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Stu nodded at the mike, smiling a little. “I know how you feel. This is just for tonight and maybe tomorrow night, so far as I know. Then I guess things’ll be ironed out.”
Brad told him he could muster twelve men from the Power Committee without going two blocks, and any one of them would be happy to geld any would-be mischief-maker. “This something Rich Moffat’s up to?”
“No, it ain’t Rich. Listen, I’ll be talking to you, okay?”
“Fine, Stu. I’ll have them on watch.”
Stu turned off the CB and walked back to the kitchen. “People let you be just as secret as you want to be. It scares me, you know? The old bald-headed sociologist is right. We could set ourselves up like kings here if we wanted to.”
Fran put her hand over his. “I want you to promise me something. Both of you. Promise me we’ll settle this once and for all at the meeting tomorrow night. I just want it to be over.”
Larry was nodding. “Exile. Yeah. It never crossed my mind, but it might be the best solution. Well, I’m going to collect Lucy and Leo and get home.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Stu said.
“Yeah.” He went out.
In the hour before dawn on September 2, Harold stood on the edge of Sunrise Amphitheater, looking down. The town was in a ditch of blackness. Nadine slept behind him in the small two-man tent they had picked up along with a few other camping supplies as they crept out of town.
We’ll come back, though. Driving chariots.
But in his secret heart, Harold doubted that. The darkness was upon him in more ways than one. The vile bastards had stolen everything from him—Frannie, his self-respect, then his ledger, now his hope. He felt that he was going down.
The wind was strong, rippling his hair, making the tight canvas of the tent snap back and forth with a steady machine-gun popping sound. Behind him, Nadine moaned in her sleep. It was a scary sound. Harold thought she was as lost as he was, maybe worse. The sounds she made in her sleep were not the sounds of a person h...
But I can keep sane. I can do that. If I can go down to whatever’s waiting for me with my mind intact, that will be something. Yes, something.
He wondered if they were down there now, Stu and his friends, surrounding his little house, if they were waiting for him to come home so they could arrest him and throw him in the cooler. He would go down in the history books—if any of those sorry slobs were left to write them, that was—as the Free Zone’s first jailbir...
“All right,” Harold whispered. “We’re going through with it.” Around and above him, the dark September wind drummed through the trees.
The Free Zone Committee meeting was rapped to order some fourteen hours later in the living room of the house Ralph Brentner and Nick Andros shared. Stu was sitting in an easy chair, tapping an end table with the rim of his beer can. “Okay, folks, we better get started here.”
Glen sat with Larry on the curving lip of the freestanding fireplace, their backs to the modest fire Ralph had kindled there. Nick, Susan Stern, and Ralph himself sat on the couch. Nick held the inevitable pen and pad of notepaper. Brad Kitchner was standing just inside the doorway with a can of Coors in his hand, talk...
Frannie was sitting with her back propped comfortably against the door of the closet where Nadine had planted the bomb. Her pack, with Harold’s ledger inside it, was between her folded legs.
“Order, I say, order!” Stu said, rapping harder. “That tape recorder working, baldy?”
“It’s fine,” Glen said. “I see your mouth is in good working order, too, East Texas.”
“I oil her a little and she do just fine,” Stu said, smiling. He glanced around at the eleven people spotted around the big combination living room/dining room area. “Okay… we’ve got a right smart of business, but first I’d like to thank Ralph for providing the roof over our heads and the booze and the crackers—”
He’s really getting good at it, Frannie thought. She tried to judge just how much Stu had changed since the day she and Harold had met him, and couldn’t do it. You get too subjective about the behavior of the people you’re close to, she decided. But she knew that when she had first met him, Stu would have been stricken...
It’s released you, my darling, she thought. I can cry for the others and still be so proud of you and love you so much —
She shifted a little, propping her back more firmly against the closet door.
“We’ll have our guests speak first,” Stu said, “and after that we’ll have a short closed meeting. Any objections to that?”
There were none.
