With the time the spooks had had to do their work, not likely that the marshal or anybody else in this village was going to turn up out of some similar hidey-hole—the luck to have a door you couldn’t open yourself wasn’t going to be general. He didn’t know about this Tara Chang the kid talked about, <woman in fringed leather. Dark-haired.> Senior rider, if he had to guess. No sign of her or the rest of the riders—no help from that quarter. Not if that gate was standing open.
He brought the kids outside—they balked when they saw Cloud waiting, and Cloud snorted and laid down his ears.
“You be polite,” Danny said in as stern a tone as he had. “He’s not used to village kids. His name is Cloud. You let him smell you over. You think nicethoughts about him and me, you hear? Hold out your hands, let him smell them. That way he won’t mistake you for spooks.”
They were scared to death. They thought <Cloud biting fingers,> but they came down the steps and, the older boy first, held out their bare hands. Cloud sniffed and snorted, threw his head away from them, and wanted <Danny riding.>
He wanted <finding food.> But he didn’t think, on a second, queasy thought, that he wanted to let Cloud do the guiding— Cloud having no fastidiousness about some things, and there being pieces of human beings in the streets. He thought instead about <store> and <cans and flour,> hoping the vermin hadn’t gotten everything, and a thought came into his head—he was sure it was the boys—telling him exactly which building would have that kind of thing.
Most urgent of everything—<closing the gate.> Once they did that, inside, they could get some distance from the walls, at least, with Cloud’s help, enough to keep from mental confusion coming at them from the spooks outside.
He didn’t know, as tired and sore as he was, if he could get up to Cloud’s back on one try, with the rifle and all. But he wasn’t giving the only gun to two jailed kids to hold. He wanted <Cloud close to the steps > and he cheated a mount off the bottom step—made a fairly senior-style landing on Cloud’s back, rifle in hand and all.
Then he told Cloud <closing gate> and Cloud set out at a fair pace down the street. The boys hurried after, wrapped in their blankets, having to run to keep up—and by the time they’d reached the gate and he’d slid down again to heave the huge door shut, the boys were still halfway back along the street.
He shoved the gate, the truck-sized door needing no small push against the accumulation of snow. He brought it to, and the bar dropped, comforting thump.
They were in sole possession, he supposed. He had a look about the gates, checked the latch—felt Cloud bristle up with warning as the boys came running up, gasping and terrified.
“We’re all right,” he said to them. “Gate’s shut. If we don’t open it, nothing can. We just stay far from the walls. What village is this, anyway?”
“Tarmin,” Carlo gasped shakily. “This is Tarmin village.”
The biggest. The most people. The place you’d run to for help. All dead.
But maybe notall dead. Other, awful possibilities came to him as he looked back along the snowy, devastated street.
“Can you think of any other places where somebody couldn’t get out?” Worse and worse thoughts. “Any sick folk? Any old people, crippled people—any babies?”
There were. There had been. The boys were well aware who and where—they were worried, they were sickened at what they saw, and scared, not feeling like outlaws and killers at all; he, God help him, didn’t want to do this. He really didn’t. But when they started telling him where people lived, and thinking of houses, it was clear they knew their village: <wanting people, > came to him in confused fashion, an aching fear for specific faces they knew and feared were <bones in the street.>
At least it wasn’t hard to find a sidearm—he could take his pick, once he began to walk about among the remains. People had come out with guns, they’d died with guns in their hands, all up and down the street. He kept his rifle in the crook of his arm, and walked back along the street with the boys in tow, Cloud following close. He scavenged a pistol and holster just lying in a bloody jacket.
He gave the jacket to the older boy. He kept the pistol. They found scarves, hats, a lot of them chewed. A coat for the younger kid—and a gun. The older boy hesitated at it, afraid to make the move. Danny took it, checked to see it was loaded, and gave it to him.
“Don’t make a mistake. Hear? I’ll nail you.”
The kid didn’t say anything. But the boy wasn’t thinking hostility, either. He was <scared,> thinking mostly about his kid brother, and <vermin under the porches.>
They went from house to house, after that, and they called out at every house. Danny imaged <rider with horse, rider with boys. Rider looking for people in houses > as loud as Cloud could make him; but Cloud didn’t smell anything he liked in those houses.
<Human baby,> Danny imaged, <human baby, old people—> but he didn’t get answers.
They’d done all they could, he told himself. They forced the door to the village store open, and it wasn’t touched. He got a flashlight and some batteries, and he kept thinking about <babies in houses > and the couple of places they’d tried the hardest.
So he went out again, took the boys with him for backup, and with the boys staying on the porches, he went into open doors with his torch in one hand, and a pistol in the other, went into upstairs halls while Cloud was sending his <nighthorse> image downstairs. He looked in the shut rooms—in one house where the boys said there was a sick old man who couldn’t get out of his bed.
That was bad. That was really bad.
And inside one after the other of the houses where they said there were babies—he saw enough to last him. Parents had run to hold their kids when the panic hit. They’d opened the doors to help their neighbors. That was all they needed to do.
You learned to damp things down when you worked with the horses. You learned just—see colors. Patterns. No emotional stuff. You could see anything. It didn’t kill you. Blood was blood, you had it, they had it, bone was bone, everybody was made of it.
He went down the steps, of the last one, the one he’d had to talk himself into—cold, numb. Cloud wanted <Danny coming back.> Cloud wanted <fight> because Cloud’s rider was upset; but there was nothing available to fight.
A support post got in his way as he came out onto the porch. He swung on it with the flashlight hard enough he bent the barrel at an angle and killed the light. The boys didn’t ask what he’d found.
He walked. He didn’t want contact with Cloud for a while. Cloud walked near him, mad and snappish. The boys must have sensed it, because they trailed along out of reach.
They went back to the store. That was the best place. The only one with no bodies and no blood.
Chapter xix
THEY WERE THE BLACKSMITH’S SONS. THEIR NAMES WERE CARLO and Randy Goss. And beyond that it was hard to get all the story. They brought Cloud up the low porch of the grocery—the flashlight, by some wonder, still almost worked, at least so they could get an oil lantern lit, and by that light they started a fire in the ironwork stove. It had been dark when the trouble came, the store was shut—the grocer lived next door, the boys said; the door over there had been open, but this one had a keyed lock, and there was no need, Danny agreed with the boys, to open the door into the house.
The awful thing, where they’d been and what they’d seen, was having an appetite. But Cloud wasted no time—Cloud was interested immediately in the cold-locker, not an ears-down kind of notice, but <ham> was in his thoughts, and Danny held the pistol on the door while Carlo and his brother opened it.