When they had stopped the second night to put up their little tents in a stand of dead aspens near a stream, Pete suddenly sat down, legs straight out in front of him.
“Ride her stone blind,” he’d said in a flat voice. “Shit, I’ve got a hell of a headache, Janey.”
Mac had knelt by him, patted him on the shoulder. “You been drinking enough, Pete?”
The eyes that had turned toward him lacked any spark, incurious as a dead moccasin snake.
“Drinking?”
“Here, have a few sips of this.” Mac had held the bottle to his friend’s lips, holding it firmly to steady it as some spilled over the front of the bleached denim shirt.
Ten minutes later the second pilot of the Aquila had recovered.
“Stupid,” he’d said, wiping his dry mouth with his sleeve. “Once went hiking in the Grand Canyon and did the same damn thing. Too little to drink. Hot and dry and altitude and not even a baseball cap on. Thought I was going to die. Janey was real worried. She figured she’d have to go back up the trail and bring in the rangers with a chopper.”
“What happened, Pete? How’d you get yourself out of it?”
“Decided I’d be embarrassed to be airlifted. We were only about a third of the way down to the Colorado River. I tried doing fifty paces, then I sat and rested for a couple of minutes. Took a long while, but we made it.”
“You still miss her, Pete, don’t you? How long’s it been?”
“Since Janey got murdered?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t count it in days or weeks, months or years.”
“What, then?”
Pete had shaken his head, eyes brimming with unshed tears. “Count it in evenings together lost. Afternoon hikes together, morning laughter together. And memories together, Mac. Lost, lost, lost. All of it lost.”
THE TWO MOTORBIKES had been in a locked garage, behind the main street of a small, dusty town in eastern Nevada. It wasn’t on the highway map, and there wasn’t a single living soul there to tell them what it had once been called.
They found half a dozen dead, most of them looking as if they’d gone of natural causes. Like starvation.
Pete and Mac were already beginning to get used to the sight of death—and its smell.
A dry, unique odour. A mix of sweet and sour. Mac said it reminded him of brackish water standing in an abandoned root cellar.
The wind had been rising, early evening, as the two astronauts walked slowly along the main drag, past a couple of stores with broken windows. A screen door was blowing backward and forward at the Silver Garter Bar.
Pete trudged over and peered into the darkness. “Mess of broken bottles is all,” he shouted back to Mac.
In a porch they came across a small pile of single-sheet newspapers, dateless, in large, smudged type, as if they’d been produced in a hurry, with a child’s printing outfit.
Mac unfolded the top one, aware of the strange, brittle feel to it, suggesting it had been wet and dry a dozen times in the past few months.
Citizens! Panic is death. Martial law will be introduced in the next seven days unless the foolish exodus of refugees from all centers of population ceases. Government scientists are nearing success in countering the scourge of Earthblood, as the plant sickness is called. Once crops begin to grow again, all will be well. So, stay home and keep calm. Trust the government like you trust yourself. Relief food supplies will reach you any day now. Stay home and stay calm.
“Guess it was the end of the line by the time they tried this,” Mac said. “Looks like they never even got to distribute these sheets.”
“There’s a stable down this alley.” Pete led the way, while Mac dropped the paper he’d been reading. It drifted from side to side on the street, finally whirling away from the nameless township out into the pink-smeared desert wasteland beyond.
He followed on, easing the padded straps on the heavy backpack. The only consolation he could find was that it was getting slowly lighter as they worked through the hi-concentrate packaged foods from the space center.