"It might not mean anything."
"Maybe not, but it's a connection I should have made. Stay put. I'll be right back."
Gino nudged Bonar with an elbow. "That was a nice call your boss made."
Bonar beamed like a proud parent. "That boy shines under pressure. Always did."
Inside of a minute, Sheriff Pitala was back with a copy of a county map with all the dead zones marked; another two minutes, and he was inside, sharing the information with Knudsen, begging to contact the few people he had on the road who had radios in their personal cars. Knudsen wouldn't let him.
Pitala went over to a side desk and sat by the phone to wait for check-in calls on the landline, his head in his hands. By the time the first call came in, the RV was long gone.
GRACE, SHARON, and Annie had been stunned into immobility by the startling cell-phone call. They'd heard a fragment of a single shouted word that Grace and Annie had been absolutely certain was Roadrunner calling Grace's name, and then nothing but static. Grace had talked into the phone anyway, words tumbling over one another, and then the cell had abruptly gone dark.
They tried everything they could think of to get the phone to work again, to recapture that fragile connection, not knowing if anything that Grace had said went through.
"It's not the signal," Grace finally said. "The phone's dead. It's a miracle it ever connected after being in the water that long."
Annie was glaring at the useless phone in frustration. "I didn't even know you had that thing with you."
"I always have it with me."
Sharon sagged against the corner of the barn, devastated to have been so close to salvation, only to have it snatched away. "Stupid.Stupid," she hissed bitterly. "We finally find a place high enough and open enough to catch a signal, and we don't have a goddamned phone because we were so stupid that we left them where those guys could find them."
Grace took Sharon's arm and shook it a little. "We don't have one second to think of things like that. We've wasted too much time already. We have to hurry."
They backtracked the same way they had come: into the cornfield at the side of the farmhouse, between the rows, green leaves rustling at their hurried passage, down onto their hands and knees when they broke out of the corn into the tall grass of the field that abutted the road.
This used to be fun, Annie thought as she crept ahead on all fours. When you're a child, dropping to your hands and knees and scrabbling through the grass was something you did for the sheer joy of it. But once you reached a certain age, the posture implied degradation, submission-"he was brought to his knees," "she came crawling back on her hands and knees"-even the language recognized that somewhere between age five and ten, crawling ceased to be fun and became humiliating.
Grace paused at the edge of the field while the others came alongside. They all dropped to their stomachs and peered through the last fringe of tall grass before the land sloped gently down into the ditch, then up onto the road.
To their left, the asphalt climbed the small rise that kept them out of sight of the roadblock; to their right, it rolled gently down into the deeper blackness of Four Corners.
Grace held her breath, listening, watching, caution pressing on her back and tapping her on the shoulder. Crossing the road was the only time they would be totally exposed. She clenched her jaw and concentrated on the evidence of all her senses.
Nothing. No sound, no lights, no sign of life.
She nudged the other two, then held up a forefinger. One at a time. They'd cross one at a time, just in case all the soldiers hadn't gone to the perimeter, just in case they'd left an odd one here and there to keep watch, just in case anything.
Annie and Sharon nodded understanding, then watched with wide eyes as Grace slipped down into the ditch, up the other side, hesitated, then darted across the road and disappeared into the ditch on the other side.
Sharon caught a deep breath, then followed; Annie went a few seconds later.
On their bellies once more, single file, they wriggled like the disconnected segments of a crippled worm back toward the deserted town.
The ditch seemed like an old friend now, its banks rising as if to shelter them from the road. Annie made a face as they slipped into the rank water puddling around slimy grass stems, and it occurred to her that she had to go to the bathroom. Bad. It seemed preposterous. You shouldn't have to go to the bathroom when you're busy running for your life and the lives of a thousand other people. Certainly Superman never had this problem.
Gradually, the ground beneath them began to rise again, and they were on dry grass. A few more yards, and the old lilac hedge bordering the cafe and house behind it popped into view on the left.
Grace scrambled around into the deep shadows between the cafe and the hedge, the other two close behind. For a moment, they all huddled close to the lilacs, blunt-nosed twigs poking their backs. The wall of the cafe blocked their view of the town, and the only thing they could hear was the sound of their own labored breathing. Eventually, even that quieted and the world was perfectly still.
The peculiar silence of this place had become normal, almost restful. Grace was kneeling comfortably, hands on her thighs, eyelids at a heavy half-mast as she rested her body and mind. In a minute, they'd head back toward the basement to gather what they needed. In just a minute . . .
"I have to go to the bathroom," Annie whispered. "Right this second."
Sharon rolled her head to look at her, amazed to feel a smile come from somewhere. It didn't make it to her mouth, but it was there, on the inside. A stupid smile, really, and all because there was something strangely comforting about Annie having to go to the bathroom. It was so wonderfully ordinary, so damnnormal.
Without thinking about it, she reached out and touched Annie on the arm, one of those priestly gestures that seem to convey some kindof a blessing:Go to the bathroom in peace, my child.
Annie pressed back into the embrace of the lilacs' greenery while Grace and Sharon crawled a few feet away, more to get out of the splash zone than to give her privacy. They hunkered down close to the hedge, facing each other like two Aborigine elders in the bush. They grinned like guilty, eavesdropping children when the silence was broken by the unmistakable sound of a stream of liquid hitting dirt.
Annie's black lace underwear was puddled around her ankles, her eyes closed in almost euphoric relief, her bare backside jammed against the impenetrable tangle of the lilac hedge's thick, horny trunks. After the first few seconds, the muscles in her legs started to quiver with the strain, and she thought she'd finally found something else that a penis might be good for.
She wiggled her butt in a vain attempt to shake herself dry, then, discouraged, started plucking glossy leaves from the tangle of branches. It was more noise than she'd made crawling all the way from the farmyard, but for the first time, she was beginning to believe they really did have the town all to themselves. She could make a little noise gathering makeshift toilet paper, she decided, and no one would shoot her.
She had almost enough when a huge, calloused hand shot around from behind her and clamped down hard over her mouth, jerking her backward.
GRACE AND SHARON were crouched by the side of the lilac hedge, waiting for Annie to finish. It seemed to be taking her forever.
Sharon shifted her shoulders anxiously. The skin on the back of her neck seemed to be moving. She shuddered and pulled the sides of her mouth down. Lord. So that's what it felt like when something really made your skin crawl. It was this blasted, deadly-silent town. The slightest noise sounded malevolent, like Annie jerking leaves off the branches to use as toilet paper. And just when you got used to the noise, it stopped, and that seemed more malevolent still.