“Okay,” Stu said. “I’ll turn the floor over to Brad Kitchner, and you folks want to listen close because he’s the guy that’s going to put the rocks back in your bourbon in about three days.”
This generated a hearty round of spontaneous applause. Blushing furiously, tugging at his tie, Brad walked to the center of the room. He came very close to tripping over a hassock on his way.
“I’m. Real. Happy. To be. Here,” Brad began in a trembling monotone. He looked as if he would have been happier anywhere else, even at the South Pole, addressing a penguin convention. “The… ah…” He paused, examining his notes, and then brightened. “The power!” he exclaimed with the air of a man making a great discovery...
He fumbled with his notes some more and then went on.
“We had two of the generators going yesterday, and as you know, one of them overloaded and blew its cookies. So to speak. What I mean is that it overlooked. Overloaded, rather. Well… you know what I mean.”
A chuckle ran through them, and it seemed to put Brad a little more at ease.
“That happened because when the plague hit, a lot of stuff got left on and we didn’t have the rest of the generators on to take the overload. We can take care of the overload danger by turning on the rest of the generators—even three or four would have absorbed the load easily—but that isn’t going to solve the fire dan...
The fire snapped comfortably. It’s going to be all right, Fran thought. Harold and Nadine have taken off without any prompting, and maybe that’s best. It solves the problem and Stu is safe from them. Poor Harold, I felt sorry for you, but in the end I felt more fear than pity. The pity is still there, and I’m afraid of...
Harold sat atop a graffiti-inlaid picnic table like something out of a lunatic’s Zen handbook. His legs were crossed. His eyes were far, hazy, contemplative. He had gone to that cold and alien place where Nadine could not follow and she was frightened. In his hands he held the twin of the walkie-talkie in the shoebox. ...
“When?” Nadine asked. She was horribly keyed up, and she had to go to the bathroom badly.
“Pretty soon,” Harold said. His grin had become a mellow smile. It was an expression she could not place right away, because she had never seen it on Harold’s face before. It took her a few minutes to place it. Harold looked happy.
The committee voted 7–0 to empower Brad to round up twenty men and women for his Turning-Off Crew. Ralph Brentner had agreed to fill up two of the Fire Department’s old tanker trucks at Boulder Reservoir and to have them at the power station when Brad turned on.
Chad Norris was next. Speaking quietly, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his chino pants, he talked about the work the Burial Committee had done over the last three weeks. He told them they had buried an incredible twenty-five thousand corpses, better than eight thousand a week, and that he believed they were now ...
“We’ve either been lucky or blessed,” he said. “This mass exodus—that’s all I know to call it—has done most of our work for us. In another town Boulder’s size, it would have taken a year to get it done. We’re expecting to inter another twenty thousand plague victims by the first of October, and we’ll probably keep stum...
Fran shifted her position so she could look out at the last of the day. The gold that had surrounded the peaks was already beginning to fade to a less spectacular lemon color. She felt a sudden wave of homesickness that was totally unexpected and almost sickening in its force.
It was five minutes to eight.
If she didn’t go in the bushes, she was going to wet her pants. She went around a stand of scrub, lowered herself a little, and let go. When she came back, Harold was still sitting on the picnic table with the walkie-talkie clasped loosely in his hand. He had pulled up the antenna.
“Harold,” she said. “It’s getting late. It’s past eight o’clock.”
He glanced at her indifferently. “They’ll be there half the night, clapping each other on the back. When the time’s right, I’ll pull the pin. Don’t you worry.”
“When? ”
Harold’s smile widened emptily. “Just as soon as it’s dark.”
Fran stifled a yawn as Al Bundell stepped confidently up beside Stu. They were going to run late, and suddenly she wished she was back in the apartment, just the two of them. It wasn’t just tiredness, not precisely that feeling of homesickness, either. All of a sudden she didn’t want to be in this house. There was no r...
“The Law Committee has had four meetings in the last week,” Al was saying, “and I’ll keep this as brief as possible. The system we’ve decided on is a kind of tribunal. Sitting members would be chosen by lottery, much the same way as young men were once selected for the draft—”