“Hold on here.” Owsley doubled over, leaning against the bole of a massive, fire-scarred sequoia. Sweat ran down his chest, darkening his shirt. His face was flushed, heightening his poor complexion.
“Must be close, Jim,” said the youngest of the men in the sec patrol. “Don’t want to lose him now.”
“My guess is that he’ll likely be holed up in the burned-out buildings,” another man suggested.
Owsley coughed and spit in the rotting pine needles. “Don’t want to risk overrunning him. Know what his boot heels look like. Brother Waits?”
“Yeah?”
“See that dark patch ahead of us? Looks like there’s some seepage, clear across the track. Go check that the old bastard’s still heading that way.”
The sec man, as skinny as a picket fence, with dreadful sores clustered around his toothless mouth, nodded. He crossed himself and pattered quickly off, pausing and stooping, straightening, then looking again.
“Well?” Owsley yelled. “Trail there?”
“Nope.”
“No?”
“There’s no sign.”
They all went and looked, ranging round, making sure that their prey hadn’t skirted around the damp patch of earth, among the bordering woods. But there was no sign at all of the distinctive marks of the old man’s worn boots.
“Think he’s backtracked on us? Heading toward Hopeville behind us?” one of the men asked, angrily fingering the butt of his revolver.
Owsley could barely contain his anger. “Only other place he could have gone is up the spur. That madwoman with all the cats lives up yonder. Could be he’s gone there.”
But the side trail was hard and stony, not carrying any tracking marks. A six-year-old Mescalero child could have followed Doc, but it was beyond the ability of any of the Children of the Rock.
“WHAT’S THAT?” the toothless man said. “Sounds like a steam engine.”
“Sounds like it’s underground, close by.” Owsley steadied himself against the tree. “Dirt’s shaking like—”
“Earthquake,” the youngest sec man said in a surprisingly calm, conversational tone of voice, as if he were commenting that the coffee was brewed.
“What’s that?” Jak said, leaping agilely from his bed, looking around, his ruby eyes wide-open.
J.B. moved quickly to the doorway. “Feels like a shaker on the way.”
A row of old predark bottles on a shelf began to rattle and jingle, and dust fell from between the hand-hewed rafters of the roof.
On her bed Krysty stirred in her blackness and suddenly opened her eyes.
“Hey, lover,” Ryan said. “Might be a good idea to move out of here.”
“WHAT IN THE NAME of perdition is that roaring noise?” Doc asked.
“My loved ones have been restless for days. I should have known they sensed something in the air.”
Maya Tennant sat in her rocking chair, unperturbed by the quake that shook the land all around her trim little cabin. Her hands were folded in her lap and supported a brace of tabby kittens, which were just a couple of her forty-seven feline companions.
“You get many tremblers up here, ma’am?” Doc asked, sitting on the stoop, his knees drawn up uncomfortably close to his bony chin.
She put her head to one side. “I’ve lived here for…let me see now. Twenty-seven years since my dear husband, Albert, passed away. And we shared twenty excellent years together. So, close on fifty years since I came hear as a teenage gal. In all that time I can count the bad quakes on the fingers of both hands. Perhaps as many as twenty.”
“Is this a bad one?”
The roaring noise had risen to a howling crescendo and was now beginning to fade away. The trees around the hut were stopping their quivering, and the dust was settling once more. And the cats were becoming quiet again.
Maya smiled gently. “If I may say so, Doc, the things that we perceive when we’re younger don’t always look the same when we grow a little older. If you take my meaning.”
“Indeed I do, ma’am, indeed I do.”
She stared out into the wilderness around, and Doc stared at her.
By her own admission Maya had to be closing in around seventy. But she was a remarkably handsome woman. Tall and slender, she moved with the easy grace of someone half her admitted age. She had dropped a kerchief and stooped to pick it up, as limber as a young girl. Her hair was as fine and white as Jak’s, tied back in a neat roll at her nape.