"Hey!"
"What the fuck?"
The other two had noticed his presence at last. The man farthest away, a fat stringy-haired gringo in blue jeans, circus cowboy chaps, and a long leather jacket, had actually managed to grab one chicken. He at least had the presence of mind to drop the bird and try to retrieve the assault rifle hanging from his shoulder, but Miguel gutshot him before he was able to lay a hand on the weapon. He screamed and fell to the ground, his body shuddering under the impact of two more bullets.
The last intruder turned tail and ran for the truck. Whether he was going for his guns or attempting to escape, Miguel did not know. He tracked the running target for two seconds before shooting him in the hip. The man went down like a galloping horse that had snapped a leg in a gopher hole. His screams were pitiable, animalistic. Miguel chambered another round and advanced on him without mercy. He was a scrawny specimen, although possessed of a potbelly he had tended well over the years. Like his friends, he was dressed in an eccentric combination of Wild West castoffs and modern hoodlum chic. As he scrabbled through the dirt, still trying to reach the sanctuary of the pickup truck, he kept one clawlike hand clamped on his ruined hip, from which geysered thick dark gouts of arterial blood keeping time with his failing heartbeat.
Miguel ground his teeth together so painfully that he thought they might shatter as he stalked past the body of his son. Every good and decent instinct in his body was drawing him toward the little boy, urging him to scoop up his body gently as though he were just sleeping and might be revived by a father's kiss upon his eyelids. But Miguel knew from a brief horrified glimpse at his wounds that his only son was gone. He squeezed off any good or decent feelings that might have remained in his heart as though he were crushing a small bird within his fist.
He was just dimly aware of one small surviving voice of rationality, a mere whisper in the chorus of rage and loathing that filled his mind. It was his own voice, speaking from a better time, telling him he had no choice but to preserve the life of this man in front of him no matter how wretched a creature he might be, because he needed to know who had done this and why. But a hot gust of intemperate hatred blew that small, reasonable voice away. With his face distorted in a rictus of pain and malice, he very carefully and slowly walked up to the whimpering, moaning creature attempting to escape from him. When he was in range, one swift boot into the rib cage flipped the man over, causing him to cry out anew. Miguel raised his knee and stamped down viciously with the heel of his boot on the man's face, muffling his scream of protest and agony. Again he stomped down, shattering a mouthful of teeth and shredding lips and cheeks.
Stomp.
Stomp.
Stomp.
By the time he was finished, by the time the demon that had arisen inside his head and apparently taken over his body was finished, Miguel's leg ached. His boots and jeans were soaked with blood and smeared with gobs of brain and bone chips. The road agent's head was no more than a gruesome pancake. A cold wind seemed to pass through him, and he collapsed to the earth, shivering.
3
Wiltshire, England Caitlin awoke to the crying of her baby. The child would be hungry and in need of changing, and today was Bret's morning off, which sounded a lot more indulgent than it really was. He might get to hide under the covers for a few minutes more while she tended to little Monique and brought the coal-fired stove back to life for coffee. It was a good idea to keep the fuel banked up overnight and never to let the stove go out completely. Not unless you felt like flapping around before dawn with a cold draft blowing up your nightdress as you got down on all fours to jam rolled-up paper and fresh coal into a dead hearth. Caitlin tried to rub another night of broken sleep from her eyes and squinted at the glowing dial of her watch. Looked like about oh-four-hundred-twenty hours. "Omigod-thirty," as Bret referred to anytime before the sun rose. She swung her long, finely muscled legs over the side of the lumpy mattress and dropped in bare feet to the flagstone floor. A fair drop, too. The antique wrought-iron bed was huge.
"Want me to get her?" Bret mumbled without much enthusiasm from under the duck feather duvet. Summer was not far off, but the weather had been chilly since the Disappearance, and although it did seem to be returning to normal, they still often slept under a couple of layers of woolen blankets and one oversized quilt.
