Mine

Part VII – Funeral Pyre

1: The Power of Love

Horn blowing.

Mary's eyes opened, the lids gummy and swollen.

Horn blowing outside. Outside the house.

Her heart kicked. She sat up in the Barcalounger, and every joint in her body seemed to scream in unison. A gasp of pain came from Mary's lips. Horn blowing outside, in the gray gloom of a winter morning. She'd gone to sleep with the TV going and the lights on; a man with a crew cut was talking about soybean production on the tube. When she tried to stand up, the jolt of agony that shot through her thigh took her breath. The bandages were crusted with dark blood, the smell of copper rank in the room. Her forearm wound pulsed with heat, but it was numb and so was her right hand. She stood up from the chair with an effort that made the air hiss between her teeth, and she hobbled to a window where she could see the front of the house.

A thin layer of snow had fallen during the night, and covered the fields. Out on the white-dusted road, about sixty yards from the farmhouse, sat a school bus with CEDAR COUNTY SCHOOLS on its side. Come to pick up Fudge Ripple, Mary knew. Except the boy wasn't ready for school. He was fast asleep, under the hay. The school bus sat there for fifteen seconds more, and then the driver gave a last frustrated honk on the horn and the bus pulled away, heading to the next house down the road.

Mary found a clock. It was seven thirty-four. She felt weak, light-headed, and nausea throbbed in her stomach. She staggered into a bathroom and leaned over the toilet, and she retched a few times but nothing much came up. She looked at herself in the mirror her eyes sunken in swollen folds, her flesh as gray as the dawn. Death, she thought. That's what I look like. Her leg was hurting with a vengeance, and she searched through a closet in the bathroom until she found a bottle of Excedrin. She took three of them, crunching them between her teeth and washing them down with a handful of water from the tap.

She longed to rest today. Longed to go back to sleep here in this warm house, but it was time to get out. The school bus driver would wonder why Fudge Ripple hadn't come out this morning when all the lights were on in the house. He'd tell somebody about it, and they'd wonder, too. Routines were the vital fabric of the Mindfuck State; when a routine was disrupted, like a missed stitch, all the little ants got stirred up. It was time to get out.

Drummer began to cry; Mary recognized it as his hungry cry, pitched a tone or two lower and less intense than his frightened cry. It was more of a nasal buzzing with a few pauses for the summoning of breath. She'd have to feed him and change his diaper before they left. A sense of urgency got her moving. First she changed her bandages, wincing as she peeled away the crusty cotton. She repacked the wounds and wrapped them tightly with fresh strips of torn sheet. Then she popped open her suitcase, put on fresh underwear, and got a pair of flannel socks from Rocky Road's dresser. Her jeans were too constrictive at the thighs for her swollen leg, so she pulled on a pair of looser denims – again, courtesy of her departed host – and cinched them tight with one of her belts. She put on a gray workshirt, a maroon sweater she'd had since 1981, and she pinned the Smiley Face button on the front. Her scuffed boots went on last. In Rocky Road's closet hung a tempting assortment of heavy coats and parkas. She took a brown corduroy coat with a fleece-lined collar off its hanger and laid it aside for later, and chose a green goosedown parka to zip Drummer up in as a makeshift bassinet. A pair of man-sized leather gloves were also set aside for later.

As Mary fed Drummer, she continually squeezed a tennis ball in her right hand to warm up the sinews. Her strength in that hand was about a third of what it normally was, her fingers cold and numb. Nerve damage, she thought. She could feel the twitching of the ravaged muscles down in the forearm wound; the damned dog had come close to gnawing an artery open, and if that had happened, she'd be dead by now. The thigh wound was the real bitch, though. It needed fifty or sixty stitches and a hell of a lot better antiseptic than what she'd found in Rocky Road's bathroom. But just as long as it stayed crusted over, she could make herself keep going.

The telephone rang as she was changing Drummer's diaper. It stopped after twelve rings, was quiet for five minutes, and then rang eight more times.

"Somebody's curious," she told Drummer as she swabbed him clean with a Handi Wipe. "Somebody wants to know why the boy didn't come out to the school bus, or why Rocky Road's not clocked in at work yet. Yes somebody does, yes him does!"

She started moving a little faster.

The telephone rang again at eight-forty as Mary was loading up the Cherokee in the garage. It went silent, and Mary continued the task. She loaded her suitcase and a garbage bag full of food from the kitchen: the rest of the sliced ham, a pack of bologna, a loaf of wheat bread, a jug of orange juice and a few apples, a box of oat bran cereal and a big bag of Fritos corn chips. She found a bottle each of mineral supplement tablets and vitamins that might've choked a horse. She swallowed two of both. When she was packed and ready to take Drummer out, she paused for a minute to make herself a bowl of Wheat Chex and drink down a Coke.

She was standing in the kitchen, finishing the cereal, when she glanced through a window and saw a pig car coming slowly up the drive.

It pulled up in front of the house, and a pig wearing a dark blue parka got out. The car had CEDAR COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT on its side. By the time the pig – who was maybe in his early twenties, just a kid – reached the front door and rang the buzzer, Mary had loaded one of the remaining rifles from the gun cabinet.

She stood around a corner from the door, waiting. The pig rang the buzzer again, then knocked with a gloved fist. "Hey, Mitch!" he called, his breath showing in the frosty air. "Where you at, boy?"

Go away, Mary thought. Her leg had started hurting her again, a deep biting ache.

