“Wrong.”

  “We’re hungry, mister.” The other intruder had a slight hesitation in his voice that wasn’t quite a full-blown stammer. But it didn’t make him seem mild-mannered or timid.

  Pete took a step toward them. “We just ate a tin of dog food, squid. Only thing left in the whole house. Now get out. Before…”

  “Before what?” He lifted the axe in a threatening gesture.

  “Before I break you both across my knee. You understand me, kid?”

  “Don’t fucking call me ‘kid,’ you dripping old prick!”

  “That’s a good fire, m-mister. We’re sort of cold, as well.”

  “Hell, let ‘em stay, Pete,” said Mac. “Where’s the harm?”

  “The harm is that they came in with their axe and… and whatever the other one’s trying to hide behind his back. Come in here and try to threaten us and steal from us. Well, if they aren’t out of here in five seconds, I’m going to forget all about my pacifist training and throw them clean through that window.”

  “You an’ whose army, you old prick?”

  Pete took three slow, hissing breaths. Clenching his fists and squaring his shoulders, placing one foot a little in front of the other, he adopted the classical martial-arts threatening posture.

  Mac was impressed.

  “Five seconds,” said Pete.

  The shorter one stepped farther into the room. He held out his right wrist, and Mac had a moment to realize that he was wearing a small gunmetal crossbow strapped to it.

  There was a dull thunking sound, and something hissed through the air, followed by a strange, wet thud, like a hammer striking a side of beef.

  Pete seemed to sag for a moment, as if he’d been kicked behind the knees. His hands went to his head, where he appeared to have sprouted a small, feathered horn.

  “He’s hit me with an arrow, Mac,” he said quietly, wonderingly.

  “Are you—“ Henderson McGill stopped, realizing what an utterly stupid and pointless question it would be.

  “He’s…he’s killed me, Mac. With a fucking arrow…”

  Three pairs of eyes watched as Peter Turner’s hands dropped away, hanging limply at his sides. His head half turned toward the door, the shadows playing over the stubby shaft of the crossbow quarrel that protruded from his temple. A worm of dark blood had begun to crawl out of the wound.

  His legs gave way, and he folded onto the floor, his head striking the corner of a low table with a ferocious crack.

  There was a rasp of breath, torn shuddering from somewhere deep within his chest. Then he was still.

  Henderson McGill closed his eyes for a moment. So much had happened since the computers recalled them from the deep induced sleep on board the Aquila. So many deaths and horrors.

  But this was different.

  “This is personal,” he said, hardly aware of having spoken out loud.

  “No, it wasn’t—“ began the youth with the empty crossbow.

  McGill closed with him and clamped both hands around his scrawny neck, using all of his enormous strength to hoist him clean off the dusty floor. His thumbs jammed under the chin, forcing the head back so that his popping eyes stared at the ceiling. His feet kicked and flailed, but Mac turned away, easily avoiding the blows.

  “Let him g-go,” stammered the other one, waving the ax in a jerky, frightened way.

  “Sure,” whispered Mac.

  The snapping of the cervical vertebrae was startlingly loud, like a dry branch beneath an unwary heel in a hunter’s wood.

  The feet continued to twitch after the powerful man dropped the corpse onto the carpet to lie alongside Pete Turner.

  “Not me, m-m-mister.” The kid was backing away toward the door into the hall, the ax clattering on the floor. His hands were up, frantic. The stench of urine was strong in the room.

  Mac snatched at the left hand of the terrified teenager and broke three fingers in a single vicious twist. The boy screamed at the top of his voice.

  Mac smiled at him. A dreadful, cold smile.

  “You sick little shit,” he breathed.

  He shook the still-screaming boy, then whacked him against the wall again and again. The body felt light and thin in his hands, and at last he felt disgust come over him. Disgust for what the world had become, for the murderous little bastard, and disgust with himself for becoming just like the rest.

  Picking the boy up, he carried him to the door and flung him outside, letting him crumple in a barely moaning heap. “You be gone now,” he said. “I find you here in half an hour, you’ll be dead. Remember this, it’s better to die decent than live like bloody ghouls.”

