“Yeah, guess so. And we got this sawed-off shotgun. It’s a 12-gauge, it says. There isn’t any maker’s name on it. Been filed off. But there’s six rounds for it.”
The rifle was a V Model Mannlicher, bolt-action, chambered for the .357 Magnum bullet with an 8-round magazine and a scope sight.
The dead man also had a knife at his belt, a honed bowie with a sixteen-inch blade. Steve took that, as well as the shotgun.
Kyle tucked the automatic into his belt and slung the Mannlicher over his shoulder.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They made good time, and by October 10 they’d managed to get very close to Aspen.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jim put his foot slowly down on the brake, easing the school bus to a halt. He put the gearshift into neutral and pulled up on the hand brake, leaned on the wheel and stared out of the front windshield.
Carrie Princip had been dozing on the back seat and she came stumbling sleepily forward. “What is it, Jim?”
He simply pointed.
She closed her eyes and turned away, putting her hand over her mouth. Moved a few seats toward the rear of the school bus and sat down, head bowed.
There was a long rope strung clear across the blacktop, between two dead oak trees. Live oaks, noticed Jim, recognizing the irony of their name in this green-turned-red world.
Five corpses dangled from the rope, hung by the necks. The cable had stretched in the weather, and the middle three had their feet dragging on the surface of the road. The outside pair were just off the ground, bobbing and dancing in the light wind like hideous marionettes.
Like virtually all of the dead that Jim and Carrie had seen in their eight days away from Stevenson, these looked to have been dead for weeks, maybe even for months.
The eyes had gone, and the thin strands of windblown hair straggled off leathery skulls. None of the five wore even the most ragged remnants of clothing. Birds had done their work so well that it wasn’t even possible to tell the sex of any of the bodies.
But there was a clue as to how and why they’d all died.
A broken door leaned up against the cracked trunk of one of the trees, with a message painted, surprisingly neatly, upon it: “They brought sickness so they were executed legally.”
“Wonder what ‘legally’ means?” said Jim Hilton. “Sounds like we’ve encountered the first of some vigilante justice, Carrie.”
“That old man Horace mentioned he’d heard they had some disease up this way, didn’t he? Cholera was one.”
“Yeah. We’re not far from my home now. An hour or so if the roads are clear.”
They’d made poor time in the bus, struggling on the narrow, tight bends, having to stop at frequent intervals to clear fallen trees and bushes off the highways.
Now evening was approaching again, with a fire-bright sun setting away beyond the distant Pacific Ocean.
A couple of miles back they’d crested a rise and glimpsed the water, glistening like a sheet of beaten silver. It was also possible to see a corner of the fabulous city of the angels, gridded out far below them.
Jim Hilton had stopped and climbed out, shading his eyes with his hand.
“My God, I’ve never seen the air so clear. I guess it’s because there’s no industry and no vehicle exhaust emissions. Like looking down through the finest diamond.”
Now the western sky was tinted purple with strands of darker clouds.
“You going to cut the rope?”
He shook his head. “No. Reckon old Betsy can push her way through.”
“I don’t think I want to watch this,” Carrie said. “But I guess you’re right. Could just be part of a trick to get us outside.”
He engaged first gear and let the yellow bus roll slowly forward until it touched the central trio of corpses.
He’d expected that the rope would probably have rotted away and would have snapped easily. But it tautened and held, stretched like a bowstring, against the power of the bus.
Two of the bodies were hoisted, their skeletal limbs pressed snugly to the safety glass, skulls rotating as though they were trying to find a way into the driver’s cab.