“Sure. Sorry. Shall I move a bit farther away from the truck?”

  “Why not?” The voice belonged to someone from the South. Kyle had traveled below the Mason-Dixon line on a commission when he’d been a photographic journalist, with Leanne, just before they got engaged.

  He hadn’t thought about Leanne as much as he should have since the Aquila had fallen from the sky. It had been vaguely agreed that he and Steve would try to loop back south toward Albuquerque, in New Mexico, where she had been living, after checking out Steve’s son, Sly, up in Aspen.

  Nothing much had changed since he’d witnessed the South firsthand. Same good old boys drinking redneck beer in redneck bars under the Stars and Bars. Georgia rednecks and Alabama rednecks and the Mississippi rednecks. Oh, yeah, the Mississippi rednecks.

  “I said to sit down, boy!”

  “Sorry.”

  “You educated? Can tell you are, boy. One of those uppity Northern niggers. I killed three like you last week. Camping they were, eating good fresh deer meat. Real yummy, boy. Screwed the bitch first. Cut her throat open.”

  The little man was close to the cab, the twin muzzles of the scattergun gaping toward Kyle.

  “Something just came to me, boy.”

  “What?”

  “Why bother keeping you alive? Good question, that. Answer is, I’m not no more.”

  Steve was visible in the shadows of the cab, trying to wriggle silently around.

  Kyle coughed. “Hey, listen, mister,” he said, trying desperately to buy himself a few more moments of precious life.

  “What?” the man asked unwillingly, curious and suspicious.

  “I figure you’re about as crazy as a shit-house rat, you peckerwood piece of white trash.”

  The underslung jaw dropped open, and the little man stared at Kyle. “You say… Why, you stinkin’ black bastard, I’m…”

  Steve took the chance while the stranger’s attention was distracted, sitting on the front seat, leveling a short-barreled pistol.

  The shotgun was trembling with the man’s rage, and Kyle stared into instant obliteration, waiting for Steve to shoot.

  Nothing happened. “Do it, for Christ’s sake!” Kyle yelled, terror pushing his voice way up the scale.

  “I’m ‘bout to,” replied the little man, recovering some tattered vestiges of what probably passed for self-control.

  “Steve!”

  Finally Steve Romero broke himself out of the frozen grip of horror, leveled the gun a second time and pulled the trigger.

  Still no result, but now the scattergun was swiveling around toward the cab of the Volvo.

  “The safety fucking catch, Steve!” screamed Kyle Lynch.

  At last the handgun fired, a thin, weak sound, muffled by the surrounding cab.

  “Missed me, you shithead!!” yelped the man, pulling the trigger on the shotgun.

  The shot erupted into the side of the truck, taking out the windshield and the driver’s window on the far side.

  Steve had been quick enough to throw himself backward, so that the starring burst of lead exploded over him.

  Kyle realized that the noise had come from one of the twin barrels. He was torn between the desire to run away and the awareness that the man could now only kill one of them. And it was probably going to be the trapped Steve Romero.

  Frantically he looked around. There were stones at his feet, mostly tiny pebbles, with the occasional fist-sized quartz-lined rock.

  Kyle snatched one up and heaved it at the murderous stranger with a clumsy, round-arm throw, aiming at the man’s head and missing him by at least six feet. The missile bounced off one of the front tires and landed in the dirt just in front of his feet.

  “What the fuck?” He glanced around at Kyle, his lips peeled back off the rotten teeth in a wolfish snarl of hatred.

  Steve sighted between his own feet and fired the automatic three more times, the gun bucking in his right hand.

  One bullet missed Kyle by less than a yard. A second round plucked at the plastic raincoat, while the third bullet hit the little man in the face, close to his nose.

  It knocked him sideways, the shotgun falling in the dirt, the impact firing the second barrel. He tottered a few stumbling steps, away from the truck, both hands pressed to his face. Bright scarlet blood was pouring between his fingers, patterning the dust around him.

  Finally he sat down with a thump, moaning and cursing, ignoring the rifle still slung across his shoulders.

