“Twisted ankle. Nothing much.” JayDee shrugged, but in truth his ankle hurt like blazes. “Billy, how’re you feeling?”
“Like shit on a cracker,” the old man said through gritted teeth. “Fellas with broke legs usually don’t feel so good. Don’t need a doc to know that. Ow, Jesus…be careful with my old ass!”
Olivia hugged Dave and wound up squeezing him so hard he gave a grunt of pain. Dust puffed off him in the embrace. “Oh my God, I thought you were dead!”
“I might’ve been,” he said, returning the hug but not so firmly in respect of her bones. “I was sitting on my balcony, thinking. I saw the spheres, and then I heard that thing plowing in and getting louder and louder. I had time to get my guns and then I jumped. After that, I don’t know what happened. I do remember running like a jack rabbit.” His eyes found Ethan. He would not tell Ethan that he’d jumped not from his own balcony but from Ethan’s after he’d kicked the door open to try to get the boy out. He stared darkly at the row of bodies under the sheets and blankets. “Any idea how many?”
“No idea yet,” she said. “But many.”
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Billy Bancroft had been lowered to the grass and was fuming as the fingers of a gnarled hand felt along his injured leg. “Seventy-six years old and I never had a fuckin’ broken bone in my life!” His eyes, bright blue, turned upon the row of corpses. He was silent for awhile, and then he said, speaking to everyone and no one in particular, “Jake Keller in there anywhere? Joel, take a look for me, will you?”
“I’ll do it,” Dave offered. He went about the task quickly and efficiently. The third body was particularly bad, and the fifth was worse. The ninth body was…“Jake’s here.”
“Damn it.” Billy’s voice was tight. “Little bastard got away owin’ me fifty dollars from our last poker game. Well,” he said, “rest in peace. Cheater.”
“We can’t stay here,” Ethan said, and was surprised at the power of his own voice; again, it carried the strength of a man’s. He fixed his attention on Dave. “You know we can’t. We don’t even have time to bring all the bodies out and—”
“Where are we going to go?” Nikki sounded on the edge of panic. “Out there? This is our home…our protection…we can’t…we can’t…” And then she looked at the huge Gorgon craft sitting at the center of the destruction, and her remaining eye went glassy. Her knees buckled. Before she fell, Ethan reached her first and then Joel Schuster, and together they lowered her gently to the ground as she moaned and put her hands to her face. She began to cry again, and once more Olivia sat down beside her to stroke her hair and soothe her.
“She lived a few miles away, in a regular neighborhood,” Olivia said, speaking mostly to Ethan. “Westview Avenue, she told me. She said the whole area caught fire one night. The houses started blowing up. When she walked in, she was in rags, in shock, and badly injured. So…this was her home. At least her shelter, for whatever it was worth.”
“Ethan’s right.”
Dave had not spoken, though he’d been about to.
John Douglas limped forward on his makeshift crutch. “That thing…that smell…of dead meat. It’s going to bring the Gray Men tonight. We’ve got to get out while we can. Find some other place. We won’t have time to bury the bodies or do much more searching through the wreckage.” He frowned. “All these wounded people can’t be left behind. Damn if I know how they’re going to travel, though. And myself included in that.” He looked up at the top of the hill, where the seven horses grazed. They were jumpy, and when two brushed each other one kicked and galloped away. Seven horses…but no magnificent seven in this bunch.
Everyone was silent. Then Ethan knew what he should say, and he said it. “We’ve got to find a truck. Something big enough to carry…I don’t know…fifty or sixty people, I guess.”
“You mean a semi?” Dave asked. “With a trailer big enough? Yeah, right! Like we’re going to find one…” He was about to say sitting around out there, but he stopped himself. It might be possible to find a tractor-trailer truck at a loading dock or parked near a warehouse. An industrial area wasn’t but about three miles away. And as for fuel…
“Diesel,” he said. “I’ll bet there’s still diesel left in some of the gas stations’ tanks. Or maybe at the truck terminals. If we can find a barrel pump somewhere we can get fuel from a diesel tank. Have to find ten to twelve feet of hose. Maybe there’s a hardware store that hasn’t been cleaned out. Have to be careful, though. There are other people hiding in their holes and they’re armed and scared. Crazed, too. You remember.” He directed this to Olivia, referring to a time last August when he’d gone out with Cal Norris searching for food and water, and Cal had been shot in the neck from the window of a house and bled to death on West Skyway.
“We don’t necessarily need a truck,” Olivia said. Her face had taken on a firmness once more and there was life in her eyes. “We can use a school bus or a metro bus. Whatever we can find that maybe still has some gas in it, and a battery that works.”
“Right.” A battery that works, he thought. That was going to be a trick. But he couldn’t let it throw him, not yet. “Hold on. We? No, ma’am, you’re not going out on this one. Joel, can you ride a horse?”
“Haven’t since I was a kid, but I’m game.”
“I can ride,” Nikki said. She had wiped her face and no longer needed to lean on Olivia. “I had a horse before all this.”
“I need somebody with a gun.” He had already noted the .45 in Joel’s belt holster. “I’d like a third rider, though. Gary, you’re elected.”
“Okay, but I hate horses and they hate me.”
“I’ll go,” the wizened older woman named Hannah Grimes said. Her hair was white and wild, as if perpetually blown by a tempest. She held up a pistol that looked as big as her head, locked in a hand full of blue veins. “This elect me, Mr. President?”
“By a landslide.” Or earthquake, Dave thought. He looked at Ethan and could almost see the gears turning in the boy’s mind. White Mansion mountain. Got to get there, somehow. “Finding a hand crank pump is going to be a tough one right there. Then we find a truck. The battery’s going to be long dead, but pray we can find a spare,” he said, and found himself speaking only to Ethan. “If we can find a truck that’s already got some gas in it, enough to get to a station with some diesel left, all the better.” Tall orders, he thought. Little wonder they hadn’t tried this before. But before, there was no Gorgon ship sitting on top of them. “After that,” he went on doggedly, “we find medical supplies in a hospital, a pharmacy, or a Doc-in-the-Box. We may have to head south. Got that?”