“Good decision, Jeff,” she said over her shoulder. “Would’ve been dead before you reached the stairs if you’d tried for it.”

  NANCI TOPPED HIM by four inches, striding through the deserted streets of the city with a long, rangy step. The steel-tipped heels of her polished boots rang in the silence.

  She’d asked him if he had any place to stay for a night. She rubbed a ruminative finger along the side of her nose when he mentioned his apartment on Jackson Street.

  “Might be undamaged. Let’s go see.”

  When they reached his apartment, they found the door kicked in, but there was little serious harm. The looters had been through the kitchen and took anything that could possibly be eaten, as well as all the knives. But they hadn’t stayed to trash the place.

  Nanci was sprawled out on the sofa, legs crossed. She’d refused any of the trail food, pulling some jerky from her own, much smaller pack. Jeff had nibbled on a fruit-and-oats bar, finding he didn’t feel as hungry as he thought he would.

  He stood by the side table under the window, where he’d laid out one of his Civil War battle tableaux using the miniature models that he’d cast and painted himself. To his amazement, the tiny soldiers still stood, unharmed, among the rolling hills of dark green cardboard.

  Nanci had glanced at it as she prowled around the apartment, and now she got up and sauntered over.

  “Antietam,” she said, softly.

  Jeff was flabbergasted. “How the sweet fuck do you know that?”

  “Majored in History. The War between the States was my last-year dissertation.” She looked out of the window into the darkening sky. “September 17 of ‘62. Bloodiest day of the whole war.” Her finger traced a pale yellow line on the diorama. “Hagerstown Turnpike. That’s Dunker Church, I guess.” A straggling, thin blue smear. “Antietam Creek. Burnsie’s Bridge. Toombs up here with his Georgians, amongst the thick trees. Heavily outnumbered.” She indicated a rounded incline. “Cemetery Hill. And Jeb Stuart away on Nicodemus Hill. It’s nice, Jeff, very nice indeed.”

  He faced her, wanting to change the subject to what really interested him. “We go south tomorrow?”

  “Right.”

  “How?”

  She smiled, looking suddenly younger. “Jeff… I could walk it from here to Calico easily in the time we have. A whole month. But I prefer to travel with a modicum of style.”

  “First-class?”

  “Absolutely. And if we find adequate transport, we can discuss the entire Civil War as we motor our way gently along toward this ghost town of yours. It’ll be admirable.”

  “Transport, Nanci?”

  “Let me do the worrying, Jeff.”

  Some distance away they both heard a sudden piercing scream, cut off as quickly as it started. It was impossible to tell whether it had come from a man or a woman. Or a child. Neither of them took any notice.

  “Can I ask you something, Nanci, since we’re going to be traveling together?”

  “Why am I interested in Zelig and how did I know about Tempest?”

  “And who the hell you are and what the hell you do.”

  “You believe schoolteacher?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s partly what I was. Rest of the time I was an assassin for Central Intelligence.” She stretched lazily and cast him an amused glance. “Now I’m for bed.”

  Jeff watched her, unable to decide whether she was joking or not about her job.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  It was a bitingly cold fall morning, with the previous day’s norther veering to a ferocious easterly, dropping the wind-chill factor close to thirty below zero.

  There were periods of hail, pattering off Mac’s face, stinging the skin. Every hour or so the sky would darken to the color of tarnished pewter and it would tip snow across New England.

  The Norton kept going, reliable as ever, though Mac had to slow it down to less than ten miles per hour on the patches of sheet ice.

  It seemed as if he’d never finish the journey to Mystic. His hands and feet felt frozen, and he began to have serious worries about getting frostbitten.

  His endless travels from the warmth of the Nevada desert to this bitter wilderness were beginning to seem more and more pointless.

  It was as though there’d been nothing but pain and death from the first traumatic moments of their reawakening. As he rode on endlessly, the cold and the monotony amplified his fears that nothing good awaited him, either.

