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*[[Patty Kroger]]
 
*[[Patty Kroger]]
 
*[[Shirly Hammett]]
 
*[[Shirly Hammett]]
 +
 +
==Text==
 +
  When it happened, it happened fast. It was around quarter of ten on July 30,
 +
and they had been on the road only an hour. Going was slow because there had
 +
been heavy showers the night before and the road was still slippery. There had
 +
been little talk among the four of them since yesterday morning, when Stu had
 +
awakened first Frannie, then Harold and Glen, to tell them about Perion's
 +
suicide. He was blaming himself, Fran thought miserably, blaming himself for
 +
something that was no more his fault than a thunderstorm would have been.
 +
  She would have liked to have told him so, partly because he needed to be
 +
scolded for his self-indulgence and partly because she loved him. This latter
 +
was a fact she could no longer conceal from herself. She thought she could
 +
convince him that Peri's death wasn't his fault . . . but the convincing would
 +
entail showing him what her own true feelings were. She thought she would have
 +
to pin her heart to her sleeve, where he could see it. Unfortunately, Harold
 +
would be able to see it, too. So that was out . . . but only for the time being.
 +
She thought she would have to do it soon, Harold or no Harold. She could only
 +
protect him so long. Then he would have to know . . . and either accept or not
 +
accept. She was afraid Harold might opt for the second choice. A decision like
 +
that could lead to something horrible. They were, after all, carrying a lot of
 +
shooting irons.
 +
  She was mulling these thoughts over when they swept around a curve and saw a
 +
large housetrailer overturned m the middle of the road, blocking it from one end
 +
to the other. Its pink corrugated side still glistened with last night's rain.
 +
This was surprising enough, but there was more-three cars, all station wagons,
 +
and a big auto-wrecker were parked along the sides of the road. There were
 +
people standing around, too, at least a dozen of them.
 +
  Fran was so surprised she braked too suddenly. The Honda she was riding
 +
skidded on the wet road, and almost dumped her before she was able to get it
 +
under control. Then all four of them had stopped, more or less in a line which
 +
crossed the road, blinking and more than a little stunned at the sight of so
 +
many people who were still alive.
 +
  "Okay, dismount," one of the men said. He was tall, sandy-bearded, and wearing
 +
dark sunglasses. Fran timetraveled for a moment inside her head, back to the
 +
Maine Turnpike and being hauled down by a state trooper for speeding.
 +
  Next he'll ask to see our drivers' licenses, Fran thought. But this was no
 +
lone State Trooper, bagging speeders and writing tickets. There were four men
 +
here, three of them standing behind the sandy-bearded man in a short skirmish
 +
line. The rest were all women. At least eight of them. They looked pale and
 +
scared, clustered around the parked station wagons in little groups.
 +
  The sandy-bearded man was carrying a pistol. The men behind him all had
 +
rifles. Two of them were wearing bits and pieces of army kit.
 +
  Dismount, goddam you," the bearded man said, and one of the men behind him
 +
levered a round into the breech of his rifle. It was a loud, bitterly imperative
 +
sound in the misty morning air.
 +
  Glen and Harold looked puzzled and apprehensive. That, and no more. They're
 +
sitting ducks, Frannie thought with rising panic. She did not fully understand
 +
the situation herself yet, but she knew the equation here was all wrong. Four
 +
men, eight women, her brain said, and then repeated it, louder, in tones of
 +
alarm: Four men! Eight women!
 +
  "Harold," Stu said in a quiet voice. Something had come up in his eyes. Some
 +
realization. "Harold, don't--2' And then everything happened.
 +
  Stu's rifle was slung over his back. He dropped one shoulder so that the strap
 +
slid down his arm, and then the rifle was in his hands.
 +
  "Don't do it!" the bearded man shouted furiously. "Garvey! Virge! Ronnie! Get
 +
them! Save the woman!"
 +
  Harold began to grab for his pistols, at first forgetting they were still
 +
strapped into their holsters.
 +
  Glen Bateman still sat behind Harold in stunned surprise.
 +
  "Harold!" Stu yelled again.
 +
  Frannie began to unsling her own rifle. She felt as if the air around her had
 +
suddenly been packed with invisible molasses, treacly stuff she would never be
 +
able to struggle through in time. She realized they were probably going to die
 +
here.
 +
  One of the girls screamed: "NOW!"
 +
  Frannie's gaze switched to this girl even as she continued to struggle with
 +
her rifle. Not really a girl; she was at least twenty-five. Her hair, ash-blond,
 +
lay against her head in a ragged helmet, as if she had recently lopped it off
 +
with a pair of hedge-clippers.
 +
  Not all of the women moved; some of them appeared to be nearly catatonic with
 +
fright. But the blond girl and three of the others did.
 +
  All of this happened in the space of seven seconds.
 +
  The bearded man had been pointing his pistol at Stu.
 +
  When the young blond woman screamed, "Now!," the bar
 +
  rel jerked slightly toward her, like a divining rod sensing
 +
  water. It went off, making a loud noise like a piece of steel
 +
  being punched through cardboard. Stu fell off his bike and
 +
  Frannie screamed his name.
 +
  Then Stu was up on both elbows (both were scraped from hitting the road, and
 +
the Honda was lying on one of his legs), firing. The bearded man seemed to dance
 +
backward like a vaudeville hoofer leaving the stage after his encore. The faded
 +
plaid shirt he was wearing puffed and billowed. His pistol, an automatic, jerked
 +
up toward the sky and that steel-punching-through-cardboard sound happened four
 +
more times. He fell over on his back.
 +
  Two of the three men behind him had jerked around at the blond woman's cry.
 +
One pulled both triggers of the weapon he was holding, an old-fashioned
 +
Remington twelvegauge. The stock of the gun was not resting against anything -he
 +
was holding it outside his right hip-and when it went off with a sound like a
 +
thunderclap in a small room, it flew backward out of his hands, ripping skin
 +
from his fingers as it went. It clattered on the road. The face of one of the
 +
women who had not reacted to the blond woman's shout dissolved in an
 +
unbelievable fury of blood, and for a moment Frannie could actually hear blood
 +
raining down on the pavement, as if there had been a sudden shower. One eye
 +
peered unharmed through the mask of blood this woman now wore. It was dazed and
 +
unknowing. Then the woman fell forward onto the road. The Country Squire station
 +
wagon behind her was peppered with buckshot. One of the windows was a cataract
 +
of milky cracks.
 +
  The blond girl grappled with the second man who had turned toward her. The
 +
rifle the man held went off between their bodies. One of the girls scrambled for
 +
the lost shotgun.
 +
  The third man, who had not turned toward the women, began to fire at Fran.
 +
Frannie sat astride her bike, her rifle in her hands, blinking stpidly at him.
 +
