Pamela joined them in a quilted suit, her breath frosting the air around her mouth. “Cold as charity,” she said. “What’re we going to do about guarding the vehicles?”
Mac bit his lip. There it was again. He should have thought of that, not just been ready to go off into the gentle slopes around them for a fun time on skis. Could be any number of thugs and killers around waiting for the chance to get their hands on the vehicles and the gas. And the guns.
And the women.
“Shit, I’ll stay and keep watch,” he said quickly. “Not that good on skis. Brings out my old knee trouble.”
With only mild argument, the rest of the family left Mac to guard the vehicles while they went skiing. There was a good pair of binoculars in the well-equipped Phantasm. Henderson McGill heated himself a mug of chamomile tea and sat in the driver’s seat, watching through the glasses.
Even at seven, little Jocelyn was already showing signs of becoming an excellent skier, cutting her way down the gentle incline to the right of the blocked road. The rest of the family were all with her, etching patterns in the virgin snow. Mac wound down the driver’s window, smiling at the echoing laughter that came rippling toward him.
There was no sign of any other human life.
Once he spotted a pair of elks, picking their delicate way through the deep carpet of white, a mile or more away across the valley. Not long after that, he was raking the skyline with the binoculars and saw what he figured was a small pack of hunting wolves, moving fast on the trail of the elk.
Far, far away, to the north and east, Mac thought he could pick up a faint smudge of what might have been smoke rising vertically into the calm morning sky.
It was becoming warmer, and he could see a tiny thread of water inching along the side of the highway where the snow was beginning to thaw. If that kept up throughout the rest of the day, it might mean a chance of their getting moving again within forty-eight hours or so.
Angel attracted his attention, waving her arms, the silvered ski poles shimmering in the bright sunlight.
“Hey, dumb ass!”
“What?”
“Want me to spell you on watch?”
Mac shook his head. “No. Thanks, lover, but I don’t mind. I’ll heat up some soup in a half hour or so.”
She was less than a hundred yards away from him, her blond hair tangled by her exertion. Her cheeks were flushed, and Mac thought how beautiful she looked. And remembered again why he’d married her.
“You enjoying it?” he shouted.
“Too easy. You see Sukie giving it a good shot? Hope this Aurora turns out to be somewhere with some decent snow in winter. That’d be real good.”
“Who knows?” he responded, shrugging his shoulders. For a moment it crossed his mind to ask her to slip back into the RV with him just for a little while. The idea of hugging and cuddling Angel seemed a real good one, but the kids would be back soon and he hated being interrupted in lovemaking.
“I’m going there!” she yelled, pointing to the left and the steep, craggy slope.
Mac nodded, half his mind still on the idea of getting Angel into bed with him. “Sure,” he said, mostly to himself. “But you take care.”
She shook her head, pointing to her muffled ears. “Can’t hear you, love.”
“Said to take care,” he called out, louder this time.
Angel waved and set off across the face of the gentle hillside, working her way with effortless skill toward the top of the farther, angled slope.
Mac stood and reached for a catering-size can of soup from one of the capacious storage closets on the RV. He glanced through the ingredients, noting the amazing range of additives and coloring agents and flavoring agents and preserving agents that the soup contained.
With the effects of Earthblood still leaching their way through the planet’s ecostructure, he guessed that it would be a long, long while before any fresh canned food became available. If ever. And when it did, there wasn’t likely to be a string of coded letters and numbers packed into it.