“They didn’t come real often,” the old lady told Shango, pausing in her laborious measuring out of thrice-used tea leaves to flavor the morning’s water rations. “But that nice Captain Brady used to make sure one of his men got up here every few days with something. And as long as he and his men came around, nobody bothered us much.” Beyond the shade of the gallery outside the kitchen, Shango could see the two remaining attendants at work laying out bedding- bright red-and-blue blankets, worn blue-striped sheets-on the unkempt lawn and rhododendron bushes, airing it in the absence of a regular supply of wash water. Beyond, a neat row of brown rectangles under the trees marked where those who’d been on oxygen or dialysis had been buried, the new grass like a mist of pale green velvet. Mrs. Close supported herself on the edge of the table when she got up to start the water boiling on the stove-one of the other residents had converted it from gas to wood-and Shango got quickly to his feet and fetched the heavy kettle.
“Thank you, dear.” She smiled up at him. She was thin as a bundle of sticks, and her hands shook with a steady, constant tremor, as if a motor within were off balance. “Mr. Dean says he saw parties of Mr. Cadiz’s men riding in the woods the day before yesterday, carrying spears and arrows, he said, and wearing those camouflage jackets the National guardsmen wore.” Mr. Dean was the community’s scout, seventy-seven and the only Angels Rest inmate capable of walking more than a mile.
She went on worriedly, “Mr. Dean also says they were riding horses the National guardsmen had the week before. Mr. Dean sometimes gets a little confused about people, but he’s very sharp on horses, so you might want to stay away from Lynchburg. Mr. Cadiz. .” She glanced around nervously and lowered her voice in embarrassment.
“Mr. Cadiz is very prejudiced against-well, he’s said some really awful things about Negroes.” She looked ashamed even to bring the matter up, and Shango was touched by her delicacy.
“And if he’s taken over the National Guard post and has all their weapons, you might want to be careful. Mr. Dean told us some other things, too, about that horrible Douglas Brattle-Mr. Cadiz’s neighbor-who’s writing that book on torture, of all things, and has all those terrible books and pictures at his house. But I think Mr. Dean must be confused about that.”
“About what?” Shango poured the hot water into the community teapot. He was still getting over his shock that the inmates of Angels Rest-a dozen trembling oldsters and the two nurses-had even let him through the gate, instead of locking it and the doors against him, not that either the honeysuckle-covered perimeter wall or the unbarred, ample windows of the old house would stand up to anything resembling a determined assault. The fact that they’d not only admitted him but had voted to share their tiny stores of food and water with him without demanding work in return, made him want to sit them all down and lecture them about the facts of life: don’t trust anybody, make sure you’ve got enough. .
He’d spent yesterday afternoon felling trees in the surrounding woods and hauling them up to the kitchen and repairing the plastic rainwater catches. His arms were now sore and stiff.
“About Mr. Brattle-well-being able to do things. Mr. Dean says Mr. Brattle could make a horse spook just by looking at it, and when one of the men argued with Mr. Cadiz, Mr. Brattle sort of-sort of waved at him, and the man doubled over and almost fell down.”
And that explained, thought Shango grimly, what probably happened to that nice Captain Brady and the National Guard.
The thought of it shivered across his skin like rat’s feet.
In his widening search for United Flight 1046, he’d heard of people with unexplained powers. Whispers at first, and he’d put them aside as fear-fed rumors. Then near Spotsylvania he’d encountered a woman who could start or extinguish fires just by looking at wood. Something was turning people into gremlins or trogs or boogies or whatever else they were called-and apparently turning people into other things as well.
No wonder McKay had looked scared that first morning, when everyone else was just concerned because the lights were out.
Hang on, Chief, he thought. The fear that had grown inside him for weeks now tore at him like broken glass. He reached into the pocket of his shorts, touched the dog tag he’d taken from Czernas’ backpack. Just hang on and keep the lid on things. I’ll get you whatever Bilmer knew, whatever Bilmer had.
And then what?
He looked out the windows again, to the neat row of grass-dusted graves.
“Now, you watch out for yourself in those woods.” Mrs. Close pressed into Shango’s hand a block of much-recycled tinfoil enclosing bread that Shango knew the community could not spare. “I don’t suppose. .” She bit her lower lip. Tiny and fragile, she couldn’t have weighed eighty-five pounds; the medication that had kept her thyroid from over-burning-devouring her body at a rate faster than food could replenish it-had long since run out. “I don’t suppose when you’ve looked at that plane wreck Mr. Dean gave you the map to, you could come back? Mr. Dean says Mr. Cadiz and his men seem to be collecting all the food and water and things and taking them back to Lynchburg for their own families and people who’ll work for them. We don’t have very much here to begin with, and I’m sure none of us are in any shape to work for Mr. Cadiz even if we wanted to. If he takes what we have, or if he hurts Mrs. Soniat or Mrs. Metcalf, I don’t know what we’ll do.”
His father had brought him up not to lie. “Is it yes or is it no?” he’d say. “Don’t say yes and then do no. That’s being a coward, and a liar.”
But he couldn’t speak, knowing that when he left this place she would die. They all would die. He’d done what he could to bar the windows with two-by-fours, had helped them set up a lookout post on the roof, had given them Czernas’ binoculars, and he knew these defenses would do no good at all.
In his mind he saw Czernas in the hot sunlight of the parkway, standing before that beautiful old woman in the green sweatpants: that woman who might be dead now, as Czernas was dead. Like Czernas, he could not speak.
Mrs. Close patted his arm gently and smiled her understanding. “It’s all right,” she said. Shango wondered how many times this woman had heard Sorry, we can’t, since her family had put her in Angels Rest. “You just do what you can, dear, and we’ll hang on here. We’re a lot tougher than we look. It was sweet of you to stay and cut the wood and put those bars on the windows.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it, hurting inside for her courage.
“We’ll be all right,” she said again. “You be careful out there.”
In Charlottesville they’d told him about four planes that had come down south of town, in the green woodlands that lay along the knees of the mountains. One of these had proved to be an American flight, he’d seen the fuselage of the plane and hadn’t gone any nearer than that. The other had burst its belly open when it first hit the ground and had spewed passengers, seats, luggage over about a thousand yards of highway 29. Shango had searched the rotted, unburied corpses until he’d found half of a boarding pass that identified it as an Air France plane.
Old Mr. Dean, who didn’t look like he could stand up to a stiff wind, had gone over Shango’s map last night and marked the precise location of the third plane, as well as innumerable minor landmarks of the woods. The witnesses at Angels Rest had all seen it come down, catching a wing on the ground and pinwheeling as it sheared apart; using the map and his compass-at least that still worked-Shango set up a grid, doing alone and without equipment a task that usually fell to professional investigation teams with helicopters, dogs, radio communication and metal detectors at their disposal. He worked doggedly, patiently, pacing himself; rationing his energy and his concentration as he’d learned to ration water and food.