Angel took up the story. “Phones worked then. Before the government cut them all off to stop rumors.” She laughed bitterly. “Rumors! Truths is what they were. I called Jeanne up and we had a kind of coded talk. Agreed that she’d run for it, out here, with her three kids. It was the time for action.”
“Got the four-by and packed everything we could inside it. Every scrap of food and tools and clothes. Left Mount Vernon Street at three in the morning. Out of Boston in twenty minutes. Got here before dawn and never regretted it for a moment.”
Mac put down the empty glass. “From everything I’ve seen I’d say you made the right move. The big cities are overloaded with the dead. Highways blocked for miles.”
“Soon as they got here, we held a council of war. Because that’s what it is, Mac.”
“I know it.”
“Paul suggested we go down to Nevada and wait for you to land. But it was too far ahead. So John felt we should do what we could right there and then.” Jeanne grinned. “That was when we formed ourselves into the McGill gang.”
“Hit both gun stores in town. Course, by then, things were getting antsy. Not a spot of green to be seen. Just the sickly pinkish red color. Lot of folks were talking moving and survival.”
“We got there firstest with the mostest.” Angel laughed. “Should’ve seen the look on old Frank Clanton’s face when we all streamed in and took half his stock of weapons.”
“What did you get?” Mac rubbed his still-numbed fingers together.
“You name it we got it,” Jeanne said. “Rifles, scoped and night scoped. Shotguns. Twenty-five handguns and around ten thousand rounds of assorted ammunition for them. Knives and axes. Machine pistols. And one or two other specials.”
Angel continued. “Then we hit the camping store in Hartford. Tents and sleeping bags. Armed to the teeth, we were. Desperadoes. Cooking stoves and every cylinder of gas in the place.”
“Why did you raid the two gun stores so close to home?” Mac was puzzled. “Wasn’t that kind of dangerous to do?”
Angel patted him on the arm. “You were snoring away in space, lover. Society was kind of crumbling, you might say. Neither Clanton nor the police nor nobody was coming up after the mad McGills. Not when they know that we got ourselves more guns than the whole National Guard. By then the law enforcement didn’t give too much of a damn.”
“And Paul suggested it’d be good to let locals know just how prepared we were, so when the going got seriously tough they might leave us alone.”
“That work?” he asked.
The smiles vanished. It was Angel who eventually answered him. “There’s been a fair bit of killing, Mac. Mostly strangers. A few that… Shit, they were friends. Wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. We decided right at the onset that we couldn’t afford to make any exceptions.”
“Not one,” agreed Jeanne. “Christ, but it was hard. Killing folks you’d known all your lives. But we did it.”
“And you’re all alive. Good wood for the winter? Gasoline? Transport? Food?”
John appeared in the doorway, a tall, powerful figure. “The McGill gang raided all over Connecticut. Biggest thing since the James and Younger boys. We worked hard, Dad, turning the house into a fortress. Steel doors and bars and shutters.”
Mac stood and embraced his oldest son. “You’ve done… done fucking wonderful. All of you. I can’t believe you’re all alive.”
“What now, Mac?” asked Angel.
In the next hour or so, all of the children, with the exception of little Sukie, came into the warm room, attracted by the hum of conversation.
Mac went again through all he knew about Operation Tempest, General Zelig and the meeting in Calico in four weeks’ time.
“That’s all I know. I reckon there’s some sort of mystery project, conjured up as a contingency plan, to counter the holocaust after Earthblood. Could be that they need specialists like me and Jim and the others.”
“What happens in Calico, Dad?” asked Pamela.
“No idea.”
“You noticed that there seems to be the first signs of growth coming through?” said Paul. “Winter’s closing in, but by the spring…”