He was an oliveskinned man who looked Italian. She felt a bullet drone by her
 +
left temple.
 +
  Harold had finally gotten one of his pistols free. He raised it and fired at
 +
the olive-skinned man. The distance was about fifteen paces. He missed. A bullet
 +
hole appeared in the skin of the pink housetrailer just to the left of the
 +
olive-skinned man's head. The olive-skinned man looked at Harold and said, "Now
 +
I gonna keel-a you, you sonnabeesh."
 +
  "Don't do that!" Harold screamed. He dropped his pistol and held out his open
 +
hands.
 +
  The olive-skinned man fired three times at Harold. All three shots missed. The
 +
third round came the closest to doing damage; it screamed off the exhaust-pipe
 +
of Harold's Yamaha. It fell over, spilling Harold and Glen off.
 +
  Now twenty seconds had passed. Harold and Stu lay flat. Glen sat cross-legged
 +
on the road, still looking as if he didn't know exactly where he was, or what
 +
was going on. Frannie was trying desperately to shoot the olive-skinned man
 +
before he could shoot Harold or Stu, but her gun wouldn't fire, the trigger
 +
wouldn't even pull, because she had forgotten to thumb the safety-catch to its
 +
off position. The blond woman continued to struggle with the second man, and the
 +
woman who had gone after the dropped shotgun was now fighting with a second
 +
woman for possession of it.
 +
  Cursing in a language which was undoubtedly Italian, the olive-skinned man
 +
aimed at Harold again and then Stu fired and the olive-skinned man's forehead
 +
caved in and he went down like a sack of potatoes.
 +
  Another woman had now joined the fray over the shotgun. The man who had lost
 +
it tried to throw her aside. She reached between his legs, grabbed the crotch of
 +
his jeans, and squeezed. Fran saw her hamstrings pop out all the way up her
 +
forearm to the elbow. The man screamed. The man lost interest in the shotgun.
 +
The man grabbed his privates and stumbled away bent-over.
 +
  Harold crawled to where his dropped pistol lay on the road and pounced on it.
 +
He raised it and fired at the man holding his privates. He fired three times and
 +
missed every time.
 +
  It's like Bonnie and Clyde, Frannie thought. Jesus, there's blood everywhere!
 +
  The blond woman with the ragged hair had lost her struggle for possession of
 +
the second man's rifle. He jerked it free and kicked her, perhaps aiming for her
 +
stomach, catching her in the thigh with one of his heavy boots instead. She went
 +
quick-stepping backward, whirling her arms for balance, and landed on her fanny
 +
with a wet splat.
 +
  Now he'll shoot her, Frannie thought, but the second man whirled around like a
 +
drunken soldier doing an about-face and began to fire rapidly into the group of
 +
three women still cringing against the side of the Country Squire.
 +
  "Yaaah! You bitches!" this gentleman screamed. "Yaaaah! You bitches!"
 +
  One of the women fell over and began to flop on the pavement between the
 +
station wagon and the overturned trailer like a stabbed fish. The other two
 +
women ran. Stu fired at the shooter and missed. The second man fired at one of
 +
the running women and did not. She threw her hands up to the sky and fell down.
 +
The other buttonhooked left and ran behind the pink trailer.
 +
  The third man, the one who had lost and failed to regain the shotgun, was
 +
still staggering around and holding his crotch. One of the women pointed the
 +
shotgun at him and pulled both triggers, her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth
 +
grimacing in anticipation of that thunder. The thunder didn't come. The shotgun
 +
was dry. She reversed it so she was holding it by the barrels and brought the
 +
stock down in a hard arc. She missed his head, but got the place where his neck
 +
joined his right shoulder. The man was driven to his knees. He began to crawl
 +
away. The woman, who was wearing a blue sweatshirt which said KENT STATE
 +
UNIVERSITY and tattered bluejeans, walked along after him, bludgeoning him with
 +
the shotgun as she went. The man continued to crawl, blood now running off him
 +
in rivers, and the woman in the Kent State sweatshirt continued to whale on him.
 +
  "Yaaaaah, you bitches!" the second man screamed, and fired at a dazed and
 +
muttering middle-aged woman. The distance between muzzle and woman was at the
 +
most three feet; she could almost have reached out and plugged the barrel with
 +
her pinky finger. He missed. He pulled the trigger again, but this time the
 +
rifle only dry-fired.
 +
  Harold was now holding his pistol in both hands, as he had seen cops do in the
 +
movies. He pulled the trigger and his bullet smashed the second man's elbow. The
 +
second man dropped his rifle and began to dance up and down, making high
 +
jabbering noises. To Frannie, he sounded a little like Roger Rabbit saying "P-P-
 +
Pleeeeze!"
 +
  "I got im!" Harold cried ecstatically. "Got im! By God, I got im!"
 +
  Frannie finally remembered the safety catch on her rifle. She thumbed it off
 +
just as Stu fired again. The second man fell down, now clutching his stomach
 +
instead of his elbow. He went on screaming.
 +
  "My God, my God," Glen said mildly. He put his face into his hands and began
 +
to weep.
 +
  Harold fired his pistol again. The second man's body jumped. He stopped
 +
screaming.
 +
  The woman in the Kent State University sweatshirt brought the stock of the
 +
shotgun down again, and this time she connected solidly with the crawling man's
 +
head. It sounded like Jim Rice connecting solidly with a high, hard fastball.
 +
The shotgun's walnut stock and the man's head both shattered.
 +
  For a moment there was silence. A bird called in it:
 +
  Whitwhit . . . whitwhit . . . whitwhit.
 +
  Then the girl in the sweatshirt stood astride the third man's body and gave a
 +
long, primeval scream of triumph that haunted Fran Goldsmith for the rest of her
 +
life.
 +
 +
  The blond girl was Dayna Jurgens, from Xenia, Ohio. The girl in the Kent State
 +
sweatshirt was Susan Stern. A third woman, the one who had squeezed Shotgun's
 +
crotch, was Patty Kroger. The other two were quite a bit older. The eldest,
 +
Dayna said, was Shirley Hammet. They didn't know the name of the other woman,
 +
who looked to be in her mid-thirties; she had been in shock, wandering, when Al,
 +
Garvey, Virge, and Ronnie had picked her up in the town of Archbold, two days
 +
before.
 +
  The nine of them got off the highway and camped in a farmhouse somewhere just
 +
west of Columbia, now over the Indiana state line. They were all in shock, and
 +
Fran thought in later days that their walk across the field from the overturned
 +
pink trailer on the turnpike to the farmhouse would have looked to an observer
 +
like a fieldtrip sponsored by the local lunatic asylum. The grass, thigh-high
 +
and still wet from the previous night's rain, had soon soaked their pants. White
 +
butterflies, sluggish in the air because their wings were still heavy with
 +
moisture, swooped toward them and then away in drugged circles and figure-
 +
eights. The sun was struggling to break through but hadn't made it yet; it was a
 +
bright smear feebly illuminating a uniform white cloud cover that stretched from
 +