"Mitch? You to home?"

The pig backed away from the door. He stood looking around for a minute, his hands on his hips, and then Mary watched him start to walk to the right. She went to another window, where she could track him. He walked to the back door and peered in, his breath fogging the glass. He knocked again, harder. "Emma? Anybody?"

Nobody here you want to meet, she thought.

The pig tried the back door's knob. Worked it left and right. Then she watched him turn his head and look toward the barn.

He called "Mitch?" and then he began walking away from the house, his boots crunching in the icy snow on his way to where the bodies and the van were.

Mary stood at the back door, the rifle in her hands. She decided to let him find Mitch and Emma.

The pig opened the barn's door and walked inside.

She waited, her eyes glittering with a kind of lust.

It didn't take long. The pig came running out. He staggered, stopped, bent over, and threw up onto the snow. Then he started running again, his long legs pumping and his face ghastly.

Mary unlocked the door and stepped out into the chill. The pig saw her, came to a skidding halt, and started reaching for his pistol. The holster's flap was snapped down, and as the pig's gloved fingers fumbled to unsnap it, Mary Terror flexed her numb hand, took aim, and shot him in the stomach at a range of thirty feet. He was knocked backward to the ground, the breath bursting white from his mouth and nostrils. As the pig rolled over and tried to struggle to his knees, Mary fired a second shot that took away a chunk of his left shoulder in a mist of steamy blood. The third bullet got him in the lower back as he was crawling across the crimson snow.

He jerked a few times, like a fish on a hook. And then he lay still, facedown, his arms splayed out in an attitude of crucifixion.

Mary breathed deeply of the cold air, savoring its sting in her lungs. Then she went back into the kitchen, set the rifle down, and finished the last two spoonfuls of Wheat Chex. She drank the milk, and followed it with the final swig of Coke. She limped to the bedroom, where she put on the corduroy coat and the gloves, then picked up Drummer in the folds of the goosedown parka. "Pretty boy, yes you are!" she said as she carried him to the kitchen. "Mama's pretty little boy!" She kissed his cheek, a surge of love rising within her like a glowing radiance. She looked out the back door again, verifying that the pig had not moved. Then she put Drummer into the Cherokee, cranked open the garage door, and slid behind the wheel.

She pulled out of the garage, past the pig car and down the driveway. Then she turned right on the road that led back to I-80 and the route west. Her shoulder bag was on the floorboard, full of Pampers and formula and holding her Magnum and the new Smith Wesson revolver to replace the lost Colt. She felt so much better this morning. Still weak, yes, but so much better. It must be the vitamins, she decided. Got some iron in her blood, and that made all the difference.

Or maybe it was the power of love, she thought as she glanced on the seat beside her at her beautiful baby.

The list of names and phone numbers was in her pocket, along with the bloodstained Sierra Club newsletter article. To the west the sky was a dark purple haze, the land white as a peace dove.

It was a morning rich with love.

The Cherokee went on, aimed toward California, freighted with firepower and madness.

2: Strip Naked

Checkout time was noon. At ten thirty-six the rust-eaten Cutlass with a Nebraska tag pulled out of the Liberty Motor Lodge's parking lot. The red-haired woman behind the wheel turned right, onto the ramp that merged into the westbound lanes of I-80. The Cutlass's passenger, a pallid woman with a bandaged hand and hellfire in her eyes, wore a dark gray sweater banded with green stripes. She kept an ice pack pressed against her left hand, and she chewed on her raw and swollen lower lip.

The miles clicked off. Snow flurries spun from the gloom, the headlights of cars on and their wipers going. The Cutlass's wipers shrieked with a noise like a banshee party, and the car's engine chugged like a boiler with spark plugs. In Des Moines, eighty miles farther west, Didi and Laura stopped at a Wendy's and got the works: burgers, fries, salad bar, and coffee. As Laura ate with no thought of manners and an eye on the clock, Didi went to the pay phone and looked up pawnbrokers in the Yellow Pages. She tore the page out, rejoined Laura, and they finished their food.

The clerk at Honest Joe's, on McKinley Avenue, examined the diamond through his loupe and asked to see some identification. They took the stone back and went on. The female clerk at Rossi's Pawn on 9th Street wouldn't talk to them without seeing proof of ownership. At the dismal, aptly named Junk 'n Stuff Pawnshop on Army Post Road, a man who made Laura think of John Carradine's head stuck on Dom DeLuise's body looked at the diamond and laughed like a chain saw. "Get real! It's paste, lady!"

"Thank you." Laura picked up the diamond and Didi followed her toward the door.

"Hey, hey, hey! Don't go away mad! Hold up a sec!"

Laura paused. The fat man with the thin, wrinkled prune of a face motioned her back with a ring-studded paw. "Come on, let's dicker a little bit."

"I don't have time for that."

"What, you're in a hurry?" He frowned, looking at her bandaged hand. "I think you're bleedin', lady."

Spots of red had seeped through the bandages. Laura said, "I cut myself." She drew up her spine straight and tall and walked back to the counter. "My husband paid over three thousand dollars for this diamond eight years ago. I've got the certification. I know it's not paste, so don't give me that crap."

"Yeah?" He grinned. No horse had bigger or yellower teeth. "So let's see the certification, then."

Laura didn't move. She didn't speak either.

"Uh-huh. So let's see a driver's license."

"My purse was stolen," Laura said.

"Oh, yeah!" He nodded, drumming his fingers on the countertop. "Where'd you steal the rock from, ladies?"

