“I’m not because you won’t give me a chancel” Marie shouted. There was laughter in her voice. “And you didn’t run, and neither did I, and it would have been so easy…” She laughed again, this time with a peculiar note in it. “And now, my friend, we go collect the traditional reward for heroes. Find Maureen. You’ve earned it.”
“Strange to say, I thought of that. But of course George will be coming back—”
“You leave George to me,” Marie said primly. “After all, I’ve got a reward coming, too. You leave George to me.”
“I think I’m jealous of him.”
“Too bad.”
The mood lasted only until they reached the Senator’s stone ranch house and went inside. There were many others there. Al Hardy, drunk but not with liquor, grinning like a fool while others pounded him on the back. Dan Forrester, exhausted, introspective and unhappy, and no one caring; they praised him and thanked him and let him have his mood, to enjoy or hate, be glad or sad. Magicians may do as they please.
Many were absent. They might be among the dead, they might have joined the pursuit; they might have fled, and be fleeing still, unaware that nobody was hunting them. The victors were too tired to think about them. Harvey searched until he found Maureen, and he went to her. There was no lust between them, only an infinite tenderness, concern; they touched each other like children.
There was no party, no celebration. Within minutes the gathering was finished. Some dropped into chairs and slept; some went to their own houses. Harvey felt nothing now; only the need to rest, to sleep, to forget everything that had happened that day. He had seen this before, in men returned from patrol in Vietnam, but he had not felt it himself: drained of energy, drained of emotion, not unhappy, able to rouse himself to brief moments of excitement only to have them slip away and leave him more exhausted than ever.
He woke remembering that they’d won. The details were gone; there had been dreams, vivid and mixed with memories of the past few days, and as the dreams faded so did the memories, leaving him only the word. Victory!
He was Iying on the floor of the front room, on a rug and covered with a blanket; he had no idea how he had come there. Perhaps he had been talking with Maureen and simply fallen to the floor. Anything was possible.
There were sounds in the house, people moving, smells of cooking food. He savored them all, the sounds and smells and sensations of life: The gray clouds outside the window seemed infinitely detailed, vivid and brilliant as sunlight; the bronze trophies on the walls were a marvel that needed investigation. He treasured each moment of life and what it might bring.
Gradually the mood faded. It left him desperately hungry. He got up, and saw that the living-room rug itself looked like a battlefield. They lay where fatigue had dropped them. Someone had lasted long enough to spread blankets… and had run short. Harvey spread his own blanket over Steve Cox, who was coiled into a ball against the cold, and followed his nose toward breakfast.
There was bright sunlight in the room. Maureen Jellison stared in disbelief. She was afraid to get out of bed; the bright sun might be a dream, and it was a dream she wanted to savor. Finally she convinced herself that she was awake. It was no illusion. The sun came in the window, warm and yellow and bright. It was over an hour high. She could feel its warmth on her arms when she threw back the covers.
Gradually she came to full wakefulness. Terror and blood and a fatigue like death itself, the memories of yesterday ran together like a too-fast movie film. There had been the horror of the morning, when the Stronghold forces had to hold fast, retreating slowly, letting the Brotherhood into the valley but never on the ridges; the gradual retreat that could not seem too obvious, with troops who couldn’t be told the battle plan for fear that they would be captured; finally the general panic, when they had all run.
“When you run they bunch up and follow,” Al Hardy had said. “Randall’s reports make that pretty clear. Their commander goes by the book. So will we, up to a point.”
The problem had been to hold along the high ground, so that the Brotherhood would stay down in the valley; to give way along the valley floor until enough of the Brotherhood had crossed the bridge. How could they get the ranchers to fight and not run until the signal? Hardy had chosen the simplest solution to that. “If you’re out there,” he’d said, “if you stand, some of them will stay with you. They’re men.”
She had resented that, but it had been no time to give Al Hardy a lecture; and he’d been right. All she’d had to do was hold on to her own courage. For someone who wasn’t sure she wanted to live, that had seemed a simple job. It wasn’t until she was actually under fire that she began to have doubts.
Something unseen had ripped Roy Miller’s side. He tried to block the wound with his forearm. His forearm nestled neatly in the great gap of torn ribs. Maureen’s breakfast rose in her throat… and in his last moment Roy looked around and caught her expression.
A mortar shell had exploded behind Deke Wilson and two of his men. The others rolled over and over and lay sprawled in positions that would have been hideously uncomfortable if they hadn’t been dead; but Deke flew forward and upward, his arms flapping frantically, and fluttered downhill like a fledgling just learning to fly, down into the yellow murk.
Joanna MacPherson turned to yell at Maureen. A bullet whispered through her hair, through the space where her skull had been only a moment before, and Joanna’s message became frantically obscene.
A fragment of metal from a mortar blast shattered Jack Turner’s mustard bomb as he was winding up for the throw. His friends ran from him, and his sister-in-law ran too, and Jack Turner staggered and thrashed within the yellow cloud, drowning.
Pudgy Galadriel from the Shire swung her sling round and round, stepped forward and sent a bottle of nerve gas flying far down the hill. A moment too long on the follow-through, and Galadriel stood poised like Winged Victory, with her head gone. Maureen saw black spots before her eyes. She leaned against a boulder and managed to stay upright.
It was one thing to stand on a clifftop and contemplate (at her leisure) jumping off (but would she have had the nerve? or was it all an act? Now she’d never know). It was quite another to watch poor, homely Galadriel crumple with the stump of her neck spitting blood, and then, without looking to see if anyone was actually watching her, to pick up her sling and a bottle of nerve gas and swing the deadly, evil thing round and round her head and, remembering at the last second that the damn thing would fly at a tangent and not in the direction the sling was pointing when she let go, sling it down into the cannibal horde that was still coming up at them. Suddenly Maureen Jellison had found quite a lot to live for. The gray skies, cold winds, brief snow flurries, the prospect of hunger in winter; all of that faded away. First there was a simple realization: If you could feel terror, you wanted to live. Strange that she’d never understood that before.
She dressed quickly and went outside. The bright sun was gone. She could not see the sun at all, but the sky overhead was bright, and the clouds seemed much thinner than usual. Had the sunlight been a final dream? It didn’t matter. The air was warm, and there was no rain. The small creek below the house was very high, and the water gurgled happily. It would be cold water, just right for trout. Birds dipped low into the stream and cried loudly. She walked down the drive to the highway.
There was no traffic. There had been, earlier, when the Stronghold’s wounded had been taken to the former county convalescent home that served as the valley’s hospital, and later there would be more when the less critically injured were brought in horse-drawn wagons, but for now the road was clear. She walked steadily on, aware of every sight and sound: the ring of an ax in the hills above; the flash of red as a red-winged blackbird darted into the brush nearby; the shouts of children herding the Stronghold’s pigs through the woods.