  The boy had managed to crawl off. Before leaving for Mystic the next morning, Mac set a fire, burning the body of his friend along with his killer.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The first few spots of rain dappled the top of the oak table set in the corner of the patio, near the angle of the stone walls. But then it began to pour down with a serious purpose and it layered the wood, slick like a sheet of ice.

  A battery-operated digital clock-calendar was clicking busily away in the corner of the room. It was almost the only unbroken thing in the whole of the luxurious log-built house.

  Steve Romero looked at it, hypnotized by the constantly changing numbers.

  “Wonder why they didn’t break that?” Kyle Lynch remarked, pulling the door shut, collar turned up against the sudden rain.

  “Who needs to know what the time is? Or the date? Not now.”

  “I do,” Kyle said, grinning. The empty Mondadori pistol was tucked in his belt, the Mannlicher rifle propped in a corner of the ravaged room.

  “You do?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then I can tell you that it’s eleven minutes after four in the afternoon of October 12.”

  “That mountain time, Steve? I mean, I need to know precisely what we’re talking about here. Wouldn’t want to miss my favorite soap by an hour because I was in the wrong zone.”

  “What’s your favorite soap?”

  The tall black navigator sniffed. “I guess… Yeah, Leanne and me used to watch ‘Pity’s Problems’ most weeks. Always sick kids and dying grannies. Used to laugh till I cried.”

  “Well, it’s mountain time.”

  “Sure, buddy?”

  “We’re three miles from Aspen, Colorado. In the heart of the Rockies. If this isn’t mountain time, Kyle, then I don’t know what the fuck is.” He shook his head in mock disgust.

  “Like you say, time doesn’t matter much anymore, does it?”

  “Want to know the ambient temperature? Clock shows that, as well.”

  “Why not?”

  “In or out?”

  Kyle threw back his head and laughed. “I don’t… No, make it outside. Just been out there and it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a steel cougar. Close to snow.”

  Steve looked at the green digital figures. “There. It’s one degree above freezing. So you guessed about right.”

  “Inside?”

  It was Steve’s turn to laugh. “It’s one degree below freezing inside.”

  “What we need is a fire,” Kyle suggested.

  They found the cords of wood stacked neatly outside the back of the house, which sat high up the side of an isolated ski trail.

  It didn’t take long to get a good fire blazing in the wide hearth. They managed to block the worst of the gaps in the shattered windows with tacked-up lengths of torn carpeting.

  “All we need now are some weenies and a bag of marshmallows.”

  “I’d settle for any kind of food.” Steve glanced at himself. “I’m six-two and I used to weigh in around one-fifty-five. Alison said it was like getting laid by a xylophone. Now it’s like a starving xylophone. I bet I’m way under one-forty now. Honestly can’t remember the last real food.”

  “Jim Hilton used to call us the beanpole twins,” said Kyle.

  “Wonder where the old devil is now? Wonder how many of us will make it back to Calico next month?”

  “I wouldn’t shed floods of tears if Mr. Pompous gets wasted on the road.”

  “Jeff?”

  Kyle nodded. “Right.”

  “He’s not that bad.”

  “He’s not that good.”

  “I wouldn’t mind him.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Chicken-fried with duchess potatoes and a side salad.”

  KYLE DOZED in front of the blazing fire. Steve wandered through the house, eventually settling with an expensive shortwave radio. It had been kicked under one of the smashed beds, but it didn’t seem too badly damaged. A drawer in the basement workshop offered some batteries.

  He carried it back with him and sat down by the blazing logs, using their dancing golden light to examine the radio.

  The sudden burst of crackling static jerked Kyle awake. “On duty right… Shit! I didn’t know where I was. Thought I was back on the Aquila.”

  “Nobody out there,” Steve said, punching the small silver buttons to take it all around the dial.

  “Wasn’t that… Stop.”

  “What?”

  “Take it back a little. Thought I heard a voice or something.”

