GLENDA STAYED ON THE ROOF for close to a minute. Her heart pounded. Maynard didn’t move. She thought of the ramifications. Cop killer. What difference did it make? The cops weren’t cops anymore; they were just a band of desperate men in a land of kill or be killed. She didn’t have to worry. There were no judges. No juries. No penal system at all. And the court was closed.
She at last got up from the roof. She descended the ladder, then shifted it, sliding it over the side of the mudroom eaves. She went down the rungs to the backyard, wondering if it was safe to whistle yet, or if any more men would come, or if she had killed the body by killing the head. The mist thickened and the moonlight brightened. She walked toward Fulton.
She knelt next to him, half believing that he might still be alive. But he was dead, lying on his stomach, his arms straight at his sides, his rifle under him, his finger twisted up under the trigger guard. Her hands started to shake.
“You prize-winning piece of shit,” she said.
Tears flooded her eyes and she sobbed, a choking sound in the thick, stinky air of the dead woods out back.
“Mom?”
She turned.
The nightmare kept getting worse.
Buzz Fulton had a chokehold around her daughter’s throat, and a gun pointed at her head. The two approached out of the woods. As they got closer, Buzz glanced at his brother.
In the gathering moonlight, Glenda saw a strange emotion play over the younger Fulton’s face. His jaw protruded and the unshaven whiskers on his pale chin looked like a gunpowder tattoo. His eyes widened, then narrowed, then moistened, and for a few seconds he looked entirely unsure of the situation. He twisted his head to one side, as if he were wearing a too-tight necktie, then to the other side, and in the moonlight she saw a band of sweat glimmer down his left cheek like a silver ribbon.
Hanna was wheezing and wheezing, like a punctured bagpipe, and looking at her with wide, scared eyes.
“You killed him?” asked Buzz.
How to explain it to him? What lie would he possibly believe?
“Bullets started flying, Buzz, and I—”
“I heard only two bullets. And they both came from the same rifle. Yours. Poor Bren is dying back there. So don’t go lying to me, Glenda.”
She saw that the whole situation was at a bad dead end.
“I didn’t want to, Buzz.” And then she remembered what that guy in the supermarket had said to her during the Stedman’s looting. “But it’s every man for himself.”
“Guess I’m going to have to shoot your daughter, then.”
“Buzz, please …” She threw her weapon down, got to her knees, and clasped her hands in entreaty. “I was only trying to protect my children, like any good mother would. And if you’ve got to shoot someone, shoot me.”
Buzz’s lips stiffened in barely controlled anger. “Does that make sense to you, Glenda? That I should give you the easy way out and shoot you dead right now? While I’ve got to stay alive and suffer like this?” His voice was shaking now, and his eyes had clouded over with tears. “Doesn’t it make better sense that I shoot your daughter so that you can suffer like I’m suffering?”
“Please don’t shoot her, Buzz. I’ll do anything. I swear I’ll do anything. I’ll come and join the girls at headquarters if you want.”
“I don’t hold truck with what the boys are doing with those girls at headquarters.”
“Then I can give you food, Buzz. We’ve got food. All kinds of it.”
This stopped him. Then he said, “Why is it that people like you got food, and I don’t have any?”
“I’ve got some hidden in the forest.”
Buzz nodded, then grinned, even as tears thickened further in his eyes. “We knew you had it.” He seemed to dwell on something for a few moments. He came out of his reverie with a businesslike squaring of his shoulders. “We might have a deal, Glenda. Get Maynard’s flashlight. It’s attached to his belt.”
She knelt beside the dead sheriff and unclipped his police flashlight. Her hands shook so badly she could hardly manage the small task. She wondered if Jake was dead somewhere in the woods.
“You’ve got to promise that you won’t kill us if I give you food.”
“I promise.” He flicked his head toward the woods and said, “Move.”
She spoke to Hanna. “Honey, it’s going to be all right. We’ll just do what Buzz says and this will all be over.”