"Let's go," Didi urged.

"You're undercover cops, right?" the man asked. "Tryin' to sting my ass?" He snorted. "Yeah, I can smell cops a mile off! Comin' in here with a phony southern accent! You people won't stop roustin' me, will you?"

"Let's go." Didi grasped Laura's arm.

She almost turned away. Almost. But her hand was killing her and they were down to the last of their cash, a gloomier day she'd never seen, and Mary Terror was out there somewhere with David. She felt her frayed temper snap, and the next thing she felt was her hand reaching up under her sweater. She grasped the handle of the automatic in the waistband of her jeans, and she brought the gun up and pointed it at the man's horse teeth.

"I'll take a thousand dollars for my diamond," Laura said. "No dickering."

The man's grin hung by a lip.

"Oh God!" Didi wailed. "Don't kill him like you did that other one, Bonnie! Don't blow the brains out of his head!"

The man trembled and lifted his arms. He had on cuff links that looked like little gold nuggets.

"Open the cash register," Laura told him. "You just bought a diamond."

He hustled to obey, and when the register was open he started counting out the cash. "Bonnie gets crazy sometimes," Didi said as she went to the front door and turned over the WE'RE OPEN sign to SORRY WE'RE CLOSED. There was nobody on the street anywhere, the wind and the snow keeping saner people indoors. "She shot a guy through the head in Nebraska yesterday. Trigger crazy is what she is."

"You want big bills?" the man gasped. "You want hundreds?"

"Whatever," Didi answered. "Come on, hurry it up!"

"I've only… I've only got… got six hundred dollars in the register. Got some more in the safe. Back there." He nodded toward a door with an OFFICE sign on it.

"Six hundred's enough," Didi said. "Take the money, Bonnie. Got to get us to Michigan, doesn't it?" She took the automatic from Laura as Didi pocketed the cash. "Anybody else in here?"

"Wanda Jane's in the back. She's the bookkeeper."

"Okay, go on through that door real nice and slow."

The man started to walk, but Laura said, "Wait. Take the diamond. You bought it." Didi flashed her a glance of disapproval, and the scared clerk just stood there not knowing what to do. "Take it," Laura said, and at last he did.

In the office, a wizened woman with butch-cut gray hair was smoking a cigarette, sitting in a smoke haze and talking on the telephone as she watched a soap opera on a portable TV. Didi didn't have to speak; the man's face and the pistol did all the talking. Wanda Jane croaked, "Jumpin' Jesus! Hal, I think we're bein' -" Didi put her hand down on the phone's prongs, cutting the connection.

"Wanda Jane, you keep your mouth shut," Didi ordered. "You two strip naked."

"The hell I will!" Wanda Jane thundered, her face reddening to the roots of her hair.

"They've already killed somebody!" the clerk said. "They're both crazy!" He was already unbuttoning his shirt. When he unbuckled his belt, his huge paunch flopped out like the nose of the Goodyear blimp.

Didi hurried them up. In a couple of minutes they were both nude and lying on their bellies on the concrete floor, and an uglier two moons Laura had never been so unfortunate to see. Didi tore the phone out of the wall and scooped their clothes up. "You lie here for ten minutes. Bobby's watching the front door. If you come out before ten minutes are up, you're dead meat, because Bobby's even crazier than Bonnie. Hear me?"

Wanda Jane grunted like a bullfrog. The man with horse teeth gripped his new diamond in his fist and bleated, "Yeah, we hear you! Just don't kill us, okay?"

"See you next time we come through," Didi promised, and she pushed Laura out of the office in front of her.

Outside, Didi dumped the clothes in a trash can. Then she and Laura ran to the Cutlass, which was parked down the street a few doors from the pawnshop, and Didi took the wheel again. In five minutes they were heading back toward I-80, and in ten minutes they were on their way west again, six hundred dollars richer and minus a diamond that had become to Laura only a dead weight.

Didi kept checking the rearview mirror. No flashing lights, no sirens. Yet the speedometer's needle showed a little over sixty, and Didi left it there. "From shoplifting to armed robbery in less than a day," Didi said, and she couldn't hold back a wicked grin. "You're a natural."

"A natural what?"

"Outlaw."

"I didn't steal anything. I left him the diamond."

"That's right, you did. But didn't it feel good, making him look at that gun and bust a gut?"

Laura watched the wipers fight the spits of snow. It had been thrilling, in a way. It had been so alien to her normal sense of propriety that it had seemed like someone else holding the gun, wearing her skin, and speaking in her voice. She wondered what Doug might think of it, or her mother and father. One thing she realized was true, and it filled her with gritty pride: she might not be an outlaw, but she was a survivor. " 'Strip naked,'" she said, and she gave a hard note of laughter. "How'd you think of that?"

"Just buying time. I couldn't think of any other way to keep them in that office for a while."

"Why'd you keep calling me Bonnie? And you said we were on our way to Michigan?"

Didi shrugged. "Pigs'll be looking for two women on their way to Michigan. One of them has a southern accent and is named Bonnie. They may be traveling with a male accomplice named Bobby. Anyway, the pigs'll look in the opposite direction from where we're going. They won't know what to make of somebody trading a three-thousand-dollar diamond for six hundred bucks at gunpoint." She smiled faintly. "Did you hear what I said? 'Pigs.' I haven't said that and meant it in a long time." Her laughter bubbled up, too. "Did you see Wanda Jane's face when I told them to strip? I thought she was going to drop a fig!"