  Unbelievably it grew colder and darker.

  The headlight on the old Norton barely penetrated the driving snow that rolled across the blacktop in front of him.

  Mac dropped his speed to walking pace, keeping both feet down, toes scraping along the glassy surface of the highway. Several times he had to swerve around tangled vehicles, many of them burned-out, blackened shells.

  Once something darted from the blizzard, right in front of him, making him drop the bike with a jarring crash. There was the momentary flash of vast bulk and towering horns. His nostrils filled with rank, bitter scent.

  The moose, or whatever it had been, vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and he hauled the bike upright and moved slowly eastward through the numbing cold.

  When he saw the sign, it seemed like something out of a dream, and he stared at it uncomprehendingly.

  Mystic—Home of the Historic Seaport.

  Pocked with bullet holes, the sign was leaning drunkenly to the left, a battered remnant from a different world.

  The bike was beginning to cough, struggling under the wintery conditions. He blinked, then said slowly, barely getting out the word, “Melville Avenue. One hundred and eight. One zero eight, Melville.”

  His lips were blue and his teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. The Norton was meandering from side to side, the back wheel barely retaining any purchase. Mac could see a tremulous vision of the house and where it was, locked into his memory. But in the whiteout conditions nothing made any sense.

  Nothing was making… sense.

  THE LEAVES WERE fire tipped, running a whole range of colors. Green shaded into gold into orange—the bright tints of death. It was a wonderfully balmy afternoon in late fall, with the sun beginning its slow decline. The water was tumbling in gentle white foam over lichen-coated boulders, down into dark pools.

  All seven of Henderson’s children were playing happily together. He lay back on the soft turf and named them on his fingers, from the oldest through to the youngest.

  “John, twenty. Paul, eighteen. Pamela, seventeen. Helen, nine. Jocelyn, seven. Jack, six. And little Sukie, just four.”

  His first wife, Jeanne, lay on his right, wearing a skinny T-shirt in dappled colors of red and yellow. Though she was a couple of years past forty, she’d kept her figure well.

  Angel, his current wife, lay on the other side, nibbling on a chicken leg. A can of beer stood open on a flat rock at her elbow, and beyond that was all the detritus of the big family party.

  “We’ve done well,” she said, following his eyes, down to the river, rubbing her hand through her tangled blond hair.

  “Yeah.”

  The water was frothing, white… as snow as ice as ivory… as parchment—as death.

  MAC KNEW that he was on Melville Avenue. The white frame houses, with balconies and turrets in the best Victorian Gothic style looked like houses on Melville Avenue.

  The dead trees and bushes were weighed down with fresh-fallen snow, their pink color almost buried in whiteness.

  The Norton wasn’t there anymore.

  Mac shook his head, puzzled.

  He had a vague impression, an image in his mind of a tumble, a sliding into the ditch, as if he’d been a spectator and it had happened to someone else.

  “Did I?” he said, unable to catch the sound of his own whispering voice.

  Now he was walking, the heavy pack dragging in the snow that rose to his ankles, leaving a meandering furrow up the side street.

  The children were laughing, their voices blending and merging until they began to sound like the banshee howling of the blizzard wind.

  There was ice up his nostrils, uncomfortable. His feet didn’t belong to him, nor did his hands. The cold had whipped the skin raw across his cheeks, and his eyes kept watering.

  Watering and freezing, freezing and nearly closing, closing for good, maybe.

  HE HEARD VOICES chattering around him, but Mac wasn’t sure if he was dreaming. If he opened his eyes he could find out, but that would involve a huge effort and he wasn’t quite ready for that.

  Not yet.

  “Lost a lot of weight.” It was a woman’s voice.

  “Fit, though. Losing weight hasn’t made any difference to some parts of him, though…”

  That prompted laughter. Two women.

  There was a gap while he slept.

  “Knew he couldn’t…walked. Paul and John backtracked and found the motorbike.”

