He looked at her, his pale blue eyes unusually solemn. “That is not what I wish for, Mildred. I beg you not to tell the others. Communicable despair, don’t you know? But most nights I go to bed, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
“I don’t get you, Doc.”
“There is not a night of my life that I don’t wish to be taken in my sleep. So that I can rejoin my beloved Emily and my two little dear ones. But every morning I awake and it is all the same. I am here and now, and they are there and gone.”
“I sometimes feel the same about my folks, Doc. The thought that everyone I ever knew has been dead for at least twenty or thirty years. Most of them would have died in the nukecaust, anyway. But I get over grieving.” She paused. “Most of the time.”
“I try to send my poor prayers across time and space to Emily,” Doc said shakily. “Tell her that the breeze she feels is my breath upon her cheek. Tell her that I am waiting to join her. Not to grieve me gone. But it’s all”
His mind wandered again, and the sentence flowed away in the late-afternoon sunlight.
“THERE IT IS.”
An area of forest had been cleared and they had passed through cultivated fields, some with horses and cattle, one with a large herd of pigs. Then they came upon a massive vegetable garden that had to have covered twenty acres.
And beyond it, set on a rise in the ground alongside a crystal lake, was the school.
“Looks like a fort, Dad,” Dean observed.
“That’s because it is a fort, young fellow,” Ahab said. “Self-contained with its own well and storerooms. We could withstand a siege for a month or more.”
The school looked as if it had originally been a stone farmhouse, then had been extended with some concrete blocks, the whole thing finally covered in fresh adobe. There were slits for rifles and heavy shutters of steel that could be closed quickly and bolted from the inside.
A large flagpole was set in the center of a courtyard out front, with a flag flying from it.
“That’s not the Stars and Bars, is it?” Ryan asked, shading his eye.
“Stars and Stripes, Dad.” Dean grinned. “Even I know that, and I haven’t even started at school yet.”
A few figures worked out in the fields, a couple of them rounding up some goats. But the main building seemed completely deserted.
“Where are the children?” Ryan asked.
“Most at lessons in the classrooms,” Ahab replied. “This time of day.”
“Those are Mr. Brody’s students, as well,” Joel said, pointing with his rifle. “He believes in some active outdoor work to keep the body and mind both healthy.”
“Don’t fancy shoveling goat shit, Dad,” Dean muttered. “Not what I call learning.”
“You do what Mr. Brody tells you to do, son. He knows best about education.”
“He sure does, Mr. Cawdor,” Joel agreed. “And that goes for everyone who works here.”
“But you’ll be seeing all of that for yourselves,” Ahab said.
“Looking forward to that, aren’t we, Dean?” He saw that the boy was staring at the range of buildings. “Aren’t we, Dean?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure are, Dad. Sure are.”
Chapter Eighteen
Ryan had received a decent education as a young boy in the ville of Front Royal, at the instruction of his father, Baron Titus Cawdor.
But the few hours he spent with Dean in the Colorado school of Nicholas Brody stretched his confidence almost to the breaking point. He was constantly worried that one of the teachers would spring some question of history or geography or reckoning at him and reveal his ignorance. Knowing that grammar was a particular weakness of his, as Krysty was ceaselessly pointing out, he took great pains with every sentence, trying to avoid any foolish mistakes, trying to think through what he was going to say before it slipped from his mouth. He examined each word with the suspicion of a timber wolf scenting poisoned bait.
Ahab and Joel left them at the heavily fortified front gate, iron-studded with a vanadium-steel inset for added strength. It would have taken a heap of implode grens or a small nuke to have broken it down.