outburst and didn’t care. Doc was terrified by hearing—he was sure—his own voice
in the blended tones.
“You will be one.”
He didn’t know whether to surrender or fight, whether to hope for the best or
give up hoping.
His mind began to slip into the madness of Moebius, to lose the slender thread
with which he kept a grasp on his sanity.
He was tired of fighting and tired of giving in.
If only something—someone—would make the decision for him.
“We will. If you let us. Join and be one. Without all the links, we cannot
survive.”
Chapter Eighteen
Taking the small population of the ville, training them and waiting for J.B. to
improve was a slow and painful process. It took almost a week, and a day didn’t
fail to pass where they all thought of Doc and what had happened to him.
Abner had some old dilapidated predark books salted away in the rusty metal
chest that lay under his bed. As a token of his trust in them, he let Mildred
and Ryan look at what he kept in this time capsule.
“This is my heritage,” he said proudly, in a tone of voice that suggested his
father had said it to him and his father to him, and what the word heritage
meant had long ago been forgotten.
The papers were fragile, yellowing and crumbling with age and neglect. Mildred
lifted them out with a delicate touch, hardly daring to breathe. Ryan stared
over her shoulder in the dim light of the room, his eye glittering as he
strained to see what relics of the past would be revealed. He had always
relished the chance to catch a part of the past, to read about the old days.
The first thing Mildred retrieved was a Hustler magazine. The pages were stiff
and stained, and she looked at Abner with an arched eyebrow.
“Don’t look at me, missy. They’re all too old for my liking.”
She laid the magazine aside with distaste. The next magazine was an old National
Enquirer for January 1998, with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee on the cover. She
smiled as she remembered the soap-opera lives of the rich and famous. She hoped
that they had perished quickly in skydark, as they would never have been
equipped to survive in the days after. The Enquirer joined the skin magazine on
the bed, and she came to a pile of crumbling paperback books.
“Stephen King—I’ve seen some of his books before,” Ryan said quietly, gently
taking the book with a reverence and gentleness that surprised Mildred.
“That’s his analysis of horror on film and in books,” Mildred remarked. “Danse
Macabre indeed. I wonder what he’d make of all this.”
“Real terror springs from the same well the storyteller draws from,” Ryan
stated, remembering the stories he had heard as a child in Front Royal, and how
they had scared him more than his first taste of battle.
Mildred said nothing. Ryan wasn’t the sort of man to say something so profound
unless he had drawn on something deep. She wanted to leave him with those
memories, whatever they might be.
“This guy was quite some King fan,” she observed, gently lifting out several
paperbacks by the author. There were also some old science-fiction paperbacks
about a character called Simon Rack and some books about the Hell’s Angels.
But the real treasure lay at the bottom—a guidebook to Kansas City, annotated in
a spidery hand, the black ink faded to a purple indentation by age and neglect.
The trunk had a small hole at the bottom, and some damp had started to seep in,
causing the back pages of the book to stick together.
Mildred pried them open as best she could, but soon found that it was at the
front that the real prize lay.
“Well, look at this,” she breathed.
Ryan peered over her shoulder and saw a map of the state. Scrawled in pen was a
roughly circular shape, shaded in with cross-hatching. “We are here” was written
in, with a page number. Mildred delicately turned the pages until she came to
the right one.
It was an in-depth map of the part of the state shaded in on the previous page.