Riders In The Sky Part 4

The interstate is divided by a wide gra.s.s median slowly turning brown, with an infrequent run of young trees in the process of shedding yellowed leaves; beyond the deep ditches that line the outside of the road, steep weedy embankments topped with fences, some wood, some wire, sagging here and there, rusted here and there, while cattle graze and horses drink and a tractor makes its way across a rolling fallow field.

And once, only once, the distant echo of gunfire.

2.

His name is Reed Turner, and he's much too young to be so old.

Once tall, he trudges along the highway with a stoop to his shoulders, too much weight there for him to stand upright. His face, once smooth, has dark lines at the corners of his eyes, the corners of his mouth, lines that have little to do with the road dirt that has settled there. He has long since lost what little baby fat he had left when last he bothered to look in a mirror. Really look. Really see what stranger would look back at him.

He is, now, just a year and a few months past the last of his teens, but when people look at him they think they see a man twice as old. Twice as tired. Twice as beaten.

Her name is Cora Bowes, and she's much too young to be so old.

She wears a baggy pair of sun-bleached jeans, a baggy denim s.h.i.+rt, and in her right hand she holds a gnarled length of wood she's learned to use as a club and walking stick. Her hair has been lightened by months on the road, is pulled back into a ponytail but still looks ragged where she's cut it herself. When she's relaxed, when she can find a good reason to smile, she is attractive in a way that puzzles others into wondering why. Nevertheless, she is. When she's relaxed. When she can find a reason to smile.

She is, now, only fifteen months past her nineteenth birthday, and once in a while she wonders exactly how old she looks. Whatever it is, it's too old, and she knows it, and sometimes, at night, she wonders where it's all gone.

They have been together since the day and night their world blew up. Three years, too many months, too many days since almost everyone they knew, everyone they had known, had perished in a firestorm battle that had left nothing standing but a church whose bell tolled every night though no one pulled the rope. Far too long since they had seen-and took years to really believe they had actually seen it-the only man they had ever trusted struggle with a woman in the bell tower, heard the screams, heard the explosions, saw him fall. Believing him dead, they had run. Nowhere in particular, just... away.

When they heard he had lived, had actually survived the fight and the fall, they went back to find him, and have been searching ever since.

They sit on a log at the side of the road, lifting a thumb at every car and eighteen-wheeler, making frantic angry gestures that have them giggling when every car and eighteen-wheeler takes a look and pa.s.ses them by.

Finally Cora drags a backpack from under her legs and zips it open, reaches in and pulls out a chocolate bar. Slowly she turns it around in both hands, smacking her lips loudly, as if preparing her stomach for a grand Thanksgiving meal.

"Cora, for crying out loud."

"What's the matter? I want to appreciate this, you creep. We're almost out, in case you hadn't noticed."

"If we're almost out, don't eat it."

She sticks her tongue out at him and peels half the wrapper away, pa.s.ses the bar under her nose as if testing a fine cigar. "I hope this is the right way."

"You're supposed to eat it, dope."

"I mean where we're going, Reed. G.o.d."

He doesn't answer right away; he's too busy squinting up the hilly road to check for traffic. They've been walking for weeks, with only three rides to ease the aches and blisters on their feet, and they're headed south now, because of a dream.

"It's right," he says at last. His voice, once high, has deepened a little.

"If you say so."

"I do, Cora. I do."

"Want a bite?"

"Nope."

"We're almost out."

"You eat it. I'll be all right." He rests a hand against his chest. "Don't mind me. I'll manage." His other hand pulls a piece of dark bark from the log. "This'll do just fine. I don't mind. It's roughage."

"Creep."

"Dope."

They smile but not at each other; they don't have to, not after all this time. Not after all they've seen.

Cora chews and swallows, the production so exaggerated he can't help but laugh.

"What day is it?" she asks.

"Tuesday."

"What year?"

Reed shrugs. "Who the h.e.l.l knows?"

Their first plan after they'd left home the second time, for the last time, had been to head for the South, because that's where their friend, Casey Chisholm, had come from. But they hadn't realized how large a place the South really was, especially when they had little money, no transportation of their own, and not a clue where in Tennessee, or anywhere else for that matter, he might have gone to ground. It took them a while, but they soon learned how to talk to strangers, how to sift through rumors, how to judge a face and a smile and a tone and a gesture. That made the searching easier, but it didn't make it successful.

And every time they think they see a huge, white, gunboat Continental with a silver hood ornament shaped like a charging horse, they go to ground themselves. They made it through the famine, were untouched by the plague, had been ha.s.sled and attacked and several times nearly separated, but the only thing they really fear is the sight of that Lincoln.

Death drives that car.

They know it.

They have seen her.

3.

