but she simply smiled and held out her hands,
palms up.
"Fine, Jim," she said. "Fine."
The slope was steep, and the snow was dangerously patchy. In parts it was frozen, with a
crust of ice over it. In others the wind had wiped the trail clear, and the wheels slithered
in furrows of rich, deep mud.
Once they were over the top of the hill, they were faced with undulating farming land
that had once carried a cereal crop. Now nothing living showed above the thin layer of
white.
Jim watched the hollows where someone had walked along the track in the same
direction that they were going.
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Over the third hill, he glimpsed the roof of a building, with a narrow column of smoke
snaking out of the red chimney. He touched on the brakes before he stopped and opened
the side window of the cab, looking back to see that once again Nanci was the first out of
the horse trailer.
"I make it," she said before he had a chance to speak. "We can stop here and go in on
foot. Leave two with the little girl. Couple of guns, in case." She caught Jim's eye. "If
that's what you think is a good idea?"
"Sure. It's what I was going to do."
He led the way, with Nanci at his heels. Then came Mac and Paul, with Jeff Thomas
bringing up the rear. Jeanne, Carrie and Heather remained behind with Jocelyn and
Sukie. The little girl seemed fretful and had suffered another fearsome bout of diarrhea
that had them throwing out soiled bedding and opening the rear doors of the trailer to air
it.
"See where there was an orchard," Jim said over his shoulder to the others.
"Still just the one set of tracks going in." Paul McGill had the Krieghoff Ulm-Primus
rifle, carrying it at the high port, ready for action.
Jim had his Ruger Blackhawk Hunter, Nanci the Port Royale machine pistol, Mac his
Brazzi 16-gauge. Jeff was holding the nameless .38, the only firearm that Nanci would
allow him to carry, refusing him either the Heckler & Koch or one of the SIG-Sauer
automatics that the McGills had brought with them.
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