horizon to horizon. But cloud cover or no cloud cover, the day was hot already,
 +
wringing with humidity, and the air was filled with whirling flocks of crows and
 +
their raucous, ugly cries. There are more crows than people now, Fran thought
 +
dazedly. If we don't watch out, they'll peck us right off the face of the earth.
 +
Revenge of the blackbirds. Were crows meat-eaters? She very much feared that
 +
they were.
 +
  Below this steady trickle of nonsense, barely visible, like the sun behind the
 +
melting cloud cover (but full of power, as the sun was on this awful, humid
 +
morning, the thirtieth of July, 1990), the gunbattle played over and over in her
 +
mind. The woman's face disintegrating under the shotgun blast. ,Stu falling
 +
over. The instant of stark terror when she had been sure he was dead. One man
 +
crying out Yaaah, you bitches! and then sounding like Roger Rabbit when Harold
 +
plugged him. The steel-punching-through-cardboard sound of the bearded man's
 +
pistol. Susan Stern's primitive cry of victory as she stood astride the body of
 +
her enemy while his brains, still warm, leaked out of his cloven skull.
 +
  Glen walked beside her, his thin, rather sardonic face now distraught, his
 +
gray hair flying wispily around his head as if in imitation of the butterflies.
 +
He held her hand, and he kept patting it compulsively.
 +
  "You mustn't let it affect you," he said. "Such horrors . . . bound to occur.
 +
Best protection is in numbers. Society, you know. Society is the keystone of the
 +
arch we call civilization, and it is the only real antidote to outlawry. You
 +
must take . . . things . . . things like this . . . as a matter of course. This
 +
was an isolated occurrence. Think of them as trolls. Yes! Trolls or yogs or
 +
affrits. Monsters of a generic sort. I accept that. I hold that truth to be
 +
self-evident, a socioconstitutional ethic, one might say. Ha! Ha!"
 +
  His laugh was half moan. She punctuated each of his elliptical sentences with
 +
"Yes, Glen," but he seemed not to hear. Glen smelled a trifle vomitous. The
 +
butterflies banged against them and then banged off again on their butterfly
 +
errands. They were almost to the farmhouse. The battle had lasted less than a
 +
minute. Less than a minute, but she suspected it was going to be held over by
 +
popular demand inside her head. Glen patted her hand. She wanted to tell him to
 +
please stop doing that, but she was afraid that he might cry if she did. She
 +
could stand the patting. She wasn't sure she could stand to see Glen Bateman
 +
weeping.
 +
  Stu was walking with Harold on one side and the blond girl, Dayna Jurgens, on
 +
the other. Susan Stern and Patty Kroger flanked the unnamed catatonic woman who
 +
had been picked up in Archbold. Shirley Hammet, the woman who had been missed at
 +
pointblank range by the man who had imitated Roger Rabbit before he died, walked
 +
a little way off to the left, muttering and making the occasional grab at the
 +
passing butterflies. The party was walking slowly, but Shirley Hammet was
 +
slower. Her gray hair hung untidily about her face, and her dazed eyes peered
 +
out at the world like frightened mice peering out of a temporary bolthole.
 +
  Harold looked at Stu uneasily. "We wiped them out, didn't we, Stu.? We blew
 +
them up. Scragged their asses."
 +
  "I guess so, Harold."
 +
  "Man, but we had to," Harold said earnestly, as if Stu had suggested things
 +
might have been otherwise. "It was them or us!"
 +
  "They would have blown your heads off," Dayna Jurgens said quietly. "I was
 +
with two guys when they hit us. They shot Rich and Damon from ambush. After it
 +
was over, they put a round in each of their heads, just to make sure. You had
 +
to, all right. By rights you should be dead now."
 +
  "By rights we should be dead now!" Harold exclaimed to Stu.
 +
  "It's all right," Stu said. "Take her easy, Harold."
 +
  "Sure! Negative perspiration!" Harold said heartily. He fumbled jerkily in his
 +
pack, got a chocolate Payday, and almost dropped it while stripping off the
 +
wrapper. He cursed it bitterly and then began to gobble it, holding it in both
 +
hands like a lollypop.
 +
  They had reached the farmhouse. Harold had to keep touching himself furtively
 +
as he ate his candybar-had to keep making sure he wasn't hurt. He felt very
 +
sick. He was afraid to look down at his crotch. He was pretty sure he had wet
 +
himself shortly after the festivities back at the pink trailer got into high
 +
gear.
 +
 +
                                    - - -
 +
 +
  Dayna and Susan did most of the talking over a distraught brunch which some
 +
picked at but none really ate. Patty Kroger, who was seventeen and absolutely
 +
beautiful, occasionally added something. The woman with no name scrunched
 +
herself into the farthest corner of the dusty farmhouse kitchen. Shirley Hammet
 +
sat at a table, ate stale Nabisco Honey Grahams, and muttered.
 +
  Dayna had left Xenia in the company of Richard Darliss and Damon Bracknell.
 +
How many others had been alive in Xenia after the flu? Only three that she had
 +
seen, a very old man, a woman, and a little girl. Dayna and her friends asked
 +
the trio to join them, but the old man waved them off, saying something about
 +
"having business in the desert."
 +
  By the eighth of July, Dayna, Richard, and Damon had begun to suffer bad
 +
dreams about a sort of boogeyman. Very scary dreams. Rich had actually gotten
 +
the idea that the boogeyman was real, Dayna said, and living in California. He
 +
had an idea that this man, if he really was a man, was the business the other
 +
three people they'd met had in the desert. She and Damon had begun to fear for
 +
Rich's sanity. He called the dreamman "the hardcase" and said he was getting an
 +
army of hardcases together. He said this army would soon sweep out of the west
 +
and enslave everyone left alive, first in America, then in the rest of-the
 +
world. Dayna and Damon had begun to privately discuss the possibility of
 +
slipping away from Rich some night, and had begun to believe that their own
 +
dreams were the result of Rich Darliss's powerful delusion.
 +
  In Williamstown, they had come around a curve in the highway to discover a
 +
large dump-truck lying on its side in the middle of the road. There was a
 +
station wagon and a wrecker parked nearby.
 +
  "We assumed it was just another smashup," Dayna.said, crumbling a graham
 +
cracker nervously between her fingers, "which was, of course, exactly what we
 +
were supposed to think."
 +
  They got off their cycles in order to trundle them around the dumptruck, and
 +
that was when the four hardcases-to use Rich's word-opened up from the ditch.
 +
They had murdered Rich and Damon and had taken Dayna prisoner. She was the
 +
fourth addition to what they sometimes called "the zoo" and sometimes "the
 +
harem." One of the others had been the muttering Shirley Hammet, who at that
 +
time had still been almost normal, although she had been repeatedly raped,
 +
sodomized, and forced to perform fellatio on all four. "And once," Dayna said,
 +
"when she couldn't hold on until it was time for one of them to take her into
 +
the bushes, Ronnie wiped her ass with a handful of barbed wire. She bled from
 +
her rectum for three days."
 +