"Not unless you can grow a pair of working udders in the next three minutes," Caitlin croaked, aware of just how swollen and heavy with milk her breasts were again. Monique was a good sleeper mostly, for which they were profoundly grateful, but that meant that Caitlin woke up most mornings needing to get her on for a long feed. Bret's half snort, half snore told her just how sincere the offer had been.
She wearily worked her feet into a pair of slippers and padded through into the baby's room, ducking under the low wooden lintel. At least he'd offered, and if she had genuinely been too tired to deal this morning, he would have dragged himself into the nursery to change the diaper before sliding Monique into bed beside Caitlin for a feed and a cuddle. They had all fallen asleep like that more than once.
The baby's cries, which had been short, disjointed, and scratchy when she first awoke, were growing longer and more insistent as she realized she was both hungry and trapped inside a large, wet, and very unpleasant square of not-so-white toweling cloth. Disposable diapers were almost impossible to get now, and as Caitlin gently wrestled with her daughter in the semidark, she tried to tell herself she was doing the right thing for Mother Earth. She quickly scraped Monique's poop into a chamber pot, wrinkling her nose in distaste. They routinely saved the malodorous contents for recycling in the farm's composting pits, but doing so was a hell of a hard sell at omigod-thirty with a thrashing baby kicking her heels in a puddle of what looked like undercooked chicken curry.
"Goddamn, sometimes I think I'd rather be back in Noisy-le-Sec," Caitlin muttered without conviction as she wiped the baby's bottom the way the midwife up at Swindon had shown her.
"Midwitches, more like it," she whispered to Monique as the offending mess went into a bucket by the change table and a fresh new terrycloth diaper and liner went under the infant's now clean butt. The liners, too, were very scarce. They were impossible to find on the open market, and the National Heath allotted them only seven per week. She really didn't want to wash and reuse them, but what choice did she have? This kid needed six or seven changes a day, not a week.
She marveled at how the quick, spare movements to secure the diaper in place had become second nature, even in the dark. She could do it blindfolded, although, of course, she could also field strip and reassemble the small armory of weapons on the manor under the same conditions. It wasn't so much the ease with which she had adapted to the thousand little tricks of parenthood that gave Caitlin pause for thought. It was the very fact that she'd become a parent in the first place. Settling into the enormous cracked leather armchair overlooking the southern fields, she eased little Monique onto her right breast while she watched the first stirrings of movement in the workers' camp beyond the security wall. The foremen were already awake, moving quietly up and down the long lines of ex-British Army tents, seeing to the campfires and the cooking wagons. For just a few moments of lingering darkness, it looked as though a regiment had bivouacked on her farm, so familiar was the strict and orderly fashion in which the men went about the job of rousing the sleepers from the long straight lines of tents. But as the baby sucked at her nipple and squirmed into a comfier position, the first hint of dawn softened the faraway line of the horizon over the Savernake Forest, and the true nature of the camp revealed itself.
Her workforce was composed almost entirely of refugees, mostly American but with a leavening of Continentals, with a cadre of former military types from the Home Guard to keep them all in line and on the job. They were the foremen she could see moving around before everyone else. After a few minutes Caitlin carefully hoisted the baby up onto her shoulder and patted her on the back waiting for the hearty burp she knew was coming, without any milk vomit, she hoped, to further stain and stink up her dressing gown. She didn't indulge herself in any limp, liberal bullshit about feeling sorry for the refugees or guilty for living in relative luxury here in the old stone manor while they slept and toiled in the fields. She did her fair share of toiling, and the bottom line was that they had all chosen to stay in the United Kingdom even after it became possible to return home to America. They were earning their room and board, to use a local phrase. Two years' labor for the Ministry of Resources and they would be free to settle wherever they wanted in the British Isles or the wider Commonwealth. Despite what some people said, England wasn't a gulag. All the men or women working her fields or those of her neighbors were at liberty to take themselves down to Portsmouth, where a free berth to the United States was available. Of course, once they stepped off the boat at the other end, they'd find themselves obliged to work for Uncle Sam for five years as payment for their passage.