The hammer clicked on the Winchester.
Mac felt a hand touch his arm, and he jumped, barely resisting the temptation to smash the butt of the gun into his daughter’s face.
“Pamela?” he said, voice hoarse and strained, bringing the realization that he’d been yelling at the top of his voice since the first bomb came crashing into the party.
“It’s over, Dad.”
“You can put the gun down now, Jim. Down. It’s over.”
A new voice, Angel, standing in the doorway to the living room. Smoke was wreathing out into the bitter cold of the hall. Mac noticed that his wife was trembling, holding up her hands as though she was surrendering to some unseen enemy. Great blisters across her palms and fingers were leaking watery threads of crimson.
“John’s dead,” said Mac, nodding. He dropped the empty Winchester into the dark puddle around his feet. “And Jack?”
Jeanne was at his side, her arm around his shoulders. “Swallowed fire. Inhaled the flames. The rest of us are… oh God, we’re here.”
Mac did a quick recon of the house and the yard. Four of the corpses that lay ragged around the house were recognizable as local people. Two were the Baptist minister and his wife.
The rest were strangers.
THE DAY AFTER the burials of John and his younger brother, the McGills held a family council.
“Tainted with too much death,” said Mac. “Thought this would be a safe place. We took our precautions, and it wasn’t enough.”
“We’ve done the repairs. Doors and windows are safe again, Dad.”
He looked at Paul, now the oldest of his four children. “Safe for now. Sure. But what about the next time?”
“Should we try and wait out the winter? Move at the first real thaw?”
Angel’s hands were wrapped in strips of clean linen and bound with plaster. Her face was pale, the tangled blond hair scraped away from her eyes.
Henderson McGill shook his head slowly. “No. They’ve tried twice. Taken hits. But they know we’re weaker. Before the end of the snows, they’ll get desperate and that could be it. We’ll move out at dawn, day after tomorrow. Everyone agree?”
Nobody moved or spoke. He laughed quietly. “Well, nobody disagrees. Day after tomorrow, then. At dawn.”
Chapter Seventeen
“North of Bakersfield.”
“That Pine Mountain to the east?”
Jim Hilton squinted at the rising sun. “Yeah, guess so.”
“What’s that?” asked Sly, pointing north. “Like stars shining.”
“Sun off glass,” said his father. “A lot of it, too.”
They were moving away from Bakersfield, toward Porterville, up on Highway 65, a deserted two-lane blacktop.
Carrie Princip appeared at the side of their pickup. They’d stopped near a narrow stream running between what would once have been banks of delicate feathery tamarisk and taller aspen. Now it was all ruby-stained husks. But among them Jim had noticed the first springing signs of a fresh, hopeful green.
The water had provided them all with drinking and washing. Carrie’s long blond hair hung to her shoulders, glistening and damp. She smiled at Jim and he responded with a grin, the shared knowledge arching between them. The previous night they’d made love….
JIM HAD BEEN TRYING to raise Joe Sirak with the small radio, but he picked up only the ominous soft hissing of uninterrupted static.
Finally he switched the set off and laid it on his blanket.
“Think he’s all right?” asked Steve. “Could be lots of reasons he’s not answering.”
“Sure.” He paused. “Lots of reasons.”
With their evening meal over and done with, they looked to bedding down for the night.
Sly and Heather slept in the bed of the truck, safe from any creeping or crawling things. It had been a long and heavy day, and the children both dropped off quickly.
Steve chose to lay out his bedroll underneath the pickup, wanting to remain close to his son. They’d already found out that Sly wasn’t at his best if he woke suddenly and found himself a stranger in the strangest of lands.
Kyle elected to sleep along the front seat, pushing the steering wheel up out of his way. He coiled his slender length up in the cramped space, grinning at Jim as he closed the door.