"And when that guy's belly came out I thought it was going to flop right to the floor! I thought Des Moines was about to have an earthquake!"

"Guy needed a girdle! Hell, he couldn't find a girdle big enough!"

They were both laughing, the laughter taking some of the edge off what they'd just done. As Laura laughed, she forgot for a precious moment the pain in her hand and in her heart, and that was mercy indeed.

"He needed a whale girdle!" Didi went on. "And did you see the butts on those two!"

"Butt and Jeff!" Laura said, tears in her eyes.

"The Honeymooners!"

"Two moons over Des Moines!"

"I swear to God, I've seen bowls of Jell-O with better -" Muscle tone, she was about to say, but she did not because of the flashing blue light that had suddenly appeared in the rear windshield. The scream of a siren came into the car, and the hair stood up on the back of Laura's neck.

"Christ!" Didi shouted as she jerked the Cutlass over into the right lane. The patrol car was roaring up in the left lane, and Didi's heart hammered as she waited for it to swerve on their tail. But it kept going, sweeping past them in a siren blare and dazzling blue lights, and it sped away into the murk of swirling sleet and snow.

Neither woman could speak. Didi's hands had clamped into claws around the steering wheel, her eyes wide with shock, and Laura sat there with her stomach cramping and her bandaged hand pressed against her chest.

Four miles farther west, they passed a car that had skidded off the highway into the guardrail. The patrol car was parked nearby, the Smokey talking to a young man in a sweatshirt with SKI WYOMING across the front. Traffic had slowed, the afternoon had darkened to a plum violet, and the pavement glistened. Didi touched her window. "Getting colder," she said. The Cutlass was a laboring, gas-guzzling beast, but its heater was first rate. She cut their speed back to fifty-five, grainy snow flying before the headlights.

"I can drive if you want to take a nap," Laura offered.

"No, I'm fine. Let your hand rest. How're you doing?"

"Okay. Hurting some."

"If you want to stop somewhere, let me know."

Laura shook her head. "No. I want to keep going."

"Six hundred dollars would buy us airline tickets," Didi said. "We could catch a flight to San Francisco from Omaha and rent a car to Freestone."

"We couldn't rent a car without a driver's license. Anyway, we'd have to give up the gun to board a plane."

Didi drove on a few more miles before she spoke again, bringing up a subject that had been needling her since the incident at the lumberyard. "What good is a gun going to be, anyway? I mean… how are you going to get David back, Laura? Mary's not going to give him up. Shell die first. Even with a gun, how're you going to get David back alive?" She emphasized the last word.

"I don't know," Laura answered.

"If Mary finds Jack Gardiner… well, who knows what she'll do? Who knows what he'll do? If she shows up at his door after all these years, he might flip out." She glanced quickly at the other woman and then away, because the pain had crept back onto Laura's face and latched there in the lines. "Jack was a dangerous man. He could talk other people into doing his killing for him, but he did his share of murders, too. He was the mind behind the Storm Front. The whole thing was his idea."

"And you really think that's him? In Freestone?"

"I think that's him in the photo, yeah. Whether he's in Freestone now or not, I don't know. But when Mary gets to him with David as some kind of a… love offering, God only knows how he'll react."

"So we've got to find Jack Gardiner first," Laura said.

"There's no telling how far Mary is ahead of us. She'll get to Freestone before us if we don't go by plane."

"She can't be that far ahead. She's hurt, too, maybe worse than I am. The weather's going to slow her down. If she gets off the interstate, it'll just slow her down more."

"Okay," Didi said. "Even if we do find Jack first, what then?"

"We wait for Mary. She'll give the baby to Jack. That's why she's going to Freestone." Laura gently touched her bandaged hand. It was hot enough to sizzle, and throbbed with a deep, agonizing pulse. She would have to stand the pain, because she had no choice. "When my baby is out of Mary's hands… that's why I might need the gun."

"You're not a killer. You're tough as old leather, yeah. But not a killer."

"I'll need the gun to hold Mary for the police," Laura told her.

There was a long silence. The Cutlass's tires hummed. "I don't think Jack would like that," Didi said. "Whatever identity he's built for himself, he's not going to let you call the police on Mary. And once you get David back… I'm not sure I can let you do that either."

"I understand," Laura said. She'd already thought about this, and her thoughts had led her to this destination. "I was hoping we could work something out."

"Right. Like a presidential pardon?"

"More like a plane ticket to either Canada or Mexico."

"Oh boy!" Didi smiled bitterly. "Nothing like starting life over in a foreign country with zilch money and a K-Mart sweater!"

"I could send you some money to help you get settled."

"I'm an American! Get it? I live in America!"

Laura didn't know what else to say. There was nothing else, really. Didi had started her journey to this point a long time ago, when she'd cast her lot with Jack Gardiner and the Storm Front. "Damn," Didi said quietly. She was thinking of a future in which the fear of someone coming up behind her suffocated the days and haunted the nights, and everywhere she walked she carried a target on her back. But there were a lot of islands in the waterways of Canada, she thought. A lot of places where the mail came in by seaplane and your closest neighbor lived ten miles away. "Would you buy me a kiln?" she asked. "For my pottery?"

"Yes."

"That's important to me, to do my pottery. Canada's a pretty country. It would be inspiring, wouldn't it?" Didi nodded, answering her own query. "I could be an expatriate. That sounds better than exile, don't you think?"

Laura agreed that it did.

