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He had caught another rabbit, had caught the trembling little thing in his bare hands and broken its neck. He had built a new fire on the bones of the old one and now the rabbit cooked, sending up savory ribbons of aroma. There were no wolves now. Tonight they had stayed away—it was meet and right that they should have...
He leaned over and raised her hand out of her lap. When he let it go it stayed in place, raised to the level of her mouth. He looked at this phenomenon for a moment and then put her hand back in her lap. There her fingers began to wiggle sluggishly, like dying snakes. He poked two fingers at her eyes, and she did not b...
He was honestly puzzled.
What had he done to her?
He couldn’t remember.
And it didn’t matter. She was pregnant. If she was also catatonic, what did that matter? She was the perfect incubator. She would breed his son, bear him, and then she could die with her purpose served. After all, it was what she was there for.
The rabbit was done. He broke it in two. He pulled her half into tiny pieces, the way you break up a baby’s food. He fed it to her a piece at a time. Some pieces fell out of her mouth and into her lap half-chewed, but she ate most of it. If she remained like this, she would need a nurse. Jenny Engstrom, perhaps.
“That was very good, dear,” he said softly.
She looked blankly up at the moon. Flagg smiled gently at her and ate his wedding supper.
Good sex always made him hungry.
He awoke in the latter part of the night and sat up in his bedroll, confused and afraid… afraid in the instinctive, unknowing way that an animal is afraid—a predator who senses that he himself may be stalked.
Had it been a dream? A vision—?
They’re coming.
Frightened, he tried to understand the thought, to put it in some context. He couldn’t. It hung there on its own like a bad hex.
They’re closer now.
Who? Who was closer now?
The night wind whispered past him, seeming to bring him a scent. Someone was coming and—
Someone’s going.
While he slept, someone had passed his camp, headed east. The unseen third? He didn’t know. It was the night of the full moon. Had the third escaped? The thought brought panic with it.
Yes, but who’s coming?
He looked at Nadine. She was asleep, pulled up in a tight fetal position, the position his son would assume in her belly only months from now.
Are there months?
Again there was that feeling of things going flaky around the edges. He lay down again, believing there would be no more sleep for him this night. But he did sleep. And by the time he drove into Vegas the next morning, he was smiling again and he had nearly forgotten his night panic. Nadine sat docilely beside him on t...
He went to the Grand, and there he learned what had happened while he slept. He saw the new look in their eyes, wary and questioning, and he felt the fear touch him again with its light moth wings.
Chapter 66
At about the same time that Nadine Cross was beginning to realize certain truths which should perhaps have been self-evident, Lloyd Henreid was sitting alone in the Cub Bar, playing Big Clock solitaire and cheating. He was out of temper. There had been a flash fire at Indian Springs that day, one dead, three hurt, and ...
Carl Hough had brought the news. He had been pissed off to a high extreme, and he was not a man to be taken lightly. He had been a pilot for Ozark Airlines before the plague, was an ex-Marine, and could have broken Lloyd in two pieces with one hand while making a daiquiri with the other if he had wanted to. According t...
Carl had come in around two on September 12, his cycle helmet under one arm. There was an ugly burn on his left cheek and blisters on one hand. There had been a fire. Bad, but not as bad as it could have been. A fuel truck had exploded, spewing burning petroleum all over the tarmac area.
“All right,” Lloyd had said. “I’ll see that the big guy knows. The guys that got hurt are at the infirmary?”
“Yeah. They are. I don’t think Freddy Campanari is going to live to see the sun go down. That leaves two pilots, me and Andy. Tell him that, and tell him something else when he gets back. I want that fuck Trashcan Man gone. That’s my price for staying.”
Lloyd gazed at Carl Hough. “Is it?”
“You’re damn well told.”
“Well, I tell you, Carl,” Lloyd said. “I can’t pass that message on. If you want to give orders to him, you’ll have to do it yourself.”
Carl looked suddenly confused and a little afraid. Fear sat strangely on that craggy face. “Yeah, I see your point. I’m just tired and fucked over, Lloyd. My face hurts like hell. I don’t mean to take it out on you.”
“That’s okay, man. It’s what I’m here for.” Sometimes he wished it wasn’t. Already his head was starting to ache.
Carl said, “But he’s gotta go. If I have to tell him that, I will. I know he’s got one of those black stones. He’s ace-high with the tall man, I guess. But, hey, listen.” Carl sat down and put his helmet on a baccarat table. “Trash was responsible for that fire. My Christ, how’re we ever going to get those planes up if...
Several people passing through the lobby of the Grand glanced uneasily over at the table where Lloyd and Carl sat.
“Keep your voice down, Carl.”
“Okay. But you see the problem, don’t you?”
“How sure are you that Trash did it?”
“Listen,” Carl said, leaning forward, “he was in the motor pool, all right? In there for a long time. Lots of guys saw him, not just me.”
“I thought he was out someplace. In the desert. You know, looking for stuff.”
“Well, he came back, all right? That sand-crawler he takes out was full of stuff. God knows where he gets it, I sure don’t. Well, he had the guys in stitches at coffee break. You know how he is. To him, weaponry is like candy is to a kid.”
“Yeah.”
“The last thing he showed us was one of those incendiary fuses. You pull the tab, and there’s this little burst of phosphorus. Then nothing for half an hour or forty minutes, depending on the size of the fuse, all right? You get it? Then there’s one hell of a fire. Small, but very intense.”
“Yeah.”
“So okay. Trashy’s showin us, just about droolin over the thing, in fact, and Freddy Campanari says, ‘Hey, people who play with fire wet the bed, Trash.’ And Steve Tobin—you know him, he’s funny like a rubber crutch—he says, ‘You guys better put away your matches, Trashy’s back in town.’ And Trash got really weird. He ...
Lloyd shook his head. Nothing about the Trashcan Man made much sense to him.
“Then he just left. Picked up the stuff he was showing us and took off. Well, none of us felt very good about it. We didn’t mean to hurt his feelings. Most of the guys really like Trash. Or they did. He’s like a little kid, you know?”