  "Jesus Christ," Stu said. "Which one was he?"
 +
  "The man with the shotgun," Susan Stern said. "The one I brained. I wish he
 +
was right here, lying on the floor, so I could do it again."
 +
  The man with the sandy beard and sunglasses they had known only as Doc. He and
 +
Virge had been part of an army detachment which had been sent to Akron when the
 +
flu broke out. Their job had been "media relations," which was an army euphemism
 +
for "media suppression." When that job was pretty well in hand, they had gone on
 +
to "crowd control," which was an army euphemism for shooting looters who ran and
 +
hanging looters who didn't. By the twentyseventh of June, Doc had told them, the
 +
chain of command had a lot more holes than it did links. A good many of their
 +
own men were too ill to patrol, but by then it didn't matter anyway, as the
 +
citizens of Akron were too weak to read or write the news, let alone loot banks
 +
and jewelry stores.
 +
  By June 30, the unit was gone-its members dead, dying, or scattered. Doc and
 +
Virge were the only two scatterees, as a matter of fact, and that was when they
 +
had begun their new lives as zoo-keepers. Garvey had come along on the first of
 +
July, and Ronnie on the third. At that point they had closed their peculiar
 +
little club to further memberships.
 +
  "But after a while you must have outnumbered them," Glen said.
 +
  Unexpectedly, it was Shirley Hammet who spoke to this.
 +
  "Pills," she said, her trapped-mice eyes staring out at them from behind the
 +
fringe of her graying bangs. "Pills every morning to get up, pills every night
 +
to go down. Ups and downs." Her voice had been sinking, and this last was barely
 +
audible. She paused, then began to mutter again.
 +
  Susan Stern took up the thread of the story. She and one of the dead women,
 +
Rachel Carmody, had been picked up on July 17, outside Columbus. By then the
 +
party was traveling in a caravan which consisted of two station wagons and the
 +
wrecker. The men used the wrecker to move crashed vehicles out of their way or
 +
to roadblock the highway, depending on what opportunities offered. Doc kept the
 +
pharmacy tied to his belt in an outsized poke. Heavy downers for bedtime; tranks
 +
for travel; reds for recess.
 +
  "I'd get up in the morning, be raped two or three times, and then wait for Doc
 +
to hand out the pills," Susan said matter-of-factly. "The daytime pills, I mean.
 +
By the third day I had abrasions on my . . . well, you know, my vagina, and any
 +
sort of normal intercourse was very painful. I used to hope for Ronnie, because
 +
all Ronnie ever wanted was a blowjob. But after the pills, you got very calm.
 +
Not sleepy, just calm. Things didn't seem to matter after you got yourself
 +
wrapped around a few of those blue pills. All you wanted to do was sit with your
 +
hands in your lap and watch the scenery go by or sit with your hands in your lap
 +
and watch them use the wrecker to move something out of the way. One day Garvey
 +
got mad because this one girl, she couldn't have been any more than twelve, she
 +
wouldn't do. . . well, I'm not going to tell you. It was that bad. So Garvey
 +
blew her head off. I didn't even care. I was just . . . calm. After a while, you
 +
almost stopped thinking about escape. What you wanted more than getting away was
 +
those blue pills."
 +
  Dayna and Patty Kroger were nodding.
 +
  But they seemed to recognize eight women as their effective limit, Patty said.
 +
When they took her on July 22 after murdering the fiftyish man she had been
 +
traveling with, they had killed a very old woman who had been a part of "the
 +
zoo" for about a week. When the unnamed girl sitting in the corner had been
 +
picked up near Archbold, a sixteen-year-old girl with strabismus had been shot
 +
and left in a ditch. "Doc used to joke about it," Patty said. "He'd say, `I
 +
don't walk under ladders, I don't cross black cats' paths, and I'm not going to
 +
have thirteen people traveling with me.' "
 +
  On the twenty-ninth, they had caught sight of Stu and the others for the first
 +
time. The zoo had been camped in a picnic area just off the interstate when the
 +
four of them passed by.
 +
  "Garvey was very taken with you," Susan said, nodding toward Frannie. Frannie
 +
shuddered.
 +
  Dayna leaned closer to them and spoke softly. "And they'd made it pretty clear
 +
whose place you were going to take." She nodded her head almost imperceptibly at
 +
Shirley Hammet, who was still muttering and eating graham crackers.
 +
  "That poor woman," Frannie said.
 +
  "It was Dayna who decided you guys might be our best chance," Patty said. "Or
 +
maybe our last chance. There were three men in your party-both she and Helen
 +
Roget had seen that. Three armed men. And Doc had gotten just the teeniest bit
 +
overconfident about the trailer-overturned-in-the-road bit. Doc would just act
 +
like somebody official, and the men in the parties they met-when there were men-
 +
just caved in. And got shot. It had been working like a charm."
 +
  "Dayna asked us to try and palm our pills this morning," Susan went on.
 +
"They'd gotten sort of careless about making sure we really took them, too, and
 +
we knew that this morning they'd be busy pulling that big trailer out into the
 +
road and tipping it over. We didn't tell everyone. The only ones in on it were
 +
Dayna and Patty and Helen Roget . . . one of the girls Ronnie shot back there.
 +
And me, of course. Helen said, `If they catch us trying to spit the pills into
 +
our hands, they're going to kill us.' And Dayna said they would kill us anyway,
 +
sooner or later, and only sooner if we were lucky, and of course we knew that
 +
was tine. So we did it."
 +
  "I had to hold mine in my mouth for quite a while," Patty said. "It was
 +
starting to dissolve by the time I got a chance to spit it out." She looked at
 +
Dayna. "I think Helen actually had to swallow hers. I think that's why she was
 +
so slow."
 +
  Dayna nodded. She was looking at Stu with a clear warmth that made Frannie
 +
uneasy. "It still would have worked if you hadn't gotten wise, big fella."
 +
  "I didn't get wise near soon enough, looks like," Stu said. "Next time I
 +
will." He stood up, went to the window, and looked out. "You. know, that's half
 +
of what scares me," he said. "How wise we're all getting."
 +
  Fran cared even less for the sympathetic way Dayna looked after him. She had
 +
no right to look sympathetic after all she'd been through. And she's much
 +
prettier than I am, in spite of everything, Fran thought. Also, I doubt if she's
 +
pregnant.
 +
  "It's a get-wise world, big fella," Dayna said. "Get wise or die."
 +
  Stu turned to look at her, really seeing her for the first time, and Fran felt
 +
a stab of pure jealous agony. I waited too long, she thought. Oh my God, I went
 +
and did it, I went and waited too long.
 +
  She happened to glance at Harold and saw that Harold was smiling in a guarded
 +
way, one hand up to his mouth to conceal it. It looked like a smile of relief.
 +
She suddenly felt that she would like to stand up, walk casually over to Harold,
 +
and hook his eyes out of his head with her fingernails.
 +
  Never, Harold! she would scream as she did it. Never!
 +
  Never?