  The hissing came and went, surging like invisible waves from the ether. Steve moved the controls more slowly and carefully.

  The clock showed one minute past five in the afternoon.

  Suddenly a faint voice emerged from the static. “Tempest on…” Then the background noise drowned out the voice.

  “Find it again,” said Kyle excitedly. “Find it, Steve.”

  “Shut up a minute. Using the fine seek-tuner control on it.”

  “Probably that madman from… Barstow, wasn’t it? One we heard from space, raving on about Earthblood stuff.”

  “Ah, the green light’s come on, showing someone’s transmitting. But it’s on bastardly low power.”

  “Tempest… anyone… teenth. On hour… ry hour… lice on fif....”

  Then it faded right away, and nothing Steve tried would bring it back again.

  “Batteries are way down.”

  “Think that was Zelig?”

  Steve laid the radio gently among the litter of household items. “Could’ve been. Could’ve been Wile E. Coyote for all I know.”

  “It surely—“

  Kyle stopped speaking, his head swiveling toward the broken French windows that faced the snow-topped peaks to the west.

  “Yeah,” breathed Steve. “I heard it, too.”

  “Company?”

  Both men crawled quickly across the room to grab their guns.

  They waited in case the faint scratching sound was repeated.

  “GOING TO CALL IT ‘Jaguar,’ I think,” said Steve Romero.

  “Jaguar?”

  “Or ‘Tiger,’ maybe ‘Puma.’ That’s the best name for it. No, ‘Panther.’ Yeah. Goes with its black color, doesn’t it?”

  The cat was surprisingly plump and well fed. It had walked confidently in when Kyle opened the broken glass doors onto the back garden. Making a distant mewing sound, it had picked its way through and around the piled rubbish on the floor with an incredible delicacy then sat calmly in front of the fire and started to groom itself.

  It hadn’t raised any objection when Steve knelt by it and started to stroke it. The head went back and the purring intensified. The slit green eyes narrowed with pleasure.

  Now it was sitting on Steve’s lap while he tried to think of good names for it.

  “’Cannibal’ would be good,” offered Kyle.

  “Why?”

  “How’d you think it looks so sleek? Like they said about Alferd Packer when he’d eaten his hunting buddies. ‘Him too fat.’ Cannibal.”

  “Never. I’ll call him ‘Panther.’ That’s settled. All right?”

  Kyle stood up and stretched. “No. I got a better idea. Give him here a moment.”

  Steve lifted the contented animal off his knee and let Kyle take it.

  “What’re you going to call him? This better be real good.”

  Kyle gently stroked the soft black fur, then held its head firmly in his right hand and gave it a swift, savage, sickening jerk, breaking the cat’s neck, killing it instanteously.

  “I’m going to call it ‘food,’” he said.

  Steve was shocked momentarily, but he couldn’t argue the point. Without food, they’d have trouble going on. They both agreed that it was delicious and tasted remarkably like rabbit.

  Next morning they set off to walk the last three miles of their odyssey into Aspen, where Steve Romero finally discovered what had happened to his ex-wife, Alison, and his eighteen-year-old son, Sly.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Jefferson Lee Thomas, once the superstud star journalist on the prestigious West American, was terrified. Frightened almost out of his wits and gibbering with panic.

  His pulse was racing, the indrawn breath burning his throat. The palms of his hands were grazed and slippery with blood and sweat. His tongue felt like the bottom of a cowboy’s boot.

  While running through the burned-out ruins of the old Ghirardelli chocolate factory, he’d fallen several times, bruising his knee and knocking the breath out of his lungs. He had also cracked his broken nose again, bringing scalding tears of pain and a trickle of blood across his neck and chest.

  Not far away, on the edge of Fisherman’s Wharf, he could hear his pursuers.

  There were about a dozen of them, though there hadn’t been enough time for Jeff to take a careful body count.

  Now he knelt beneath the gaping mouth of a shattered window, the fresh salt breeze coming in off the misty bay.