  “… hour and the snow would’ve buried it. Never thought we’d ever…”

  A little girl spoke close to his ear. “Time to wake up, Daddy.”

  “I know, Sukie. Any minute now.” Henderson McGill realized that he was home.

  IT TOOK HIM four days to claw his way back to something like reasonable health.

  His fingers and toes began to heal, though he lost most of his nails, blackened and dead. His sight was blurred by the cold and the whiteout, but that recovered on the second day, enabling him to see his family.

  It had been two years, plus a few weeks.

  Sukie had changed most. From a tiny child, barely toddling, she’d become an active little girl, rushing around the big fortress-house at a hundred miles per hour, a hundred questions in her wake.

  The others had all grown in proportion.

  John was now a strapping man, bearded, as was Paul, both with their father’s muscular build. Pamela had shifted from girl to woman, with Jeanne’s dark hair and coloring and solemn brown eyes.

  There was so much catching up, and Mac didn’t feel ready for it. Not immediately. Not until after supper on the fourth day. It was eleven o’clock, and the children had left him sitting by the fire with his two wives.

  There was a snifter of brandy at his elbow. Beyond the reinforced shutters that covered the barred window the wind howled and the snow piled higher. The guns stood ready in every room.

  But McGill felt safe.

  “Now,” he said. “Now I want to hear all about it. How come everyone’s lived through Earthblood and how you got food and all.”

  The women looked at each other, both smiling. Angel answered.

  “Long story, Mac. But I guess we have the time for it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  It was also snowing up in Colorado.

  Fine and powdery snow filled in the hollows of the Rockies and spilled down into the valleys, drifting in the driving wind, piling against the flanks of the houses on the edges of Aspen. The white stuff formed a soft barrier across what had once been state Highway 82.

  Kyle stopped and looked through the curtain of whiteness. “Wish I had my grandfather’s old Leica camera with me.”

  “Arty-farty photographs of the grandeur of nature,” Steve said with a grin.

  “There speaks the one-time veggie and practitioner of transcendental meditation. The man with a sawed-off 12 gauge at his hip, a sixteen-inch bowie knife in his belt and a dozen rabbit corpses dotting the land between here and Stevenson base.”

  Steve nodded. “You got an ace on the line there, Kyle. Man changes. Have to. Try and live as a strict vegetarian after Earthblood and you die quicker rather than slower.”

  “Best get moving before this snow starts blocking the trails. How far?”

  “To the last address I had for Sly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Another mile and a quarter.”

  They found the sign a quarter mile farther into the township.

  Here, too, the sign prepared them, showing a world with a changed face. Aspen. Keep Out If You Don’t Belong. Death For Strangers.

  “Friendliest little place in the west,” said Steve Romero.

  The warning sign offered the threat of vigilante patrols. Kyle and Steve had already witnessed that all too often, particularly around the smaller towns. Fortunately the weather was sufficiently bad to keep the gun carriers indoors.

  “Alison’s place is along here. Overlook Avenue. Lot of new houses. Lives up here with Sly and her new man.”

  Kyle stopped and brushed snow from his stubbled beard. “What’s he do?”

  “Who?”

  “Alison’s husband.”

  “Not a lot. You want to know?”

  “Yeah. You’ve never really talked about your family. All the years I’ve known you. I know she’s married twice after you. You feel bitter. And your kid… Sly. All I know about him is that he’s eighteen.”

  Steve coughed. “This bastard snow gets in everywhere.”

  “What does Sly do? What school is he at? Sorry, I mean what school was he at?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t talk about my family. About Sly. I just want to find him and maybe bring him with us.”

  “Alison’s husband?”

  “Name’s Randy.” He laughed bitterly. “Met him once, and he’s just what you’d expect. Built like a brick shit-house with brains to match. He runs a ski-lift operation on the far side of Aspen.”

  “What if Sly wants to come and they want him to stay? You thought that one through, Steve?”

  “I’ll just take him.”

