Trembling white hot inside, Alec answered in a voice so choked and low that he himself could barely hear it, “That’s right. I refuse.”
“Then get out!” Douglas roared, pointing to the door. “Take whatever you own and get the hell out of here!”
“That’s just what I’m going to do.”
Alec started for the door. Everyone else in the house was staring at him now, all pretense of polite disinterest vanished. Will looked worse than when he had been shot.
“Just a minute,” Douglas snapped as Alec reached the door. “You can take whatever you please from this base. But you leave Angela alone. You’re not good enough for her, no matter how cleverly you’ve tricked her.”
“I’ll take what I want,” Alec said.
“Try taking her and I’ll have you hunted down like an animal and killed. I promise you!”
BOOK FOUR
Chapter 24
Alec stormed blindly out into the frozen night.
He passed Angela’s house, saw the lights and glimpsed a bustle of women inside. He guessed that they were preparing breakfast, talking together, laughing and gossiping.
He went on past. By the time he had put together his own few belongings and saddled a horse, dawn was streaking the eastern sky. But it was a dull, overcast day that arose, with a sky as grimly sullen as Alec’s own thoughts. He rode beyond the checkpoints and the guarded fence gates, away from Douglas’s base.
Riding most of the day, he camped up in the hills under a stand of firs. Their branches made a poor fire that burned too quickly, then smoldered without heat. By morning he was shaking with bone-deep cold. And hungry.
The only weapon he had brought with him was the automatic rifle he had come in with originally.
It was heavy and cumbersome to use on small game, even when choked down to single-shot action.
And Alec quickly discovered that his shooting was not good enough to hit a rabbit or smaller rodent as it scurried across the frozen ground. His dilemma was painfuclass="underline" squirt a clip of rounds at a rabbit and you might hit the animal, you might even have enough of it intact to gnaw on, but you’d be out of ammunition in a day or two.
On his third day of wandering it snowed, a heavy fierce blizzard that howled through the woods and blotted out everything except the very nearest trees. Alec was lucky enough to find a cave and enough hardwood to make a fire that lasted through the night. The horse needed it as much as he did. There was no forage to speak of, and the animal was weakening rapidly. Briefly he thought of killing the animal for food, but then he would be on foot in the middle of this snowy wilderness.
He spent two days in the cave, locked in by the blizzard. No firewood, no food, nothing but the stench of the horse and the moaning wind. When it ended and the sky shone blue again, the world was completely covered with white. Snow plastered the trees and made their laden branches sparkle crystalline in the newly risen Sun. Drifts heaped up against the mouth of Alec’s cave waist high.
The land beyond was a rolling featureless unmarked expanse of white.
He admired its beauty for several minutes. Then his hunger and his fear of dying drove him out into the snow’s cold embrace.
The horse died that morning. It collapsed under him in a shuddering groan and floundered in the snow. Alec could feel the warmth of life seeping out of its body. Now he was totally alone. Nothing alive was in sight. There were no landmarks, no direction to aim for, no hope. He stood in the thigh-deep snow, wet and cold and trembling between despair and bleak fear.
He looked at the horse’s emaciated carcass, flirted with the thought of carving off some flesh and eating it raw. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Sleep, he told himself. That’s what I need.
Rest and sleep.
And the wind sighed, making the trees croon to him, Sleep… yes, sleep.
But then, from somewhere deep within his memory came a fragment of poetry that he hadn’t realized he knew. It spoke itself in his mind, and he jerked erect. He muttered it to himself, then flung his head back and, arms outstretched, shouted it to the trees and wind:
To sleep! Perchance to dream:—aye, there’s the rub;
“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…”
That sleep of death. Alec repeated it to himself.
And he hunched forward and fought his way through the snow. It was a bitter exhausting battle, as much against himself as against the elements.
Cold, hungry, weary, he clamped an iron determination over his aching, protesting muscles and empty gut as he pressed forward.
There are villages all around here, he told himself.
Look for smoke, or maybe a road.
He found a road first. He barely recognized it; there was nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the snow-covered landscape except a faint pair of ruts where sled runners had pressed down. It was easier to walk in the ruts, though, and thankfully Alec staggered along, heading slightly downhill, away from the base and toward the valley floor where the farmlands and villages stood.
It was nearly dark when he tottered up to the village. It was either the same one they had taken months earlier or another just like it. Then Alec saw the old man who sat by the gate. Underneath his muffling coat and heavy, pulled-down hat he was the same man. With the same shotgun across his lap.
They said nothing to each other. Alec stood by the gate on unsteady feet, clutching his automatic rifle feebly, numb with cold, puffing with exhaustion.
The old man faced him, shotgun in his gloved hands, looking uncertain and red-faced in the last dying rays of the Sun.
Finally the old man shrugged and beckoned to Alec, then turned and headed into the village. Alec followed him, staggering, down cold deserted lanes where the snow had been pounded flat and solid by the passage of many feet.
The old man led him to a hut. “In there,” he said, in a ragged, age-roughened voice.
Alec pushed the door open and stumbled into the room. A flood of warmth from the fireplace was the first thing he sensed. It made his face hurt. Then he saw the two men at the table, startled, half out of their chairs, a steaming bowl of food on the table between them.
They were two of Alec’s men. That was all he noticed. He fell face down and was unconscious before he reached the hut’s bare earthen floor.
They spent a couple of days pumping warm food into him and letting him rest on their pallet.
Miraculously, Alec realized, he had not come down with a fever. A touch of frostbite and a lot of raw, chaffed skin. But otherwise no damage that rest and food could not cure.
The men—Zimmerman and Peters—had decided to remain at the village when Alec’s force had broken up. Most of the group had joined Will Russo’s band, once they learned that Alec was Douglas’s prisoner. Jameson had taken the rest south. No one knew what had become of Ferret; he had disappeared. Gradually, Alec realized that Zimmerman and Peters were living together as lovers. He was startled at first, although homosexuality was not rare in the lunar community.
After a few days, Alec was more embarrassed than anything else. He wished he had another hut to live in.
“You say Jameson headed south?” he asked Peters over breakfast on the third day. Zimmerman had already left to help the other village men who were shovelling newly-fallen snow out of the village lanes.
Peters shook his head solemnly. He had grown a luxuriant dark beard since Alec had last seen him.