“We’d best get to bed early,” said Jim, rubbing at the back of his neck. A slit in the side panel of the tractor’s cab meant a ferocious, cutting draft slicing in, and it had caught him on the muscle across the shoulders. “I think we should hit the road early. Still got miles to go.”
“Before we rest, Dad?”
“Yeah. Before we rest.”
“What was…was that noise?” Sly Romero leaned forward apprehensively, looking out into the swirling darkness. “Sounded nasty.”
“Dogs,” said Carrie Princip. “We’ve seen packs of them, banded together to hunt. Nothing to worry about, Sly.”
“Apart from the unfortunate fact that they aren’t dogs, Carrie.” Nanci stood up and quickly pulled the door shut. “They were wolves.”
“You don’t get wolves in Oregon, Nanci,” said Jim disbelievingly.
“Didn’t used to, Jim. Remember you’ve been away from the planet for a while. For a strange old while. When food dried up, a lot of animals from zoos were slaughtered. But the animal libbers set a whole lot more free. Particularly up in the high-plains country and out west.”
“Wolves?” said Heather. “Are they dangerous?”
“Of course they are, child! But there were also bears, tigers and all manner of snakes let loose. Even some elephants from San Diego. Naturally most of them were totally unsuited to survive in this ravaged landscape and were dead within a few days. But not all. Oh, goodness, not all.”
ONE OF THE BIZARRE talents that Flagg had communicated to Margaret Tabor was the ability to wake up at any time she’d decided the night before.
At nineteen minutes past four on the morning of December 27, 2040, her eyes, dark as an Aztec sacrificial knife, flicked open. And she sat up.
“Today,” she whispered.
THE RIVER VALLEY was wide at the top, becoming narrow toward its bottom, where it doglegged sharply to the south. A rickety wooden bridge crossed it there, with a flat area at its side that had once been a tennis court for a large house that had stood higher up the slope. The house was now a burned-out ruin. Around the sharp bend, the stream became a little wider and divided into a number of steep-sided ravines.
The fast-flowing water would normally have been so narrow and placid that a healthy man or woman could easily have leapt across it.
But now, swollen with melting snow from higher up the hillside, it was twenty feet wide, brown and frothing around the sharp-toothed boulders. At the head of the valley stood a massive dam of earth and stone, nearly a hundred feet wide and forty feet deep. Before Earthblood culled the population, there would have been a number of officials responsible for monitoring the condition of the dam, opening and closing the floodgates and overflow systems when necessary.
Now there was a thin rope of water trickling over the top of the dam, which was showing signs of deterioration. Fine cracks appeared across some of the concrete supports on the downstream side.
Behind it were confined hundreds of thousands of tons of icy meltwater.
Two roads passed close by, one from the west and one, wider, from the northeast.
Nanci Simms was at the wheel of the first tractor, leading Paul McGill, who was driving the second machine. The road had been winding upward for some time, with the wipers going across the screens every now and again as there were further flurries of wet snow. But the weather was generally reasonable, still very much warmer than it had been.
She touched the brakes, warning the last of Henderson McGill’s sons that she was stopping. Jim Hilton swung out of the back of the trailer, picking his way through the mud.
“What’s up, Nanci?”
“Road goes back south again, down this valley. Old house across there, burned-out. There’s a wooden bridge, but it’s only for pedestrians. Doesn’t look too safe from up here.”
“That stream’s fast,” he shouted above the roaring of the engine. “And the dam looks ready to go at any moment.”
Nanci was leaning out of the side of the cab. “Which way, Jim? If that dam does give, it’ll take everything out of the valley for miles—including us if we’re on the highway. If we go back, then we waste time.”