The Cutlass passed from Iowa into Nebraska, following I-80 as it snaked around Omaha and on across the flat, white-frosted plains. Laura closed her eyes and rested as best she could, with the wipers scraping across the windshield and the tires a dull roar.

Thursday's child, she thought.

Thursday's child has far to go.

She remembered one of the nurses saying that, at David's birth.

And she hadn't thought of this before, but it came to her between the scrape and the roar: she'd been born on a Thursday, too.

Far to go, she thought. She'd come a long way, but the most dangerous distance still lay ahead. Somewhere on that dark horizon, Mary Terror was traveling with David, getting closer to California with the passing of every mile. Behind Laura's eyes, she saw David lying in a pool of blood, his skull shattered by a bullet, and she shoved the image away before it took root. Far to go. Far to go. Into the golden West, dark as a tomb.

3: He Knows

Three hours ahead of the Cutlass, the snow was whirling before Mary's headlights. It was coming down fast and heavy now from the solid night, a blowing snow that the wipers were straining to clear. Every so often a gust of wind would broadside the Cherokee and the wheel would shudder in Mary's hands. She could feel the tires wanting to slew on the slick interstate, and around her the other traffic – which had thinned out dramatically since nightfall – had slowed to half the posted speed.

"We're going to be fine," she told Drummer. "Don't you worry, Mama'll take care of her sweet baby." But the truth was that the ants of fear were crawling under her skin, and she'd passed two pileups since she'd left a McDonald's in North Platte, Nebraska, twenty minutes before. This kind of driving shredded the nerves and shot the eyes, but the interstate was still clear and Mary didn't want to stop until she had to. Drummer had been fed and changed at the McDonald's, and he was getting sleepy. Mary's injured leg was numb from driving, but the pain in her forearm wound woke up occasionally and bit her hard and deep just to let her know who was really in charge. She felt feverish, too, her face moist and swollen with heat. She had to go on, as far as she could tonight, before her suffering body gave out on her.

"Let's sing," Mary said. "'Age of Aquarius,'" she decided. "The Fifth Dimension, remember?" But of course Drummer did not. She began to sing the song, in a voice that might have been pleasant in her youth, but was now harsh and incapable of carrying a tune. " 'If You're Going to San Francisco,'" she said: another song title, but she couldn't recall the artist's name. She began to sing that, too, but she knew only the part about going to San Francisco with flowers in your hair, so she sang that over and over a few times and then let it go.

The snow blew against the windshield and the Cherokee trembled. The flakes hit the glass and stuck there, large and intricate like Swiss lace, for a few seconds before the wipers could plow them aside and the next ones came.

"'Hot Fun in the Summertime,'" Mary said. "Sly and the Family Stone." Except she didn't know the words to it, all she could do was hum the tune. '"Marrakesh Express.' Crosby, Stills, and Nash." She knew almost all of that one; it had been one of Lord Jack's favorites.

" 'Light My Fire,'" the man in the backseat said in a voice like velvet and leather.

Mary looked into the rearview mirror and saw his face and part of her own. Her skin was glistening with fever sweat. His was white, like carved ice.

" 'Light My Fire,'" God repeated. His dark hair was a thick mane, his face sculpted with shadows. "Sing it with me."

She was shivering. The heater was blasting, she was full of heat, but she was shivering. God looked just like he did when she'd seen him up close in Hollywood. She smelled the phantom aromas of pot and strawberry incense, the combination like an exotic and lost perfume.

He began to sing, there in the back of the Cherokee, as the snow flailed down and Mary Terror gripped the wheel.

She listened to his half moan, half snarl, and after a while she joined him. They sang "Light My Fire" together, his voice tough and vibrant, hers searching for the lost chord. And they were on the part about setting the night on fire when Mary saw red flames erupt in the windshield. Not flames, no: brake lights. A truck, its driver stomping on the brakes just in front of her.

She wrenched the wheel to the right and felt the tires defy her. The Cherokee was sliding into the rear of a tractor-trailer rig. She made a choked noise as God sang on. And then the Cherokee lurched as the tires found traction; the vehicle went off onto the right shoulder and missed slamming into the truck by about two feet. Maybe she had screamed; she didn't know, but Drummer was awake and crying shrilly. '

Mary put the emergency brake on, picked up Drummer, and hugged him against her. The song had stopped. God was no longer in the backseat; he had abandoned her. The truck was moving on, and a hundred yards ahead blue lights spun and figures stood in the sweeping snow. It was another wreck, two cars jammed together like mating roaches. "It's all right," Mary said as she rocked the child. "It's all right, shhhhhh." He wouldn't stop, and now he was wailing and hiccuping at the same time. "Shhhhh, shhhhhh," she whispered. She was burning up, her leg was hurting again, and her nerves were raw. He kept crying, his face squeezed with anger. "SHUT UP!" Mary shouted. "SHUT UP, I SAID!" She shook him, trying to rattle his crybox loose. His breath snagged on a series of hiccups, his mouth open but nothing coming out. Mary felt a jolt of panic, and she pressed Drummer against her shoulder and thumped his back. "Breathe!" she said. "Breathe! Breathe, damn you!"

He shuddered, pulling the air into his lungs, and then he let out a holler that said he was through taking shit.