“You listen to your mama, sweetheart. Uncle Buzz ain’t going to hurt you.” Buzz’s slightly licentious tone reminded Glenda of how Buzz had come on to Hanna at Marblehill when she was twelve years old.
She walked ahead of them into the forest, hating to turn her back on the whole situation, cursing herself for being so stupid. She feared that at any moment she would hear a gunshot behind her, and that would be it; Hanna’s short life would be over. She prayed to God, but she couldn’t sense Him right now.
They walked to the end of the yard out past the shed. As she passed the shed and was heading toward the dead sycamores, she heard a noise—the slide of a foot along the dead grass behind the shed, the soft whisper of shoulders shifting inside a T-shirt—and, turning, saw Jake emerge from the shadows, Leigh’s pistol held up straight in both hands, just like she had taught him, his face so scared in the moonlight that his pale blue eyes bulged.
“You let my sister go or I’ll blow your head off, Buzz.”
Her first instinct was to curse him for being such a fool, and for now endangering his own life; but when Buzz jerked to a stop and flicked his head a fraction to the left, and his eyes narrowed with sudden tension, and fresh sweat popped out of his pores like water out of a newly divined well, she thought that, yes, she had to learn to trust Jake, and that she couldn’t do this by herself, not in a world gone mad with hunger and darkness. She was going to have to count on her children.
“Easy there, son,” said Buzz. “I can’t believe your mama gave you a gun.”
“Let my sister go or you’re a dead man.”
“Son, I guess it comes down to nerve. Who’s got more of it? Me or you?”
Jake fired straight into the air, and Buzz’s nerve crumbled.
“Let my sister go, or the next one’s for you.”
“Easy, boy, you don’t want to have an accident.”
He let Hanna go. Hanna hurried to Glenda. Glenda took her in her arms and stroked her hair.
“Now put the gun on the ground,” said Jake.
“Jake, that’s the only weapon I have. You don’t want to leave a man defenseless with the shroud up there.”
“I said, put the gun on the ground. I’m giving you a chance here, Buzz.”
Buzz hesitated for close to five seconds, and in the light of the Moon Glenda saw the frantic thinking that was going on behind his eyes. Despite this scrutiny of his options, he at last put the gun down and stood up slowly.
“Now beat it,” said Jake.
Buzz lifted both arms into the air and backed away. “It’s okay, son, I’m on my way.”
“Shoot him, Jake,” said Hanna. “Don’t let him get away.”
“Don’t you listen to your sister, Jake. Miss, I apologize for what I done to you.”
“Jake, just shoot him. He’s going to come back.”
“Mom?”
“Let him go.”
“But, Mom,” said Hanna, “he’s going to come back, I know he is.”
“Buzz, I’m real sorry I had to kill your brother.” And the tears came back because she really couldn’t believe she had killed a cop.
“The Lord will make His judgment, ma’am.”
“Shoot him, Jake!”
But Jake didn’t shoot.
And Buzz finally disappeared into the dark woods.
Ten minutes later, as they were carrying food back to the house, they heard his truck out on the highway, its bump and rattle a sound that now terrified Glenda.
Back in the house, she foned Gerry, and he answered on the third ring.
“I wouldn’t stay in the area,” he said. “You don’t know Buzz the way I do. He’s a vindictive son of a bitch. When I was a regular at the Crossroads, there was barely a night that went by when he didn’t get in a fight. Hanna’s right. You should have killed him when you had the chance. Revenge is one of his main motivating principles. And now you’ve gone and killed his brother. In self-defense, admittedly, but that’s something Buzz isn’t going to understand.”
“But where would we go?” asked Glenda.
“I’m told there’s still limited cell-phone service in certain parts of the United States.”
“We’re getting partial service here, but it’s a bit sketchy.”
“See if you can phone Neil on his cell. Tell him what’s happened. Maybe you can go down to Coral Cables. Do you have anywhere to recharge the car?”
