“I lost my wife and one of my twin daughters,” said Jim. “Much like you. Cholera took them.”
“Least you got little Heather as a comfort. I got all those drugs in ready for sickness. Filled the barns with cans of food and drink and supplies of gas for cooking. I figured that we could easy hold out here at least five years on what I raided. All those drugs….”
“Couldn’t save your wife and girl?”
Cole stopped stirring the thick stew and sighed. He rubbed his sleeve across his eyes. “We haven’t had Christmas yet, have we? I figure it’s about the twenty-third.” Jim nodded. “It was May 7. Marie got up early. Smothered little Buffy with her Andromeda Aliens pillow. Then she took down the 12-gauge and blew off the top of her head. Never left me a note or nothing. Sound of the shot woke me and I found…in the end room down the hall. Kept it locked ever since.”
Jim looked around the kitchen, seeing the dirt and the neglect. He also saw a man who was sliding slowly down a hill. He would likely go faster and faster until he plunged into an abyss that would open to receive him and then close over him as though he’d never been.
“Want to come along with us, Cole?” he said.
The man sniffed, nodding at Jim. “Kind of you. You figure I’m lost, don’t you? Sure, you do. I hear myself talking when I’m all alone. No, Jim. Take all the food you can carry. Truly. Any drugs or anything you want. Might come in useful when you get where it is you’re headed. All I’ll be needing, when I’m ready, is the shotgun and one round. That’s all.”
BY TWO in the afternoon, they were ready to leave the isolated house.
Sukie didn’t seem to be any better, but they now had a thermometer to check the progress of the fever, and her temperature had dropped a point and a half since the first injection. The main thing was that she didn’t seem to be any worse.
Jim had tried again to persuade Cole Dalton to ride along with them, but the hermit had refused him, smiling and patting him on the arm.
“Like they say… Thanks but no thanks. I pay my own price to live here, Jim. Price’ll get too high one day, and I’ll just settle the account.” He laughed, but this time the madness wasn’t there. Just a sound of infinite melancholy.
“Take care, then.” The two men shook hands.
“And you, too.”
ON THE WAY OUT, Paul McGill took the lead, with Carrie driving the second tractor. Jim Hilton stood in the rattling horse trailer, looking out of the back window at the lonely figure, beard blowing in the wind, waving once to the disappearing convoy.
“Sad guy,” he said as they crested the rise, heading back toward the highway.
Nanci was sitting on the blankets, surrounded by the boxes of food that Cole had insisted they take. “You know about the locked bedroom?” she said.
“Sure. Told me how his wife suffocated their little girl and then shot herself. I got the impression Cole was keeping it as a kind of shrine.”
“Nope. I picked the lock…. Don’t look like that, Jim. Knowledge is life and ignorance can be death. There were two bodies on the bed, badly decomposed, but you could still see how they’d died. Little girl had her throat slit from ear to ear.”
“He could’ve made a mistake.”
Nanci ignored him. “And the woman had died from a shotgun blast. Fired from about twenty feet away in the middle of the back.”
Jim turned away and watched the snow beginning to fall more heavily.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“It’s the night before Christmas, Dad.”
Jim Hilton blinked his eyes open, rubbing at the sleep that crusted their corners. The horse trailers had no heating at all, but their stout walls and roofs kept most of the cold easterly wind at bay. Everyone in the party had either sleeping bags or blankets. Or both. He sniffed and looked across at his daughter.
Heather was sitting up, cocooned in bedding, only her tousled head protruding from the top. She was grinning at her father. For a moment he glimpsed his dead wife, Lori, in Heather’s bright face, and a pang of loss knifed through his heart.