“Left?”
“I bury her in the garden. Dig deep, Captain, so coyotes don’t get her. Put big stones on top. Under magnolia. Think it might live again one day.”
Tears were coursing over the stubble on Jim Hilton’s cheeks as he held his daughter’s hand in his.
“Where’s Heather?” he whispered hoarsely.
“She gone only a couple days.”
“You buried her, too, Ramon? By Christ, but you been busy for the family.”
“No, not bury Miss Heather, Captain. She don’t got the cholera. She couldn’t stand it once her sister slipped into the long sleeping. She knew. Cared for Mrs. Hilton. Knew what was happening. Asked me to take care. She gone.”
“Left. Where did she go?”
He felt the shrug rather than saw it. All Jim could see was the tiny, guttering candle flame, and all he could feel was his daughter’s weightless hand resting in his.
The flame went out, and Ramon left him alone in the cold, velvet dark. Once he thought Carrie might have come in and sat with him.
Andrea Hilton died just after dawn, as the light shone through gaps in the drapes. At the very last he thought he might have felt a tiny response. A squeeze of her fingers against his own.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It seemed as if the whole of the Catskills had been wiped away in one catastrophic fire. A flaming holocaust that had swept clear across the millions of acres of dead and dying trees, taking away everything and everyone in its path.
Mac sat the saddle of the antique Norton motorbike, looking eastward, away toward the state line with Connecticut.
“Sixty miles or so, from the map. And then around another hundred to Mystic.”
Pete Turner swung his legs over and off the pillion seat, stretching. “We’ve only got enough gas for another hour… hour and a half. Then we walk. Don’t figure we’ll get any gas around here.”
The Kawasaki had finally given up the ghost the previous day, October 15.
On the way northward from near Memphis, the two friends had been lucky enough to find two small hoards of gasoline, both times in solitary houses set well back off side roads.
They’d increasingly discovered that the interstates and main highways were either blocked by abandoned vehicles or were the territory of roaming gangs of armed men.
The farther north and east they got, the worse the situation became.
When they’d set off from Stevenson base, three interminable weeks ago, Henderson McGill’s intention had been to take the straightest, fastest route available. Stick to the interstates to New York, then up to Boston.
He’d quickly begun to have second thoughts.
In a single morning, not far from Lexington, Kentucky, they’d come under hostile fire from two of the killing gangs. The first time it was a ragged salvo from inaccurate hunting rifles. The second time it was a lethal spray of concentrated lead from three or more M-18s on full auto.
Mac and Pete had skidded around in a cloud of dust, taking to the shoulder of the road, the spray of dirt concealing them from any further bullets while they powered away on full revs.
Pete swore that the men who’d opened fire had all been wearing military uniforms.
Since then it had been side roads and extreme caution all the way.
They’d seen enough of the mountains of corpses on the outskirts of some of the small Southern cities to be able to make a horrified guess at what a metropolis like New York must resemble.
“Charnel house. Only people going to be alive in the big centers of population are ghouls and the clinically insane,” Mac had said.
“You not going to Boston?”
“No. Not now.”
“Mystic first stop?”
Mac had sighed, leaning back against the bole of a fallen tree, staring into the flames of the small fire they’d risked lighting. The temperature had dropped alarmingly as they moved north, with frost on the outside of the tents.
“Jeanne and the three oldest will have tried to get out before the going got too tough. I know them. And they’d have headed for Mystic to hole up with Angel and the four littlies.”