Miguel could see the that man was losing his composure fast. It was not surprising. Being wrenched from city life onto the frontier and told to make do as best one could, would be enough to break most people, but these poor bastards did not just have surly beasts and stony ground with which to contend. They had fallen afoul of human treachery as well.
The vaquero came to a decision.
'There is a store here in Leona,' he said. 'It has a well-stocked cellar, protected from the heat and rain. You can take supplies from there. I will show you. As for your raiders, if they are not here and they did head north, they will have set down in Crockett for a few days. It has not been reclaimed, and much of the town still stands. I believe the power failed there after the Wave. If you wish, I will help you take back what is yours.'
The men gaped at him as though he had just materialized in the morning air. He was aware that compared with them he must look every bit as rough and untrustworthy as the bandits who had attacked their party. Their questions spilled out one on top of the next.
'You would do that?'
'You would help us?'
'You're sure that's where they would be?'
'Why?'
He shrugged. 'We are also traveling north. It will be safer for my daughter if we travel with a large group, even though we may attract more attention. If you will have us as companions, I will help you. Sofia, however, I must insist be protected. If there is fighting to be done, I will do it.'
He gave her a stern look, as if to cut short any dissent, but she bristled anyway.
'I want these men as much as you do, Papa,' she protested through thin lips.
Miguel folded his arms and shook his head. 'They are not the same men, Sofia. And even if they were, it would not be your role to settle our affairs with them. That is my duty and mine alone. Your mother, God rest her soul, would not have it any other way. As you well know, young lady.'
The Mormons tactfully found something interesting to look at off on the horizon while the surviving members of the Pieraro clan played out their small confrontation. Miguel did not glare at his daughter. Indeed, he was proud of her for wanting to exact vengeance with her own hands. But although a life of hardscrabble farming had given her great strength and fitness for one of her age and sex, she remained at heart a young girl, and he would do all he could to protect her innocence as much as her life. While she fumed and pouted, he merely stared back at her, waiting her out. After a few moments she expressed her exasperation in the time-honored manner of all teenage girls, rolling her eyes and muttering loudly about the unfairness and indignity of life.
Miguel shrugged.
'We are all heading north.' he said to the two men. 'It is a dangerous path we take, especially for Sofia. If you help us through Blackstone's land, I will help you through this. Is that a fair trade?'
The dogs sniffed at the feet of both men and wagged their tails, pronouncing them acceptable. D'Age looked the more pained of the two, and Miguel remembered he had lost someone to the raiders.
'Why do you think they will stay in Crockett?' he asked.
Sofia spoke before Miguel could. 'To rape the women and enjoy the spoils,' she said. 'That is what they did to Mama.'
Miguel felt sick. He'd hoped to have protected Sofia from that knowledge.
'Come,' he said. 'We have much to do.'
18
New York Some people were just lucky, but Ryan Dubois wasn't one of them. The mortar round that exploded and blew him into three large, messy pieces of burned meat merely tossed Julianne through a store window that had already been shattered. She tumbled through the air, eerily detached, recalling a childhood misadventure involving a trampoline and a dislocated shoulder. Her sense of time passing stretched like a rubber band, and then- snap! The world sped up again in a violent, jaggy swirl of color and pain and the loudest noise she had ever heard in her life.
Jules screamed in agony as she hit something hard and immovable and the same shoulder was wrenched out of place with a grinding pop. She rolled across a wooden floor, every turn a flaring supernova of pain in her back and side, dark purple blossoms opening in front of her eyes as she fought to hold on to consciousness. Impact knocked the wind out of her, and she had trouble taking a breath, as though she'd just been gut punched by Lennox Lewis. Attempting to push herself up off the floor, she collapsed, screaming again as white-hot flames seemed to shoot down one side of her body. The rolling thunder of rocket fall and mortar fire lashed at the street outside, and she was oddly certain the Rhino was dead, disassembled at high speed just like poor Ryan, but then he unexpectedly landed feet first on the floor next to her. His filthy bloodstained boots crushed a small glass figurine a few inches from her face as he knelt down to help her up.
She tried to cry out, to warn him that she was injured, but he had his arms around her and was dragging her away from the open window before she could protest. The pain was grotesque, unbearable, nauseating, and she did pass out for a few minutes. Another white dwarf of agony exploding somewhere inside her woke her up again to a world filled with death and horror and the screaming of a small child.
After a few seconds she realized the small child was herself and the Rhino had done something to her shoulder. She felt a sting in her neck and then the most delicious warmth as a soothing bath of soft analgesic pleasure flowed out from that point to gently wash away all of her many hurts and outrages. Her eyelids felt heavy and her chin dropped down onto her chest as the Rhino heaved her up off the floor and away into a long, dark tunnel. Jules came to consciousness slowly, in fits and starts. She was dreaming. A nightmare, actually. Some penny dreadful horror, probably from eating too much Brie and watching that awful 28 Days Later with Fifi. They'd put the bloody thing in the DVD player only because Mr. Lee had brought a copy back from a trip ashore in Kupang and they simply couldn't sit through another fucking session of The English Patient. Now she was fighting to drag herself out of the dreadful nightmare of a world emptied of people-no, haunted by them. The world was haunted by millions of souls who had disappeared, and now they were back, returned from some hell dimension with every trace of humanity sucked from their souls. They had eyes like the milky orbs of dead fish and lips rotted away from yellow teeth, and they were coming for her. Of course, she couldn't run from them. She tried, but she never moved, not an inch, no matter how fast she pumped her legs.
Jules forced herself out of the half-waking state with great effort, pushing back against the vision of hell as if bench-pressing a huge weight away from herself. She finally woke up in her hotel room in New York on fresh white Egyptian cotton sheets, with the prospect of a day's shopping in front of her and a night at the theater with Paul, and dinner at Gabriel's. She would wear her new Kate Spade slingbacks and perhaps the Karen Millen Black Silk Bird Dress, but definitely the Kate Spades, because they were gorgeous and she'd just bought them and the shop was wonderful; it was as if she were floating through it again, turning over and over in the air, with a thousand jagged shards of glass and the disembodied head and upper torso of Ryan Dubois, and she was falling, slamming into the floor, and hurting the same shoulder she had dislocated on a trampoline, and again playing hockey at school, and screaming…
Screaming.
She came fully awake at last with a gasp. Still groggy and disoriented and feeling as though she were at the end of a tumbling free-fall through her personal history.
Paul?
Dear Paul. God, how long had it been since they had dated?
And Fifi was dead.
And she had not shopped in New York for many years.
And those shoes were lost somewhere back in England.
And then she knew where she was. She'd been blown through the front window of a Kate Spade store on the corner of Broome and Mercer streets. She had never shopped there. For an infuriating, irrational moment she could not recall where she'd bought the gorgeous slingbacks her sister had stolen so many years ago. And then she remembered. It was in San Francisco, way back in 2000, at the opening of the store. She levered herself up against