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Text

 When it happened, it happened fast. It was around quarter of ten on July 30,

and they had been on the road only an hour. Going was slow because there had been heavy showers the night before and the road was still slippery. There had been little talk among the four of them since yesterday morning, when Stu had awakened first Frannie, then Harold and Glen, to tell them about Perion's suicide. He was blaming himself, Fran thought miserably, blaming himself for something that was no more his fault than a thunderstorm would have been. 

 She would have liked to have told him so, partly because he needed to be

scolded for his self-indulgence and partly because she loved him. This latter was a fact she could no longer conceal from herself. She thought she could convince him that Peri's death wasn't his fault . . . but the convincing would entail showing him what her own true feelings were. She thought she would have to pin her heart to her sleeve, where he could see it. Unfortunately, Harold would be able to see it, too. So that was out . . . but only for the time being. She thought she would have to do it soon, Harold or no Harold. She could only protect him so long. Then he would have to know . . . and either accept or not accept. She was afraid Harold might opt for the second choice. A decision like that could lead to something horrible. They were, after all, carrying a lot of shooting irons. 

 She was mulling these thoughts over when they swept around a curve and saw a

large housetrailer overturned m the middle of the road, blocking it from one end to the other. Its pink corrugated side still glistened with last night's rain. This was surprising enough, but there was more-three cars, all station wagons, and a big auto-wrecker were parked along the sides of the road. There were people standing around, too, at least a dozen of them. 

 Fran was so surprised she braked too suddenly. The Honda she was riding

skidded on the wet road, and almost dumped her before she was able to get it under control. Then all four of them had stopped, more or less in a line which crossed the road, blinking and more than a little stunned at the sight of so many people who were still alive. 

 "Okay, dismount," one of the men said. He was tall, sandy-bearded, and wearing

dark sunglasses. Fran timetraveled for a moment inside her head, back to the Maine Turnpike and being hauled down by a state trooper for speeding. 

 Next he'll ask to see our drivers' licenses, Fran thought. But this was no

lone State Trooper, bagging speeders and writing tickets. There were four men here, three of them standing behind the sandy-bearded man in a short skirmish line. The rest were all women. At least eight of them. They looked pale and scared, clustered around the parked station wagons in little groups. 

 The sandy-bearded man was carrying a pistol. The men behind him all had

rifles. Two of them were wearing bits and pieces of army kit. 

 Dismount, goddam you," the bearded man said, and one of the men behind him

levered a round into the breech of his rifle. It was a loud, bitterly imperative sound in the misty morning air. 

 Glen and Harold looked puzzled and apprehensive. That, and no more. They're

sitting ducks, Frannie thought with rising panic. She did not fully understand the situation herself yet, but she knew the equation here was all wrong. Four men, eight women, her brain said, and then repeated it, louder, in tones of alarm: Four men! Eight women! 

 "Harold," Stu said in a quiet voice. Something had come up in his eyes. Some

realization. "Harold, don't--2' And then everything happened. 

 Stu's rifle was slung over his back. He dropped one shoulder so that the strap

slid down his arm, and then the rifle was in his hands. 

 "Don't do it!" the bearded man shouted furiously. "Garvey! Virge! Ronnie! Get

them! Save the woman!" 

 Harold began to grab for his pistols, at first forgetting they were still

strapped into their holsters. 

 Glen Bateman still sat behind Harold in stunned surprise.
 "Harold!" Stu yelled again.
 Frannie began to unsling her own rifle. She felt as if the air around her had

suddenly been packed with invisible molasses, treacly stuff she would never be able to struggle through in time. She realized they were probably going to die here. 

 One of the girls screamed: "NOW!"
 Frannie's gaze switched to this girl even as she continued to struggle with

her rifle. Not really a girl; she was at least twenty-five. Her hair, ash-blond, lay against her head in a ragged helmet, as if she had recently lopped it off with a pair of hedge-clippers. 

 Not all of the women moved; some of them appeared to be nearly catatonic with

fright. But the blond girl and three of the others did. 

 All of this happened in the space of seven seconds.
  The bearded man had been pointing his pistol at Stu.
 When the young blond woman screamed, "Now!," the bar
 rel jerked slightly toward her, like a divining rod sensing
 water. It went off, making a loud noise like a piece of steel
 being punched through cardboard. Stu fell off his bike and
 Frannie screamed his name.
 Then Stu was up on both elbows (both were scraped from hitting the road, and

the Honda was lying on one of his legs), firing. The bearded man seemed to dance backward like a vaudeville hoofer leaving the stage after his encore. The faded plaid shirt he was wearing puffed and billowed. His pistol, an automatic, jerked up toward the sky and that steel-punching-through-cardboard sound happened four more times. He fell over on his back. 

