would not be time to circulate through town and remove the reward posters for Hattie.
“But if they were just machines—” His father sighed.
“I don’t think we should ever use the word ‘just’ about machines anymore,” Lloyd replied. “They are—or were—not machines we understand, and there were other machines here that are not here now. The two issues must be connected.”
“What othern maysheens?” his mother asked, sobbing now.
“Don’t trouble about them now,” Lloyd consoled her. “We need to be on the move. As you said, Farruh, we need to look alive—to stay alive.”
“Is they after you—dem folks from St. Louis?”
This was the first time any such thing had been mentioned in Hephaestus’s sober presence, and his faced showed it. Lloyd spoke his mind.
“It may be, and it may not. I think not. If they were to come, whoever they are, I believe there would be no mistaking it—and they would come for me. This is something else. It may be connected by chance, if there is such a thing. But …” and then he could not think.
“What yer sperit voice say?” his mother asked at last, putting into her old and often suppressed family speech the same suddenly accepted confidence that Hephaestus had arrived at in his own way.
Lloyd felt the momentousness of the change in the family dynamic and paused to weigh his words in respect for the new weight that had been openly placed upon his young shoulders. His rarefied mind rummaged through the shattered dishware and gaping flesh for some answer that would satisfy his own flesh and blood enough to get them all out of there. Fast.
“We were not the intended victims of this—if it be a crime,” he said. “But there is something about our presence here, and our (and he really meant his own) ability to see this as something outside experience, that must be heeded. How, I’m not yet sure. There is something larger happening in this country than we ever imagined back in Zanesville. Whether we can run from it, and truly get away, or come to understand it remains to be seen. But we can’t ignore it, and more than ever I feel we must get to our destination in Texas as quickly as we can. Uncle Micah has already warned and inspired us that something out of the ordinary awaits us there. It was our leaving Zanesville and our old lives that set in motion the wheels that have brought us here—to both this place and this new, unlikely world. We can but go forward, and now we have to do so with the greatest haste.”
“So you think we are in danger, real danger?” Hephaestus queried.
“I think,” Lloyd said, with a face on him that was far too old for his years, “that just as we must put behind us old ideas about machines—even my ideas about machines (and this remark completed the familial acknowledgment of the change that had occurred)—we need to be prepared for danger wherever we look. From now on, danger is always real. Even unreal danger. Especially the unreal.”
CHAPTER 8
Dead of Night
HEPHAESTUS HAD NO IDEA WHAT LLOYD WAS SAYING, AND YET HE understood that what was called for now was belief in his son. The failed inventor had sobered up inside himself at the deepest level.
“The Clutters have two horses and a wagon they used as a hearse,” he announced. “Petrie told me. I think I heard them out back. They may not get us all the way to Texas, but they’ll get us out of here. When any kind of word gets out about this, we’ll be in strife. People will think somehow we done this. Whether these be the real Clutters or no, locals will need to make sense of things.”
Lloyd nodded.
“These are the Clutters that Petrie knew. And what happened to them may have something to do with our arrival. But we aren’t to blame and we won’t be burned for it if we keep our heads.”
“We takem wib us and give ’em proper beerial,” Rapture said.
“That’s right,” Lloyd agreed. “We take everything with us, we get a head start. Then anyone who wants to know more has got to find us, and they have no proof of anything being wrong.”
“Let’s load up the coffin first,” Hephaestus suggested. “The way these folk lived, we might get a couple of days or even more before they’re missed. Even Petrie said he hadn’t had a meal or a jaw with them in weeks.”