“If it hadn’t been like that, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “They would have got me, too—”
Her voice died. He waited. Finally he spoke.
“The people in the area didn’t warn you that there was danger?” he asked.
What she wanted to tell him was not even now coming easily. It was up to him, plainly, to draw her out gently, to make it possible with questions for her to tell him.
“Nobody local had told us anything,” Merry answered dully. “I don’t think they knew themselves there were raiders around.”
“Someone local must have known, if they were waiting and ready for you.”
“Yes,” she answered, “they were waiting. I don’t know how they knew. Maybe they’d been camped nearby, in a patch of woods somewhere, or perhaps in some place that’d already been raided. Just—there was no warning. No warning at all. Just all of a sudden they were there, coming out of the trees on both sides of the road.”
“Then it was planned,” Jeebee said.
“Yes,” Merry said indifferently. Her words were still addressed to the fire. It was as if all that mattered could be seen there, among the alternately fading and bright-glowing embers, where the greatest heat of the fire was, under the flames.
“It was an ambush.” She shook her head, very slightly. “There were way too many of them for us, but they wanted it easy.”
She went silent, again. Jeebee waited. But this time it was as if she had run out of words to go on with. He prodded her with another question as Wolf had nosed up one of his arms when he was bedridden and unmoving.
“How did they think it’d go?”
“I don’t know,” Merry said in the same dead voice to the flames. “Easy, I suppose. There had to have been more than a hundred of them. They let the wagon get right into the middle of where they were waiting, before they came out of the trees. It was just luck I was back, further than usual, heading in Missy”—she glanced for only a second at Jeebee—“you don’t know her. We traded for her after you left us. She wasn’t full-trained to staying with the wagon and so she’d stray—”
Merry paused.
“If I hadn’t gone back after her… but I did, and when they swarmed the wagon, they were all up ahead of me. I heard the alarm siren when Dad pulled it; and I looked back, to see them riding in on it from both sides. Then the siren quit; and I knew Dad must already be inside with Nick. Almost at the same time, I heard our machine guns, both of them…”
She ran down. Jeebee waited. “You know what he always said,” she went on dully. “‘
She stopped speaking. The firelight glanced off her hair. She was sitting with her elbows on her knees, apparently all her attention concentrated on the fire. The moments stretched out.
“I rode,” she said at last, in a monotone. “I think some of them even chased me a little ways—I’m not sure of that. But I rode; and after a while I was too far away to hear the firing…”
She broke off. Again, a silence. Only the fire crackled and snapped.
“They couldn’t have known how well Dad and Nick were prepared to fight them off,” she went on finally. “They must have been surprised… ”
She lifted her head slowly and looked steadily at Jeebee.
“You know what else he said.” She waited.
Jeebee nodded and she went on.
“‘
Her eyes were still on Jeebee. He wanted to reach out and touch her, comfortingly, but he was afraid that even that might be wrong at this moment.
“You went back,” Jeebee said. She dropped her eyes and nodded. He waited.
“I went deep into some woods and waited there—oh, a couple of hours perhaps,” she said to the embers. “Finally, I went back… slowly. I had the binoculars. I found a good spot I could see, from maybe a hundred yards or more away. I could have been even closer. They weren’t paying attention to anything but the wagon. They’d tried to burn it. The front seat was gone, the wooden facings over the front and back ends were gone, the canvas with our sign on it was burned away and so were the tires. All that was left was the steel underneath. They were up by the steel box of the wagon itself, and they must’ve realized by that time that it wasn’t the ordinary sort of thing they went after. The machine guns would have let them know that. It wasn’t going to be that easy for them to get at Dad and Nick.”
Her eyes clung to Jeebee’s now, as if she was holding on to him with her gaze alone.
“They’d spread out in two fans front and back so that they were out of traverse range of the slots the machine guns could fire through,” she said. “And the fire they’d started at first had gone out. But just as I started watching they got a new fire going, between the wheels and under the bed of the wagon. They were going to heat the metal shell of the wagon, until it drove Dad and Nick out, or cooked them alive.
“I could see them there. They were as thick as crowds used to be at circuses when I was a little girl,” she said. “They were waiting for the fire under the wagon to do their work for them. There was nothing I could do; and I didn’t know what Dad and Nick could do anymore. But he had something to do. He’d just never told me, Dad hadn’t.”
He waited. She bit her lip.
“You didn’t know either what they’d planned, did you?” she said to Jeebee. “They didn’t tell you? No. No, of course, if they wouldn’t tell me, neither Dad nor Nick would ever tell you that. They didn’t tell me because they didn’t want me to know, for fear I might not have ridden off then, in the first place.”
She took a deep breath.
“All of a sudden,” she said, “there was an explosion. It was as if the wagon was one large stick of dynamite. I saw a bright flash for just part of a second, then even from where I was standing, I could feel the air push me, and the sound of it made me deaf for a moment. I was deaf and blind, both, there for a bit—and then I could see that the wagon was gone. All gone. And the raiders who’d been close to it were gone, too. Fifty feet or more away there were things lying that were other, dead raiders. There was no one moving. No one. It was all over. It was done.”
She closed her eyes and sat back in her chair as if she were very weary.
Jeebee got out of his own chair, knelt beside hers, and put his arms around her, holding her head to his head, with the palm of one hand.
“They did it to make sure you got away,” he said. Against the side of his head, he felt her head move in a faint nod.
“Yes,” she whispered.
They stayed together, not moving for some little time. Then Merry stirred, pulling herself out of his arms, and turned to look into his face. She smiled and took his arm, pushing him upward and back toward his seat.
She smiled at him.
“It’s all right now,” she said, “it’s all right now I’ve told you. It’ll never be that bad for me again, now that you know, too.”
Jeebee seated himself, still looking back at her, trying to think of something to say.
There was nothing. After a while she took the coffeepot and filled his cup carefully, then poured a little more into her own and sipped it. They sat there in silence, both of them watching the fire, and from time to time Jeebee bent down to pick up another piece of wood and put it on the fire.
CHAPTER 32
Within the next week, actual winter moved in. It began with a three-day snowstorm that kept them cave- bound. That was followed by a spell of open weather, then by storms at about two-day intervals, on the average, and lasting anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days.
