BEFORE GOING ON WATCH, Ryan found himself slipping into a dream. In the background was the rhythmic beating of a slack-skinned drum, accompanied by chanting. But where he was sitting was pitchy dark, the high-walled canyons of the Colorado Plateau. A single flute was piping, above and behind him, slow and mournful.
His nostrils caught the elusive scent of wood smoke, far away, below and to the north, where he knew a narrow river trickled its slow way through the red rocks. There was a faint rustle of movement, farther along the ledge where he squatted and waited.
“Hey, Brother Eagle,” he whispered, hearing the harsh scratch of claws on stone.
The sound wasn’t repeated.
Without any change in his sensations, Ryan realized he now lay in soft, sun-warmed earth, in a vast prairie of swelling corn. He heard the angry buzzing of a gas engine, not far away, and he knew instinctively that it was hunting him. But if he kept very still, then he might be safe.
A baby rabbit limped trembling toward him, ears flattened along its skull, eyes wide and staring. Each movement brought a tiny puff of orange dust from beneath its paws.
“Dad? Where are you?”
The voice was Dean’s, overlaid with desperation and terror, ragged and cracking. Ryan wanted to reply to his son, stand and look for him, take him in his arms and keep him safe from the evil that was darkening around them. But if he moved, then a great eye would seize upon him and he would be plucked from cowering safety to a hideous, rending death.
“Ryan.”
He didn’t move. Something touched him by the shoulder and he thought it was the brush of honed, brazen talons. Ryan moaned in his sleep.
“Ryan. Four o’clock. Nothing stirring out there. You all right?”
“Hi, J.B., yeah, fine. Locked into a bad dream. Thought I heard Dean calling for help.”
The slight figure of the Armorer was silhouetted against the side window. “I’ve been thinking about Mildred for the past few days. Specially at night. You think they’re all right down there, Ryan? Safe?”
“Who knows, old friend? Trader wants to visit the ruins of Seattle. I just want to get on home. But, well, today’s another day.”
Chapter Three
“Yesterday was the last day for their rendezvous,” Mildred Wyeth said, peering at a handwritten calendar on the scrubbed wall of the kitchen.
The doors were open in the ranch house, allowing a cooling breeze to find its way through the building. Cooling was relative. Outside, the baking New Mexico sun was at its apogee and the old predark thermometer nailed to the shaded wall of the veranda was registering one hundred eighteen degrees.
Doc Tanner was snoring out on the porch, his cracked knee boots lying discarded by his bare feet, gnarled hands folded across his stomach.
Dean Cawdor and Jak Lauren had gone hunting together, just after dawn, looking for some small deer that the boy had spotted the previous evening in a narrow draw to the west of the spread.
Krysty sat at the table in the kitchen, fanning herself with a cloth.
“I’ve been checking off the days as well,” she said. “Be so good to get some news.”
“You don’t ‘feel’ anything, Krysty?”
“You asked me before, Mildred.”
“Sorry. But”
Krysty smiled, brashing back a wisp of fiery hair from her pale forehead. “No, I’m the one should be saying ‘sorry.’ No need to snap at you. We’re all edgy.”
“You can’t pick up vibrations over big distances. You told me that often enough.”
“According to my mother, it’s impossible, unless you’re a true seer. But I still sometimes get feelings from a good distance. But nothing of J.B. and Ryan.”
“Least we’ve had no real trouble since Jak picked up that splinter when he was replacing the broken fence.”
Mildred poured herself a dipper of water from the galvanized bucket and sipped at it, pouring the last drops over her face, letting it run down her neck onto her breasts. “If he hadn’t finally showed it to me, the stupe could easily have lost his arm.”
The tiny splinter had worked its way down under the nail on the index finger of the teenager’s right hand. Mildred had noticed the boy wince when he nearly dropped a plate, helping with the washing-up, and had asked him what was wrong.