“The nursing home pump is still working. At least the last time I was there.”
She followed her husband’s advice. She recharged her cell phone by shining a flashlight at it for a few minutes, then tried Neil.
She tried throughout the night, but kept getting service interruption messages.
A little after midnight, service resumed and she was at last able to get through. It turned out he wasn’t in Coral Gables at all. He was at an Air Force base, Homestead.
The change in Neil’s voice took her by surprise. He usually spoke so confidently, as if he had the world in the palm of his hand. But now he sounded distracted. And more than distracted … what was the word? Yes … he sounded diffuse, as if all his energy and concentration had been scattered.
“I’m working on a new approach.” But his words lacked confidence. She heard what sounded like gunfire in the background. “A virus. It actually works on a kind of interesting principle. It attacks the Tarsalan genetic component of the xenophyta directly, but … I … Jesus, Glenda, you shot a cop?”
And she explained to him how Maynard wasn’t really a cop anymore but just a kind of feudal lord. Then she began to explain about Buzz.
“That idiot Gerry brought to Marblehill a few years back?” he asked.
“That’s him.” Then she explained that Buzz was a vindictive son of a bitch.
“Look …” Neil cut her off, as if the zany details of her war with the sheriff and his brother were beside the point. “I want you and the kids heading to Marblehill. One thing this whole exercise in futility has taught me … it’s all about family. I’ve got some airmen stocking the place. And guarding it. We’ve got a bit of a situation down here at Homestead. And if this virus thing … if it doesn’t pan out … me, Louise, and the girls will be heading up to Marblehill. I’ve got enough food up there to last a year. And I’ve got the place well stocked with medicine…. How’s Hanna? How’s she managing the heat?”
“She’s getting bad, Neil.”
She told him about the prescriptions she had taken from the nursing home, and that they weren’t Hanna’s regular prescriptions, and of how Hanna was buzzed most of the time and wheezing constantly.
“You remember Greg Bard?” asked Neil. “He was a friend of Ian Hamilton’s. I think you met him at Melissa’s christening.”
“The Air Force colonel?”
“Right. He’s getting things arranged for Marblehill.”
“So there’s going to be other families?”
“No. Just the airmen and us. Greg’s a helluva guy. I’ll make sure he knows about Hanna. What’s she taking?”
Glenda gave him Hanna’s prescriptions—her puffers and pills and so forth—and as he took the information down, she felt suddenly safe in a way she never did with Gerry. She could sense Neil’s masterliness, and the overall command of his personality. Neil was going to pull it out of the fire for her. Neil was the alpha male, the king of the tribe, whereas Gerry had always been the quieter one.
“I’m going to have to drive manually,” she said.
“That might pose a problem,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because we’re getting reports of widespread erosion. No plants holding things down. Greg says a lot of landslides everywhere, especially up in those mountains, and no road crews are going out for repairs. So you may have to feel your way along. Some roads are bound to be impassable.”
“But one charge should do, right? It’s not more than four hundred miles. And my car’s got an upper limit of four hundred and fifty per charge.”
“It depends on how far out of your way you have to go. Do you have a map? Like an old paper map? Or do you keep everything stored online? Because the satellite feeds can’t provide maps to your car anymore.”
“Gerry’s got some old maps downstairs.”
“He’s still collecting maps?”
“Mainly old ocean maps. But I think he has some of the area.”
“Take them, just in case. You might end up on back roads.”
She had her kids pack in a hurry because she was afraid Buzz might return at any minute.
She tried to fone Gerry because she wanted to tell him where they were going, not Coral Gables but Marblehill, but she couldn’t get through.
“I don’t get it. I got through just a while ago. Now there’s nothing. And the sky’s still open.”
“Mom,” said Hanna, “things are breaking down everywhere. The shroud might be open, but do you think the people who run AT&T Interlunar are actually going to their jobs anymore? They’re just trying to stay alive, like we are. This is the new Stone Age.”
