Deep Trek

Away to his right the sun was beginning to set, its orange fire surrounded by banks of ominous dark purple clouds.

NANCI LOOKED at the 9 mm Heckler & Koch automatic that rested across her lap. It had been an additional struggle to pick it up, but now she had the means of choosing the manner and time of her own passing.

Twice in the past hour she’d suffered agonizing cramps. A barbed band of white pain had tightened around her stomach, making her cry out in shock, her fingers slipping from their hold on the deep wound in her thigh.

Nanci knew enough about her own body to be certain that she was losing the struggle. Losing it more quickly than she’d hoped, with the specter of dehydration cracking her tongue and blurring her vision.

The precious drops of water in the canteen were eked out with the certain knowledge that the next morning would see the end of the line.

With evening closing in, Nanci had forced herself to scrabble painfully from the heap of rocks toward the corpses.

There were few things that Nanci Simms wasn’t prepared to do, but even she winced with repugnance at applying her teeth to the throat of the first of the dead men. She bit and chewed at the ragged flesh, until salt blood came stickily between her lips. She nearly puked, but fought for control.

Sucking avidly at the wound.

JEFF WALKED stolidly south.

He’d taken care to fill a pack with some dried meat and a gallon of drinking water. The Port Royale hung from his shoulders, with extra ammo in the rucksack. His Smith & Wesson 4506 with the five-inch barrel and wraparound Delrin stocks was on his right hip. A supalite sleeping bag was strapped to the top of the pack. It was growing dark, and colder.

BY DAWN, things had changed drastically for both Jeff Thomas and Nanci Simms.

Things were very different.

Yet they were oddly very much the same.

Chapter Sixteen

“Happy birthday, dear Pamela, happy birthday to you.”

Henderson McGill clapped his hands together, face flushed with an amiable mixture of excitement and draft beer from the cellar. “Come on, come on. How ’bout three cheers for the birthday girl?”

His oldest son, John, pounded on the oak refectory table. “Hear, hear, Dad! Three cheers now for the best little sister in the whole of the goddamn brave new world!”

The entire family joined together, celebrating the eighteenth birthday of Pamela McGill, third of the six surviving children.

It was early evening, mid November, up in Connecticut. A steady fall of snow had begun the previous night and had laid down a blanket of nearly six unbroken inches. Mac had been out with his two oldest sons around noon, all well armed, checking that nobody had been sneaking around their land. But the perfect whiteness was unsullied.

Jack, nearly seven, was sitting on the massive Victorian oak sideboard, drumming his heels together while he joined in the cheers for his sister. As he waved his arms around, the boy very nearly dislodged the print of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks that hung on the wall. His mother, Angel, waved a finger in stern warning.

Despite the difficulties of their isolation, caused by Earthblood, everyone had managed to find a present for Pamela.

Jeanne, her mother, had given her a small platinum ring, set with a tiger’s-eye stone, that had belonged to her own mother. Angel had rummaged in her possessions for a cameo brooch on a thin chain of golden links that had been a wedding present ten years ago from Mac’s mother.

John had carved a tiny goat from a lopped piece of apple wood.

Paul gave Pamela a somber black Apache tear, polished until it gleamed, set in a small box of maple with a glass top.

Jocelyn, Jack and Sukie had worked together, helped by their mother, to produce a collage picture, drawing on the shoe boxes of family photographs that lay in the closet beneath the stairs.

Mac had given a lot of thought to what he could give his daughter. Finally he settled on a fine illustrated edition of the poetry of Robert Frost, which had been a gift to him on his own eighteenth birthday from his old English teacher, Carla Wright. It was something that he’d always treasured.

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