  Kyle started toward him, then stopped, rocking on the balls of his feet, paralyzed by fear and indecision.

  Steve crawled out of the cab and stood by the open door, the gun pointing at the dirt. His face was pale with shock.

  “What shall we do?” he asked.

  “Kill him,” replied Kyle, “before he tries to take us out.”

  “Shoot him again?”

  “Sure. For Christ’s sake, Steve. He would have killed us.”

  “Oh, my sweet Lord, I’m done for, boys. I’m done for.”

  Blood was dappling the transparent coat, pooling over the spread thighs.

  “Shoot him, Steve.”

  “I don’t think… You do it, Kyle. I’ve done my bit. I shot him once. Now you shoot him and we’re equal.”

  “This isn’t some kind of school-yard game, Steve. He was going to send us both off to buy the farm.”

  Steve shook his head and lobbed the gun across. Kyle fumbled and nearly dropped it.

  Now the little man on the ground was moving, struggling to disentangle the rifle from his shoulder.

  With the hands busy and away from the face, Kyle could see the damage wrought by the bullet. It had gone in through the left cheek, directly behind the nose, and exited the other side, clawing out a chunk of flesh and bone, removing part of the upper jaw.

  It was a ghastly wound, but Kyle could see that it wasn’t likely to prove immediately fatal.

  Gripping the gun so hard he wondered if he might be leaving finger marks impressed in the butt, Kyle stepped behind the seated man.

  He stopped what he was doing and stared up. “Prefer it if your friend did it, nigger.” The words were distorted by the bubbling crimson froth that tumbled over his neck and chest.

  “Fuck you,” said Kyle.

  He leveled the gun at the nape of the man’s neck and squeezed the trigger. It kicked so much that he nearly missed, even at the range of under four feet, the bullet barely clipping the side of the skull. But it was still enough to knock him over in the dirt, unconscious.

  Kyle bent and kept firing the gun until the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. The stranger’s head was pulped.

  “Satisfied, Steve?” shouted Kyle. “Does that make us equal, friend?”

  But that violent act, born of fear and disgust, had left the gun an empty threat.

  Though they strip-searched the cab, there was no more ammunition for the empty automatic. Nothing of any use.

  “It says on the side it’s made by Mondadori in Italy and it fires .32-caliber bullets,” said Steve. “Might as well take it with us. Least there’s probably a chance of finding some ammo.”

  “Yeah, guess so. And we got this sawed-off shotgun. It’s a 12-gauge, it says. There isn’t any maker’s name on it. Been filed off. But there’s six rounds for it.”

  The rifle was a V Model Mannlicher, bolt-action, chambered for the .357 Magnum bullet with an 8-round magazine and a scope sight.

  The dead man also had a knife at his belt, a honed bowie with a sixteen-inch blade. Steve took that, as well as the shotgun.

  Kyle tucked the automatic into his belt and slung the Mannlicher over his shoulder.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They made good time, and by October 10 they’d managed to get very close to Aspen.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Jim put his foot slowly down on the brake, easing the school bus to a halt. He put the gearshift into neutral and pulled up on the hand brake, leaned on the wheel and stared out of the front windshield.

  Carrie Princip had been dozing on the back seat and she came stumbling sleepily forward. “What is it, Jim?”

  He simply pointed.

  She closed her eyes and turned away, putting her hand over her mouth. Moved a few seats toward the rear of the school bus and sat down, head bowed.

  There was a long rope strung clear across the blacktop, between two dead oak trees. Live oaks, noticed Jim, recognizing the irony of their name in this green-turned-red world.

  Five corpses dangled from the rope, hung by the necks. The cable had stretched in the weather, and the middle three had their feet dragging on the surface of the road. The outside pair were just off the ground, bobbing and dancing in the light wind like hideous marionettes.

  Like virtually all of the dead that Jim and Carrie had seen in their eight days away from Stevenson, these looked to have been dead for weeks, maybe even for months.

