The Dead Town

to run, only the sea at their backs and a city full of replicants coming for them.

“We’ve already got a dozen kids at this house, the Samples place,” Carson told Deucalion. “We’ll have more soon. Only you can drive them out, with that trick you have, take them to Erika.”

Deucalion agreed. “It’s strategically smart. The adults will put up a better fight if they don’t have their children at hand to worry about.”

“You can use this truck to transport them,” Michael said, “once we get rid of the dead replicants in the back.”

Something drew Deucalion’s attention to a nearby building. Carson saw it, too, and leveled the shotgun.

Following their lead, Michael recognized Addison Hawk as he stepped out of the recessed entryway to the offices of the Gazette. More than ever, he looked like a town sheriff in an old Jimmy Stewart Western.

Carson did not lower the shotgun. The publisher had evidently been alone in his office. Maybe the real Addison Hawk was sitting in there in the dark, a bead of silver face jewelry on his left temple.

“I heard the radio,” Hawk said, “but I didn’t think I could believe it.”

“Believe it,” Carson said, “and stop right there for a minute.”

“I want to help,” the publisher said. “What can I do to help? This can’t happen, not to this town, not to this town of all towns.”

“How can we be sure of him?” Carson asked Deucalion.

“You mean short of opening him up and looking inside? I don’t know. But we have to decide quickly. Not just about him. Everyone we encounter from here on.”

This night provided Michael’s first experience of snow. None in Louisiana, none in San Francisco. He expected it to be beautiful, which it was, but he didn’t expect it to be unsettling, which it also was. The millions of flakes whirling, movement everywhere, so much movement that you couldn’t trust your peripheral vision or your visual instinct to identify something hostile if it was approaching with any subtlety. In the windless dark, the graceful descent of the flakes, still fluffy although a little icier than before, was as lulling as it was alluring, fading the hard edges of things, by its beauty ceaselessly selling the lie that the world was a gentle place, soft, with no sharp edges.

Michael said, “Carson, you remember those guys who came into the restaurant to get Chrissy Benedetto’s mother? How they were?”

Denise Benedetto, muted and brain damaged, a silver bead on her temple, had somehow gotten away from her captors. Two policemen and one man in civilian clothes had come after her, into the restaurant where Carson and Michael were having dinner.

“They were bold,” Carson said. “Arrogant. Cold bastards.”

“I’ve lived my whole life here,” Addison Hawk said with some distress, “except when I was away in the service. My dad and mom are here. My aunt Brinna, she’s all alone now. Uncle Forrest and Aunt Carrie. What’re you telling me is going to happen to them? What’re you telling me?”

“Arrogant, cold,” Michael agreed, “and something almost dead in their eyes.”

After a hesitation, Carson lowered the shotgun. “I guess sometimes … we’ll just have to trust and hope.”

Chapter 35

At first Ariel seemed all right with Nancy’s need to bring some order to the littered floor of the barn. There was a push broom for the purpose of doing exactly that, and Nancy wielded it diligently, starting near the door by which they had entered and working her way back toward the tack room. She had no intention of cleaning out the stalls—mucking them out was the correct term — and she felt sure that she could resist that temptation as long as she didn’t look inside them.

Horses were engines of disorder, dropping all their road apples, pawing their hooves at the soft covering of their stall floors until little clouds of dust and minced hay and probably feces billowed out from under the doors. They were no messier than other animals, of course. Pigs and cows and chickens and goats, dogs and cats, birds and fish, all of them crapping, on land and in the sea and in the air, pissing and crapping every day, every hour, every minute. All of nature was a filthy, untamed chaos, a riot of plants that cast their seeds and spores everywhere, growing in wild tangles, relinquishing their fruit to rot on the ground, growing until they collapsed and rotted themselves and then grew again out of their own disgusting rot. All of it topsy-turvy, unsymmetrical, pure confusion, muddle, jumble, all living things a bedlam, pandemonium, since time began. Someone had to put an end to it, to the chaos, and the Community was ready for the job.

Nancy was particularly ready for the job, sweeping the scattered stalks of hay into little piles, and then sweeping the little piles together into bigger ones. If she could have swept the horses into piles, she would have done that, too, the horses and the mice. No doubt there were dozens of mice quivering in corners all over the barn, quivering and crapping.

Eleven minutes and forty-one seconds after she began to sweep the barn floor, Nancy Potter became aware of Ariel’s screaming. She realized that the girl had been shrieking for a while, perhaps for a minute or longer. Initially the sound didn’t seem sufficiently important to allow it to distract Nancy from the sweeping, and she didn’t register the source; it was just a mildly annoying background noise. Reluctantly, after hesitating another twenty- three seconds, she paused in her sweeping and turned to the girl.

Ariel trembled violently as she screamed. More than merely trembled. Vibrated. She was like a machine with several flywheels coming loose inside all at the same time, connecting rods knocking, cranks rattling against crankshafts, overlapping waves of succussion loosening every weld and rivet and bolt and screw.

The horses were growing agitated. The mares whinnied in fear. The stallion began to kick the barn wall at the back of his stall. His quarters hadn’t been fortified with steel plate because he was supposed to be the first to be processed, in which case it would be the mares who, standing witness, might attempt to kick out of their stalls.

“All right, Ariel, all right,” Nancy said, “just let me finish sweeping. Then I’ll bring Commander out here, I’ll prep him, you can tear him down and get started. I need a few minutes to finish the sweeping, to do it exactly right, and then I’ll wash out the bristles of the broom. I can’t put the broom away when the bristles are full of hay bits and mouse crap.”

Ariel’s scream escalated for a moment, and then her mouth grew so wide that the corners of her lips extended to her earlobes. She gagged, choked off her scream, and spewed forth a thick stream of silvery nanoanimals, such a violent disgorgement of her essence that she appeared to deflate. She pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of collapsing inward, sort of folding up, and disappearing into the tail end of her spew.

Airborne as a dense cloud of buzzing-hissing nanoanimals, Ariel became frenetic and appeared to ricochet around the room, diving and soaring. She ate a hole through the barn roof and disappeared into the night — only to reappear through another hole, plunge into the dirt floor, and tunnel across the room. The swarm resurfaced under Nancy’s left foot, surprising her, consumed her leg to midthigh in an instant, and raced away.

The leg stump was essentially cauterized by the action of the nanoanimals. No vital fluids drizzled out of it. Because Nancy was a Communitarian and not a mere human being, she had no pain. She remained on her feet — foot — because she could use the push broom for a cane.

This development would make sweeping up the last of the hay a more difficult task, and Nancy was not sure how she would be able to proceed in a timely and efficient manner. And now she needed to deal with the additional issue of two holes in the floor and the fifteen-foot-long swale caused when Ariel’s tunnel collapsed between her entry and exit points.

Furthermore, Nancy noticed for the first time that where she had already swept the hard-packed earthen floor, the stiff bristles of the broom left shallow brush marks going every which way in the dirt. She wouldn’t feel the job was done until all the brush marks went in the same direction.

The horses were going nuts. Nancy glared at them, but of course they didn’t care. They were like so many other animals in the mismade nature of this world: so easily startled, frightened, panicked, stampeded like herds of cattle or packs of lemmings, like frantic flocks of gobbling turkeys and overexcited fans at rock-and-roll concerts