 Two of the three men behind him had jerked around at the blond woman's cry.

One pulled both triggers of the weapon he was holding, an old-fashioned Remington twelvegauge. The stock of the gun was not resting against anything -he was holding it outside his right hip-and when it went off with a sound like a thunderclap in a small room, it flew backward out of his hands, ripping skin from his fingers as it went. It clattered on the road. The face of one of the women who had not reacted to the blond woman's shout dissolved in an unbelievable fury of blood, and for a moment Frannie could actually hear blood raining down on the pavement, as if there had been a sudden shower. One eye peered unharmed through the mask of blood this woman now wore. It was dazed and unknowing. Then the woman fell forward onto the road. The Country Squire station wagon behind her was peppered with buckshot. One of the windows was a cataract of milky cracks. 

 The blond girl grappled with the second man who had turned toward her. The

rifle the man held went off between their bodies. One of the girls scrambled for the lost shotgun. 

 The third man, who had not turned toward the women, began to fire at Fran.

Frannie sat astride her bike, her rifle in her hands, blinking stpidly at him. He was an oliveskinned man who looked Italian. She felt a bullet drone by her left temple. 

 Harold had finally gotten one of his pistols free. He raised it and fired at

the olive-skinned man. The distance was about fifteen paces. He missed. A bullet hole appeared in the skin of the pink housetrailer just to the left of the olive-skinned man's head. The olive-skinned man looked at Harold and said, "Now I gonna keel-a you, you sonnabeesh." 

 "Don't do that!" Harold screamed. He dropped his pistol and held out his open

hands. 

 The olive-skinned man fired three times at Harold. All three shots missed. The

third round came the closest to doing damage; it screamed off the exhaust-pipe of Harold's Yamaha. It fell over, spilling Harold and Glen off. 

 Now twenty seconds had passed. Harold and Stu lay flat. Glen sat cross-legged

on the road, still looking as if he didn't know exactly where he was, or what was going on. Frannie was trying desperately to shoot the olive-skinned man before he could shoot Harold or Stu, but her gun wouldn't fire, the trigger wouldn't even pull, because she had forgotten to thumb the safety-catch to its off position. The blond woman continued to struggle with the second man, and the woman who had gone after the dropped shotgun was now fighting with a second woman for possession of it. 

 Cursing in a language which was undoubtedly Italian, the olive-skinned man

aimed at Harold again and then Stu fired and the olive-skinned man's forehead caved in and he went down like a sack of potatoes. 

 Another woman had now joined the fray over the shotgun. The man who had lost

it tried to throw her aside. She reached between his legs, grabbed the crotch of his jeans, and squeezed. Fran saw her hamstrings pop out all the way up her forearm to the elbow. The man screamed. The man lost interest in the shotgun. The man grabbed his privates and stumbled away bent-over. 

 Harold crawled to where his dropped pistol lay on the road and pounced on it.

He raised it and fired at the man holding his privates. He fired three times and missed every time. 

 It's like Bonnie and Clyde, Frannie thought. Jesus, there's blood everywhere!
 The blond woman with the ragged hair had lost her struggle for possession of

the second man's rifle. He jerked it free and kicked her, perhaps aiming for her stomach, catching her in the thigh with one of his heavy boots instead. She went quick-stepping backward, whirling her arms for balance, and landed on her fanny with a wet splat. 

 Now he'll shoot her, Frannie thought, but the second man whirled around like a

drunken soldier doing an about-face and began to fire rapidly into the group of three women still cringing against the side of the Country Squire. 

 "Yaaah! You bitches!" this gentleman screamed. "Yaaaah! You bitches!"
 One of the women fell over and began to flop on the pavement between the

station wagon and the overturned trailer like a stabbed fish. The other two women ran. Stu fired at the shooter and missed. The second man fired at one of the running women and did not. She threw her hands up to the sky and fell down. The other buttonhooked left and ran behind the pink trailer. 

 The third man, the one who had lost and failed to regain the shotgun, was

still staggering around and holding his crotch. One of the women pointed the shotgun at him and pulled both triggers, her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth grimacing in anticipation of that thunder. The thunder didn't come. The shotgun was dry. She reversed it so she was holding it by the barrels and brought the stock down in a hard arc. She missed his head, but got the place where his neck joined his right shoulder. The man was driven to his knees. He began to crawl away. The woman, who was wearing a blue sweatshirt which said KENT STATE UNIVERSITY and tattered bluejeans, walked along after him, bludgeoning him with the shotgun as she went. The man continued to crawl, blood now running off him in rivers, and the woman in the Kent State sweatshirt continued to whale on him. 

 "Yaaaaah, you bitches!" the second man screamed, and fired at a dazed and

muttering middle-aged woman. The distance between muzzle and woman was at the most three feet; she could almost have reached out and plugged the barrel with her pinky finger. He missed. He pulled the trigger again, but this time the rifle only dry-fired. 

 Harold was now holding his pistol in both hands, as he had seen cops do in the

movies. He pulled the trigger and his bullet smashed the second man's elbow. The second man dropped his rifle and began to dance up and down, making high jabbering noises. To Frannie, he sounded a little like Roger Rabbit saying "P-P- Pleeeeze!" 

 "I got im!" Harold cried ecstatically. "Got im! By God, I got im!"
 Frannie finally remembered the safety catch on her rifle. She thumbed it off

just as Stu fired again. The second man fell down, now clutching his stomach instead of his elbow. He went on screaming. 

 "My God, my God," Glen said mildly. He put his face into his hands and began

to weep. 

 Harold fired his pistol again. The second man's body jumped. He stopped

screaming. 

 The woman in the Kent State University sweatshirt brought the stock of the

shotgun down again, and this time she connected solidly with the crawling man's head. It sounded like Jim Rice connecting solidly with a high, hard fastball. The shotgun's walnut stock and the man's head both shattered. 

 For a moment there was silence. A bird called in it:
 Whitwhit . . . whitwhit . . . whitwhit.
 Then the girl in the sweatshirt stood astride the third man's body and gave a

long, primeval scream of triumph that haunted Fran Goldsmith for the rest of her life. 

 The blond girl was Dayna Jurgens, from Xenia, Ohio. The girl in the Kent State

sweatshirt was Susan Stern. A third woman, the one who had squeezed Shotgun's crotch, was Patty Kroger. The other two were quite a bit older. The eldest, Dayna said, was Shirley Hammet. They didn't know the name of the other woman, who looked to be in her mid-thirties; she had been in shock, wandering, when Al, Garvey, Virge, and Ronnie had picked her up in the town of Archbold, two days before. 

