Paul and Leona took the brick-fronted ranch house two lots down from Martin's house because it had a swimming pool. Martin and Winch wired a generator for them, then Winch fixed up the smaller house across the street for himself. The two children, Solomon and Missa, stayed with Martin and Catrin for the first two nights. The third day, Solomon asked if he and Missa could stay with Winch. Since they spent most of the day with him anyway, Catrin said they could, and the next day they were calling him Winch-Dad.

The first time they did it in front of Catrin, Winch blushed and said, "Hope you don't mind. Solomon asked me if I was his dad, and I said I would be if he wanted me to be. I should've asked you first."

"I think he made a fine choice," Catrin said.

Several days later, Martin had been spading a new section for the garden for half an hour, looked up, and saw Solomon and Missa standing near him, waiting to be recognized. Solomon had his hands in his pockets and Missa played with her ear. She was wearing a very wide-brimmed woman's hat that she had stuck some silk flowers and weeds into.

"Hi guys," Martin said, leaning on the shovel handle. "What have you got planned for the day?"

Missa began babbling something about Solomon having two daddies.

Martin looked to Solomon for another version of the question.

"Are you my daddy too?"

"I can be if you want me to be."

"Can I have two dads?"

"Of course you can."

"I think it's a fine idea," Catrin said, coming over and brushing the dirt off her hands.

"Me two dads?" Missa asked, looking troubled.

"If you want."

"Un-huh," she said, still pulling on her ear. "I do."

"Then you have two dads. Is Winch at home?"

Solomon said he was. Remembering the power of ritual, Martin pushed the blade of the shovel into the dirt and said, "Let's make this official."

He sent Solomon to bring Winch back, and when they returned, he and Catrin had got cleaned up and had five wine glasses set up on the table.

Martin poured apple juice into each glass, explaining, "We have an important moment here. Solomon and Missa were asking if they could have two dads, and I thought we should make this official."

Winch looked embarrassed.

Martin handed out the half glasses of juice to the children and then to the adults.

"From this moment forward-" (He raised his glass, as did Solomon and Missa, solemnly.) "-you have two fathers and one mother," and they all drank.

"You're a gentleman," Winch said to Martin.

"A thoughtful gentleman," Catrin added.

From that time on, the children wandered freely from house to house, accepting the three of them as parents, though it seemed to all of them that Missa had a special fondness for Winch, staying with him even when he began his first ragged practicing on his saxophone. Solomon would leave if he were there when Winch started- "It hurts my ears," he said and would spend his time playing with Isha and Mona. Martin noticed that one of the things Solomon enjoyed was looking through picture books of butterflies, birds, insects, or any other kind of animal. Sometimes he would run excitedly into the house and announce, "A monkey! I saw a monkey in the tree!" And then he would go through his books until he found a picture of the kind he saw.

One day, with Isha tagging along, Martin showed Solomon the small city zoo, all the empty cages. "The animals were kept here for people to see."

Solomon furrowed his small brow as he studied the name-plaques and looked at the pictures.

"Something wrong?" Martin asked him.

"Were the animals bad?"

"No, they were just regular animals."

Solomon stepped over the curbing and went inside one of the cages. "They kept them in jail," he said.

Martin wondered what connections he was putting together in there. "When everybody got sick, some people who thought the animals shouldn't be in jail anymore came and let them go. That's why we have monkeys and zebras in our neighborhood."

"If they weren't bad, they shouldn't have been in jail," Solomon said, squinting as he looked up at him.

"Seems that way to me. Come on, there's something else I want to show you."

On their way home, with Isha sitting quietly in the back seat, Martin drove him to the library. The first thing they both noticed was the smell of mildew in the air. He looked up, and sure enough, the roof had leaked. Water had poured in over the stacks of fiction and the damage was immense in that section. He didn't see that there was much he could do.

"Want to see the animal books?"

Solomon was enthralled and went through one after the other. While he picked out three thick ones to take home, Martin found several books on photoelectric cells he wanted to show Winch.

Martin picked out a few picture books for Missa and asked Solomon to read to him from one of the simpler ones.

Solomon moved his finger from word to word and read slowly, "The little... man sat on the...."

"Elephant's."

"...elephant's back and...."

"Shouted."

"...shouted to the birds, 'I am the... biggest little man in the world.'"

"Good deal," Martin said. "Now you and I can both read to Missa."

Solomon grinned and nodded. He liked that idea.

While they drove back home, Isha riding behind them, listening and sniffing the air, Martin decided it was time to see that both Missa and Solomon had some help with their reading. If they could read, they could learn anything they wanted.

Chapter 45.

Besides a few candy bars in a drawer the rats hadn't got to, all Diaz had found in Coolidge that he could use was five cans of Spam, a clean bed and some blankets that had been stored in plastic bags. Everything in the six houses around the gas station-grocery store was exactly as the occupants had left it, except for the rat damage, which was extensive. He ate, slept three hours, and went looking for a car that ran. Finding none, nor a motorcycle, he found a ten-speed bicycle with good tires, slung his skates over his shoulders with his antidepressants stashed in their toes, and took off.

Bloody stool, did he hate riding a bicycle. It made him feel so... clean cut.

In the next town, he had found a shiny 90 cc Honda motorcycle - a motorized weenie-cycle. It disgusted him more than the bicycle - but it was there and he was there and didn't want to be.

He got it running, got to Dodge City, the next town of any size, as fast as possible and stepped off it, letting it putt itself into a weed-choked ditch. Rather than ride one of those again, he'd skate. His feet would heal up, but his pride, never.

