He was walking steadily toward the south, intent on making some quality distance in the coolness before fatigue forced him to stop and rest for the remainder of the night.
Flagging energy had already made him drink a large part of the gallon of water that he’d taken from the expired Mercedes. Two thirds of his dried meat had also been nibbled away as he trudged along the shoulder of the highway.
There had only been a couple of signs of life on the road.
Once a small roe deer had picked its delicate way across the blacktop immediately in front of him, its hooves pecking at the pavement. By the time Jeff had registered what it was, the moment for shooting it had passed.
The second time it was a pair of coyotes, tails slung between their legs, padding alongside him for a quarter mile, muzzles turning toward him as though they were weighing the lone man up as a
potential meal. When he finally stopped and unholstered the big Smith & Wesson .45, they both disappeared silently into the wilderness, leaving him on his own again.
THE BRACKISH WATER had tasted to Nanci like the finest of chilled Zinfandels, served in a crystal goblet.
Then Brother Edward had held the flickering candle while his sister, Sister Stephanie, had managed to sew up the small but deep wound in Nanci’s leg.
“You have been most brave, dear lady,” he said to her.
Edward was in his early fifties, tall and stooped, with rimless glasses and a long beard heavily flecked with silver. His sister was a little younger, with a prominent Adam’s apple and a nervous habit of swallowing two or three times in every sentence.
They both wore gray jeans, shirts and parkas, with backpacks. As far as Nanci could make out, neither of them was carrying any sort of weapon.
“We spread the word of the Lord throughout these blighted lands,” explained the brother as Stephanie finished binding the stitched wound. Nanci had noticed that he had carefully averted his eyes from her thighs and the pale V of her panties during the operation.
“Now that we have saved your life, Sister Nanci, you are obligated to aid us in our mission.” Stephanie rubbed her long-fingered hands together as though something vaguely sticky had come into contact with them.
“What?”
The woman smiled with a wonderfully forgiving Christian charity that Nanci thought made her look like a simpering idiot.
“Yes, of course. Jesus has saved you, so you now become His handmaiden, ready to serve joyfully in apostolic work.”
Nanci shifted, aware of the butt of the handgun tucked safely out of sight in the small of her back. “I’m not certain that I wish to devote myself to the Lord. Though I’m awfully grateful to you for your assistance. It was really most Christian of you to help me.”
The brother and sister looked at each other. A segment of moon had broken through the banks of heavy cloud, and Nanci could now see them more clearly.
She noted the peculiarly goatlike shape of both heads, with tapering foreheads and prominent chins, and deep-set eyes that seemed to ooze a fervent spiritual love.
“If you refuse,” said Brother Edward, “then we shall be forced, with sadness and compassion and
extreme reluctance, to blow your fucking head clean off the top of your blaspheming spine.”
“With what? The word of God comes in .38-caliber, does it, now?”
Sister Stephanie stooped over her rucksack and straightened, holding a sawed-down scattergun. “Comes in 16-gauge, does the utterance of the Almighty, you sacrilegious slut.”
“KEEP THEM SPREAD, and keep them still.” The voice had a slow, menacing drawl to it, like a redneck lawman’s from rural Mississippi.
Jeff had never seen the patrol. Fatigue had closed down his senses, though he’d never seen himself as much of a backwoods survivalist. His previous idea of a hard time had been getting stuck with the table by the rest rooms at Tante Elizabeth’s exclusive eatery in San Francisco.
There’d been a blinding light from a clump of dead saguaros, and then the quiet, deathly voice telling him what to do. Assume the position, flat on the cold tarmac, arms and legs wide, like a stranded starfish on a flat beach.