She turned on her heel and started to move away, along the ridge, heading north.
The others all stood still in the ankle-deep snow, staring after her.
Jim broke the shocked silence. “Nanci?”
She answered him over her shoulder, not even bothering to check her stride. “What?”
“Where are you going?”
“North.”
“Why?”
This time she ignored him, walking steadily away, starting to dip down along the coastal side of the slope.
Jeff raised his voice. “Nanci! Where the fuck are you going? What’s happening?”
She stopped and turned slowly around. She looked straight into the face of the ex-reporter, holding his gaze until he slowly dropped his eyes.
“Why Zelig wants you people defeats me. You have the collective brain of a barn door. If you all worked together for a few days, then I imagine that you might just be capable of changing a spent light bulb.”
“I thought we were going to try and get us a tractor, Nanci?” said Paul McGill, puzzled.
“Yes,” she allowed, not bothering to conceal her exasperation. She spoke slowly and very clearly, as though she were dealing with a half-wit. “Likely they have some useful tractors down in that Mannheim spread. But they have a fortress. You following me? Good. We go down and when we’re about fifty yards away from the building they’ll open up with the Lord knows how much firepower. Half a picosecond and we’d all get to be dead. Terrific. So we go on north until we find another spread that won’t prove an impossible nut for us to crack.”
She swung off again, leaving a clear trail through the snow. The rest of them were silent for a few moments, the sniffling of Sukie McGill the only sound.
“I reckon…” began Jeff Thomas, stamping his boots like a petulant child. Then there was a tiny whoomping noise, and a small spray of powdery snow erupted a few yards below him, followed by a little trail of gray smoke from one of the fireports down in the wall of the farmhouse. Then came the crack of the rifle.
“That’s to warn you!” shouted Nanci. “Tell you that they could probably hit you at that range, standing around like a crowd of sun-shocked geese.”
This time they didn’t need to think about it. They scurried along in a raggedy line after Nanci’s upright figure. She never once looked behind to see whether or not anyone was following her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Yes.”
“Got the same sort of defenses that the Mannheim place had back yonder,” said Henderson McGill.
Nanci glanced at him. “You got real good eyes and ears and a halfway decent brain, Mac. How come you so rarely bother to use any of them?”
“What am I missing?”
The woman turned to the others, who were standing in a ragged circle at the center of a grove of dead, brittle sycamores above a large spread that lay below them like a child’s construction toy. “Any of you found a use for your mind other than stopping you falling over every time you take a step forward?”
Everyone suddenly found a fascination in their own snow-caked feet, looking away from her startlingly pale eyes. Paul fumbled with the straps on the makeshift backpack that held his little sister, Sukie. She seemed to be recovering already from the high temperature and sniffling cold.
Heather Hilton was the only one who answered Nanci. “I don’t hear a generator going,” she said.
“Excellent. Take a team point, child. Collect fifty of them, and you get a beautifully illustrated edition of the gospels for children, meaningfully edited.” She shook her head at the others. “Really, people! We’re around three hundred and fifty yards from that farm. And, like little Heather notices, there’s no sound of a generator. There’s the outward show of power and defense, just like before. But nothing much beside. No smoke from a chimney. No footmarks between the main house and the outbuildings. Just plenty of nothing….” She paused. “And you better believe that nothing’s plenty for me.”
Despite her optimism, Nanci Simms wasn’t the kind of woman who took pointless chances.
“Jim and Mac and Carrie with me. Paul, stay here and keep a good lookout. All the way around, and don’t forget the skies. Keep watching the skies, son.”