Deep Trek

Chapter Eight

Jim Hilton looked at the list he’d written in a notebook.

“Weapons are all right. I’ve written what everyone’s got, including the ammo situation. We find any nine millimeter, it’d help a lot. But everyone’s satisfied with what they’ve got. It would be good to find a small purse-size gun for Heather.”

“How about Sly?”

“I’m not sure, Steve. You know better than we do about the lad. How would he get on with a blaster? Be able to cope?”

Steve rubbed his eyes. “I don’t really know. I always wanted him to do what other boys did. It was very hard sometimes, but it mostly worked out. He knows he and Heather are the only ones without guns. But he said to me that she was a little girl. Sly sees himself as a man grown. Knows he’s different. Knows he’s not so clever. But he saved my life up in Colorado. Saved both me and Kyle.”

Jim nodded. “Fine with me. It’s your say-so in this, Steve. We manage to find us a couple of little .32s around someplace, then they can have one each.”

Nanci Simms was sitting cross-legged opposite Jim in the circle. All the adults were there, with Sly and Heather Hilton walking together up and down the main street, talking animatedly in the bright morning sunlight.

“Enough talk, Jim,” said the older woman. “We’ve agreed to split up. Best chance that way. Cover some options. Then we can meet up again where we agreed. Muir Woods on December fifth.”

A lot of the extended argument—running for more than two hours—had been about what the word “north” might reasonably mean.

Kyle had drawn up as accurate a map of the old United States as he could, laying in the lines of latitude and longitude.

Everyone agreed that the message about Aurora must mean it was more north than any other direction. So, assuming it wasn’t as far away as Canada—or Alaska, as a better-natured Jeff Thomas pointed out—then it was possible to establish some sensible limited parameters.

Northern California was a strong candidate. Carrie mentioned the potential range of the Chinook sent by Zelig, with fuel capability being a factor.

“Way it went up…like swallowing an implode gren…makes it likely they were carrying some extra fuel aboard with them. Which means that speculations on the location of their home base are… are precisely that. Merely theoretical speculation.”

Nanci’s words torpedoed the Northern-California faction.

Oregon and Washington moved in as the joint favorites.

Jim clapped his hands together at that point, where everyone was getting very enthusiastic. “Look, it’s going to be tough. Much tougher than most of us reckon. There’s Northern Nevada,” he went on, looking at Kyle’s neat map. “Northern Utah. Definitely Idaho. Wyoming and Montana are also possibilities. Not such favorites, but we can’t foreclose on where we go to look. The stakes are too great to make what could be a terminal mistake for all of us.”

Nanci Simms nodded slowly. “Can’t argue with any of that. I have serious doubts about Wyoming and Montana, but I don’t deny the feasibility of either of them. Now, I have the best transport.”

There was a ripple of laughter.

Kyle punched the air. “Kind of an understatement,” he said.

The Mercedes would have looked good down on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles. Out in the bloodied desert it was like a shimmering vision of the lost consumer society.

After the trauma of finding his wife dead and Heather’s sister, Andrea, dying, Jim had made his way out toward Calico in a liberated Corvette that he knew one of his neighbors had put up on chocks in a rear garage. It had brought them within seven miles of their destination before the oil-warning light came on and the engine ground to a juddering and final halt on the hard shoulder.

He, Heather and Carrie had hiked the rest of the way, carrying all their camping gear and provisions on their backs.

Kyle, Steve and Sly hadn’t arrived in the ghost town in much better shape.

The open-back pickup truck had started life about fifteen years ago as a Park Mescalero. But it had changed a lot in those years, acquiring bits of Fords and part of a Subaru and a chunk of a Volvo. They’d found it by sheer luck, not far from Kayenta, abandoned, with a half tank of fuel in it. The registration documents, tucked away behind the front seat, showed that it had been registered eleven months earlier, down in Chinle, in the name Hillerman.

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