Sly had thrown himself down on the sofa immediately after Randy’s death and refused to move or even speak. He was a large, clumsy-looking boy, in a dark sweater and baggy jeans. Kyle still hadn’t had a chance to see his face, wondering if he favored his mother or Steve.

  His friend walked back into the room. “We’ll stay the night and move at dawn. It’s a long hard road. If the snow’s still falling, we’d best wait.”

  Kyle nodded. “What about Alison?”

  “Stays where she is. If someone comes along and finds her, then she lives. If not…” He allowed the sentence to trail away.

  “Taking Sly?”

  “Of course.” Steve sat down and patted the boy on the back. “Sly’s a part of the family now. But what about you, Kyle?”

  “What?”

  “Leanne in Albuquerque?”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, fact is she and I were sort of breaking up before the Aquila blasted off. Been seeing a lady called Rosa, just now and then. No, I’ll join you on the road to Calico.”

  SLY FELL ASLEEP, face down, breathing heavily.

  Alison had become quieter, though she still shrieked out occasional threats promising them that she’d come after them and that there was some mysterious group of men who would hunt them down.

  Steve had gone in to try to gag her again, leaving Kyle to stand and stare out at the steadily falling snow. A shuffling sound from behind him made Kyle turn around.

  Sly was standing up, rubbing his eyes. He dropped his hands and stared curiously at Kyle.

  “You’re a friend of my dad’s?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  Now that he could finally see the eighteen-year-old clearly, a lot of things made sense. Sly had a round, soft face, with a gentle, moonish smile. He also had the distinctive hooded eyes of someone with Down’s syndrome.

  THE SNOW DIDN’T STOP until the middle of the next morning, but the two friends agreed that they’d get moving immediately. Alison’s repeated threats about the vigilante groups made them feel they wanted out of Aspen as soon as possible.

  They’d stocked up their packs with what food they could find, and Steve had spent some time helping Sly to get dressed in thermal underclothes and several layers of jumpers and shirts.

  The boy was excited about their journey.

  “We going to meet all the other astronauts, Dad?” he’d asked.

  “Yeah. Hope so, son.”

  They looked in on the woman before they left. But she refused to speak to them, trying to spit at her ex-husband as he turned away.

  They heard her through the closed door. “You fucking wait, Steve!”

  Sly decided that he had to take a last-minute pee. Waiting for him in the kitchen, Kyle and Steve looked out at the white mound that was Randy’s corpse.

  “Does it make any difference to you having the boy along, Kyle? The way he is, you know?”

  “Yeah. The difference it makes, Steve, is that I’m even more pleased we came to Colorado to get him.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The days in the Jackson Street apartment drifted by in a bizarre, almost timeless world.

  Nanci Simms had totally taken over the running of Jeff Thomas’s life, imposing her forceful personality on him.

  She refused to allow him into San Francisco, pointing out she’d already rescued him once and didn’t intend to have to do it again.

  Every now and again she would leave, generally just after midnight, with the Port Royale machine pistol slung over her elegant shoulders and a pair of matched Heckler & Koch P-111 automatics at her hip. Both held fifteen rounds of 9mm full-metal-jacket ammunition.

  Three times Jeff woke to find her seated in his kitchen, her silver head stooped over the candle-lit table, fieldstripping her greased weapons and carefully reloading them.

  She brought back food and drink, including a bottle of fine Polish vodka.

  They would sit and discuss the Civil War battles for hours, using his models to play over the various elements of the long campaigns.

  For much of this time, Jeff Thomas was really happy. He felt secure with her, warm and well fed, while the anarchy outside rarely intruded.

  One morning he woke to hear her easing open the security door, the Port Royale in her hands. She was wearing only a white cotton T-shirt and pale purple satin bikini pants. Despite her age, Nanci’s body was in fantastic condition.

  Seeing him awake, she put a finger to her lips, then vanished into the corridor. Several minutes later Jeff heard the silk-ripping sound of the gun on full auto.

