The ground felt spongy after so much flying. Diana hopped up and down a few times, then headed north along the road. She didn’t look back. Her past was behind her in more ways than one. She hadn’t gone far when movement in a belt of trees between fields alerted her to wildlife. She expected deer, but instead saw two coyotes staring back at her.
Usually, coyotes weren’t dangerous. But Diana shrugged out of her backpack. At the top was the last item she had packed: mace. She hefted it, thinking it was too bad it had been in her backpack when Harold Pierce had come at her. She would have loved to spray him smack in the eyes. Diana looked up. The coyotes were gone. She stuck the mace in her front pocket, slid her shoulders into her back-pack, and set off down the road, seeking a sign of habitation. It was a gorgeous sunny day. The temperature was pushing ninety-five but she didn’t mind the heat. She never had. It was cold that got to her.
She admired the fine blue of the sky and the puffy white of the clouds, and reflected on the irony that on the other side of the world, at that very moment, the sky was choked with radioactive dust. Diana wondered how far the EMP effect teached. She wondered, too, with rising concern, how she was going to get from Nebraska to Minnesota before the deadline.
Kurt Carpenter had a timetable. Those he selected had exactly one hundred hours from the moment the first nukes detonated on U.S. soil to reach the compound. And that was the best-case scenario. As Carpenter had put it to her, “I can’t jeopardize the welfare of the majority for the sake of a few. Our only hope of weathering the worst of it is to hunker in out bunkers and stay there until the radiation levels drop.”
A hundred hours was a lot of time. Diana could make it to Minnesota by car, provided she could get her hands on one. But they looked to be scarce in this particular part of the heartland. Diana had hiked for about ten minutes when the growl of an engine reached her. She questioned how that could be with the EMP effect. Then she remembered. The pulse fried electronic systems in use. Those not being used—a car that wasn’t running, for instance—weren’t affected. She moved to the side of the road and waited.
The source of the growl came over a low rise ahead of her. It was a pickup, an antique popular in her great-grandfather’s day, spewing as much smoke as noise. Clunking and rattling, it bore down on her at a turtle crawl. Then gears ground and the pickup leaped toward her like an old tiger eager to sink its fangs into fresh prey.
Diana smiled and waved.
In a swirl of dust and a belch of exhaust, the pickup came to a stop next to her. The driver had to be in his sixties if he was a day. He wore a grimy T-shirt with holes in it and jeans so thin it was a wonder his leg hairs didn’t poke through.
He grinned, revealing yellow teeth, where he had teeth. He also had a lazy eye that tended to drift. “How do, girlie? Was it you in that plane I saw come down from my barn?”
“Afraid so,” Diana confirmed. “Any chance you can give me a lift to the next town?” The old man snickered. “Dearie, that would take an hour or better. And the radio’s been saying as how we should stick close to home on account of the invasion.”
“What invasion?”
“Haven’t you heard? There’s talk the Chinese army is pushing down from Canada and the Russians are set to land in Philadelphia.”
“That’s preposterous.”
The old man reached across and pushed the passenger door open. It creaked on long-neglected hinges.
“Come to my place and you can hear it yourself.”
The man was nice enough, and it would be stupid of her to stay there when he was offering her a lift. She shrugged out of her backpack, placed it on the floor, and climbed in. The door creaked even louder when she slammed it.
“Hang on.” The old man worked the gearshift, turning the pickup around. “I’m Amos Stiggims, by the way. I’m a farmer like my pappy before me and his pappy before him.”
“I have an uncle who farms a little. He raises organic vegetables mostly.”
“You don’t say.” Stiggims managed to grind through first and second gear as he chugged to the top of the rise. “I’ve never had much truck with those organic types. They look down their noses at me because I use what chemicals the law allows.” He ground third, too. “They’re like that uppity so-and-so on the television.”
“Who?”
“You know. He’s on late night. Always poking fun at folks like me. It’s white trash this and white trash that. Somebody ought to shove a shotgun up his ass and pull the trigger.” Stiggims cackled at the prospect.
Diana studied him without being obvious. He seemed harmless enough, just an old crank who hadn’t come to terms with the outside world. But to be diplomatic, she sought to get on his good side by saying,
“Topical humor doesn’t do much for me, either.”
Stiggims glanced at her sharply. “What kind of humor?”
“Topical. You know. About the news and the day’s events.”
Stiggims muttered something that sounded to Diana like “One of those.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, nothing, girlie.”
In the distance, well back from the road, sat a farm-house, a barn, and outbuildings. Even that far off, Diana could tell they were like their owner and his truck: well past their prime. If she hadn’t known better, she’d think they were built during the days of the Pony Express. Suddenly she sat up. “Mr. Stiggims, do you own a cell phone?”
“A what?”
“A cellular phone. I don’t see any telephone lines to your property. Or maybe they bury the cable out here. Is that it?”
“Oh. The telephone. Sure, that’s it. They bury the lines on account of the fierce thunderstorms and tornados we get. The winds are always knocking down trees and stuff.” A dirt track linked the road to the farmhouse. The pickup raised clouds of dust the whole length of it. As they braked,
Diana saw that she had given the buildings too much credit. Almost anywhere else, they would be condemned.
“Here we are. Come on in and make your call.” Stiggims hopped out and started around the truck. Diana had to jiggle the door handle a few times to get it to work. She climbed down and turned to get her back-pack, saying, “I really appreciate this. The last thing I want is to be stranded. I need to get out of here as soon as possible.”
“That’s a pity,” Amos Stiggims said. “What is?”
It was then that Diana saw the tire iron.
6. Semper Pi
As the man raised his rifle, Ben Thomas thrust his arm out the open window of his truck. The Double Eagle boomed and bucked twice, and the man, still wearing a lunatic grin on his lunatic face, melted to the asphalt. The hollow points made a mess of his head.
Ben looked at the dead drivers again. “Jesus,” he said under his breath. He shouldn’t be shocked, but he was. If his hitch in the Marines had taught him anything, it was to never put any cruelty past his fellow man. When he had been stationed in the Middle East, in the war that wasn’t a war, he’d seen things that churned his gut and twisted his soul.
The other lesson Ben had learned was that there were no limits to hate. In the name of hatred all manner of atrocities were committed. Beheadings, mutilations, castrations, blowing children to bits and pieces. It had disgusted him. It had changed him. When he had gotten back, his wife kept saying he wasn’t the same man. Hell, no, of course he wasn’t. But how could he explain? What could he tell her that would help her see the horror? Words weren’t enough. So Ben had drifted deeper inside himself and they had drifted further apart, until one day he had come home and found a note saying that she couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t take his dark silences, his lack of humor, and the cold front he put on. Little did she realize, it wasn’t a front. Now, placing his pistol on the seat, Ben chugged around the knot of vehicles. He would be damned if he were staying there until the cops showed up. They’d haul him in for questioning. Even if they eventually let him go, it could cost him days he couldn’t spare.