“Hey, it’s the new Dark Age,” said Jake, and laughed at his own joke.
She thought she might leave a note for Gerry, telling him where they were going, just in case he came back, and just in case their fones stopped working for good, but realized that if she left a note it might be a signpost to Buzz and he would follow them.
She and Hanna had a big fight about it.
“Mom, we have to leave a note.”
“We can’t leave a note.”
“But if we don’t leave a note, how’s Dad going to know where we are? He thinks we’re heading to Coral Gables.”
“If we leave a note, Buzz will see it, and he’ll come looking for us. He’s been down to Marblehill before. He knows how to get there.”
“Jake,” said Hanna, “you should have shot him while you had the chance.”
“You try shooting someone,” said Jake morosely. “It’s not as easy as it looks. It takes a lot of guts.”
“Guts that you don’t have.”
“Mom, will you tell her to fuck off.”
“Jake, do we have to use that kind of language?” asked Glenda.
Hanna frowned. “Shut up, Jake. Mom and I are having a serious discussion.”
“We’re not leaving a note, Hanna.”
“Then how’s he going to find us?”
“He’ll figure it out. He’s a pretty smart guy.”
“You don’t even want him to find us,” said Hanna. “You’re thinking this is your chance to finally get rid of him.”
Glenda’s anger flared and, in her worn-out state, she felt tears threatening. “How can you say that?”
“Because it’s true.”
“It’s not true. We may have had some pretty rough fights—”
“You know what will happen to Dad if he can’t find us? He’ll die. He won’t know where we are, he’ll think we’re dead, and he’ll die of a broken heart.”
“Hanna, listen to what I’m telling you. If we leave a note for Dad, Buzz will break in, see it, and come after us. I killed his brother. He’s not going to forget that. It’s not like I keyed his car, or egged his house, or butted in front of him at the bank. I killed his brother. I dropped Maynard in cold blood right in front of him. So I’m asking you, please. Don’t leave a note. And don’t try and sneak a note while we’re getting ready. Just let me keep trying your father on the fone.”
“That fone’s a hunk of junk,” said Jake. “You should have rented a better one.”
“With whose money, Jake?”
“I’m leaving a note,” said Hanna.
“No, you’re not.”
“We could leave a note with a clue in it,” suggested Jake. “Something only Dad would understand. We wouldn’t have to spell out that we were going to Marblehill.”
“And what if he doesn’t get the clue?” said Hanna. “You’re such an idiot sometimes, Jake.”
“Come on,” said Glenda. “We’re all tired. And we’re frazzled. Let’s just get to Marblehill. Don’t you want to go there and see your cousins? Didn’t you have fun there last summer and the summer before? And Uncle Neil is bound to have a fone, and a much better one than this. So let’s just forget about the note. Let’s pack, get in the car, and go to the nursing home so we can recharge. Before Buzz comes back.”
She watched her daughter every step of the way. Hanna sullenly disassembled her clarinet—doctor-recommended for her asthma—in the light of one of the flashlights and put it into its case. She then packed some makeup, and a bag full of clothes, commenting on how Melissa and Ashley were going to make fun of her cheap, bargain-brand clothes, and finally finished by taking five puffs of her inhaler.
“Honey, don’t overdo that stuff.”
“Mom, fuck off.”
Glenda didn’t punish Hanna for saying this. She just went through the motions, and started packing.
Hanna broke down and cried, even though she was zoned out on her bronchodilator. She came into her mother’s arms, and told her she was sorry for saying fuck off. But that didn’t stop Glenda from checking Hanna’s room one last time for a note, and checking it thoroughly.
She at last got into the car with her kids, like they were going on a summer vacation, and as she headed out on the road, she looked up at the sky. And saw that the Moon had finally disappeared behind the western edge of the shroud’s toxic wound. She felt lonely then. She didn’t know if she was ever going to see Old Hill again. She didn’t know if she was going to see North Carolina.
But most of all, she didn’t know if she was going to see Gerry again.