He chewed his lower lip as he thought over the difficulty Aronson had raised. A couple of errant whiskers got caught between his teeth.
'You are right,' he said. 'I must admit I have been worrying about this very matter all morning. The bandit gangs are pushing much deeper into the Federal Mandate than they have before. And there seem to be more of them. I do not think it would be wise to split up into smaller groups that could be easily picked off. Altogether we have, what, six men, two boys, your two women, and Sofia. If they can all pull a trigger to protect themselves and if we are careful, that is enough to give the agents pause. A smaller group, however, they will simply overrun, especially if they know there are women to be had.'
Aronson nodded, seemingly satisfied with that line of reasoning. 'So we all travel together.'
'Yes,' said Miguel. 'But if we are successful in tracking them, only the men will fight. There will be work for the women tending the animals and, when we are done and if we are lucky, looking after the wounded. This fight will be no place for them.'
The chatter of voices from the other side of the diner had gone quiet while Miguel spoke. He turned around to find Sofia and the two Mormon women looking at him. He thought that his daughter might say something in protest. He recognized the flame of indignation in her eyes, but before Sofia could speak, Maive Aronson leaned across a bag full of beans and squeezed her arm.
'Do you think you could go find Mr. Atchison for me? I have need of inquiring with him about how much we can load in these saddlebags. I believe he is tending to the horses. Here, Adam can help you go find him.'
The youngest of the Mormon men, a pink-faced boy of maybe sixteen or seventeen, pulled up short as he tried to wrestle a big cardboard box into the room. His companion-Orin was his name if Miguel recalled correctly-bumped into him from behind, almost knocking him over. It was enough to break the tension. Sofia did give her father a cool glare as she left the diner, but Miguel was man enough not to be troubled by the poor opinion of a teenage girl. He even smiled slightly as she swept out of the room with as much dignity as she could muster, pulling Adam along in her wake. His grin lingered for a moment when he saw that the other boy, Orin, was genuinely put out not to have been chosen for escort duties. And then the black fog of sorrow descended upon him again.
'We should travel fast and light,' he said, almost sighing. 'Perhaps we should leave everything here that we will not need in the fight. Your herd can be secured here.'
Cooper Aronson looked as if he was about to say something, but Miguel cut him off. 'There will be a fight, Mister Aronson.'
The Mormon leader nodded reluctantly.
Miguel continued, 'You are all carrying the same weapons, yes?'
Ben Randall answered, 'Yep. Government-issue M16s. They hand them out when you get off the boat in Corpus Christi. I'm surprised you and your daughter don't have them,' he said before suddenly blushing bright red and stumbling over an apology. 'Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean…'
Miguel waved it away with one hand. 'We were issued three army rifles when we arrived, but I do not like them as guns. We are not soldiers, and they are unreliable in any case. I took some time when we arrived at the homestead to seek out more appropriate firearms. Some for killing snakes,' he said, patting the cut-down shotgun in the oversized holster at his hip, 'and some for farmwork, like my Winchester. I prefer a weapon with which I am familiar. And I have used a Winchester all my life.'
'And your daughter's rifle?'
'She hunts,' Miguel said. 'It is no matter. She will not be involved in this. She can protect herself and the women with that Remington.'
'Is she a good shot?' Aronson asked.
Miguel nodded. 'She brought down a ten-point whitetail buck at three hundred yards.' He paused for a second. 'I do not believe she will hesitate before pulling the trigger on a man.'
Aronson took a moment to digest all that before looking to his wife. 'How are the supplies?'
'We will have what we need to see us through the next week,' she answered.
'That will be more than enough,' said Miguel. 'We will resolve this one way or another in two days.'
23
New York 'Maybe Union Square's not such a good idea,' said Jules.
The rooftop garden, which had gone wild in the last three years, afforded them with an excellent view of the soldiers pouring into Union Square, where Jules had been hoping to lay up for the night. She and the Rhino leaned over the guardrail in the constant drizzle and passed a pair of binoculars between them, scanning east on 14th Street to where the army apparently was gathering… well… a small army of some sort as far as Jules could tell. Jules's injured shoulder forced her to use the binoculars one-handed when she took them, and the image was correspondingly shaky. Her shivering from hunger, cold, and fatigue did not help matters. Only a day had passed since her shower before bed back on Duane Street, yet she was already sweaty, itchy, and greasy from the rain.
'Looks like they're getting together some sort of armored task force to punch a few blocks north,' said the Rhino, shaking a shower of raindrops from his army surplus Gore-Tex jacket.
All manner of armored vehicles and even a few tanks were rumbling into the streets around the little park. They couldn't see much to the northeast, but from the martial thunder and lightning in that direction there was something untoward going on.
'Well, that's just marvelous,' Jules replied sunnily, relatively dry in her own Gore-Tex jacket. 'We're going north; perhaps we could thumb a ride… That's sarcasm, by the way,' she added. 'Just in case you got all excited at the idea of a ride on a big bloody tank.'
He continued to peer through his binoculars, not bothering to answer.
'Perhaps if we headed down to the river,' she suggested more seriously, stepping back from the sheer drop to West 14th and pushing through the wet, overgrown foliage to a small open vantage point a little farther down. The rooftop garden thinned out there, possibly because it would be in the shade of a looming elevator shaft for more than half the day. The road far below them was badly congested with crashed cars and, for some inexplicable reason, dozens of Dumpsters. It looked as though a small river was running along the street, and at the corner of Seventh Avenue she could see an extraordinary sight: a veritable geyser gushing up from underground through the entrance to the subway there. It made her wonder whether the entire city might collapse in on itself and sink into the rivers that surrounded it.
'Nope, can't go west,' the Rhino said, as he moved a piece of chewing tobacco from one cheek to the other. Julianne prepared herself for the inevitable stream of spit, and…
There it was.
She felt like shuddering every time he did that, but if he wasn't smoking cigars-and he wasn't right now because of the chance they'd be spotted in the dark-the Rhino insisted on getting his tobacco hit via plugs of the foul 'chaw,' as he called it.
'Can't do that, Miss Jules,' he continued. 'I endured a good long time picking Lewis's tiny brains about who controlled which parts of the city, and he said everything north of Eighteenth and west of Eighth was being fought over by Serbs, Russians, Chechens, and Rastas. You don't want to be tangling with any of them.'
An enormous blast a mile or two to the north sent a bright white ball of fire and sparks high into the sky.
'Do I have to make the obvious point that I don't want to be tangling with any of these fucking munters?' she asked.
'Sarcasm again, Miss Julianne?'
'Yes. Sarcasm. I'm afraid that at the moment I have only the lowest form of wit to offer. And to think I took a first in rhetoric at Cambridge.'
'Didn't you cheat your way through college?'
'Cheated and bonked, but I did have a base level of competence, you know. It's in my nature. Daddy virtually lived off his wits until he blew his brains out.'
The Rhino lowered his binoculars and joined her in the small clearing. Jules could recognize a few of the plants that had gone wild up there-some Japanese maples that had burst out of their pots and colonized a large square of
