_Ring_.
Jed threw the dead bolt, unlocked the door, opened it. The man stood on the stoop, smiling at him, and Jed didn't like that smile.
"Hello, Mr. McGill."
Jed stared at him dumbly.
The man pushed past him, uninvited, into the living room. "Nice place you've got here."
Get out, he wanted to say. Get out of my house. But he only turned and watched as the man maneuvered around the couch and the coffee table and sat down in the easy chair facing the television. The man was still smiling as he motioned for Jed to sit on the couch, and now Jed knew what he did not like about the smile. It was fake, yes, but that's not what unnerved him so. It was the hint of a threat behind the smile, the belligerence backing it.
He should not have opened the door, he realized. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. It was too late to stop it.
Whatever was going to happen?
He looked at the smiling business-suited man on the couch.
Yes.
He wished he'd brought his shotgun out with him, but it was still in the bedroom, leaning in the corner by the dresser. His rifles were in the gun case.
"Have a seat," the man said.
Jed walked slowly forward, stopped in back of the couch. "What do you want?"
"I just want to talk, Jed. Is that all right with you?"
"Not at two o'clock in the morning it's not."
"I stopped by your store today. Buy-and-Save. Cute name. Cute store."
Jed stiffened. "I don't know who you are or what you're trying to do, but I'm not going to let you barge into my house in the middle of the night and make fun of my store --"
"Calm down, Jed. Calm down." The man's smile was wider. "I'm not criticizing your store. I liked it. It was a nice place." He paused. "While it lasted."
"What --"
"The Store is going to be selling groceries," the man said. "As of tonight, Buy-and-Save is out of business."
Jed walked around the couch, advancing on the man. "Listen to me," he said angrily. "I don't know what you think you're doing, but I can't be threatened and I can't be scared off. You get the hell out of my house right now or I won't be responsible for what happens."
The man stood, still smiling. "Jed, Jed, Jed . . ."
"Get the fuck out of my house!"
"I was afraid you'd take it this way."
There was a noise behind him, and Jed turned to see other men entering through the open front door. Tall men, pale men, dressed in shiny black leather, wearing jackboots. Their faces were blank, devoid of expression, and there was something inhuman about them. Vampires, was his first thought, but that didn't seem quite right.
It was in the ballpark, though. It was definitely in the ballpark.
The men continued filing into his house.
Six of them.
Eight.
Twelve.
He ran across the room, toward the gun case, but the black-garbed white faced creatures were already there and in front of him. He whirled around. They were in back of him. To the sides.
He was surrounded.
"The Store is going to be selling groceries," the man repeated. "As of tonight, Buy-and-Save is out of business."
"The fuck it is!" Jed yelled at him.
The man pushed his way forward. His smile was now a full-fledged smirk, and the hostility was evident on his face. "The fuck it isn't," he said.
He faded into the background as the others closed in.
Jed did not even have a chance to scream.
4
Ginny awoke late.
She stretched, sat up, saw that Bill was not in bed and, hearing noise outside, peeked through the bedroom curtains. They'd talked last night before going to bed about cleaning out the garage, donating some of their old furniture and bric-a-brac to the Baptist rummage sale, throwing away the useless garbage that they'd accumulated over the years so they could actually walk into the garage, but they'd talked about the same thing a million times before and hadn't done it, and she hadn't expected them to follow through this time. Bill was already awake and dressed and outside, though, and when she peered through the window, she saw several boxes on the dirt drive and saw him carrying yet another one out of the garage. She tapped on the glass, and he waved at her, pointing to an imaginary watch on his wrist to indicate that she was late and should get out and help.
Ginny pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and walked out to the kitchen to pour herself a cup of coffee. Sam was already gone, at work, and Shannon was stretched out on the floor of the living room watching TV, an empty orange juice glass beside her.
"Why aren't you out helping your father?" Ginny said.
Her daughter did not even look up. "Why aren't you?"
"Smart-ass. I find anything of yours in the garage, I'm donating it."
Shannon sat up. "You better not!"
Ginny grinned.
"Dad!"
Laughing, Ginny walked outside. Bill was wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. "About time," he said.
"I was getting my beauty rest," she told him.
He grinned. "Didn't work." He held up his hands to protect himself as she advanced toward him across the gravel. "You set yourself up for that one."
She punched him lightly on the arm. "Geek."
He drew himself up to his full height. "Computer nerd, if you don't mind."
Ginny glanced around at the array of boxes. "So what's going, what's staying? Have you found anything you're willing to part with?"
"Quite a bit, actually." He motioned toward a box next to a manzanita bush. "There's some of your stuff in there. I didn't know what you wanted or what you didn't, so I figured I'd let you sort through it."
Ginny walked over, looked into the box, saw an old PTA plaque she'd gotten when Sam was in elementary school, a jewelry box Bill's mother had given her that she'd never liked, a folded red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. She squatted down and started sorting through the items, pushing things aside or moving them around but taking nothing out. Sandwiched between a Betty Crocker recipe book and a 1982 Sierra Club calendar, she found a single photograph, an old Polaroid shot. She . pulled it out. "How did that get in here?"
The picture was of herself, as a teenager in the mid-seventies sometime, dressed in the absurd fashions of that era. She was at some sort of concert or rally, and her best friend, Stacy Morales, was next to her, posing in front of a bunch of other girls The ERA rally.
It all came back to her now. Spring, 1976. Her senior year in high school.
She and Stacy and a bunch of other girls from Cortez had traveled in Stacy's mom's van to ASU, where the campus women's center was putting on a rally to support the Equal Rights Amendment. It had been her first exposure to college life, and the students, the campus, the ideas, the lifestyles had all made a huge impression on her. She'd left the rally feeling energized and empowered, as though she could do anything. It was as if a whole new world had opened up to her. She returned to her own school the next day feeling like an adult among kids, and her grades actually went up that last semester as she'd studied her hardest to make sure she'd be able to get into a good college.
As she stared at the photo now, she experienced more than a twinge of nostalgia. Behind Stacy was a female college student wearing a T-shirt bearing the partially obstructed slogan: A HARD MAN is GOOD TO FIND. Next to her was a large-breasted young woman, shirt raised, flashing her tits at the camera and shouting joyfully. In those days, sex had been seen as liberating, and it had felt as though the dawn of a new era was upon them. No longer were men going to be allowed to have dominion over women's sexuality. The Pill had given them freedom, had given them control over their own bodies, and sex was going to be something in which women participated, not something to which they were subjected.
But those days were long gone. Today many of the feminists were as bad as the old male chauvinists had been. There was a prudishness in the women's movement now, a fear of sexuality that was more reactionary and regressive than the attitudes of most modern men. What had happened to the progress they had made back then? What had happened to the concept of "liberation"? Nowadays, women who called themselves feminists were advocating restrictions and censorship, trying to inhibit freedom rather than expand it.