The Dead Town

Chapter 50

Frost on foot, urgently seeking transportation, was not sure where he would go when he had wheels. If Chief Rafael Jarmillo, out there bringing a hard new kind of law to this hellish town, was not the real Jarmillo, if the real Jarmillo and his family had been ground up like Dagget, then roads out of Rainbow Falls were probably blockaded. This was the War of the Worlds or something like it, and restricting the movement of people in a captured town was always a priority in a war. To be seen approaching the roadblock and then turning away from it would invite pursuit. Frost wanted to avoid pursuit. After what he had seen, he didn’t think he’d survive being chased by whatever the things were that pretended to be local cops.

As he prowled this residential neighborhood, wading along snow-mantled sidewalks, drawing steadily closer to the business district, he saw shadows moving behind drawn curtains in some houses, and he wondered what might be casting them. He definitely wasn’t going to indulge his curiosity by ringing a doorbell or two. At a few houses, he saw faces at windows, people seeming to study the night, but he kept moving because maybe they weren’t people any more than the brunette from the cocoon had been the beauty queen that she first appeared to be.

A car turned the corner a block away, and as its headlights swung in his direction, Frost crouched on the sidewalk beside a Lexus SUV. Maybe the driver of the approaching vehicle was someone coming home from shopping or from dining out, human and trustworthy. But if the police were not really police, and if they were patrolling with the determination to limit citizens’ ability to move freely about, they might be assisted by others of their kind driving ordinary vehicles instead of marked squad cars, on the lookout for pedestrians and unauthorized motorists. Under the grumble of the car’s engine, Frost heard the muted clinking of snow chains as it cruised past without slowing.

Driving might make him a more obvious target than if he remained on foot, but he continued to seek transportation. Instead of cruising around at random, he would drive directly to some parking spot where he could keep a watch on all approaches, yet where the crystallized exhaust of the idling engine would not attract attention, so that he could stay warm and gain time to think. Perhaps in the last row of for-sale vehicles in a closed car dealership, far back from passing traffic in the street. Or the big supermarket on Ursa Avenue. It would be closed now, the lot deserted, and a dark corner there might be just the place.

When he found the old Chevy — winter tires but no snow chains — in front of a house in the next block, he tried the driver’s door. He dared to think that he might have some luck left, after all, when the car proved not to be locked. He had a penlight and a multifunction penknife, but luck was indeed with him; he didn’t need to hot-wire the Chevy when he found the keys under the floor mat.

In spite of the cold, the car started at once. The engine sounded tuned and well maintained. He boldly switched on headlights, popped the hand brake, and shifted into drive, half expecting to hear a shout and see the angry owner rushing down the front-porch steps. But he pulled into the street and drove away without a protest being raised.

The vintage car needed time to warm up before the heater would work. As he drove, Frost anticipated the first wash of hot air with no less relish than he had ever looked forward to a filet-mignon dinner — or to sex, for that matter. Earlier, he’d been daydreaming of a time fifteen or twenty years ahead, when he might retire on some tropical shore or in a desert resort where they didn’t sell gloves or winter coats because no one ever needed them. Now he dared only think ahead fifteen or twenty minutes, and his goal was simple survival.

Of the choices available to him, the supermarket parking lot was the closest, and he remained watchful street after street, leery of an encounter with a patrol car. As the heat at last breathed from the vents, he realized that the Chevy offered more than mobility and heat. He turned on the radio — and discovered that the alien invasion was not as secret as he feared it might be and that it wasn’t an alien invasion.