Her voice was rising higher, carrying the shrill, ragged note of hysteria. Mac holstered his own gun and went to his wife, putting his strong arms around her and giving her a great hug, holding her while she wept.
Nanci sighed. “Tears are just salt water that gets in your eyes and stops you seeing clearly.”
“Fuck you, too, lady,” sobbed Jeanne.
“That’s better. Anger is better than grief, Jeanne. Believe me. Not many people left on this planet know that better than I do. We aren’t going after these mind-sick bastards because there’s no profit in it for us.”
“What about other folks, Nanci?” asked Jeff Thomas, still busily wiping his bloodied hands on the long skirt of one of the dead women.
“Warn them, you mean, Jefferson?”
“Sure.”
Nanci patted the younger man on the cheek, making him flinch instinctively away from her. Mac noticed the movement and wondered at it.
“Bleeding-heart liberal Democrats, aren’t we all.” Nanci grinned. “Newtown’s finished. They needed numerical strength to butcher strangers. They lost that, and the odds are they’ll fragment and drift away from this unholy place.”
“Not our business,” said Paul McGill, matter-of-factly. “Should move on ourselves.”
“Good lad.” Nanci Simms favored the eighteen-year-old with a rare, warm smile. “Correct. That’s what I was struggling, perhaps a little clumsily, to say to you, Jeanne. We must only look out for ourselves and each other in this group. To be alone is to be weak. To be weak is to die.”
As a small concession to the others, Nanci agreed that they should linger for an extra twenty minutes or so. Long enough to splash around some of the ten-gallon drums of cooking oil that Sukie discovered in the biggest hut.
And fire the whole settlement.
The flames were whipped up by the rising easterly, spreading rapidly through the makeshift huts. Billowing clouds of dancing ruby sparks quickly ignited the dry brush around, starting a blaze that swept toward the coast.
It also started a backdraft that threatened their vehicles, leading to a hasty withdrawal away up the dirt road toward the highway.
Jeff Thomas took the wheel of their four-by-four and led the way out, nervously watching the orange glow that filled the rear mirrors.
“Slow down, Jefferson,” warned Nanci. “Don’t get too far ahead of the others.”
“Fire’s big and getting bigger,” he replied, leaning forward in his seat with the effort of concentration, jerking the vehicle to the left as a roe deer, spooked by the inferno, darted across under the front wheels.
Nanci was leaning back, relaxed, wiping at a smoke smear on her cheek, showing not the least sign of having been instrumental in the brutal killings of twenty or more human beings less than an hour ago.
“Remember that objects in the mirror may appear smaller and more distant than they really are,” she said.
“Why don’t we leave the others, Nanci?”
She patted him on the knee, allowing her hand to crab its slow way upward, over his thigh. Her hand settled comfortably in his groin, distracting him enough to make him drop back to less than twenty miles per hour.
“Good old loyal Jefferson.” She laughed, squeezing his swelling erection through the jeans. “Never change, do you? I said there was safety in numbers. The McGills got gas, got plenty of firepower and they all seem to know how to use it. We’ll stick with them.” She stopped, letting the silence grow into a long meaningful pause. “For the time being.”
Chapter Five
General John Kennedy Zelig sat behind a large plain desk and leaned his chin in his hands. The calendar showed the date of December 15,2040. The battery-operated digital clock clicked over another minute, changing the time to 16:37. He wondered how much longer the battery would last and made a quick note on a scribble pad of yellow paper to ask someone to check their supplies for spares.
The office was in one of dozens of almost identical Quonset huts that lay beneath camouflage netting in a remote valley away to the snow-shrouded north.
It was a part of the ultrasecret complex that was known by its code name of Aurora.