By sunset it's clear they won't get another ride today, so they pick up their backpacks and sleeping bags and trudge away from the road, into a stand of trees at the edge of a small farm. They don't bother with the farmhouse because they have nothing to trade in exchange for a bed and meal. Besides, Reed thinks as they bat aside branches in search of a dry clearing, the last time they had stopped at one, the farmer had spent the whole night reading to them from the Bible, trying to save them before it was too late and the world ended and they were d.a.m.ned.

And doomed.

It was tempting to tell the well-meaning old man not to bother, thanks but no thanks, they had already seen part of the End.

They had already seen the first Horseman.

Reed didn't, though. The old man wouldn't have believed him, and would probably have run them off at the business end of a shotgun for being blasphemers or something. It had happened before; Cora had a scar on her right thigh to prove it.

Water drips on his hair, splashes in his face. The earlier Reed, the one who lived in Maple Landing, New Jersey, and l.u.s.ted after Cora, who wouldn't give him the time of day, that Reed Turner would have lost his temper and started screaming, kicking at the trees and cursing everything that moved. This Reed, however, only wipes the water away.

"Just think," he says as he follows her around the lower boughs of a fat pine, "that the guys who settled this place back in the old days, they had to live like this all the time. Pretty amazing, don't you think?"

"Pretty stupid," she answers, stepping into a small clearing and dropping her bags. "I would've stayed home and let someone else do it."

"Some pioneer you are."

"I'm not a G.o.dd.a.m.n pioneer," she snaps. "I am a G.o.dd.a.m.n orphan, and don't you d.a.m.n forget it."

He starts to say, well thanks a lot, what about me?, but he doesn't. She's in one of her moods, and even a grunt would set her off, and he'd have to put up with her temper for the rest of the night. Not that he blames her. More times than he wanted to count, she had almost convinced him to give this up, that Chisholm was a lost cause and they'd never find him unless they suddenly got a h.e.l.l of a lot luckier than they had been. A miracle; it would take a d.a.m.n miracle.

But the hints and clues kept coming, and he couldn't ignore them: a huge white-haired man dressed in black seen in this small town, or in that place barely large enough to make it on a map. Because they had no real time reference for the sightings, they had just about covered every state east of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon; because they kept hearing stories about the giant who preached wherever someone would listen, they kept moving.

They have nothing else to do.

They have nowhere else to go.

Cora digs the pit for their evening fire; he sets out the sleeping bags and rummages through what's left of their larder. Pretty skimpy, he realizes, deciding on a couple cans of vegetables and one can of soup. Tomorrow they'd have to stop at the next town and, if it wasn't battened down against strangers, see what they could do to pick up more. If necessary, get a job for a week or so. They have gotten good at that, too.

"Steak," he says.

"What?"

He winces, not realizing he's spoken aloud. He fusses with the contraption he'd made a long time ago, a collapsible cooking frame that fits over the fire for their one small pan, their one small pot. "Sorry. Just daydreaming."

"Some day," she tells him, making it sound like a promise.

They eat, they don't speak, they make sure the fire is out and the utensils cleaned and put away before crawling into their sleeping bags to stare at the sky.

He's almost asleep, when Cora whispers, "That guy."

"Huh?"

"That guy we met last year. The one in West Virginia, remember? Broken arm? Looked like he'd fallen down a mountain? We gave him some money. Remember?"

He does; he doesn't want to.

"You ... you said he was different. Like Chisholm."

Even though she can't see him, he nods. "Yeah."

"Why, Reed? Why was he any different than us?"

"I've told you a hundred times, Cora, I don't know. Soon as I saw him I just knew."

Something dark flies under the few stars they can see; in the trees something s.h.i.+fts, it sounds like feathers.

His left hand nudges her hip, and she slips her right hand into his. It's the way of it these past few months, falling asleep holding hands. For reasons they can't explain, it's better than an embrace.

A car on the interstate backfires twice, and she squeezes his fingers suddenly and so tightly he has to bite down on his lip to keep from making a noise. It's something they've never gotten used to, the guns that came out when the famine was at its worst and people all over defended their pantries, when the plague mushroomed with neither rhyme nor reason and the guns came out to keep the odd-looking away.

He's almost asleep again, when she whispers, "It's changed, Reed. It's not the same out there. Or is it just me?"

A hopeful note he sours when he says, "No. I know what you mean."

And it has changed.

What there is now, everywhere they've been, from everything they've seen in newspapers and on television, is an intensity that's almost terrifying in its strength. It didn't take some people long to put together the several disasters that had occurred over the past half decade, then fit them together and come up with some version of Armageddon. Even the doubters learned to keep their opinions to themselves, and those who urged calm and reason have at last run out of reasons why death and famine and plague and war have nothing to do with prophecies that aren't confined to any one religion's Bible.

A simple thunderstorm sends people screaming into the streets, cowering behind locked doors, pouring into houses of wors.h.i.+p not necessarily Christian.

And it's all one step away from a violent explosion.

"Reed?" Cora says, a little girl voice.

"Yeah?"

"Where is he?"

"An island, Cora. That's all the dream says-he's on an island. And he's close."

4.