Page 28 (1/2)

The loco-nosed and jowly It is painted a forest green with a yelloinged emblem across the front of it, but the dust of a thousand journeys has collected on the surface, giving it the look of so that has recently risen froine slides open suddenly and the sooty face of an olda baseball cap, and he takes it off and fans himself with it as he looks Teins to notice the faces of otherout the sides of the boxcars farther down

The old man spits into the dirt and wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt

You two in trouble? he asks

I don’t know, Temple says Are we in trouble?

Not by us you ain’t

That’s good to hear

The old man wipes the sweat from his forehead and leaves a streak of black

Where you headed? he asks

West

Good thing You don’t wanna be goin east There’s bad business back there

Is that right?

Slugs I got used to But after a while you see more’n you want to see and you just stop lookin

Uh-huh

The old man nods his head at Maury

What’s his story?

He don’t talk He’s just a du Teet a bead on her or anything like that

How old are you? he asks

Fifteen, she says, taking a chance on the truth and the fatherly instincts of theto be wanderin the countryside Too young by a mile

I tried to be older, she says But it’s somethin that’s hard to force

He chuckles and rubs his eyes and looks out over the shrubby verge to the river below and then back at her

What you got behind your back? he asks

She reveals the gurkha knife, holding it up to show hi on doin with that?

If you turned out to be trouble, I was gonna kill you with it

The old man looks at her with eyes still as toad ponds in the afterins to laugh

THE OLD ht in nu up strays like Te them to safer, s where they co nails in their skulls with a butane-powered nail gun, then piling the way back He was on a run back from DC when the trouble started, that first day when the dead began to get up and walk around like living folk His faot by the tied all at once This neorld, this world now a quarter of a century old, it wasn’t anything he ever got to confront with his faed all at the sa since it seems like there’s nowhere to settle and no one to settle with He remembers, he says, that Wilson of before--but only just barely

The others are ex-military men, mostly Some mercenaries who floundered without an econoathered piles of cash, found the to spend it on that couldn’t be taken for free and with the world’s pered to benefit them, their accounts suddenly cleared, they reverted to the only actions that still seemed mercenary in this topsy-turvy landscape: They rode the countryside like desperadoes, helping people