The man took Keira's arm. 'I knew your sister,' he said softly. 'She was a strong girl.'
Not strong enough, Keira thought. Not against the car family. Not against the disease. Not strong at all.
She started to follow the new man back to the ranch house, then stopped. She had forgotten something-something important. It must have been important if it could bother her now. Then she remembered.
'Eli? she said.
He was bending over her father. He straightened when she spoke.
'Eli, someone got away. The hauler who hit my father. He was headed north.' 'It was a private hauler?'
'Yes. He got out and tried to rob my father. My father scratched him.'
'Oh, Jesus,' Eli whispered. He sounded almost the way her father had at the end. Then he turned and spoke to the other man. 'Steve, tell Ingraham. He's our best driver. Give him some grenades. Tell him no holds barred.'
The man called Steve went leaping up the slope as agilely as Jacob could have.
'Jesus,' Eli repeated. Somehow, he managed to lift her father and carry him back as though he were merely wounded, not half-crushed. He had fashioned a kind of sack of his shirt. Keira walked beside him, hardly noticing when a car sped by down on the highway.
Up the hill, Steve-Stephen Kaneshiro, he told her-joined her again. He brought her food and she ate ravenously, guiltily. Apparently nothing would disturb her appetite.
Stephen kept her away from the ruin of the house. He stayed with her, silent but somehow comforting. He found an empty car and sat with her in it. Eli's people had apparently driven away or killed all of the second, uncontaminated group of car people. Now they were cleaning up. Some were digging a mass grave. Others were loading their newly appropriated cars and trucks with whatever they thought their enclave could use.
'Take a couple of radios,' Stephen told a woman who passed near them. 'I think for a change we'll be needing them.' The woman nodded and went away.
Jacob found Stephen and Keira sitting together in the car. Without a word, he climbed into Keira's lap and fell asleep. She stroked his hair, accepting his presence and his youth and thinking nothing. It was possible to endure if she thought
nothing at all.
Sometime later, Ingraham returned. He had driven all the way to the edge of Needles, but found no private hauler. Everyone had gathered near him to hear about his chase. When they had heard, they all looked at Eli.
Eli closed his eyes, rubbed a hand over his face. 'All right.' He spoke so softly, Keira would not have heard him without her newly enhanced hearing. 'All right, we knew it would happen sooner or later.'
'But a private hauler,' Stephen said. 'They go all over the country, all over the continent. And they deal with people
who go all over the world.'
Eli nodded bleakly. He looked years older and agonizingly weary. 'What are we going to do?' Ingraham asked.
Meda answered him. 'What do you think we're going to do? We're going home!'
Eli put his arm around her. 'That's right,' he said. 'In a few months we'll be one of the few sane enclaves left in the country -maybe in the world. He shook his head. 'Use your imagination. Think of what it will be like in the cities and towns.' He paused, reached down and picked up Zera, who had sat at his feet and was leaning sideways against his
right leg. 'Remember the kids,' he said softly. 'They'll need us more than ever now. Whatever you do, remember the
kids.'
EPILOGUE
Stephen Kaneshiro waited until he began to hear radio reports of the new illness. Then he put on his gloves and drove with Ingraham into Barstow. From there, by phone, he tried to locate his wife and son. He had been with Keira until then, had seemed content with her, but he felt he had a duty to bring his wife and son to relative safety, though they must have given him up for dead long ago.
Eli warned him that no one knew what effect the disease might have on a young child. Stephen understood, but he wanted to give his family what he felt might be their only chance.
He could not. It took him two days of anonymous, sound-only phoning to discover that his wife had gone back to her parents and recently had returned with them to Japan.
He came back to the mountaintop ranch and Keira. Her hair was growing in thick and dark. She was pregnant-perhaps by Stephen, perhaps from her one night with Eli. Stephen did not seem to care which any more than she did.
'Will you stay with me?' she asked him. He was a good man. He had helped her through the terrible time after the deaths of her father and sister. He did not excite her as Eli had. She had not known how much she cared for him, how
much she needed him until he went away. When he came back, all she could think was: No wife! Thank God! Then she
was ashamed. Sometime later she asked the question. 'Will you stay with me?'
They sat in their room next to the nursery. Their room in Meda's house. He sat on the bed and she on the desk chair where she could not touch him. She could not bear to touch him until she knew he did not plan to leave her.
'We'll have to cut ourselves off even more than we have so far,' he said. 'I brought new weapons, ammunition, and
foods we can't raise. I think we're going to have to be self-sufficient for a while. Maybe a long while. You and I
couldn't even have a house. Not enough wood.' 'It doesn't matter,' she said.
'San Francisco is burning,' he continued. 'I bought a lot of news printouts in town. We haven't been getting enough by radio. Fires are being set everywhere. Maybe uninfected people are sterilizing the city in the only way they can think
of. Or maybe it's infected people crazy with their symptoms and the noise and smells and lights. L.A. is beginning to
burn, too, and San Diego. In Phoenix, someone is blowing up houses and buildings. Three oil refineries went up in Texas. In Louisiana there's a group that has decided the disease was brought in by foreigners-so they're shooting anyone who seems a little odd to them. Mostly Asians, blacks, and browns.'
She stared at him. He stared back expressionlessly.
'In New York, Seattle, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, doctors and nurses have been caught spreading the disease. The compulsion is at work already.'
She thought of her father, then shook her head, not wanting to think of him. He had been so right, so wrong, and so utterly helpless.
'Everything will be chaos soon,' Stephen said. 'There have been outbreaks in Germany, England, France, Turkey, India, Korea, Nigeria, the Soviet Union. ... It will be chaos. Then a new order. Hell, a new species. Jacob will win, you
know. We'll help him. And Jacob thinks uninfected people smell like food.' 'We'll have to help him to help ourselves,' she said.
'We'll be obsolete, you and me.'
'They'll be our children.'
He lowered his eyes, looked at her belly where her pregnancy was beginning to show. 'They'll be all we have,' he said, 'the two of us.' There was a long pause. 'I've lost everyone, too. Will you stay with me?'
She nodded solemnly and went to him. They held each other until they could no longer tell which of them was trembling.
