No sign of any survivors.
THE PLAN had been Flagg’s.
He’d originated it, perceiving the ramifications of the Earthblood virus long before anyone else at his level of power. Indeed, the new chief of the Hunters of the Sun had sometimes wondered whether Flagg might not have had something to do with the original release of the lethal plant cancer. He had certainly been lightning quick off the mark.
And now he was gone. Dying, with the greatest of ironies, of food poisoning.
The idea of men and women of authority combining to pick up the reins of the shattered wagon that had once been the United States had been Flagg’s. He’d sounded them out and drawn them in.
Everything was going so well, even better than the projections of the computer program that he had drawn up as a blueprint of what would happen and how they might assume absolute control.
Everything was rolling along, except for Zelig.
If only they could find him and purge his hidden nest. There were other people seeking his Aurora.
“Stupid pretentious name,” grunted the chief.
Already they had one, and he would be interviewed by the chief the following day, on December 6. He might tell them something or help lead them in the right direction. It was north. They already knew that.
The chief looked forward to interrogating this journalist. Jeff Thomas.
She always liked interrogating men.
IT WAS MOVING on to dusk in Muir Woods, with a light covering of snow lying wetly around the parked van.
They’d had a meal of dried meat, with a tin of loganberries, washed down with fresh spring water. The last of the bread had been finished the day before. Food was down to subsistence level.
“Still snowing,” said Heather, her voice subdued after the disappointment of the long, empty day.
“Yeah. Dark, as well.”
“Seems like nobody’s coming, doesn’t it? Nobody at all.”
“Looks that way, love.” Jim Hilton felt close to despair. “Yeah, it looks that way.”
PART II
Chapter Twenty-Two
The snow had stopped falling, leaving the forest around them layered in deep, silent white.
The dry dead branches crackled and popped, sending fountains of golden sparks soaring up into the night sky between the towering sequoias of Muir Woods. The brace of steelhead trout bubbled and hissed on the makeshift spit that Jim Hilton had constructed over the glowing fire, and the scent of their cooking filled the nostrils of the man and his eleven-year-old daughter.
“Never had turkey and sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, Dad.”
“Probably won’t have any for Christmas, either. Less than three weeks away now.”
She nodded, her blue-gray eyes solemn. “Wonder if we’ll meet up with any of the others by then.”
It was a thought that had been filling every waking hour for Jim Hilton for the past week, ever since the moment that they’d parted company in the Sweetwater Mountains with the other survivors from his crew.
Heather got up to go and scavenge for more wood for the bright-flamed fire, leaving Jim with his memories of the past ten insane weeks. The events, the deaths, the partings, and those of the crew who were missing, swirled around in his head like a bizarre surrealistic dream, making him want to pinch his arm to see if he were really there.
“Nearly made it,” he said, his whispered words barely audible over the bubbling of the cooking fish.
When he heard footsteps in the blackness, he looked around, his hand dropping from a combat reflex to the butt of the six-shot Ruger Blackhawk Hunter .44 at his hip, then he shuddered when he glimpsed his daughter. This was how far he’d come with the sweep of events—an unquestioning readiness to shoot and kill, without any thought or weighing of right and wrong.
“It’s only me, Dad.”
“Made me jump, kitten.”
“Dad!” she said reproachfully.
“Sorry, love. Keep forgetting you don’t like your old pet-name now.”
The slender girl knelt and methodically stacked the armful of wood at the edge of the fire to help dry it out. She was already learning vital techniques of survival in this desolate new world. Jim caught a flicker of his dead wife in his daughter’s face, in the way she frowned in concentration. His wife, Lori, buried in the garden of their home below the huge Hollywood sign, his other daughter, Andrea, twin to Heather, lying in the damp earth alongside her.