The black teenager had gone down like a steer under the poleax, falling stiff and still. The first one was still kicking and twitching, eyes wide, his feet moving as though he were trying to push himself into the earth.
The last of them looked at Jim. “Please, mister,” he said. “Listen to me, mister.”
“I don’t have the time, son. You’d have killed us. You too shall die.”
He leveled the revolver and squeezed the trigger a fourth time, blowing the top of the youth’s head into shards of splintered bone and a pulp of blood-flecked brains.
Carrie was getting shakily to her feet, face white as parchment as she looked at the three corpses. They were all still, except for the leader’s fingers, which were scratching in the mud as residual nerve impulses continued to operate.
Moments later even that finally stopped.
“You too shall die,” she said. “By God, Jim, you sounded like some Old Testament avenging angel. Holding a smoking gun instead of a flaming sword.”
Jim was reloading the Ruger as she spoke. “Yeah, guess I did,” he replied.
He was relieved that she didn’t ask him if it had really been necessary to kill all three of their attackers.
They left the corpses where they lay, but before moving on Jim searched them and examined the three dropped guns.
One was a cheap and corroded little automatic of anonymous make. Now that he could see them more clearly, Jim found the other two weapons weren’t quite what he’d thought. The black teenager had been carrying an old Lorcin .25. Designed as a purse gun for women, it had been immensely popular toward the end of the twentieth century. Holding six rounds of .25-caliber ammunition, with a snub two-inch barrel, it had a smooth white stock and a satin chrome finish.
Carrie took it off him, weighing it in her hand. “Can I have this?”
“Nobody here to stop you. But you might do better with this Smith & Wesson revolver.”
It was the 2060 Model, very similar to the old 650, which in turn was close to the Model 34 of nearly a hundred years earlier.
The weapon was a six-shot .22-caliber revolver with a four-inch barrel and a rounded butt, chromed steel, in nice condition. Twenty spare rounds for it were tucked into one of the pockets of the boy’s plaid jacket.
“I like this better,” she said, aiming at the dead trees around with the little Lorcin. “It’s sort of neater.”
“No,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Twenty-five-caliber ammunition isn’t all that common. Any bullets are going to be like pure gold these days. So, stick to a safer caliber like this Smith & Wesson .22.”
“Can I have them both?”
Jim shook his head. “Take the revolver, Carrie, and get accustomed to it. Way things are looking, you might need to use it.”
THE BUS HAD BEEN SITTING on a side road, its doors open, the key in the ignition.
Carrie had spotted the bright splash of ocher among the crimson foliage of a clump of dead sycamores.
They walked up a rutted trail, seeing the vehicle in a clearing. There was an elderly man sitting stooped by a narrow, trickling stream. As Jim and Carrie drew closer they saw that he was almost unbelievably thin and frail.
He looked up when they were within a dozen feet of him.
“Howdy, there,” he said in a voice that struggled to get above a whisper.
“Hi.” Jim couldn’t think of anything sensible to say. From closer up it was obvious that the old man was close to death. The bones of his face looked as if they were ready to cut through the tight, blistered skin. The eyes had sunk back into the skull, and the toothless mouth sagged open. He was wearing a dark suit with a vest, a tie loosely knotted around the scraggy wattles of his throat.
“Come far?”
Carrie answered. “Nevada. Walked it.”
“Good way.”
“This your bus?” asked Jim Hilton.
“Name’s Horace Korchik. Used to be the driver of old Betsy here. Came the troubles and I got her out the garage. Hid her. Me and the wife was going to use her to get out into the country. Come from Glendale. Wife died the day before we was leaving. Used to come picnic here in our younger days. Drove Betsy up with my wife lyin’ snug on the back seat. Buried her about a week ago.” His eyes narrowed. “Could be longer. Lost track of… Since then I just been waiting out here. Waiting to go join her.”