Inch by inch, Ed raised his head, until his eyes appeared over the sill of the Chevy’s window. It was impossible to see where the shooting was coming from, although he guessed the sniper was concealed in the old asbestos house. He could hardly see Dyson now, in the gloom of the evening, but there wasn’t any question at all that he was dead. Half of his head was lying on the road.
Ed started up the Chevy’s engine, released the parking-brake, and slowly rolled away down the street, keeping his head down behind the door. Only when he was well around the corner did he sit up straight, and drive with howling tyres back to the highway, where the rest of the convoy were waiting.
‘Where’s Dyson?’ asked Della, as Ed stepped down. ‘Did he get us a car?’
‘He’s dead,’ said Ed. ‘There’s a sniper in one of the houses back there – hit him when he was trying to open a car door.’
‘A sniper?’ asked one of the farmhands, a tough little Nebraskan in faded overalls. ‘Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go smoke him out!’
Ed shook his head. ‘There’s no point. He’d probably pick off two or three of us before we could get anyplace near him. I don’t want anybody else dead, and that’s it. It’s serious enough, losing Dyson.’
‘What are we going to do about a car?’ asked a pale-faced woman, holding a sleeping two-year-old in her arms.
‘Well, we have a choice,’ said Ed. ‘Either you seven find somewhere to bed down for the night, and we’ll go on ahead and see if we can’t find another car for you, and send someone back with it; or else you can squeeze into the vehicles we have left.’
The woman said, ‘Mr Hardesty, I’d rather stay. We’ve been travelling all day, we’re exhausted. And, besides, if we leave now, we’re going to have to abandon all of our food, and I don’t think we ought to do that.’
‘She’s right,’ said her husband. ‘Who knows when we’re going to fend anything else to eat? We can’t afford to abandon fifty or sixty cans of meat It could keep us alive for weeks.’
Ed looked around at the other workers who had been travelling in the broken-down Mercury. Old Mrs Tilsley, who had given him fresh-baked cookies from her cottage window-sill when he was young, leaning on the arm of her grandson, Keith Perks; Henry and Susan Carlsson, who had come to work at South Burlington after their own farm in Dighton had gone bankrupt.
God, he thought, it had been easy enough to accept responsibility for these people when he had been threatening Senator Jones with his automatic. But now they were looking to him to guide them through the worst disaster of their whole lives; and he wasn’t at all sure he was strong enough or even willing enough. He had left his own mother behind someplace. There hadn’t been time to go look for her. And apart from his mother, there were Season and Sally, in Los Angeles, who might even be dead for all he knew; and Jack Marowitz, and Willard Noakes, and Dyson Kane, who had all been butchered; and the Muldoon brothers, who had been doing nothing at all but their job. And everybody else across the breadth of the United States who had died in the riots and the looting that had followed his sanctimonious revelation of Shearson’s little bit of business on the side.
If I’d just been adult enough to keep my mouth shut, he thought, then maybe the President would have had time to cope with the situation as it broke. If I’d thought the whole thing through before I started shooting my mouth off. If only Shearson hadn’t asked me to be his ‘representative farmer.’
He said, quietly, ‘You’re sure you’re prepared to stay? We’ll send a car back just as soon as we find one.’
‘We’ll stay,’ said Henry Carlsson, in a firm voice. ‘I don’t expect there’ll be a whole lot of danger around here. It looks like everything’s been pretty thoroughly looted in any case.’
‘All right, then,’ said Ed. ‘The rest of us will move on. Do you need extra shotgun cartridges, anything like that?’
‘We’ll manage,’ Henry Carlsson assured him.
So, twenty minutes later, the depleted convoy drove off into the darkness, leaving seven people behind them. Ed glanced in his rearview mirror and saw them signal a quick goodbye with a flashlight.
In the back of the wagon, Shearson Jones said, ‘I could happily get myself outside of a filet de boeuf en croûte with Perigourdine sauce. Do you know that’s a speciality of the Maisonette restaurant, on East Sixth Street, in Cincinnati, of all places? They also do an excellent trout, stuffed with crab.’
Ed said, ‘I warned you, senator. One more word about food, and you’re going to be hitch-hiking your way to California.’
As they headed through the hills towards Albuquerque, Peter Kaiser asked, ‘Do you want me to take over the wheel now? I’d be happy to.’
Ed rubbed his eyes. ‘I’m not sure if I can trust you yet, Mr Kaiser.’
‘Well, maybe you can’t,’ said Peter, ‘but you can’t stay awake all night. You’re going to have to sleep sometime.’ Della said, ‘He’s right, Ed. I can keep an eye on him.’
‘Okay,’ Ed agreed. ‘But there’s just one thing.’
‘Oh, yes?’
He reached his hand backwards from the driving-seat, and said, ‘You can give me my gun back, okay?’
‘Your gun?’ queried Peter Kaiser. ‘I don’t have your gun.’
‘You’re trying to tell me you didn’t sneak it out from under my seat when we were driving along?’
‘Of course I didn’t. What are you talking about? Do you want to search me?’
Ed turned around in his seat. ‘What about you, Senator? Do you have it?’
Shearson gave a small, contemptuous shake of his head which clearly implied that he didn’t have time for weapons. His weapon was his political influence.
‘All right,’ said Ed, flicking on his turn signal and drawing into the side of the road. ‘You can drive for a while. Three hours, straight down sixty-six; and don’t stop for anybody or anything, unless you see an abandoned car in good shape that we can send back to the Carlssons.’
Peter Kaiser heaved himself up into the driver’s seat, while Ed squeezed himself into the back seat next to Shearson Jones.
‘I’d appreciate it if you’d resist the temptation to rest your head on my stomach while you sleep,’ said Shearson.
‘I think I can manage that,’ Ed replied, and bundled up a towel to make himself a pillow.
As Peter Kaiser drove the wagon through the night, Ed lay awake, exhausted but unable to sleep. The shock of Dyson Kane’s death on the streets of Tucumcari began to make him tremble, as if someone was shaking him to make him understand something – shaking him and shaking him and refusing to let up.
He dozed for minutes at a time, and dreams danced in front of his eyes like some kind of grotesque carnival. The house at South Burlington, flaring up; Willard Noakes, collapsing into the darkness; and Dyson Kane lying on the roadway, his blood sprayed everywhere, only it wasn’t blood at all, but a pattern cut out of coloured paper, and when Ed walked towards him, Dyson turned his face around towards him and grinned a disturbing, idiot grin…
As dawn began to rise through the Zuni Mountains behind them, they came across an abandoned white Pontiac, one of its doors still open, and its keys still in the ignition. There was no sign of the driver. Young Dave Morton, Olaf Morton’s son, volunteered to drive it back to Tucumcari and pick up the seven people they had left behind.
Ed, pale-faced, unshaved, frowzy with sleep, said, ‘You take care now, do you understand? If anything goes wrong, you come speeding back to join us. We’ll take it slow from here, and wait for you two hours at Lake Havasu. Then we’re going on, whether you’ve caught up with us or not.’