Chapter Twelve
They left that afternoon. Not because they had a plan of action but because they could not stay. Collie would not leave Crystal. Storey had to tear her fists from the dog’s dark fur. Her screams pierced the morning. Between screams and sobs she insisted that the dog would wake and they could not tell her no.
In the end, Storey carried her back down the hill, over his shoulder, rolled tightly in a blanket Jess had fetched from her house. Again like a crazed cat that clawed. That such a small being could wail with such volume. They could not shush her, but what did it matter, with the old man shouting and shooting, the blare of his engine as he fled? The woods, the empty houses absorbed it all without comment.
The decision to leave was made as she napped, finally, in the old man’s daybed, a pillowed platform under his one big window. He hadn’t seemed like a daybed kind of coot, but maybe it had been his wife’s. Maybe the old man slept there in her scent, curled like a hound.
They ate the cold soup in the bowls and heated more. They woke her to eat, and when she was done she insisted on wearing the lion suit. Storey helped her put it on over her fleece, and then she fell back to sleep. Good. Jess made a pot of coffee. The cream in the fridge had soured after days of no electricity, but Jess found a can of sweetened condensed milk and they stirred it in gratefully. They each drank two cups, and packed the rest of the Folgers in the wagon.
Storey said, “East is where the cities are, the coast. The biggest roads. The money. So I’m thinking it’s unionists probably. East and south. By all rights, that’s where we should go.”
“ ‘By all rights.’ So you don’t think we should go there. You think we should go west.”
“Yes.”
“Why? We could take the boat south. A couple of hours to the end of the lake, and then get on a new highway.”
“Too exposed,” Storey said.
“We could go tonight. Hug the shore. Go back past Randall, Green Hill. Cut across to a new road.”
Storey set his cup down so it wouldn’t tremble. “The lake has been nothing but…” Jess could tell he was seeing some filmstrip of memory.
“Hell,” Jess said.
“Right.”
Jess said, “You’ve gotta think there are sane people on the coast that can help us. And maybe the highway west from Bangor is clear.”
“We don’t know what’s happening over there. Could be total civil war.”
“So—what? Could be anywhere. Everywhere.”
“So we stay out of sight. Go west little by little. Move the way we’ve been moving. On the road and off it. The New Hampshire border’s all woods. No way they can secure the whole thing. Whoever’s fighting probably has no interest in what’s west of here anyway. It’s mostly empty.”
“What about Collie?”
“What about her?”
“She’s not exactly discreet.”
“We’ll play the quiet game,” Storey said.
“How does that work?”
“If she’s super-quiet the bad men won’t come.”
They left just after three, Storey carrying the girl, Jess pulling the wagon. They went straight across the fields, up the good road. Nobody shot at them now. By five they were in Randall, where the ashes no longer smoldered, and they met the paved two-lane highway and followed it as it curved west.