  The eyes had gone, and the thin strands of windblown hair straggled off leathery skulls. None of the five wore even the most ragged remnants of clothing. Birds had done their work so well that it wasn’t even possible to tell the sex of any of the bodies.

  But there was a clue as to how and why they’d all died.

  A broken door leaned up against the cracked trunk of one of the trees, with a message painted, surprisingly neatly, upon it: “They brought sickness so they were executed legally.”

  “Wonder what ‘legally’ means?” said Jim Hilton. “Sounds like we’ve encountered the first of some vigilante justice, Carrie.”

  “That old man Horace mentioned he’d heard they had some disease up this way, didn’t he? Cholera was one.”

  “Yeah. We’re not far from my home now. An hour or so if the roads are clear.”

  They’d made poor time in the bus, struggling on the narrow, tight bends, having to stop at frequent intervals to clear fallen trees and bushes off the highways.

  Now evening was approaching again, with a fire-bright sun setting away beyond the distant Pacific Ocean.

  A couple of miles back they’d crested a rise and glimpsed the water, glistening like a sheet of beaten silver. It was also possible to see a corner of the fabulous city of the angels, gridded out far below them.

  Jim Hilton had stopped and climbed out, shading his eyes with his hand.

  “My God, I’ve never seen the air so clear. I guess it’s because there’s no industry and no vehicle exhaust emissions. Like looking down through the finest diamond.”

  Now the western sky was tinted purple with strands of darker clouds.

  “You going to cut the rope?”

  He shook his head. “No. Reckon old Betsy can push her way through.”

  “I don’t think I want to watch this,” Carrie said. “But I guess you’re right. Could just be part of a trick to get us outside.”

  He engaged first gear and let the yellow bus roll slowly forward until it touched the central trio of corpses.

  He’d expected that the rope would probably have rotted away and would have snapped easily. But it tautened and held, stretched like a bowstring, against the power of the bus.

  Two of the bodies were hoisted, their skeletal limbs pressed snugly to the safety glass, skulls rotating as though they were trying to find a way into the driver’s cab.

  “Cut it, Jim,” called Carrie. “That’s really a triple gross-out.”

  “It’ll manage it. Come on, Betsy, show ‘em what you can do.”

  He floored the pedal, the engine roaring. It was the tree on the right of the road that gave way, its dead roots losing the unequal struggle. The dead oak and the rope and the bodies vanished under the bus as it suddenly accelerated, then equally suddenly, jerked to a juddering, protesting halt.

  Jim swore and put it back again into neutral, using the vacuum brakes.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Rope’s caught.”

  “Where?”

  “Round the axle, I guess, or the brakes. Jammed some place.”

  He crawled underneath, finding that his worst fears were confirmed. There was a great knot of cable and splintered bones and tree, all tangled around the front axle on the right side.

  “Hopeless,” he said, dusting himself off. “It’s hopeless.”

  “We walk?”

  He shrugged. “Could be safer, seeing what happened to those hanged people… Means there might be patrols out. It’s not far.”

  As he led the way across the steep hills, Jim remembered picnics with Lori and the twins. Hot summers with the plastic foam cooler and Cokes and pieces of chicken breast.

  “It’ll soon be dark.”

  “Yeah.”

  With the sun almost down, it was proving a rough scramble across the steep ravines of the dust-dry scrubland.

  Somewhere near the old reservoir they both heard the distant ringing howl of a coyote.

  “Must’ve been good times for creatures like that,” said Carrie.

  “Crows and coyotes. All the scavengers. Probably the rats and the cockroaches have taken over in the hearts of the big cities.”

  “Think we’ll stay up here in the hills, Jim. Though, reckon we’ll manage to reach your house tonight?”

  “Could be. But it’s going to be way on past midnight.”

  Using narrow paths, half-remembered, Jim Hilton took the woman close by the haunting, haunted shapes of the nine colossal letters that spelled out the name of Hollywood.

  They shimmered white in the ghostly moonlight, towering high above them.

  “Read someplace that a woman threw herself off the top of one of them,” Carrie said, voice hushed. “Maybe hadn’t made it in silvertown.”