 The nine of them got off the highway and camped in a farmhouse somewhere just

west of Columbia, now over the Indiana state line. They were all in shock, and Fran thought in later days that their walk across the field from the overturned pink trailer on the turnpike to the farmhouse would have looked to an observer like a fieldtrip sponsored by the local lunatic asylum. The grass, thigh-high and still wet from the previous night's rain, had soon soaked their pants. White butterflies, sluggish in the air because their wings were still heavy with moisture, swooped toward them and then away in drugged circles and figure- eights. The sun was struggling to break through but hadn't made it yet; it was a bright smear feebly illuminating a uniform white cloud cover that stretched from horizon to horizon. But cloud cover or no cloud cover, the day was hot already, wringing with humidity, and the air was filled with whirling flocks of crows and their raucous, ugly cries. There are more crows than people now, Fran thought dazedly. If we don't watch out, they'll peck us right off the face of the earth. Revenge of the blackbirds. Were crows meat-eaters? She very much feared that they were. 

 Below this steady trickle of nonsense, barely visible, like the sun behind the

melting cloud cover (but full of power, as the sun was on this awful, humid morning, the thirtieth of July, 1990), the gunbattle played over and over in her mind. The woman's face disintegrating under the shotgun blast. ,Stu falling over. The instant of stark terror when she had been sure he was dead. One man crying out Yaaah, you bitches! and then sounding like Roger Rabbit when Harold plugged him. The steel-punching-through-cardboard sound of the bearded man's pistol. Susan Stern's primitive cry of victory as she stood astride the body of her enemy while his brains, still warm, leaked out of his cloven skull. 

 Glen walked beside her, his thin, rather sardonic face now distraught, his

gray hair flying wispily around his head as if in imitation of the butterflies. He held her hand, and he kept patting it compulsively. 

 "You mustn't let it affect you," he said. "Such horrors . . . bound to occur.

Best protection is in numbers. Society, you know. Society is the keystone of the arch we call civilization, and it is the only real antidote to outlawry. You must take . . . things . . . things like this . . . as a matter of course. This was an isolated occurrence. Think of them as trolls. Yes! Trolls or yogs or affrits. Monsters of a generic sort. I accept that. I hold that truth to be self-evident, a socioconstitutional ethic, one might say. Ha! Ha!" 

 His laugh was half moan. She punctuated each of his elliptical sentences with

"Yes, Glen," but he seemed not to hear. Glen smelled a trifle vomitous. The butterflies banged against them and then banged off again on their butterfly errands. They were almost to the farmhouse. The battle had lasted less than a minute. Less than a minute, but she suspected it was going to be held over by popular demand inside her head. Glen patted her hand. She wanted to tell him to please stop doing that, but she was afraid that he might cry if she did. She could stand the patting. She wasn't sure she could stand to see Glen Bateman weeping. 

 Stu was walking with Harold on one side and the blond girl, Dayna Jurgens, on

the other. Susan Stern and Patty Kroger flanked the unnamed catatonic woman who had been picked up in Archbold. Shirley Hammet, the woman who had been missed at pointblank range by the man who had imitated Roger Rabbit before he died, walked a little way off to the left, muttering and making the occasional grab at the passing butterflies. The party was walking slowly, but Shirley Hammet was slower. Her gray hair hung untidily about her face, and her dazed eyes peered out at the world like frightened mice peering out of a temporary bolthole. 

 Harold looked at Stu uneasily. "We wiped them out, didn't we, Stu.? We blew

them up. Scragged their asses." 

 "I guess so, Harold."
 "Man, but we had to," Harold said earnestly, as if Stu had suggested things

might have been otherwise. "It was them or us!" 

 "They would have blown your heads off," Dayna Jurgens said quietly. "I was

with two guys when they hit us. They shot Rich and Damon from ambush. After it was over, they put a round in each of their heads, just to make sure. You had to, all right. By rights you should be dead now." 

 "By rights we should be dead now!" Harold exclaimed to Stu.
 "It's all right," Stu said. "Take her easy, Harold."
 "Sure! Negative perspiration!" Harold said heartily. He fumbled jerkily in his

pack, got a chocolate Payday, and almost dropped it while stripping off the wrapper. He cursed it bitterly and then began to gobble it, holding it in both hands like a lollypop. 

 They had reached the farmhouse. Harold had to keep touching himself furtively

as he ate his candybar-had to keep making sure he wasn't hurt. He felt very sick. He was afraid to look down at his crotch. He was pretty sure he had wet himself shortly after the festivities back at the pink trailer got into high gear. 

                                    - - -

 Dayna and Susan did most of the talking over a distraught brunch which some

picked at but none really ate. Patty Kroger, who was seventeen and absolutely beautiful, occasionally added something. The woman with no name scrunched herself into the farthest corner of the dusty farmhouse kitchen. Shirley Hammet sat at a table, ate stale Nabisco Honey Grahams, and muttered. 

 Dayna had left Xenia in the company of Richard Darliss and Damon Bracknell.

How many others had been alive in Xenia after the flu? Only three that she had seen, a very old man, a woman, and a little girl. Dayna and her friends asked the trio to join them, but the old man waved them off, saying something about "having business in the desert." 

 By the eighth of July, Dayna, Richard, and Damon had begun to suffer bad

dreams about a sort of boogeyman. Very scary dreams. Rich had actually gotten the idea that the boogeyman was real, Dayna said, and living in California. He had an idea that this man, if he really was a man, was the business the other three people they'd met had in the desert. She and Damon had begun to fear for Rich's sanity. He called the dreamman "the hardcase" and said he was getting an army of hardcases together. He said this army would soon sweep out of the west and enslave everyone left alive, first in America, then in the rest of-the world. Dayna and Damon had begun to privately discuss the possibility of slipping away from Rich some night, and had begun to believe that their own dreams were the result of Rich Darliss's powerful delusion. 

 In Williamstown, they had come around a curve in the highway to discover a

large dump-truck lying on its side in the middle of the road. There was a station wagon and a wrecker parked nearby. 

 "We assumed it was just another smashup," Dayna.said, crumbling a graham

cracker nervously between her fingers, "which was, of course, exactly what we were supposed to think." 

