Dies the Fire

Ken took a shuddering breath. "I haven't been much use to any woman, since Mary… died. I couldn't protect her or my daughters-yeeeeow!"

Pamela poised her fingers to give his chest hair another painful tweak.

"What was that for?" he gasped.

"For being stupid, is what. It isn't like you. Will Hutton couldn't protect his family, and he's as tough as anyone in the outfit. And Mike couldn't have alone, either-what's the old saying, even Hercules can't fight two?"

"He rescued us."

"With Eric and Will helping! We protect each other. You didn't protect your family before the Change, either: the law did, and the police did, and the military did, and the State of Oregon did, and the U-S of A did. Now the outfit does. And you're our engineer, and you know a hell of a lot of history. You're at least as useful to everyone as I am, or Will is."

Softly: "I played at Renaissance fencing because it was fun, Ken; I'm a middle-class Jewish veterinarian from southern California! I never thought I'd have to kill with it. Hold me, will you?"

A few minutes later: "Yeeeow! What was that for!"

"To drive the lesson home." Her hand strayed.

"Thanks, but-"

"Hey, I'm doing that 'cause I like it, buddy! Doesn't feel bad, does it?"

"No, but-"

"There's no prize for making the finish line here," she said. "Just two codgers having fun… "

A moment later: "Well, well!" She rolled over and straddled him. "That does feel nice!"

Seventeen

"Lord and Lady, I don't think I can stand this much longer," Judy Barstow said, her olive Mediterranean skin gray.

Juniper nodded. They were ten miles north of Salem, and…

She wiped at the flies crawling over her face, spat, and pulled the bandana up over her face again, which let her breathe through her mouth without inhaling any of them- even after many days' exposure, she hadn't gotten used to the stink. Her eyes skipped over the bodies lying by the road, and the rats that crawled bloated and insolent among them. Rags and tatters of flesh were left; the crows were at them too, but the rats were so numerous that they could drive the birds off in chittering hordes. Inside an SUV windows pullulated with heaving gray bodies…

"It's almost as bad here as it was along I-5," she said. "I don't think we should try to get any closer to Portland."

"No," Judy said. "I don't either. My grandfather got out of Lithuania in World War Two… I never really understood what he was talking about before."

Almost compulsively she opened the economy-sized bottle of sanitizer again, and handed it around. Juniper's face and hands were already raw and chapped from the desiccating effect of the alcohol-based solution, but she obediently scrubbed down all the exposed parts of her body. Steve and Vince followed suit.

None of them had much skin exposed, despite the mild heat. When you thought of where the flies had been…

"No, we shouldn't be here," the nurse-midwife went on. "We're endangering the whole clan as well as ourselves. I never thought it could be as bad as this! If someone designed an environment to spread disease, this would be it."

She swallowed and went on: "How… how can They let this happen?"

Juniper pushed her bicycle over beside her friend's and put her arm around her shoulders; that was more symbolic than anything, when the person you hugged was wearing an armored jack, but symbols counted.

"How could They let the Holocaust happen, or the Black Death, or the Burning Times? We're not People of the Book; everything's co

"Our good?" Judy asked, looking around.

"We might have killed the planet, if this hadn't happened. Killed the whole human race, and the plants and the animals too. I don't know, but it's possible."

Judy drew a breath, coughed, and nodded. "All right. Thanks. But let's get out of here!"

Juniper nodded and pulled out the map. "All right," she said. "We had to know… but oh, how I wish we didn't!" Her finger traced a road west and then south. "We'll cross here, near Wheatland, and turn south towards Corvallis, then slant across to home the way I did right after the Change."

Vince Torelli had put an arrow to his bow as soon as they stopped. He left it there as he put the weapon back in its frame across the handlebars, held by the nock's grip on the string and the angle of the arrow-shelf. Then he stepped on the pedals and darted out ahead of them, keeping a careful hundred yards in advance. The two women followed; it took them a little more time to build up speed, as their bicycles were towing little baggage carts that held their modest supplies. Steve Matucheck followed behind, looking over his shoulder regularly.

The stink died down as they moved west-away from the produce truck that had probably attracted the group of people who stayed around it and died, and into open country. They wove down the two-lane blacktop, eyes busy keeping watch on the empty fields to either side-and not ignoring the abandoned cars and trucks that sat as they had since 6:15 p.m., March 17th.

Back at her cabin, she could go hours without thinking about the Change; days, sometimes, in the scramble to get the fields planted. Out here, not a minute went by when you could forget.

Once they were out from strip-mall development the fields were eerily silent; grass tall and shaggy, but not a cow to be seen; now and then a field of beets gone tangled with weeds, or wheat begi

Another hour, and they stopped for a drink from their canteens; Judy restrained herself from checking the water, since she'd made sure they brought it to a rolling boil for twenty minutes that morning.

"Anyone seen those dogs?" Juniper asked; a feral pack had shadowed them.

"Not since about ten," Steve Matucheck said.

"Odd. We haven't seen a living soul since yesterday, and yet so many stayed by the roads until they died," Juniper said.

Surprisingly, Vince Torelli spoke up. "Lady Juniper, I think it's part of the same thing. The ones that stayed at home, or walked back and forth on the roads, they died. The ones with sense enough to get away, they stood a better chance-but we won't be seeing them, much. Not around here."

Juniper nodded, trying not to let the young man see how much being called Lady Juniper a

But I'll be glad to get back to it; and Eilir; and the others… even Cuchulain.

A little of that eagerness was sheer hunger. There hadn't been much to spare for them to take along on this trip; the Eternal Soup was a fond memory.

Judy nodded. "Just being away from a big city is the biggest survival factor," she said. "But a close second would be sense enough to realize that the Change was here to stay, and not sit around waiting for rescue or go wandering aimlessly. Chuck and I managed to talk our people into getting right out. You made for the hills right away too."