her wanting coming off her in mild but clearly receivable waves. Her color was very high now, and she was looking desperately down at her hands, which were fiddling together in her lap like a couple of hurt spiders. Her eyes were shiny, as if she might be on the verge of tears.
“Nadine—”
(
She looked up at him and he saw she was past the verge of tears. She was about to speak when Joe strolled up, carrying his guitar case in one hand. They looked at him guiltily, as if he had found them doing something rather more personal than talking.
“Lady,” Joe said conversationally.
“What?” Larry asked, startled and not tracking very well.
“Lady!” Joe said again, and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder.
Larry and Nadine looked at each other.
Suddenly there was a fourth voice, highpitched and choking with emotion, as startling as the voice of God.
“Thank heaven!” it cried. “Oh thank heaven!”
They stood up and looked at the woman who was now half running up the street toward them. She was smiling and crying at the same time.
“Glad to see you,” she said. “I’m so glad to see you, thank heaven—”
She swayed and might have fainted if Larry hadn’t been there to steady her until her dizziness passed. He guessed her age at about twenty-five. She was dressed in bluejeans and a plain white cotton blouse. Her face was pale, her blue eyes unnaturally fixed. Those eyes stared at Larry as if trying to convince the brain behind them that this was not a hallucination, that the three people she saw were really here.
“I’m Larry Underwood,” he said. “The lady is Nadine Cross. The boy is Joe. We’re very happy to meet you.”
The woman continued to stare at him wordlessly for a moment, and then walked slowly away from him and toward Nadine.
“I’m so pleased…” she began, “… so pleased to meet you.” She stumbled a little. “Oh my God, are you really people?”
“Yes,” Nadine said.
The woman put her arms around Nadine and sobbed. Nadine held her. Joe stood in the street by a stalled pickup truck, his guitar case in one hand, his free thumb in his mouth. At last he went to Larry and looked up at him. Larry held his hand. The two of them stood that way and watched the women solemnly. And that was how they met Lucy Swann.
She was eager to go with them when they told her where they were headed, and that they had reason to believe there were at least two other people there, and possibly more. Larry found a medium-sized knapsack for her in the Enfield Sporting Goods, and Nadine went down to her house on the outskirts of town to help her pack… two changes of clothes, some underwear, an extra pair of shoes, a raincoat. And pictures of her late husband and daughter.
They camped that night in a town called Quechee, now over the state line and into Vermont. Lucy Swann told a tale which was short and simple and not much different from the others they would hear. The grief came built- in, and the shock, which had driven her at least within hailing distance of madness.
Her husband had sickened on the twenty-fifth of June, her daughter the next day. She had nursed them as well as she had been able, fully expecting to come down with the rales, as they were calling the sickness in her corner of New England, herself. By the twenty-seventh, when her husband had gone into a coma, Enfield was pretty much cut off from the outside world. Television reception had become spotty and queer. People were dying like flies. During the previous week they had seen extraordinary movements of army troops along the turnpike, but none of them had business in such a little place as Enfield, New Hampshire. In the early morning hours of June twenty-eighth, her husband had died. Her daughter had seemed a little bit better for a while on the twenty-ninth, and then had taken an abrupt turn for the worst that evening. She had died around eleven o’clock. By July 3, everyone in Enfield except her and an old man named Bill Dadds had died. Bill had been sick, Lucy said, but he seemed to have thrown it off entirely. Then, on the morning of Independence Day, she had found Bill dead on Main Street, swollen up and black, like everyone else.
“So I buried my people, and Bill too,” she said as they sat around the crackling fire. “It took all of one day, but I put them to rest. And then I thought that I better go on down to Concord, where my mother and father live. But I just… never got around to it.” She looked at them appealingly. “Was it so wrong? Do you think they would have been alive?”
“No,” Larry said. “The immunity sure wasn’t hereditary in any direct way. My mother…” He looked into the fire.
“Wes and me, we had to get married,” Lucy said. “That was the summer after I graduated high school—1984. My mom and dad didn’t want me to marry him. They wanted me to go away to have the baby and just give her up. But I wouldn’t. My mom said it would end in divorce. My dad said Wes was a no-account man and he’d always be shiftless. I just said, ‘That may be, but we’ll see what happens.’ I just wanted to take the chance. You know?”
“Yes,” Nadine said. She was sitting next to Lucy, looking at her with great compassion.
“We had a nice little home, and I sure never thought it would end like this,” Lucy said with a sigh that was half a sob. “We settled down real good, the three of us. It was more Marcy than me that settled Wes down. He thought the sun rose and set on that baby. He thought…”
“Don’t,” Nadine said. “All that was before.”
That word again, Larry thought. That little two-syllable word.
“Yes. It’s gone now. And I guess I could have gotten along. I was, anyway, until I started to have all those bad dreams.”
Larry’s head jerked up. “Dreams?”
Nadine was looking at Joe. A moment before, the boy had been nodding out in front of the fire. Now he was staring at Lucy, his eyes gleaming.
“Bad dreams, nightmares,” Lucy said. “They’re not always the same. Mostly it’s a man chasing me, and I can never see exactly what he looks like because he’s all wrapped up in a, what do you call it, a cloak. And he stays in the shadows and alleys.” She shivered. “I got so I was afraid to go to sleep. But now maybe I’ll—”
“Brrr-ack man!” Joe cried suddenly, so fiercely they all jumped. He leaped to his feet and held his arms out like a miniature Bela Lugosi, his fingers hooked into claws. “Brrack man! Bad dreams! Chases! Chases me! ‘Cares me!” And he shrank against Nadine and stared untrustingly into the darkness.
A little silence fell among them.
“This is crazy,” Larry said, and then stopped. They were all looking at him. Suddenly the darkness seemed very dark indeed, and Lucy looked frightened again.
He forced himself to go on. “Lucy, do you ever dream about… well, about a place in Nebraska?”
“I had a dream one night about an old Negro woman,” Lucy said, “but it didn’t last very long. She said something like, ‘You come see me.’ Then I was back in Enfield and that… that scary guy was chasing me. Then I woke up.”
Larry looked at her so long that she colored and dropped her eyes.
He looked at Joe. “Joe, do you ever dream about… uh, corn? An old woman? A guitar?” Joe only looked at him from Nadine’s encircling arm.
“Leave him alone, you’ll upset him more,” Nadine said, but she was the one who sounded upset.
Larry thought. “A house, Joe? A little house with a porch up on jacks?”
He thought he saw a gleam in Joe’s eyes.
“Stop it, Larry!” Nadine said.
“A swing, Joe? A swing made out of a tire?”
Joe suddenly jerked in Nadine’s arms. His thumb came out of his mouth. Nadine tried to hold him, but Joe broke through.
“The swing!” Joe said exultantly. “The swing! The swing!” He whirled away from them and pointed first at Nadine, then at Larry. “Her! You! Lots!”
“Lots?” Larry asked, but Joe had subsided again.
