She came up behind him, putting her arms around him, her breasts pressing insistently into his back. “Look on the bright side, Mac. We got guns and supplies. Folks around here… those still living… know we’re the McGill fortress. Not likely they’ll make a play against us. We sit out the winter here.”
“Then?”
“What you said about Zelig and the messages. Could mean that there’s some sort of place set up somewhere. We could go find them.”
“Today was the day for the meet at Calico.” He took another long slow breath, laying his hands on top of his wife’s. “Wonder how it went, how many got there, what they found?”
Angel laid her head against his back, squeezing him more tightly. “No way we’ll find that out, not for some time. Snow always closed in hard over New England, and there are no ploughs out on the freeways tonight, lover.”
Her hands moved a little lower, from around the muscular walls of his stomach, then lower still.
“Hey,” he whispered.
“Jeanne doesn’t mind it. She and me talked about this.”
Mac could feel himself responding to her touch. He felt a moment of shock at the realization that it had been over two years since he’d last had any sort of sexual relief.
“Better go into the bedroom before I go off half-cocked.”
“Feels like more than half to me, lover. Lot more.”
IT WAS eleven minutes after two o’clock in the morning.
McGill rolled silently from his bed, managing not to disturb his wife, who was sleeping contentedly on her back. Her mouth was half-open, and she was snoring gently.
He washed quickly in the blue-and-white porcelain bowl that had come from England nearly two hundred years ago, wincing at the touch of icy water. The bowl had been carried by his great-great-great grandmother as they fled the oppression of the Highland Clearances to seek their fortunes in a new land across the gray waters of the Atlantic.
On its soft, rounded shape were faded pictures of old flowers with forgotten names.
The night was passing and the frame house was settling, its beams accommodating to the bitter chill of the darkness outside.
Mac stood again and stared across what had once been a shady and pleasant garden. It had now become a cleared firezone with good lines of fire running from side to side and no dead zones to shelter crawling enemies.
Behind him the iron-framed piano still stood against the wall. The moonlight gave enough of a glow for him to be able to read the title of the sheet music that stood open—a song from the middle part of the previous century, called “Daydream Believer.” It had always been one of the favorites of his daughter Pamela.
He resisted the temptation to tap out the melody and hum the words about the reality of life that confronts the homecoming queen.
There was a photograph on top of the piano, and Mac leaned forward to look carefully at it. It had been taken nearly three years ago on a bright summer afternoon, smiling eyes gazing toward the time-set camera.
The clouds feathered away from the edges of the moon, and the room became brighter. Somehow it seemed to make it colder, and Mac, only wearing a cutoff pair of stone-washed jeans, shivered.
He picked up the picture, remembering the moment as he wiped a smear of dust from it.
John had been around seventeen. The stubble of his first beard glowed gold in the photo like an inverted halo.
Paul, a year younger, had his hands folded in his lap. Mac had noticed too late that the boy was giving the finger to the camera.
Pamela had bangs back then, a fringe of hair dangling over the veiled brown eyes. A hint of a smile lifted the corners of her mouth. Was that because she’d started to secretly see Dermot, the local leader of the pack?
He angled the picture, realizing with a shake of the head how like her mother, Jeanne, his oldest daughter was.
The background had puzzled him for a few moments, his memory blurring on him. Now he saw it was a patch of cropped turf near the tumbling waters of the Ottauquechee, not far from White River Junction, up in Vermont.