  “Tinseltown. That was what they used to call it. Tinseltown.”

  TAHOE DRIVE SNAKED UP and around and in and out, overlooking the valley beneath and the distant black block of Los Angeles.

  “Time was you’d have seen nothing but lights down there,” said Jim.

  Now it was grave silent.

  The houses on both sides of the road were totally still.

  “That was the Harknetts’ place. Gave great parties. Vodka by the gallon. Friendliest people you ever met. Andy Wells lived there. Had one of the all-time great messy divorces. Talk about the wicked witch of the west. That… hey, it’s been burned down. Shame. Tom and Zena Hedger. College folk. Could never master his barbecue, though. Generally finished up with a call to the fire service.”

  “How far to your place?”

  “Couple of hundred yards, on the left. Just past that abandoned Subaru.”

  On an impulse, Jim drew the Ruger from its holster. The short hairs at the nape of his neck had begun to prickle.

  “What you seen?” whispered Carrie, drawing her own six-shot revolver.

  “Nothing. Just a feeling, but I learned to trust that when I’ve been backcountry. Up in Montana once, near Swiftcurrent Lake on a late-evening hike. Had the same feeling and when I walked around the next corner there was a sow grizzly with a cub.”

  “Hey.”

  “Know what steps I took?”

  She smiled, teeth white in the gloom. “Yeah. Fucking long ones, Jim.”

  They stood still. Something rustled through the dead, cropped grass of his neighbour’s lawn, making him start. There was a glimpse of a sinuous shape sliding toward the side of the plot.

  It had been fairly common to see rattlers around Tahoe Drive, and he figured that the absence of humans would have brought more of them down from the barranca at the rear of the street.

  Jim found it almost unbearably strange and painful to see his own home under these circumstances. He’d flown out into deep space before, though never for as long as this last mission. But in the past he’d always, always been met back at base by Lori and the girls. Then there’d been the time of debriefing and press conferences.

  Only after all that was out of the way would he come home on leave to a great welcome from family and neighbours and friends.

  “You got your keys?”

  He’d been supping away into the past, and Carrie’s whisper made him jump.

  “Yeah. Picked them up from my locker. Think we’ll try around the back.”

  A dog barked not far away, answered by another and another. While driving the school bus Jim had glimpsed, or thought he’d glimpsed, a pack of dogs, all shapes and sizes, running together through a burned patch of scrub.

  There was a thick-mesh wire fence, chest high, all around the property. Jim walked along the side of the house as quietly as he was able, conscious of his boots crunching through dead grass. There didn’t seem any visible damage. No broken glass, and the shutters were in place across his daughters’ bedroom window. The back door was locked.

  He could now see the moonlight dancing off the water in the pool. The level was low, more than two feet below the top, and it was easy to make out bunches of leaves and a couple of larger branches floating in the sullen darkness.

  There was a mesh screen over double glass doors, and Jim tugged gently at it. But it was bolted from the inside.

  The kitchen and the rear entrance to the house was to the left, and he reached it in half a dozen short strides. Carrie was keeping close behind him.

  “Watch the garden,” he said.

  The security lock turned easily and Jim pushed the door open.

  He stepped into his home for the first time in two years and four weeks, shocked by the instant realization that he wasn’t alone.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Tenth.”

  “The date?”

  “Right. Today’s October 10. We still got five weeks to get all the way into the city and sort things out. Then hike south down to Calico for the fifteenth of the next month.”

  Jeff Thomas peered into the mirror, touching his broken nose. “No problem at all, Jed.” He leaned closer, trying to angle the glass to catch the dawn light. “You reckon I look stupid?”

  Jed Herne was doing his morning’s exercises, attempting to loosen the night’s tightness from his knees. “No. You might be stupid, but that nose doesn’t make much difference.”

  The heavy bruising around the eyes, which had made the journalist look like a querulous owl, was almost gone and the deep gash across the face had healed up, leaving a jagged scar that seamed over the stubbled cheek.