  A couple of days before, Nanci had stolen a gun for him, a stainless-steel Smith & Wesson 4506. The big .45 had an 8-round magazine, a five-inch barrel and wraparound Delrin stocks and a serrated hammer spur with adjustable rear sight.

  “It will stop a charging buffalo,” she’d said. “Only advice I’ll give you, Jeff, is to use it when you mean it and mean it when you use it.”

  Now, with the gunfire still echoing in his ears, he grabbed it and ran out of the door, picking his way down the stairs to the second floor. He found her there calmly checking that each of the four bodies at her feet were all dead.

  They were.

  She looked up and saw him there, wearing only his underpants, holding the gun.

  “Come here,” she said. “My firm recollection is that I told you never to come out unless I called for you.”

  “Thought you might need help.”

  “Nice thought, but wrong.” She slapped him so hard and fast across the face, both cheeks, that he nearly fell over. “It’s important that you learn to do what I say.”

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  Then Nanci had smiled, reached out with her right hand and slid it inside his pants to cup him with strong fingers, bringing him to instant hardness. “Nice of you to worry, though. Now let us go up to bed and make some long, slow loving.”

  Jeff had never made love to a woman over sixty before. In fact, as he studied himself in the full-length bathroom mirror afterward, he couldn’t remember making love to any woman over twenty-one.

  His face showed the marks of her slap, and his cheeks and chin were reddened from her insistence on his pleasuring her with his tongue.

  There were scratches on his shoulder and across his lower stomach. His jaw ached, and much lower down it felt as though he had been massaged with a red chili paste.

  But it had been the best sex he’d ever known.

  THE DIGITAL calendar clock on the wall of the kitchen showed November 12, 2040, eleven-thirty at night. Outside it was a dull, cold evening, with a mixture of fog and drizzle coming in off the bay.

  They’d just been reworking the Battle of Chickamauga, with its dubious, hollow triumph for the army of Tennessee. Thirty-five thousand men fallen and nothing gained.

  Nanci had stood up and stretched. “Bedtime, Jefferson. Get that educated tongue of yours ready to give me some slow loving.” She looked at the tiny figures in blue and gray. “Shame we have to leave in the morning. I was working up to Sherman’s march to the sea.”

  “Can we take the models with us, Nanci?”

  “No. Not enough space in the Mercedes.”

  “The what?”

  “Found it days ago,” she said, her hand resting on his shoulder and sending a thrill of pleasure through him. “Got it filled up with gas and garaged out on Cedar, near Van Ness.”

  “Terrific. I like to go in style.”

  “So you’re grateful to me, Jeff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.” Her fingers slid inside his shirt, over his chest, seeking the left nipple, finding it and tightening, making him gasp with pain and excitement. She squeezed tighter, making him bite his lip. Her face was against his, her breath warm on his cheek. “I trust that you’ll be very grateful to me, Jeff.”

  “Oh, God, yes,” he sighed.

  NANCI INSISTED on doing all the driving herself. She pushed on fast, finding ways around what looked like impossible traffic blocks. The silver Mercedes rolled on like a dream, the soft top down in the warm sunshine. South toward Los Angeles.

  “I could spell you at the wheel,” he offered in midafternoon.

  “This is not a casual spin out into the Sierras for transient pleasure. This is now and this is real.”

  Camp was set for the night near Alta Sierra, close by Isabella Lake. They weren’t too far north of L.A., and on their way to closing in on Calico.

  Jeff felt slightly sick from the long drive and he was relieved when Nanci didn’t call on him for sexual services.

  She had lit a small fire and cooked the remains of a cat she’d snared in San Francisco.

  “Nanci?”

  “You’re going to ask me again about what I really used to do for a living. I’d prefer it if you didn’t, Jefferson.”

  “You said you’d been a teacher. And a contract assassin for Central Intelligence. I believe both of them. By God, I do! But how do you know about Zelig? What’s going on, Nanci?”

