“No chance,” Danny said brutally, but there wasn’t any faking it. He thought about the street and it probably carried. The kids reflected something back so scared, so full of blood and terror and sense of being stalked that he couldn’t get an image through it and didn’t have time to try. “Everyone’s gone or dead. We can probably find things the spooks didn’t get, but it’s not safe out there. I don’t want to get boxed in this far down the street. I want nearer that gate—if we can find anything left.”
“It couldn’t get in,” the older—Carlo—said. “It went all around the place—”
“It’s Brionne,” the younger broke in. “It was Brionne.”
<Blond girl, younger than either boy. Blond girl by the fireside.
<Man and woman and the boys angry and yelling.
<Gun going off. Carlo holding the gun. Anger. Hate. Man hitting Carlo… >
“Don’t tell him!” the younger cried, shaking at Carlo’s arm. “Don’t tell him, don’t think it, don’t think about it! He can hear you!”
“Kid’s right,” Danny muttered. He didn’t like Cloud outside alone right now the way he didn’t like the idea that Carlo’d shot a man. “What you did to get locked up—I don’t give a damn. We got to get a place we can hold out.” There had to be a lot of supplies and equipment in the village that the vermin hadn’t gotten. Guns. Shells. Knives. All the resources a village had inside it were still here. Had to be. He didn’t like taking stuff from dead people—but he wasn’t riding away from guns and shells and food that could make a difference in their survival, either.
And if they could find a hidey-hole he liked the look of, they could tuck into it until he could get sorted out. The village gate out there hadn’t looked to be damaged—just standing open.
Spooks could go over a wall. A horse couldn’t. A horse could trick you and spooks calling to you could make you open a door— but the rogue for all its strength couldn’t get in and it couldn’t for all its power make these kids open the bars without a key. That was why they were alive.
“Woman saved your lives,” he said to them, searching the cabinet for shells. And found another box. “She could’ve been a fool and opened that front door. Bars wouldn’t stop the little ones. They’d have got you. She knew she was going to do it and she shot herself instead. You don’t ever forget that woman’s name, you. Hear me?“
The older one held onto the younger. The younger kid was crying. He guessed by that he’d scared them enough—but she’d been a woman with the guts to stop it all when she started going under its influence. The only better thing she could have done was come in with them, shut the doors and throw the key out, if she’d had her head clear.
But no question, once the spooks started clawing at that door, she was lucky to have found the trigger once.
With the time the spooks had had to do their work, not likely that the marshal or anybody else in this village was going to turn up out of some similar hidey-hole—the luck to have a door you couldn’t open yourself wasn’t going to be general. He didn’t know about this Tara Chang the kid talked about, <woman in fringed leather. Dark-haired.> Senior rider, if he had to guess. No sign of her or the rest of the riders—no help from that quarter. Not if that gate was standing open.
He brought the kids outside—they balked when they saw Cloud waiting, and Cloud snorted and laid down his ears.
“You be polite,” Danny said in as stern a tone as he had. “He’s not used to village kids. His name is Cloud. You let him smell you over. You think nice thoughts about him and me, you hear? Hold out your hands, let him smell them. That way he won’t mistake you for spooks.”
They were scared to death. They thought <Cloud biting fingers,> but they came down the steps and, the older boy first, held out their bare hands. Cloud sniffed and snorted, threw his head away from them, and wanted <Danny riding.>
He wanted <finding food.> But he didn’t think, on a second, queasy thought, that he wanted to let Cloud do the guiding— Cloud having no fastidiousness about some things, and there being pieces of human beings in the streets. He thought instead about <store> and <cans and flour,> hoping the vermin hadn’t gotten everything, and a thought came into his head—he was sure it was the boys—telling him exactly which building would have that kind of thing.
Most urgent of everything—<closing the gate.> Once they did that, inside, they could get some distance from the walls, at least, with Cloud’s help, enough to keep from mental confusion coming at them from the spooks outside.
He didn’t know, as tired and sore as he was, if he could get up to Cloud’s back on one try, with the rifle and all. But he wasn’t giving the only gun to two jailed kids to hold. He wanted <Cloud close to the steps > and he cheated a mount off the bottom step—made a fairly senior-style landing on Cloud’s back, rifle in hand and all.
Then he told Cloud <closing gate> and Cloud set out at a fair pace down the street. The boys hurried after, wrapped in their blankets, having to run to keep up—and by the time they’d reached the gate and he’d slid down again to heave the huge door shut, the boys were still halfway back along the street.
He shoved the gate, the truck-sized door needing no small push against the accumulation of snow. He brought it to, and the bar dropped, comforting thump.
They were in sole possession, he supposed. He had a look about the gates, checked the latch—felt Cloud bristle up with warning as the boys came running up, gasping and terrified.
“We’re all right,” he said to them. “Gate’s shut. If we don’t open it, nothing can. We just stay far from the walls. What village is this, anyway?”
“Tarmin,” Carlo gasped shakily. “This is Tarmin village.”
The biggest. The most people. The place you’d run to for help. All dead.
But maybe not all dead. Other, awful possibilities came to him as he looked back along the snowy, devastated street.
“Can you think of any other places where somebody couldn’t get out?” Worse and worse thoughts. “Any sick folk? Any old people, crippled people—any babies?”
There were. There had been. The boys were well aware who and where—they were worried, they were sickened at what they saw, and scared, not feeling like outlaws and killers at all; he, God help him, didn’t want to do this. He really didn’t. But when they started telling him where people lived, and thinking of houses, it was clear they knew their village: <wanting people, > came to him in confused fashion, an aching fear for specific faces they knew and feared were <bones in the street.>
At least it wasn’t hard to find a sidearm—he could take his pick, once he began to walk about among the remains. People had come out with guns, they’d died with guns in their hands, all up and down the street. He kept his rifle in the crook of his arm, and walked back along the street with the boys in tow, Cloud following close. He scavenged a pistol and holster just lying in a bloody jacket.
He gave the jacket to the older boy. He kept the pistol. They found scarves, hats, a lot of them chewed. A coat for the younger kid—and a gun. The older boy hesitated at it, afraid to make the move. Danny took it, checked to see it was loaded, and gave it to him.
“Don’t make a mistake. Hear? I’ll nail you.”
The kid didn’t say anything. But the boy wasn’t thinking hostility, either. He was <scared,> thinking mostly about his kid brother, and <vermin under the porches.>
They went from house to house, after that, and they called out at every house. Danny imaged <rider with horse, rider with boys. Rider looking for people in houses > as loud as Cloud could make him; but Cloud didn’t smell anything he liked in those houses.