  Kyle slapped him on the back. “Look, the kid’s eighteen. Got a mind of his own, right?”

  “Sure, sure. Let’s get on and cut the talk. I’m frozen.”

  When they stopped before a house, Kyle looked at Steve questioningly. “This it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Looks like something out of a child’s fairy story. All that snow and the fancy woodwork.”

  “Wicked witch’s castle maybe,” said Steve with sudden bitterness.

  “How do we play this?”

  “Just walk in,” offered Steve, patting the walnut stock of the shotgun.

  “Want me to go around the back…get ready to give you a little support if you want it? Or, if you need it…”

  “I guess so, Kyle. I’ll give you two minutes. Then you give me five minutes. If you haven’t heard anything, just come running.”

  KYLE STOOD in the back garden, the snow falling about him in the infinite stillness. The world had closed in, and visibility was no more than thirty paces. No other buildings could be seen. There were lights on in the house, though it was still well short of noon, but the windows were steamed up and he couldn’t make out any details.

  He could smell wreathing wood smoke, with an undercurrent of cooking food. Baking bread, was his guess.

  One surprise was the number of children’s toys scattered around, some barely visible beneath hillocks of fresh snow. Steve hadn’t mentioned Alison or Randy having any other, younger kids.

  Kyle took off his pack and laid it under cover, by an elegant veranda that ran the length of the building. He eased the Mannlicher Model V rifle from his shoulder, checking that there was a .357 round in the chamber, remembering to make sure the safety was off.

  Kyle Lynch closed his eyes for a few moments, trying to steady his breathing. Executing the redneck had been a hideous shock. This was different. In the next few minutes he might find himself having to use the weapon against more human beings. Maybe against a woman.

  He checked his wristwatch.

  Surprisingly only three of the seven minutes had passed. The time moved slowly, and he felt tensely coiled inside.

  There hadn’t been a sound from inside the large house.

  The tiny numbers clicked over, past the agreed limit of four hundred and twenty seconds.

  “Shit,” said Kyle.

  The back door was on the latch, and he eased it quietly open, finding it difficult and clumsy with the scope-sighted rifle tucked under his right arm. For a fearsome moment the tall, slender black thought he was going to drop the gun.

  The smell of baking bread was stronger, flooding his nostrils, making his mouth water with a sudden hunger.

  He could hear voices coming from beyond the half-closed kitchen door. But they were too faint for Kyle to pick out any words.

  He edged closer, Mannlicher at his hip, finger lightly on the trigger.

  Now he could make out voices. A woman, shrill and angry. A man, speaking more slowly, but overlaid with a ferocious tension. And Steve Romero, quieter and more controlled.

  “I knew you’d try this, Steve.”

  “Why not? My boy and…” The words trailed off into something Kyle couldn’t catch.

  The other man’s voice rose, ragged with uncontrollable anger.

  “You seen the signs, Romero! We got a lot of good friends here in Aspen. We run it like always. Tight and clean and no room for outsiders. Might be a lot of folks died with Earthblood, still, around a hundred or more left and we all know each other. Look after each other.”

  Kyle heard Steve trying to interrupt the threatening diatribe, saying something about their not needing Sly to stay with them.

  “Don’t fucking need the boy! Not the point. He’s big and strong and willing. New world’s going to need folks like him. Doesn’t matter a damn to me about the rest.”

  The woman spoke up. Alison. “He can tackle simple…” The rest was drowned out by her husband.

  “That doesn’t matter. You come here with a gun and threaten us. You won’t get ten yards from Aspen once I warn the others. Track you easy in this snow. Fucking radio operator! You don’t have the balls to pull the trigger.”

  There was a scream and the sound of a blow, fist against flesh. Then the boom of the scattergun and another scream, much louder.

  Kyle kicked the door open and burst into the living room.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “A hard time we had of it,” said Angel McGill.

  “Times we thought we wouldn’t pull through,” agreed Jeanne.