  She turned, hair tinted crimson by the fire’s glow, her eyes like burning rubies.

  “It is probably a cliche, but it is honestly better for you that you don’t know too much. Either you trust me or you don’t. But don’t ask. One day, if the lords of chaos are willing, you’ll find out.”

  Seventy miles short of Calico, beyond Mojave, Jeff saw a half-dozen figures strung out across the highway, stunted by the perspective and the shimmering desert heat.

  Nanci took her foot off the gas, letting the Mercedes whisper down to something closer to fifty than ninety.

  “They might be…” he began.

  “Shut up and grab hold of that .45, there’s a good boy.”

  The figures were closer, taking individual shapes. Dark blue pants, peaked caps with silver badges, polished mirror sunglasses that concealed the eyes. Four in leather jackets, the other two in shirtsleeves. All of them were holding drawn revolvers that glittered in the morning sunlight.

  “Fucking cops,” said Jeff.

  “Ten out of ten for surface observation. Zero out of ten for intelligence.”

  “You mean they aren’t—“

  He was pushed back in the bucket seat as the Mercedes suddenly accelerated hard toward the line of men.

  Jeff had a splinter of a frozen second to wonder if this was where he became dead.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Captain James Hilton, lately the commander of the United States Space Vessel Aquila, stared down the sunlit main street of the ghost town.

  There was the dazzle of the chromed hood of the sleek silver Mercedes sports car parked near the open front of what had once been a gift shop. Wind chimes still tinkled in the light breeze, and you could just taste the faint, elusive flavor of pinon pine candles.

  There were five bullet holes in the car, not counting the smashed windshield. The front fender was crumpled and smeared with gobbets of brown, drying blood. One of the double headlights was gone, and Jim could still make out the macabre hank of blond-haired scalp that dangled from the socket.

  He’d personally removed the severed finger from the radiator grill, noticing that the sterling silver ring was monogrammed C.H.P.

  The rough surface of the old picnic table in front of him felt warm to the touch. Jim glanced at the sky, seeing it cloudless from east to west.

  It was 15 November 2040.

  The date and the place that Zelig had warned them to attend.

  He looked around, seeing what changes the past seven eventful weeks had wrought in his command. Mentally he ticked off the names. Finding, to his dismay, that some of the faces had blurred.

  Bob Rogers from Topeka, dead in his cryo-capsule.

  Mike Man, the best chess player that Jim had ever known, dead in the landing crash.

  Marcey Cortling, the Aquila’s number two, decapitated.

  Ryan O’Keefe, their psychiatrist, also dead at Stevenson base.

  Jed Herne, shot by a sniper, not far from San Francisco, his death described to them by Jeff Thomas that morning.

  Pete Turner and Henderson McGill, both missing. Believed killed. Their planned trip up to New England was the longest and the most dangerous. Mac’s loss was about the hardest of the crew to bear.

  Seven dead or lost, and the survivors from the Aquila.

  Himself.

  Steve Romero and Kyle Lynch, going out together and returning together.

  Jeff Thomas, beating the odds to return to Calico.

  And Carrie, who’d been such a vital support for Jim through the past seven weeks.

  Seven from twelve.

  But they also had some additions.

  His own daughter, Heather, sitting on the porch of what used to be the house of the town’s schoolteacher. She was playing a game with a handful of quartz pebbles with ever-smiling Sly Romero.

  Jim turned his head to the north, where the ground rose steeply, close by the remains of an old mining railway. He’d felt the woman’s presence before he saw her, conscious of the intensity of her gaze.

  The enigmatic Nanci Simms, immaculate in her khaki trouser suit and polished boots, was standing on the ridge and staring at him.

  There were some questions there, but they could wait awhile.

  There was no sign of Zelig. No sign of anyone moving for as far as the eye could see. Just the ocher expanse of the desert, stretching away, unchanged and eternal. Jim sighed. “What now?” he said.

 

 

  James Axler, Earth Blood 001: Earthblood

 

 

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