He spent the day peering through garage windows and after finding several possibilities, located a '64 Harley - O Yes! - with ape-hanger handlebars, aviator goggles dangling from the handgrip, stiff new leather saddlebags, and gleaming black paint, not a scratch on it. O Yes! O Yes, amen!

He put new oil in it, wiped it down and babied it to life.

He picked up Highway 54 and rode through a hundred miles of flat, hot, stinking burned stubble. There was nothing there, not even birds.

Wichita - burned.

Another hundred and fifty miles of ash-black landscape, and then into Missouri. It was greener there and the trees that grew between every field were already spreading beyond their bounds, creeping into the fields. In another fifty years, if the rains didn't fail, the entire state would be a forest of hickory, oak, and walnut.

In late evening, bugs stinging his face and smearing his goggles, he got thirsty. Off the side of the highway, there was a little town named El Dorado Springs, perhaps built around a natural spring, he was thinking. Eating all that Spam was making him thirstier than hell.

El Dorado Springs wasn't much of a place, a lot of the business had been boarded up before the epidemic, but down Main Street on the left was a sunken area, like a crater several blocks on a side, and in it there had been a park. Now, like everything else, it was overgrown with weeds that had jumped at their first chance to go wild.

In the bottom of the crater-park, there was a bandstand shell, a fish pool, still water-filled, amazingly enough, with a few fat koi skimming insects off the surface. And in an even more sunken area, down a flight of steps, sure enough, were two pipes, coming out of a whitewashed wall, where water briskly squirted out.

Though the water stank of minerals, Diaz splashed his face and cupped his hands and drank away his Spam-thirst.

When he stood up and turned around, there behind him stood a red-eyed bushy-bearded three-hundred pound individual in blue overalls who held a shotgun on him, the black opening of its barrel not six inches from Diaz's nose.

Chapter 46.

Martin and Winch leaned over the dining room table with several books of diagrams open in front of them.

"Sure," Winch said, thumbing through some pages, "I could hook something together. I don't think we'd get a lot of juice out of it. Sunlight's not what it used to be, but there'd probably be enough to run some low voltage lights, charge up your music and video players, stuff like that."

"Good enough. I've missed music a lot. I need to get some Beethoven and Beatles in my ears."

"Beatles?" Winch said. "Stones. I should be able to wire up something like this pretty easily. I'm having to go farther and farther looking for gasoline, and there's water in most of it. The day of the generator is rapidly coming to an end."

"The noise of those things gets on my nerves," Martin said. "I love it when they turn off."

"Leona had Paul get a big one. Theirs runs night and day. She's got Paul out every day draining gas tanks. She tried to get me to run a pipeline from that gas station up to their house. That's three-quarters of a mile. For gasoline? Uphill? What's with her?"

Leona had been inviting everyone to her house every time she had a new appliance hooked up. The last time they were all invited, she had a movie playing on the television, the houselights all on, a full-sized refrigerator humming away, although there wasn't much in it but ice cubes, and her special treat was to whip up some canned fruit in her blender and serve it with raisin toast, which she had toasted in her toaster. "We have an electric hot water heater too," she had said, "if anyone wants to come over and take a hot bath."

"I guess," Martin said, "she sees this as her fulfillment of the American Dream - grow up and put stuff in your new house. It was all snatched away just when she thought she was going to get her cut of the deal. Like that Stewart person I told you about, with the back seat of his car full of movies and electronics."

"There's something secretive about her," Winch said. "The way she changes the subject when it comes to her past."

"As though we would care."

One morning in August, while Catrin was in the garden picking beans and Martin was helping Solomon and Missa practice their writing, there was a polite knock on the front screen. Martin thought it was probably Winch or Leona and yelled, "Come on in."

He heard the door rattle open and then the closer hiss shut. From the rocking chair, Mona had sat up, ears erect, on full alert. "Hold on a minute, kids," Martin said and stood up and went to the entryway.

It was a new person, an Asian, very brown, and he backed up a step at Martin's approach. "Excuse me. I am Xeng." He pronounced it as tsing.

"I'm Martin." He held out his hand and Xeng shook it, making his half bow again. He had a wild shock of black hair and wore a Hawaiian shirt, black pants with many pockets, and plastic sandals. Solomon and Missa ran up behind Martin and stared around his legs. "How did you find us?"

"From Mr. Diaz."

"Diaz! Where did you meet him? How was he?"

"Meet him in Evanston, in Wyoming. Mr. Diaz was a very happy man. He give me your address. He said to look in the mailbox for where to find you."

Martin gathered everyone together and introduced him. Winch and Catrin spilled over with questions. Paul, as usual, said nothing. Leona, aside from asking if he was a Christian ("No, I am Buddhist, kind of," Xeng said pleasantly), was silent.

They found out that Xeng had come from Cambodia twelve years before, the single remaining member of his family. In Cambodia, he had been an herbalist, and in Evanston, he had worked for a veterinarian, hoping to become one himself some day, although he knew his chances, at the age of thirty-eight, were small.

Martin asked Xeng if he'd like to continue his medical education and become the community's doctor.

"For people?" Xeng asked, amazed. "I could never do that."

"We've been lucky, but sooner or later, we're going to need a doctor to fix a broken arm or leg. It can't be that different. The rest of us wouldn't know the first thing to do."

Catrin was nodding. "He's right, Xeng. None of the rest of us know anything about medicine. When it comes to setting bones and stitching up wounds, what's the difference between a dog and a person?"

"Dog complains less," Xeng said.

Winch laughed and put his hand on Xeng's shoulder. "We'll try not to whine. Take the job."

Xeng nodded but he looked nervous. "I will take the job, but...."

Without warning, Solomon bolted from the room.

Xeng said, "The boy is afraid of me already."

"What's Solomon up to?" Catrin asked Martin.