and telling jokes, as if nothing of importance were happening. Hell of a racket out there was the most anyone would say. How am I supposed to concentrate on the cards? Peter would miss that life; he was AWOL nine days, as much of an outlaw as Hollis or Tifty. No matter what Gunnar might offer in Peter’s defense, the man’s message had been clear: you do this on your own; no one’s going to say they knew you.
The next thing he was aware of, Hollis was shaking him awake. They disembarked into the cold. This far north, there could be no doubt of the change of seasons. The sky set low with heavy gray clouds like formations of airborne stone.
“See?” Tifty said, gesturing at the ground around the truck. “No tracks at all.”
They drove on. The absence of virals nagged at Peter’s mind. Even outside the hardboxes they’d seen no tracks, no scat. A welcome turn of events, but so unlikely as to be disturbing, as if the virals were saving something special for them.
Their progress slowed, the roads becoming vague; frequently Tifty had to stop the truck to recalculate their course, using a compass and maps and sometimes a sextant, a device Peter had never seen before. Michael showed him how it worked. By measuring the sun’s angle to the horizon, and taking into account the time and date, it was possible to compute their location without any other points of reference. The instrument was typically used on ships at sea, Michael explained, where the horizon was unobstructed, but it could work on land, too. How do you know this stuff? Peter asked, but realized as he posed the question what the answer was. Michael had taught himself to use a sextant for that day when he would sail out to find, or not find, the barrier.
The days of travel passed, and still no virals. By now they were openly puzzling over this, though the discussion never advanced beyond noting its oddness. Strange, they said. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky. Which they were, but luck had a way of betraying you in the end. Eleven days in, Tifty announced that they were approaching the Missouri-Iowa line. They were dirty and exhausted; tempers were short. For two full days they’d been stymied by a nameless river, backtracking mile after mile, trying to find a bridge still standing. Their fuel supply was getting low. The landscape had changed again, not quite as flat as Texas but close, with gently undulating hills subsumed under waist-high grass. The hour was approaching noon when Hollis, at the wheel, brought the truck to a halt.
Peter, who had been dozing in the back, roused to the sound of the truck’s doors opening. He drew upright to find himself alone in the cab. Why were they stopping?
He retrieved his rifle and climbed down. Everything was coated with a fine, pale powder—the grass, the trees. Snow? The air had a tart smell, like something burnt. Not snow. Ashes. Little clouds of whiteness puffed underfoot as Peter advanced to where the others were standing, at the crest of a hill. There he stopped, as his companions had stopped, pinned in place by what they saw.
“For the love of God,” Michael said. “What the hell are we looking at?”
53
This woman: who was she?
A spy. An insurgent. That much was obvious; her attempt to free the hostages had all the trademarks, and she had killed six men before making her fatal mistake. But the absence of a tag on her arm didn’t add up. That curious odor Guilder had detected; what did it mean? They’d recovered her weapon, a Browning semiautomatic with two bullets remaining in the magazine. Guilder had never seen one like it; it wasn’t one of theirs. Either the insurgency had stockpiled a cache of weapons from a source he didn’t know about, or the woman came from someplace else entirely.
Guilder didn’t like mysteries. He liked them even less than he liked the idea of Sergio.
The woman seemed unbreakable. She hadn’t told them so much as her name. Even Sod, that psychopath, a man of notoriously revolting appetites, had failed to extract a scrap of information. The decision to employ the man’s services had come about with curious ease. Sending people to the feedlot was one thing; the virals made mercifully short work of it, and the creatures needed to be fed. It wasn’t anything nice, but it was over fast. And as for a