They decided that it was time to abandon the Phantasm.
Pamela had noticed that the engine had been running hot since the previous afternoon, and it looked as if the bearings were going. Also, the vacuum brakes needed pumping before hitting a serious downgrade, and even then seemed sluggish. Now, confronted by the totally blocked road, it seemed that the end had come for it.
It meant a division of everything between the four-by-four and the jeep towing the fuel tank.
“Hardly worth keeping that going,” said Paul McGill. “By the time we divide up the remaining gas, it’ll about fill the two tanks with a spit and dribble left over.”
Nanci nodded. “Agreed. Mac?”
“Sure. Whatever you think best.”
“Guns can be divided, as well as the food and what clothes we can carry.” The burly teenager shook his head. “Shame. Going to have to dump an awful lot of stuff that Jeanne and Angel packed for us back home.”
“Can’t we trade it, Daddy?” asked Jocelyn. “Mommy said when we were leaving home that if we ran into hard times we could trade some things.”
“Great idea,” said Henderson McGill. “Well done, sweety. Brilliant.” He swung the girl off her feet and gave her a hug and a kiss.
“Ugh.” She pulled a face. “You’re awful bristly.”
He laughed, looking around at the others. “Just ask me who’s got the brightest little girl in the world… what’s left of the world, and I’ll tell you.”
“No.”
The flat word came from Nanci Simms. Mac turned, puzzled. “How’s that?”
“We don’t try and trade what’s left. We burn out the Phantasm with everything inside it as soon as we’re ready to move on. Take what we can first.”
“Why the fuck not?” Jeanne stepped forward, jaw thrust out, hands on hips.
“Come on, lady. Think about it for a moment. We’re not dealing with a garage sale in downtown Tulsa. This is now. We go along in that big RV to the nearest community and offer them the stuff we don’t want. What do they do?”
Jeff answered her question. “They look at us and think about what kind of gear we aren’t selling. And there’s half a dozen of us and maybe fifty or a hundred of them.”
Pamela McGill shrugged. “We got guns.”
“Come on, child.” Nanci whistled through her teeth. “You’ve lived through Earthblood and traveled clear across the land from sea to shining sea. And you don’t seem to me to have learned squat from it.”
Mac put Jocelyn down, face changed. “Surely we could do some sort of trade without running too big a risk, Nanci? Shame to waste it all.”
She ticked off the points on her gloved fingers. “One, it isn’t a question of the degree of risk. We’re talking dead or not dead, Mac. Two, we’ll strip everything we can carry from the RV and jam it in the jeep or our truck. Won’t be much useful waste. Three, time’s passing, so let’s get on with it.”
No one said anything after that, and they set about transferring from the RV what they needed to keep, then set fire to the vehicle.
“Seems there’s always fires these days,” said Jeanne as she drove away from the blazing inferno that had been their home for so many weeks. Mac was at her side, with the two little girls in the rear of the jeep.
Pamela and Paul were with Jeff and Nanci in the four-by-four, leading them back along the same highway to search for a route that would take them around the worst effects of the quake and allow them to pick up another road north.
They had a hard time of it.
It seemed that every single route they found that looked as if it might lead in the general direction they wanted was eventually blocked. The roads ended in a massive fall of thousands of tons of rock and dirt or in a bridge ripped from its foundations or a diverted river that foamed across the original blacktop. Or, in one case, a two-mile stretch of straight highway had been rippled like cooling toffee into hundreds of ridges steep enough to make it impassable.