"Oh, I love you, I love you so much!" Mary told him as she rocked him and tried to quiet him down. What if he'd strangled to death just then? What if he hadn't been able to breathe and he'd died right here? What good would a lump of dead baby be for Jack? "Oh Mama loves her baby, her sweet sweet Drummer, yes she does," Mary crooned, and after a few minutes Drummer's tantrum subsided and his crying ceased. "Good baby. Good baby Drummer." She found the pacifier he'd spat out and stuck it back in his mouth. Then she laid him on the floorboard again, snuggled deep in a dead man's parka, and she got out of the Cherokee and stood in the falling snow trying to cool her fever.

She limped away a distance, picked up a handful of snow, and rubbed it over her face. The air was wet and heavy, the snowflakes whirling down from a heaven as dark as stone. She stood watching other cars, vans, and trucks go past, heading west. The cold made her head clear and sharpened her senses. She could go on. She had to go on.

Jack was waiting for her, and when they were joined again life would be incense and peppermints.

Back behind the wheel, Mary repeated the three names over and over again as the night went on and the miles clicked away. "Hudley… Cavanaugh… Walker… Hudley…"

"Cavanaugh… Walker," God said, returned to the Cherokee's backseat.

He came and went, at his whim. There were no chains on God. Sometimes Mary looked back at him and thought he favored Jack, other times she thought there had never been another face like his and there never would be again. "Do you remember me?" she asked him. "I saw you once." But he didn't answer, and when she glanced in the rearview mirror again the backseat was empty.

The snow was getting heavier, the wind rocking the Cherokee like a cradle. The land changed from flat to rolling, a preview of Wyoming. Mary stopped at a gas station near Kimball, twenty-five miles east of the Wyoming state line, and she filled the Cherokee's tank and bought a pack of glazed doughnuts and black coffee in a plastic cup. The brassy-haired woman behind the counter told her she ought to get off the interstate, that the weather was going to get worse before it got better, and there was a Holiday Inn a couple of miles north. Mary thanked her for the advice, paid what she owed, and pulled out.

She crossed the Wyoming line, and the land began to rise toward the Rocky Mountains. The lights of Cheyenne emerged from the snow-torn dark, then disappeared in Mary's rearview mirror as she drove on. The wind's force had increased, shrieking around the Cherokee and shaking it like an infant with a rattle. The wiper blades were losing their combat with the snow, the headlights showing cones of whirling white. Fever sweat glistened on Mary's face, and from the backseat the voice of God urged her on. Forty miles past Cheyenne, Laramie went past like a white dream, and the Cherokee's tires began to slip as I-80 rose on its rugged ascent between mountain ranges.

Another twenty miles beyond Laramie, into the teeth of the wind, and Mary suddenly realized there were no more vehicles coming from the west. She was alone on the highway. An abandoned tractor-trailer truck, its emergency lights flashing, came out of the snow on her right, its back freighted with frost. The highway's ascent was steeper now, the Cherokee's engine lugging. She felt the wheels slide on patches of ice, the wind savage as it howled across the mountain peaks. The wiper blades were getting loaded down, the windshield as white as a cataract. She had to fight the wheel from side to side as the wind beat at the Cherokee, and she passed two more abandoned cars that had slammed together and skidded off onto the median. Yellow emergency lights were flashing ahead of her again, and in another moment she could make out the big blinking sign that stood on the interstate: STOP ROAD CLOSED. A highway patrol car was parked nearby, its lights spinning in the murk of snowflakes. As Mary slowed the Cherokee, two troopers in heavy overcoats began to wave red flashlights at her, flagging her down. She stopped, rolled her window down, and the cold that swept in iced her lungs and overpowered the heater in four seconds. Both the troopers wore ski masks and caps with earflaps, and the one who stepped up to her window to speak to her shouted, "Can't go any farther, ma'am! I-80's closed between here and Creston!"

"I have to get through!" Her lips were already freezing, the air's temperature fallen below zero and snowflakes clinging to her eyebrows.

"No, ma'am! Not tonight! Highway's iced up over the mountains!" He aimed his flashlight to Mary's right. "You'll have to pull off here!"

She looked where the light was pointed, and saw a sign that said EXIT 272. Below the exit number were MCFADDEN and ROCK RIVER. A snowplow was shoving a mound of white off the exit road.

"The Silver Cloud Inn's about two miles toward McFadden!" the trooper went on. "That's where we're sending everybody!"

"I can't stop! I've got to keep going!"

"We've had three fatalities on that stretch of highway since this storm started, ma'am, and it's not going to get any better before daylight! You're not in a big enough hurry to get yourself killed!"

Mary looked at Drummer, swaddled in the parka. Again the question came to her what good would a lump of dead baby be for Jack? Her leg was hurting her, she was tired and it had been a long day. It was time to rest until the storm had passed. "All right!" she told the trooper. "I'll pull off!"

"Just follow the signs!" he said, and he waved her toward the exit with his flashlight.

Mary trailed the snowplow for a few hundred yards and then eased the Cherokee around it. Her headlights caught a sign that said SILVER CLOUD INN NEXT LEFT. SEE THE WORLD-FAMOUS DINOSAUR GARDENS! She took the left turn when it came, and had to fight the Cherokee uphill on a curving road bordered with dense, snow-weighted woods. The tires moaned as they lost their grip, and the Cherokee skidded violently to the right and careened off the guardrail before rubber found pavement again. Mary kept pushing the Cherokee onward, and around the next curve she saw abandoned cars on the sides of the road. Maybe a hundred yards farther, and the Cherokee's tires lost their purchase again, this time swinging the vehicle toward the left and slamming into a four-foot-high snowbank. The engine rattled and died with an exhausted moan, and the wind's shriek reigned over all. Mary started the engine again, backed away from the snowbank, and tried to force the Cherokee on, but the tires slipped and slid and she realized the rest of the way would have to be on foot. She turned onto the left shoulder, cut the engine, and pulled up the emergency brake. Then she buttoned up her corduroy coat to her neck, zipped Drummer securely in the parka, and put her bag with its cache of baby supplies and guns over her shoulder. She picked Drummer up, opened her door, and stepped out into the storm.

