"Well—"
"Well, what?"
"Well… I shouldn't be telling you this, but St. Joe's has a deal with the city under the civil emergency plan. There's a medical distributor called Novaprod north of town." He gave me an address and simple directions. "The authorities put a National Guard unit up there to protect it. That's our primary source for drugs and hardware."
"They'll let me in?"
"If I call up and tell them you're coming, and if you have some ID to show."
"Do that for me, Colin. Please."
"I will if I can get a line out. The phones are unreliable."
"If there's a favor I can do in return…"
"Maybe there is. You used to work in aerospace, right? Perihelion?"
"Not recently, but yes."
"Can you tell me how much longer all this is going to last?" He half whispered the question, and suddenly I could hear the fatigue in his voice, the unadmitted fear. "I mean, one way or the other?"
I apologized and told him I simply didn't know—and I doubted anyone at Perihelion knew more than I did.
He sighed. "Okay," he said. "It's just galling, the idea that we could go through all this and burn out in a couple of days and never know what it was all about."
"I wish I could give you an answer."
Someone on the other end of the line began calling his name. "I wish a lot of things," he said. "Gotta go, Tyler."
I thanked him again and clicked off.
Dawn was still a few hours away.
Simon had been standing a few yards from the car, staring up at the starry sky and pretending not to listen. I waved him back and said, "We have to get going."
He nodded meekly. "Did you find help for Diane?"
"Sort of."
He accepted the answer without asking for details. But before he bent to get in the car he tugged at my sleeve and said, "There ... what do you suppose that is, Tyler?"
He was pointing at the western horizon, where a gently curving silver line arced through five degrees of the night sky. It looked as if someone had scratched an enormous, shallow letter C out of the blackness.
"Maybe a condensation trail," I said. "A military jet."
"At night? Not at night."
"Then I don't know what it is, Simon. Come on, get in— we don't have time to waste."
* * * * *
We made better time than I expected. We reached the medical supply warehouse, a numbered unit in a dreary industrial park, with time to spare before sunrise. I presented my ID to the nervous National Guardsman posted at the entrance; he handed me over to another Guardsman and a civilian employee who walked me through the aisles of shelving. I found what I needed and a third Guardsman helped me carry it to the car, though he backed off quickly when he saw Diane gasping in the backseat. "Luck to you," he said, his voice shaking a little.
I took the time to set up an IV drip, the bag jury-rigged to the jacket hanger in the car, and showed Simon how to monitor the flow and make sure she didn't snag the line in her sleep. (She didn't wake even when I put the needle in her arm.)
Simon waited until we were back on the road before he asked, "Is she dying?"
I gripped the wheel a little tighter. "Not if I can help it."
"Where are we taking her?"
"We're taking her home."
"What, all the way across country? To Carol and E.D.'s house?"
"Right."
"Why there?"
"Because I can help her there."
"That's a long drive. I mean, the way things are."
"Yes. It might be a long drive."
I glanced into the backseat. He stroked her head, gently. Her hair was limp and matted with perspiration. His hands were pale where he had washed off the blood.
"I don't deserve to be with her," he said. "I know this is my fault. I could have left the ranch when Teddy did. I could have gotten help."
Yes, I thought. You could have.
"But I believed in what we were doing. Probably you don't understand that. But it wasn't just the red calf, Tyler. I was certain we'd be raised up imperishable. That in the end we'd be rewarded."
"Rewarded for what?"
"Faith. Perseverance. Because from the very first time I set eyes on Diane I had a powerful feeling we'd be part of something spectacular, even if I didn't wholly comprehend it. That one day we'd stand together before the throne of God—no less than that. 'This generation shall not pass away till all be fulfilled.' Our generation, even if we took a wrong turn at first. I admit, things happened at those New Kingdom rallies that seem shameful to me now. Drunkenness, lechery, lies. We turned our backs on that, which was good; but it seemed like the world got a little smaller when we weren't among people who were trying to build the chiliasm, however imperfectly. As if we'd lost a family. And I thought, well, if you look for the cleanest and simplest path, that should take you in the right direction. 'In your patience possess ye your souls.'"
"Jordan Tabernacle," I said.
"It's easy to set prophecy against the Spin. Signs in the sun and in the moon and in the stars, it says in Luke. Well, here we are. The powers of heaven shaken. But it isn't—it isn't—"
He seemed to lose the thought.
"How's her breathing back there?" But I didn't really need to ask. I could hear every breath she took, labored but regular. I just wanted to distract him.
"She's not in distress," Simon said. Then he said, "Please, Tyler. Stop and let me out."
We were traveling east. There was surprisingly little traffic on the interstate. Colin Hinz had warned me about congestion around Sky Harbor airport, but we'd bypassed that. Out here we'd encountered only a few passenger cars, though there were a good many vehicles abandoned on the shoulder. "That's not a good idea," I said.
I looked in the mirror and saw Simon knuckling tears out of his eyes. At that moment he looked as vulnerable and bewildered as a ten-year-old at a funeral.
"I only ever had two signposts in my life," he said. "God and Diane. And I betrayed them both. I waited too long. You're kind to deny it, but she's dying."
"Not necessarily."
"I don't want to be with her and know I could have prevented this. I would as soon die in the desert. I mean it, Tyler. I want to get out."
The sky was growing light again, an ugly violet glow more like the arc in a malfunctioning fluorescent lamp than anything wholesome or natural.
"I don't care," I said.
Simon gave me a startled look. "What?"
"I don't care how you feel. The reason you should stay with Diane is that we have a difficult drive ahead of us and I can't take care of her and steer at the same time. And I'm going to have to sleep sooner or later. If you take the wheel once in a while we won't have to stop except for food and fuel." If we could find any. "If you drop out it'll double the travel time."
"Does it matter?"
"She may not be dying, Simon, but she's exactly as sick as you think she is, and she will die if she doesn't get help. And the only help I know about is a couple of thousand miles from here."
"Heaven and earth are passing away. We're all going to die."
"I can't speak for heaven and earth. I refuse to let her die as long as I have a choice."
"I envy you that," Simon said quietly.
"What? What could you possibly envy?"
"Your faith," he said.
* * * * *
A certain kind of optimism was still possible, but only at night. It wilted by daylight.
I drove into the Hiroshima of the rising sun. I had stopped worrying that the light itself would kill me, though it probably wasn't doing me any good. That any of us had survived the first day was a mystery—a miracle, Simon might have said. It encouraged a certain rough practicality: I pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the glove compartment and tried to keep my eyes on the road instead of on the hemisphere of orange fire levitating out of the horizon.