When they reached the Acres house, they should have had a clear view of Shiloh Beach. They didn’t. The air was opaque with snow, the dusky clouds a burden on the mind. Along the white ribbon of the road, there were no cars, no tracks. Rachel fumbled under the cuff of her glove, then pulled her muffler down. When she spoke, her words formed puffs of white. “It’s ten o’clock now. We’ll have to watch the time, Mary. We can’t stay out in this long.”
Mary felt the cold seeping through her layers of protective clothing. “Just long enough to get to Shiloh.”
“And back,” Rachel reminded her.
Silver’s hooves bit through the snow to the black asphalt. Mary looked back at the trail of the mare’s tracks, braided with the dotted lines of the dogs’ tracks. Even as she watched they faded, erased by the wind-harried snow. Houses materialized one after the other out of the haze. Lightless windows made black patterns on gray and white, and not one chimney showed a wisp of smoke.
They had traveled nearly five blocks in this dim, suffocatingly silent world when they came to the first burned house. It looked like a crude sumi-e painting, black strokes of charred studs against white drifts. From that point every house they passed was a gutted ruin. Mary couldn’t make sense of those ruins, not until she realized that in the last two weeks there had been nothing and no one to stop fire, driven by the wind, from leaping from one house to the next.
The black and white piles were like markers in a graveyard, set at regular intervals, hinting maddeningly at knowledge held secret. Even the dogs seemed oppressed. They paced behind Silver, tails low, ears flicking constantly for a sound. Mary rocked with Silver’s lulling amble while the chill air parched her lips and throat, the snow whirled into her eyes, and even though she could feel Rachel rocking with her, she had an irrational sense that she was alone, and with every moment hope waned within her.
The Apie station. They’d find someone there. Harry. He’d be there.
The shopping mall began to take shape ahead of them, and as they drew nearer emerged out of the murky atmosphere as a ruin, the long, low L of buildings reduced to a snow-shrouded slag heap of rubble. The parking lot was dotted with cars, some still aligned in angled formations, and of the fifty or more cars, at least a third were wrecked and burned, as if they’d been hit by artillery shells, as if—
Rachel said hoarsely, “They were blown up.” She pointed to the nearest hulk. “Bullet holes. That means Rovers.”
Mary felt a chill between her shoulder blades that was not the cold as she looked around the ruins, seeking any hint of movement. But nothing moved here except the wind.
The dogs were digging at a mound of snow near what had once been the supermarket entrance. Rachel shouted, “Shadow—Sparky, what are you into?” She slid off Silver’s back, ran to the mound, and pulled the dogs away. Mary dismounted and followed her, stared numbly at the face in the snow. A Rover. A skull design in red and black still marked his face, but the design was marred by the frozen cascade of blood from his crushed forehead.
Rachel squinted into the shattered building. “Under those girders—that’s the rear end of a pickup. They must’ve driven it into the store and blown it up. Bastards! Why destroy everything? Did they think that would help them live?”
Mary looked away, but she saw other similar mounds in the snow. “Rachel, we’d better get to the Apie station.”
“It won’t be there.”
“How do you know? It will be there.”
Rachel looked at her, eyes strangely opaque. Then she called the dogs and set off across the parking lot, with Silver following like another large, placid dog. Mary skirted the mounds, trying not to see the hands or knees or feet left uncovered by the snow, trying not to recognize the charred remains spilling out of one of the exploded cars. Two adults. Three children. It was like crossing a battlefield.
But if the Rovers had spent their nihilistic passion here, maybe the rest of the town had been spared—and the Apie station.
Highway 101 was strewn with motionless vehicles given a semblance of movement by windblown snow. Rachel and Mary trudged southward, passing one burned building after another, and finally Mary couldn’t deny the bleak truth: nothing in the heart of Shiloh had escaped the fires. They skirted cars without looking into them. They drifted down a defile of blackened relics. And when they reached the Apie station, Mary gazed at its ruins with tears freezing on her cheeks. The riven steel of the antenna tower lay sprawled atop the rubble like the bones of a dinosaur.
So much for our link with the rest of the world, she thought. Harry Berden hadn’t gone home to Boise soon enough. She told herself that his body was probably buried in that snow white, fire black ruin, but she felt nothing she recognized as grief—not for Harry, not for her mother, not for anyone. All she felt was a keening desolation. She stood trembling, heart stuttering, and the pain seemed past bearing.
So much for hope.
At length, she looked at Rachel, saw the same despair in her eyes, but it was caged behind a stubborn resolve. Mary nodded. “It’s only been two weeks. The government, the army—someone will show up eventually. Besides, there must be survivors around here. We survived.”
Rachel shivered. “Yes. We survived.” Then she turned away and walked toward the ruins of the building that had housed Connie’s clinic, and for the next half hour they searched among treacherous avalanches of fallen boards and brick. They were rewarded for their efforts with three large bottles of antibiotic capsules, two of aspirin, another of alcohol, four rolls of gauze, a package of tape sutures, an assortment of disposable syringes, a scalpel, a pair of scissors, and a box of ten twenty-cc vials of morphine. Rachel put it all in a burlap sack.
We’re scavengers now, Mary thought, as they made their way through the debris to the highway where Silver and the dogs waited. This is how we’ll live. If we live. Like jackals at a carcass, we’ll live off the remains of a dead civilization. Her cold-numbed feet dragged, her fingers ached, and with every breath of chill air, she felt her internal temperature sink a fraction of a degree.
Rachel leaned wearily against Silver’s flank. “Mary, we’d better get home. Let’s head for the beach. The tide should be out, and it’ll be easier going that way.”
Mary wanted to object that they couldn’t go home yet. They hadn’t found any survivors. And there must be survivors in Shiloh. Somewhere. But she knew, as Rachel did, that if they didn’t get out of this enervating cold, they might not be able to count themselves among the survivors much longer. Tomorrow, the next day, they would, they must try again.
With the aid of a car fender, they mounted Silver and at the next cross street turned west. Burned houses marked the way, and Mary was convinced that the somber sentinels would continue all the way to the sea. It was then that she saw, emerging out of the fog of snow, an open area surrounded by trees and shrubs untouched by fire. The deep green of azalea and rhododendron leaves under the snow was pathetically bright, and in the midst of this unravaged island stood a church: an old, white clapboard, picture-postcard church. Mary stared at it, expecting it to disappear, a phantom of her hope.
But it didn’t disappear. It took on substance with Silver’s every step forward.
“Rachel, do you see it?”
“I see it. That’s the old Community Church.”
At the back of the building a brick chimney rose above the ridgepole. There was no smoke coming from it. And yet—Mary focused on the space above the chimney. Yes, a wavering of the tree branches behind it. Heat waves.