Deep Trek

“Can I go to bed?”

“Sure. They got the fire going good?”

“Yeah.”

“Be with you in a minute.”

The girl waved a casual hand and turned, walking back rather more briskly through the gloaming. Jim Hilton could catch the aromatic smell of burning logs from down the street.

At last he looked behind him, through the broken window, and saw a strange tableau.

Though the light was diminished, he could make out Nanci Simms bending forward a little. One hand was locked in Jeff Thomas’s bushy hair. His face, already badly scarred from the Aquila’s crash, was distorted with pain. The woman was forcing him slowly to his knees, talking to him softly all the time and smiling at him.

Jim stood, silently watching. He saw the ex-journalist groveling in the dirt, head lowered, Nanci pressing him down until his mouth was against the polished black leather of her boots. Kissing and licking them.

It seemed to Jim that Jeff wasn’t really struggling all that hard to get away.

NANCI HAD BROUGHT plenty of food, crammed into the trunk of the damaged Mercedes.

As they ate by the fire, she glanced over at Jim Hilton. “You know Jeff and I had that unfortunate tangle on the way here?”

“Sure.”

“Cops,” interrupted Jeff.

“Let me tell it,” she said quickly. The man leaned back as though she’d slapped him. “Looked like cops. Might have been highway patrol—” she hesitated “—once. Not now. I was thinking they might get some friends and track us up here, Jim.”

“You reckon?”

Far away in the deeps of the diamond-starred night, they all heard a lone coyote howling at the sliver of moon that showed itself behind a wrack of thin, high cloud.

“I think it’s not beyond the realm of possibility,” she said.

Jim thought that she surely sounded like a schoolteacher. Then he thought about Jeff Thomas crawling in the dirt. And about the heavy weaponry she carried.

“Post guards?”

“You’re the man in charge, Jim,” Nanci replied with what he felt was a touch of barely contained sarcasm.

“Then we will.”

The rest of them stayed silent, their attention on the food.

After the meal Kyle Lynch walked over to join him. “Thinking about Mac and Pete?” he asked.

“Yeah. Figure they both must have taken that last train to the coast. Still, guess you never know. Maybe…”

He stopped as both of them heard the unmistakable sound coming toward them from the north and west. Toward Bakersfield or maybe where Fresno had once been.

The unmistakable sound of a helicopter.

Chapter Two

The battery-powered clock on the table by the barred window was showing three minutes to midnight, on November 15.

Henderson McGill had got up to go to the washroom, pausing on his way back to bed to stand in the living room and stare out across the white expanse of the rear garden. Part of the fortification of his second wife’s home, in Mystic, had involved the radical cutting back of the Earthblood-blighted trees and bushes, creating an open area down to the stone wall at the bottom of the large plot.

Three-quarter-inch iron bars had been cemented into the frames of all of the windows on the first floor, preventing any would-be intruder from forcing an entry.

Mac gripped the cold metal, setting his jaw. It was almost impossible for him to come to terms with what had happened… what was happening.

Seven weeks ago he’d still been shrouded in a deep cryosleep, plunging dizzily through the whispering abyss of black space, locked away into the dreamless darkness.

From that first waking moment, it had been like living through an endless nightmare. A barren wilderness road where the markers were corpses.

His knuckles whitened, and he rested his forehead against the cool iron. Closing his eyes, he found himself sinking into a stupid and pointless prayer that all of this would really be only a chimera of the night, that he would open his eyes again and all would be well.

“Can’t sleep, lover?”

Mac sighed, aware of the bitter cold that made his breath fog the glass near his mouth. “Yeah, Angel. Just thinking how well you all did to stay alive in the middle of…” He let go the bars and gestured toward the snow-covered garden. “The middle of all this madness. This death.”

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