  “Why’d I come? Why the fuck did I come here? Knew it was stupid. Don’t care for the chick. Figured my place would be trashed. Nothing here. Why the fuck didn’t I go with Jim? Dad’ll be long dead. Thought I could find some place to start again. Now I’m fucking finished.”

  Outside there was an unearthly howling as the pack of hunters drew closer. Jeff shuddered. San Francisco in the middle of October could be a chill, bleak place. But he’d had plenty of friends. Where were they all now he needed them?

  “Dead or gone,” he whispered. “Probably dead and gone.”

  If only he’d used the stolen mountain bike. The borrowed mountain bike. Taken it and gone south on the side roads and narrow trails along the western flanks of the Sierras, heading out toward the meeting place in Calico on the fifteenth of next month. Where there should be company.

  It was funny. The only thing that had been funny in the past couple of days. Not funny amusing. Funny peculiar.

  The big white building shaped like a pyramid—what was it called? Didn’t matter. It still stood there, soot streaked, amid the fire-stormed ruins of the central part of the city. On one wall, about eight floors from the point, someone had painted a message in bright red letters.

  “1115CACA.”

  It had crossed his mind that it could be a runic reference to the date and place of the rumored meeting, a reminder aimed at those who might comprehend it. The fifteenth day of the eleventh month in Calico, California.

  “For those who don’t understand, no explanation is possible. If you do understand, then no explanation is necessary.”

  Jeff wondered where that old quotation had sprung from, and why he was trapped and hunted in the fabled city of fourteen hills.

  “Fuck knows,” he said, actually managing a weak grin at himself....

  IT HAD PROVED impossible to get into San Francisco on any form of transport, even on the bike. Every single road was blocked solid with jammed vehicles. And so many dead!

  Jeff had dumped the bike into a culvert, carrying on with his lightened pack, and his broad-bladed butcher’s knife stuck in his belt. Hunger was becoming more and more insistent.

  He’d eventually entered the city over the Oakland Bay Bridge, walking across the tops of the cars on the upper deck, picking his way in the dark, high above the racing water.

  The idea of trying to get to his apartment, and even track down his girlfriend, was seeming more and more ridiculous.

  The night wind had tugged at him, and a light mist had coated the rusting metal, making it slippery.

  Jeff had reached over halfway, past Treasure Island, when a croaking voice from the shadows nearly made him fall.

  “Would you have a can of beans, mister?”

  “What?”

  An old woman with straggly hair, wearing a thick coat several sizes too large for her, had waved a hand at him.

  “Two cans of beans, mister, then? Or could you make it three cans?”

  “Bugger off before I slit your throat, you stinking old harridan!”

  “You have a nice day, too, mister.” She’d raised her voice. “I can catch the scent of death on you, son!”

  For a moment he’d considered pursuing her into the maze of trashed metal and glass to carry out his threat to open up her scrawny neck. But discretion had prevailed, and he’d simply continued on into the city, coming down off the bridge and walking cautiously toward the Embarcadero.

  Among the shambles of ruined stores and smart eateries, Jeff had holed up until the dawn was well established. Then he’d crept warily out into the ruins of the city that he’d loved, the city that had been his home.

  Somehow nothing stated the sad demise of the city as much as the bridge. The graceful arch across the chill gray waters, its girders painted a dark reddish brown. The color of the heart’s blood of all the country singers who had come west and failed to make it. That was what his neighbor on Jackson Street, Mad Dave Caswell, had told Jeff the day he’d arrived in town.

  Now, silhouetted against the pink sky, he’d seen that the bay bridge had a great gap at its center. Huge hawsers trailed into the water, and the middle span dangled in thin air. Much of it was stained a bitter ebony color, streaked with scorch marks.

  Jeff’s only conclusion was that there had been a massive traffic accident as tens of thousands tried to flee San .Francisco toward the north, and there had been a fireball so intense it had actually destroyed the main structure of the bridge.

  It was a sad and bitter sight.

  Jeff Thomas had wandered the streets for a day and half, not wanting to go back to his apartment, guessing what he’d find.