Mary nodded, accepting those terse instructions as if this weren’t the first time she’d handled such a weapon. Yet its lethal potential didn’t take shape in her mind. She saw Rachel pull another rifle out of the cabinet, put the sling over her head, and shift the gun so that it angled across her back. Mary followed her example.
Then together they set to work.
Rachel and Mary became looters—purposeful, conscienceless, and guiltless—programmed by imperatives Mary still didn’t understand.
We’ll need these things.
Perhaps Rachel actually put it into words. Mary was sure she didn’t add: to survive.
Through the summer afternoon under a blue sky dappled with opaline mackerel clouds, they looted the shelter and house, loaded the van time and again, drove to Amarna, emptied their plunder into the garage, then returned for more. They didn’t touch the bodies except to cover them with sheets. And Rachel didn’t shed a tear, didn’t speak an unnecessary word. She moved, as she always did, at a deliberate pace, but she didn’t once stop moving. Her eyes remained lifeless, and sometimes Mary was convinced she’d been struck blind by shock. Yet it was obvious that her eyes did at least register the images necessary to her. Her whole body seemed to function on that basic level. No doubt her heart still beat. She still breathed. Mary could see that: shallow breaths through parted lips.
Food, clothing, linens, tools, paper, books—all the books—anything the Rovers hadn’t destroyed went into the van, then into the garage at Amarna. Mary didn’t look at any of it, refused to recognize it as touching the lives of two people she had called friends. Only one thing briefly commanded her attention: the engraved handcuffs Jim was awarded when he retired as chief of the Shiloh Veepies.
And finally, when the last load had been piled into the van, Rachel climbed into the driver’s seat and asked, “What happened to Sparky?” But she didn’t seem to expect or want an answer to that question. Eyes fixed ahead, she drove away from the Acres house for the last time.
When they reached the gate at Amarna, Mary got out to open it, then after Rachel drove through, she pushed it shut. Her hands shook as she fumbled with the chain and lock. Pulling up the drawbridge, letting down the portcullis. She should call Harry Berden. Not that Harry could do anything. The cavalry was under siege, too, and the captain had lost a third of his troops two nights ago in the battle of the mall. But he could send someone to decently dispose of the bodies.
She turned away from the gate, looked up, seeking the sun, then looked down to the glow behind the wall of clouds in the west. Her watch blinked the time: 8:14. She got into the van, tried—and failed—to think of something to say to break Rachel’s terrible silence.
Rachel stopped the van in front of the garage, but all she said was, “We’d better move some of the stuff so we can get the van inside.”
Shadow and Topaz came to greet them, but they were subdued, panting despite the evening chill. Rachel and Mary worked in the waning light, shifting cartons and sacks into the north studio or the basement, until finally there was enough room in the garage for the van. The van was still full, but they didn’t try to unload it. All they took with them when they left the garage was their rifles. The door rumbled shut, and Mary leaned against it, her knees on the verge of giving way.
“Where are the dogs?” Rachel asked.
Mary found it an effort to speak. “Shadow’s in the house. I saw her when I took the last load to the basement.”
Rachel nodded, called Topaz. She seemed to materialize out of the fading light from near the breezeway gate, and Rachel knelt to stroke her head. “Sweet lady, you don’t know what the hell’s going on. Neither do I, love, neither do—” Her voice caught, and Mary expected the break in her underlying silence, the iron silence that bound her grief.
But it didn’t come.
Rachel rose and went to the gate. Mary followed her into the breezeway. The astringent smell of the firewood stacked against the house was oddly reassuring; she could hear a soft chirking from the chicken coop behind the garage.
And a throaty, distant rumble.
She thought herself inured to terror now. But she had only become inured to horror. This was terror, striking hard at the solar plexus.
What she heard was the sound of a motor. A car.
“Rachel?”
She had heard it, too. She turned and went back to the gate. Mary stood beside her, breath caught, listening.
Rachel whispered, “It’s coming up our road.”
Mary nodded. It could, of course, be quite innocent. A lost tourist, perhaps. It might even be an Apie patrol.
There. Lights glimmering through the trees.
Topaz whined impatiently, but she didn’t bark. Maybe the car was familiar to her. Now the lights flashed around the curve; the pitch of the motor changed as the car slowed. The gate. Whoever was driving had seen the gate.
Mary stared at the twin points of light. It occurred to her that she should go call the Apies, but at that moment the motor roared and the car hit the gate with a clanging crash, plunged through, one-eyed now, careened down the road toward the house. Topaz began barking, and Rachel shouted, “Mary, are there any lights on in the house?”
“No, I didn’t turn any on except in the basement, and I know I turned that one off.”
“Maybe they’ll think the house is empty. That gives us the advantage of surprise.” And she brought her rifle up into firing position, resting the barrel on the top of the gate.
Mary stared at Rachel, suddenly transformed into a steady-handed guerrilla soldier, ready to kill. The rumble of the motor reverberated in a numbing crescendo, and Mary was struck with a new kind of fear. I can’t kill anyone.
It was then that she recognized the vehicle roaring toward them; there was just enough light left.
Jim Acres’s old brown Dodge van.
And within her, after this day of hideous revelations, terror found a channel into rage.
Topaz barked manically, and the van lurched across the lawn, a hubcap spinning off, flashing away in the skewed light of the remaining headlight. Mary snapped off the rifle’s safety, felt the polished wood against her cheek, relished the potent weight of the weapon as she watched the last seconds of the van’s approach through the scope, cross hairs centered on the windshield, on the glowing skull mask behind it.
The van slewed to a stop, both front doors swung open, the side door slammed back, and Rovers spilled out. Six—no, seven, eight raffish scarecrows in fluorescent paint, all laughing and shouting in demented camaraderie, staggering stoned. “Tice diggin for the take!” Had they said the same thing last night at the Acres house?
Mary fixed one in the cross hairs, squeezed off a shot. The recoil pounded her shoulder, the muzzle flash startled her, and her ears were numbed by the report, yet she heard a yelp as the Rover jerked back, fell writhing. Rachel’s gun cracked while Mary lined her sights on another skull-faced figure, this one with an automatic snugged in his hands. She fired, and a spray of bullets smashed into the walls of the house, but they were high, and the gun tumbled to the ground as he fell.
Another fluorescent apparition dived for it. Rachel’s shot dropped him. Shouted obscenities and Topaz’s barking filled a millisecond before Mary and Rachel pulled off shots almost in unison, before Mary saw another Rover move out from behind the van with another automatic. She fired, shouting, “Get down!” and crouched behind the gate as the top of it vanished in a shower of splinters. But the Rover was wounded, and Rachel sprang up to fire again as soon as the burst ended. Mary saw the remaining Rovers running for the van, fired five more rounds, and Rachel yelled, “Mary, let them go!”