The cold overpowered her fever as it had the Cherokee's heater. It was a solid thing, hard as iron, and it locked around her and turned every movement into an agony of slow motion. But the wind was fast and loud, and the snow-covered trees thrashed in white torment. She limped along the left lane, her arms folded around the infant and snow slashing into her face like bits of razor blade. She felt wet heat on her thigh wound: new blood oozing up through the broken crust, like lava seething from a volcanic core.

The road leveled off. The woods gave way to mounds of blowing snow, and Mary could see the yellow lights of a long, ranch-house-type building ahead. Something gargantuan was suddenly towering above Mary and the baby, its reptilian head agrin with jagged teeth. Another massive form with armor plates on its back stood nearby, the snow up to its snout. The world-famous Dinosaur Gardens, Mary realized as she limped between the concrete monsters. A third huge beast reared up from the snow on her left, an alligator's head on a hippo's body. On her right what looked like a tank with glass eyes and concrete horns stood as if about to charge the rearing statue. Between her and the Silver Cloud Inn was a prehistoric landscape, dozens of dinosaurs frozen on the snowfield. She limped onward, carrying her own history. Around her stood fourteen-foot-tall thunder lizards and meat eaters, their sculpted heads white with snow and bearded with icicles, snow wedged into the cracks of their skins. The wind roared like a great monstrous voice, a memory of dinosaur song, and it almost knocked Mary to her knees amid the beasts.

Headlights hit her. An enclosed vehicle on treads was coming toward her, snow whirling up in its wake. When it reached her, a man in a cowboy hat and a long brown coat got out and grasped her shoulder, guiding her around to the passenger side. "Anybody else behind you?" he shouted into her ear, and she shook her head.

When they were inside the snow buggy, the heater on full blast, the man picked up a CB radio's microphone and said, "Found the new arrivals, Jody. Takin' 'em in."

"That's a big ten-four," a man's voice answered through crackling static. Mary figured it was one of the pigs down on I-80. Then the cowboy turned the buggy around and started driving toward the inn, and he said, "Get you good and warm in just a few minutes, ma'am."

The Silver Cloud Inn was made of bleached stones and had a huge pair of antlers over the front door. The cowboy pulled the buggy up to the steps, and Mary got out with Drummer pressed against her. Then the cowboy came around and started to take her shoulder bag, but Mary pulled back and said, "I've got it," and he opened the inn's door for her. Inside, there was a large lobby with oak beams and a stone fireplace that a car could have parked in. The fire was popping sparks, the lobby sweet with the smell of woodsmoke and delicious warmth. Twenty or more people of all ages and descriptions were on cots or in sleeping bags around the fireplace, and another dozen or so were talking or playing cards. Their attention was drawn to Mary and the baby for a few seconds, and then they went back to what they were doing.

"Lord, what a night! Storm's a screamer, for sure!" The cowboy took off his hat, revealing thinning white hair and a braided ponytail with a band around it made of multicolored Indian beads. He had a grizzled, heavily lined face and bright blue eyes beneath white brows. "Rachel, let's get this lady some hot coffee!"

A gray-haired, plump Indian woman in a red sweater and bluejeans began to draw coffee from a metal dispenser into a plastic cup. On the table beside the coffeemaker were a few sandwiches, some cheese, fruit, and slices of poundcake. "Name's Sam Jiles," the cowboy said. "Welcome to the Silver Cloud Inn. I'm sorry you couldn't see it on a better day."

"That's all right. I'm glad to be here."

"Rooms were all gone around seven o'clock. Cots ran out around nine, but we might have a sleepin' bag left. You travelin' alone with your baby?"

"Yes. Going to California." She felt him waiting for more. "To meet my husband," she added.

"Bad night to be on the road, I say." Jiles walked to the registration desk, where another CB radio was set up. "Excuse me just a minute." He picked up the mike. "Silver Cloud to Big Smokey, come on back, Smokey." The static crackled and hissed, and the pig's voice answered, "Big Smokey. You got an ear, Silver Cloud."

Rachel brought Mary the coffee, and she looked at Drummer in the parka's folds. "Oh, that's a new one!" she said, her eyes large and dark brown. "Boy or girl?"

"Boy."

"What's his name?"

"Brought 'em in real fine, Jody," Sam Jiles was saying over the radio. "You fellas want me to bring you down some eats?"

"I hear you talkin', Sam. We're stuck here till I-80's open."

"Okay, bring you down some grub and coffee pronto."

"Does he have a name yet?"

Mary blinked, looking into the Indian woman's eyes. What was going through her head was the thought that she was trapped with strangers at her back and two pigs guarding the only way out. "David," she said, and the name was foul in her mouth, but Drummer was his real and secret name, not to be shared with everyone.

"That's a nice, strong name. I'm Rachel Jiles."

"I'm… Mary Brown." It had come from the color of the woman's eyes.