 They got off their cycles in order to trundle them around the dumptruck, and

that was when the four hardcases-to use Rich's word-opened up from the ditch. They had murdered Rich and Damon and had taken Dayna prisoner. She was the fourth addition to what they sometimes called "the zoo" and sometimes "the harem." One of the others had been the muttering Shirley Hammet, who at that time had still been almost normal, although she had been repeatedly raped, sodomized, and forced to perform fellatio on all four. "And once," Dayna said, "when she couldn't hold on until it was time for one of them to take her into the bushes, Ronnie wiped her ass with a handful of barbed wire. She bled from her rectum for three days." 

 "Jesus Christ," Stu said. "Which one was he?"
 "The man with the shotgun," Susan Stern said. "The one I brained. I wish he

was right here, lying on the floor, so I could do it again." 

 The man with the sandy beard and sunglasses they had known only as Doc. He and

Virge had been part of an army detachment which had been sent to Akron when the flu broke out. Their job had been "media relations," which was an army euphemism for "media suppression." When that job was pretty well in hand, they had gone on to "crowd control," which was an army euphemism for shooting looters who ran and hanging looters who didn't. By the twentyseventh of June, Doc had told them, the chain of command had a lot more holes than it did links. A good many of their own men were too ill to patrol, but by then it didn't matter anyway, as the citizens of Akron were too weak to read or write the news, let alone loot banks and jewelry stores. 

 By June 30, the unit was gone-its members dead, dying, or scattered. Doc and

Virge were the only two scatterees, as a matter of fact, and that was when they had begun their new lives as zoo-keepers. Garvey had come along on the first of July, and Ronnie on the third. At that point they had closed their peculiar little club to further memberships. 

 "But after a while you must have outnumbered them," Glen said.
 Unexpectedly, it was Shirley Hammet who spoke to this.
 "Pills," she said, her trapped-mice eyes staring out at them from behind the

fringe of her graying bangs. "Pills every morning to get up, pills every night to go down. Ups and downs." Her voice had been sinking, and this last was barely audible. She paused, then began to mutter again. 

 Susan Stern took up the thread of the story. She and one of the dead women,

Rachel Carmody, had been picked up on July 17, outside Columbus. By then the party was traveling in a caravan which consisted of two station wagons and the wrecker. The men used the wrecker to move crashed vehicles out of their way or to roadblock the highway, depending on what opportunities offered. Doc kept the pharmacy tied to his belt in an outsized poke. Heavy downers for bedtime; tranks for travel; reds for recess. 

 "I'd get up in the morning, be raped two or three times, and then wait for Doc

to hand out the pills," Susan said matter-of-factly. "The daytime pills, I mean. By the third day I had abrasions on my . . . well, you know, my vagina, and any sort of normal intercourse was very painful. I used to hope for Ronnie, because all Ronnie ever wanted was a blowjob. But after the pills, you got very calm. Not sleepy, just calm. Things didn't seem to matter after you got yourself wrapped around a few of those blue pills. All you wanted to do was sit with your hands in your lap and watch the scenery go by or sit with your hands in your lap and watch them use the wrecker to move something out of the way. One day Garvey got mad because this one girl, she couldn't have been any more than twelve, she wouldn't do. . . well, I'm not going to tell you. It was that bad. So Garvey blew her head off. I didn't even care. I was just . . . calm. After a while, you almost stopped thinking about escape. What you wanted more than getting away was those blue pills." 

 Dayna and Patty Kroger were nodding.
 But they seemed to recognize eight women as their effective limit, Patty said.

When they took her on July 22 after murdering the fiftyish man she had been traveling with, they had killed a very old woman who had been a part of "the zoo" for about a week. When the unnamed girl sitting in the corner had been picked up near Archbold, a sixteen-year-old girl with strabismus had been shot and left in a ditch. "Doc used to joke about it," Patty said. "He'd say, `I don't walk under ladders, I don't cross black cats' paths, and I'm not going to have thirteen people traveling with me.' " 

 On the twenty-ninth, they had caught sight of Stu and the others for the first

time. The zoo had been camped in a picnic area just off the interstate when the four of them passed by. 

 "Garvey was very taken with you," Susan said, nodding toward Frannie. Frannie

shuddered. 

 Dayna leaned closer to them and spoke softly. "And they'd made it pretty clear

whose place you were going to take." She nodded her head almost imperceptibly at Shirley Hammet, who was still muttering and eating graham crackers. 

 "That poor woman," Frannie said.
 "It was Dayna who decided you guys might be our best chance," Patty said. "Or

maybe our last chance. There were three men in your party-both she and Helen Roget had seen that. Three armed men. And Doc had gotten just the teeniest bit overconfident about the trailer-overturned-in-the-road bit. Doc would just act like somebody official, and the men in the parties they met-when there were men- just caved in. And got shot. It had been working like a charm." 

 "Dayna asked us to try and palm our pills this morning," Susan went on.

"They'd gotten sort of careless about making sure we really took them, too, and we knew that this morning they'd be busy pulling that big trailer out into the road and tipping it over. We didn't tell everyone. The only ones in on it were Dayna and Patty and Helen Roget . . . one of the girls Ronnie shot back there. And me, of course. Helen said, `If they catch us trying to spit the pills into our hands, they're going to kill us.' And Dayna said they would kill us anyway, sooner or later, and only sooner if we were lucky, and of course we knew that was tine. So we did it." 

 "I had to hold mine in my mouth for quite a while," Patty said. "It was

starting to dissolve by the time I got a chance to spit it out." She looked at Dayna. "I think Helen actually had to swallow hers. I think that's why she was so slow." 

 Dayna nodded. She was looking at Stu with a clear warmth that made Frannie

uneasy. "It still would have worked if you hadn't gotten wise, big fella." 

 "I didn't get wise near soon enough, looks like," Stu said. "Next time I

will." He stood up, went to the window, and looked out. "You. know, that's half of what scares me," he said. "How wise we're all getting." 

 Fran cared even less for the sympathetic way Dayna looked after him. She had

no right to look sympathetic after all she'd been through. And she's much prettier than I am, in spite of everything, Fran thought. Also, I doubt if she's pregnant. 

 "It's a get-wise world, big fella," Dayna said. "Get wise or die."
 Stu turned to look at her, really seeing her for the first time, and Fran felt

a stab of pure jealous agony. I waited too long, she thought. Oh my God, I went and did it, I went and waited too long. 

 She happened to glance at Harold and saw that Harold was smiling in a guarded

way, one hand up to his mouth to conceal it. It looked like a smile of relief. She suddenly felt that she would like to stand up, walk casually over to Harold, and hook his eyes out of his head with her fingernails. 

 Never, Harold! she would scream as she did it. Never!
 Never?
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