“Seems longer. If I look back down the trail, where it bends in that sharp sort of fork, I can still see the dead horses and men.” He moved to the unmarked edge of the trail, staring down. “And I can still spot the broke-up wag and mules. Doesn’t seem very far away from us.”
“Mildred has an old predark saying about how times passes quickly when you’re having a good time. I guess the downside of that’s true, as well.”
THEY DIDN’T SEE another living soul, but they found mute evidence that Joey and his two desperadoes had been working their business a little higher up the trail. The weather was changeable, and as they came around a snakeback turn in the trail, there was a drop in the temperature, the sky grew darker and hailstones began to patter down, bouncing off the rocks.
And there, lying at the side of the trail, was a dead donkey and the bodies of an old man and a girl, barely into her teens. It was only when they drew near enough to peer more closely at the naked girl that they could be certain of her sex.
The man, who, they presumed, was probably her grandfather, lay huddled on his side, a small black hole just in front of his ear, the silver hair scorched by a powder burn. His clothes were in disarray, all of his pockets turned inside-out.
Someone had slit the girl’s throat, and it was obvious from the bruises and congealed blood around her mouth and between her thighs that she had been brutally used before being slaughtered.
Her face was turned to the sky, her eyes wide open. Dean noticed that hailstones were striking into her staring eyes and winced with horror. Looking around, he saw a kerchief that had been ripped from the old man’s pockets and he unfolded it and placed it over the girl’s face.
“We can’t bury them, can we, Dad?” Dean said, answering his own question. “Course, we got no spades. Nothing to dig with.” When he turned away from the bodies, Ryan noticed a new hardness to Dean’s face, as though the experience had aged him.
ONLY A FEW MINUTES of daylight remained when Ryan spotted a small, neat sign, set in concrete, off to the left of the Leadville trail. Nicholas Brody School, Twelve Miles, was all that it said, in rectangular yellow lettering.
Ryan knew that road signs, even before the long winters, had always been fair game for any trigger-happy drunk motoring by. But this sign was virginal and untouched.
“We make it tonight?”
“No way, Dean. This part of the Rockies got grizzly and wolf running wild, as well as cougars. And it used to be a breeding ground for muties, back in my war wag days. No, we’ll find somewhere for the night. Start fresh in the morning. That way we’ll both make a better impression.”
DEAN SLEPT BADLY. He had lain awake for two or three hours, working over in his mind the fact that this was probably the last night he’d spend with his father for at least a year.
There had been a gas station on the same side of the road as the sign for the school. The pumps were long gone, hacked off their squat bases for the scrap-metal content, and the cash office had all its windows smashed. But it still retained its flat concrete roof, stained by nearly a hundred years of Rocky Mountain winters, and all four walls.
As Dean had lain there, aware of his father’s steady breathing at his side, he had caught the eerie sound of a wolf pack on the hunt, their keening rising and falling, ending in the exultant, unmistakable noise of their making a kill.
They sounded as if they were only a mile or so away, but distance was difficult to judge among the snowy peaks.
Finally, sleep had come.
But it was an unquiet, uneasy sleep, disturbed by gibbering phantoms.
The dream that finally jerked the boy awake, sweating, crying out, had him in a schoolroom. Then there were rows of desks but no other pupils, a blackboard covered in arcane squiggles that made no sense at all to him and a teacher.