"We have some food left." Rachel motioned toward the table. "Ham and cheese sandwiches. Some beef stew there, too." She nodded at bowls and a clay pot. "Help yourself."

"Thanks, I will." Mary limped over to the table, and Rachel stayed with her.

"Did you hurt your leg?" Rachel asked.

"No, it's an old injury. Broken ankle didn't heal right." Drummer began to cry at that moment, as if shouting to the world that Mary Terror was lying. She rocked him and cooed to him, but his crying soared up and up with increasing power. Rachel suddenly held out her stocky arms and said, "I've had three boys. Maybe I can try it?"

What would it hurt? Besides, the pain in Mary's leg was so bad it was sapping her strength. She handed Drummer over and fed herself while Rachel rocked him and sang softly in a language Mary didn't understand. Drummer's crying began to quiet, his head cocked to one side as if listening to the woman's singing. In about two minutes he had ceased crying altogether, and Rachel sang and smiled, her round face almost radiant with care for a stranger's child.

Sam Jiles made food packages for the two troopers, loading up sandwiches, fruit, and cake into two sacks and adding cups and a thermos of coffee. He asked one of the men to go with him in the tracked snow buggy, and he kissed Rachel on the cheek and said he'd be back quicker than a skillet sizzles grease. Then he and his companion left the Silver Cloud, a gust of freezing wind and snow coming through the front door with their departure.

Rachel seemed to enjoy cradling Drummer, so Mary let her hold the baby while she ate and drank her fill. She limped over to the fireplace to warm herself, threading a path through the other people, and she took off her gloves and offered her palms to the flames. Her fever had returned, throbbing with a hot pulse at her temples, and she couldn't stay near the fire very long. She glanced at the faces around her, judging them: predominant in the mix were middle-aged people, but there was a couple who might have been in their sixties and two young couples who had the tanned, fit look of ardent skiers. She moved away from the hearth, back toward where Rachel stood with Drummer, and that was when she felt someone watching her.

Mary looked to her right, and found a young man sitting against the wall, his legs crossed beneath him. He had a thin, hawk-nosed face and sandy-brown hair that spilled down over his shoulders, and he wore black horn-rimmed glasses, faded jeans with patches on the knees, and a dark blue turtleneck sweater. Beside him was a battered army jacket and a rolled-up sleeping bag. He was watching her intently with deep-socketed eyes the color of ashes. His stare didn't waver as she returned it, and then he frowned slightly and began to examine his fingernails.

She didn't like him. He made her nervous. She went back to Rachel and took her child. Rachel said, "He's sure a good baby! All three of my boys used to holler like screech owls when they were as little as him. How old is he?"

"He was born on…" She didn't know the exact date. "The third of February," she said, which was when she'd taken him from the hospital.

"Do you have any other children?"

"No, just Drum -" Mary smiled. "Just David." Her gaze skittered back to the young man. He was staring at her again. She felt fever sweat on her cheeks. What was that fucking hippie looking at?

"I'll see if I can find a sleeping bag for you," Rachel said. "We always keep a supply on hand for the campers." She went off across the lobby and through another door, and Mary found a place to sit on the floor away from everyone else.

She kissed Drummer's forehead and crooned softly to him. His skin was cool against her lips. "Going to California, yes we are. Going to California, Mama and her sweet baby." She realized with a start that there were two spots of blood, each about the size of a quarter, on the thigh of her jeans. The blood was seeping up through her makeshift bandage. She set Drummer aside, took off her coat, and laid it across her lap.

She looked up, and saw the hippie watching her.

Mary pulled her shoulder bag, with its small Magnum automatic and the.38 from Rocky Road's gun cabinet, against her side.

"He knows."

The voice sent chill bumps shivering up her spine. It had been spoken from her left, and close to her ear. She turned her head. God was there, hunkered down beside her, his glacial face gaunt and his eyes dark with truth. He wore skin-tight black velvet and a gold chain with a crucifix on it. On his head was a floppy-brimmed black hat with a snake-skin band. It was the same outfit he'd worn when she'd seen him up close in Hollywood. Except for one thing: God wore a yellow Smiley Face button on his lapel. "He knows," the cruel mouth repeated in a whisper.

Mary Terror stared at the young hippie. He was looking at his fingernails again; he darted a glance at her, then shifted his position and studied the fire.

Or pretended to.

"Road's closed," God said. "Pigs at the roadblock. Your leg's busted open again. And that fucker knows. What'cha gonna do, Mary?"

She didn't answer. She couldn't.

She leaned her back against the wall and closed her eyes. She could feel him watching, but every time she opened her eyes she couldn't catch him at it. Rachel returned with a tattered but usable sleeping bag, and Mary spread it out like a mattress and laid on top of it instead of confining herself inside. She kept the shoulder bag's strap around her arm, its top zippered shut, and Drummer alternately drowsed and fretted beside her.

"He knows," she heard God whisper in her ear as she drifted toward sleep. His voice pulled her away from rest. She felt swollen with damp, pulsing heat, her thigh and forearm wounds heavy with crusted blood under the bandages. A firm touch to her thigh made searing pain travel from her hip to her knee, and the blood spots were growing.

"What'cha gonna do, Mary?" God asked, and she thought he might have laughed a little.

"Damn you," she rasped, and she pulled Drummer closer. It was the two of them against a hateful world.

The exhaustion won over pain and fear, at least for a while. Mary slept, Drummer sucked busily on his pacifier, and the young hippie scratched his chin and watched the woman and her infant.