It was around 7:00 PM when they pulled into the driveway, and from the thick overcast a light rain had begun to fall. Around the rambling house, Curtiz had his Hispanics and Asians clipping the shrubs and pulling weeds. Their clothes were dark from the rain.

The woman had stopped moaning when Martin had stopped the car, but she hadn't moved from her upright fetal position. When they pulled her out, her hair was stuck to her face and arms in jagged streaks.

"What's her name?" Curtiz asked.

"She hasn't talked," Ryan said.

"Ah. I see. Silent type. And a good haul of weapons." He picked up one of the automatic shotguns. "Very good. Very nice. We'll have to send you boys up to Sacramento and see if you can have some luck there."

"I don't think Sacramento will burn as easily as San Francisco," Martin said.

"Probably not," Curtiz said, nonplussed. "Buildings not as close together." He was looking at the woman again. "But all cities will burn, eventually."

It occurred to Martin that he was probably right - they would burn from lightning, if nothing else, and no one would be around to put the fires out. Ash would fertilize the soil and weeds and trees would grow out of the foundations of every great building. Vines would one day twine through the hulks of melted mainframes.

"Martin, go inside and see what you can fix up for dinner." Curtiz rubbed his hands together. He radiated good humor. Big guns and a mute woman had lifted his spirits. "We're having our first dinner party tonight. Dinner for ten. See if you can make it good." He was the happiest Martin had seen him.

"I've never fixed dinner for more than two people."

"I'll send in one of the rice-eaters to help you out," he answered absently. He was still looking in at either the weapons or the woman, Martin wasn't sure, thoughtfully smoothing his thin mustache with one finger as he tapped his teeth together inside his closed mouth. "What are you waiting for?" he said without looking away from the inside of the van.

"I've had a long day. Can I see Max first?"

"No. He'll be at dinner. If you can get everything ready by eight-thirty."

When Martin opened the kitchen door, he saw a chaos of dirty pans, dishes, wrappers, food boxes, and colorfully molding food. The air had a warm rotten smell. Outside the window, several of the men worked on one of the Land Rovers, racing the engine, holding it at high revs for a quarter of a minute and then backing slowly off. It was deafening. They had apparently taken the muffler off.

Since Curtiz had taken over the house as his command post, whoever had been in the kitchen had apparently never cleaned a dish or put anything away. Every available flat surface was littered with sour-smelling milk cartons, food-crusted can lids, wadded cellophane, empty cereal boxes, dirty silverware, bits of food, garbage.

From where Martin stood examining the disaster, he could see a china cabinet through the kitchen in the dining room, the former owner's special dishes still lined up in precise rows behind the glass doors.

One of the Asians walked in behind him. "Scuse," he said, dipping his head. He was hardly five feet tall, probably mid-twenties, a few acne pockmarks in the angular hollows of his cheeks. His green coveralls were wet across the shoulders and his wet hair plastered flat on his head.

"My name's Martin." He held out his hand.

"I am Billy," he said. After a moment's hesitation, he shook Martin's hand.

"We're supposed to fix dinner for ten people," Martin said.

Billy looked past Martin into the kitchen and shrugged. "Kitchen is very nasty."

Martin opened the door at the end of the kitchen that led into the garage and saw a wheelbarrow. "Bring that in, will you?"

"Wheelbarrow?"

"Yes, bring it in."

Billy shrugged again and wheeled it inside, parking it where Martin gestured, next to the counter. With his forearms Martin pushed everything into it. Dishes clattered and broke and splatted into the rot-softened leftovers.

The men outside the window revved the Land Rover loud enough to vibrate the dishes in the wheelbarrow and hide most of Martin's noise. Ryan appeared in the doorway with his hand on the butt of his pistol. "What in the hell is going on?" he shouted when the noise died down.

"I'm doing dishes," Martin said. "There'll always be more dishes."

Ryan stared at the heap in the wheelbarrow.

"It's a new world, Ryan, right? You just set fire to San Francisco. Why would you care about a few broken dishes?"

Ryan stood there, still looking uneasy. His eyes darted from place to place and he had a band of sweat just below his hairline.

"Must be getting close to that time," Martin said. "Time for you to go see god."

Ryan looked straight at him, uneasiness giving way to hostility. "I don't just see god." He walked out.

Martin glanced at Billy. He was picking pieces of grass off his coveralls and pressing his lips together, holding back a grin.

The only fresh vegetables were a few onions in one of the refrigerator bins, and they were getting a bit soft. Otherwise, the shelves were fully stocked with several kinds of canned meat, and twenty or thirty cans of soft drinks and two six-packs of beer. The freezer, on the other hand, was filled to capacity with frozen dinners of every variety. Martin was hungry enough that even greased and breaded paper-mache would taste like a gourmet delight.

The pantry didn't offer much. There were a few cans of peas and beans and some cheese spread. All of it was factory-prepared, all remnants of the old world. The only fresh food would be the soft onions.

Roaches, Martin thought. We're acting like roaches, eating the refuse of the old world. How long would it be before frozen foods would defrost and spoil and the remaining cans of food would swell with poisons? What would these people eat then?

Under yellow sodium lights, the men outside were revving the Land Rover even harder than before, sending thick clouds of half-burned fuel into the slanting rain. When they used all their gasoline and what remained was contaminated with water, what would they do? Where would they walk then?

He saw one of them speak to the others and gesture at the rain. They slammed the hood of the Land Rover, killed the engine, and went under the carport and lit up cigarettes. Still living in the old world, Martin thought. He opened the kitchen window to get some of the rotten-food smell out of the house but the wind blew in the stink of car exhaust.

While they opened frozen dinners, and separated the ingredients into different bowls, Martin asked Billy, "Why do you stay here? Why don't you and the others run away?"

Billy stopped and stared at Martin. "You d'not know?"

"No. Know what?"

"I must stay. All must stay." Billy held out his arm, showing Martin the track marks inside his elbow. "Mr. Curtiz has medicine to protect us from disease. He give us a shot every night to keep us safe. If we d'not have medicine, we get sick." Billy began chopping the onions on the cutting board. "I know because one day I d'not get medicine, I got very sick that day. Mr. Curtiz give me the shot, I got well, just like that."

"I see." Curtiz was more clever and depraved than Martin had given him credit for being. As long as everyone was an addict and Curtiz had what they needed, there was no need to guard or threaten them. He held their biochemistry hostage.

Martin was opening cans of peas when Curtiz came and stood in the doorway and watched them. He was smoking a plastic-tipped cigar, had his hair combed and was freshly shaved. Again he smelled of menthol, but he also brought with him a stale wet-straw odor. His white bush jacket was conspicuously clean, and from beneath its hem protruded a shiny black holster, one of things brought back from San Francisco.

Martin slid a platter of frozen chicken into the microwave. Billy dumped the large bowl of canned and frozen peas and diced onion into a pot of boiling water.

"We had fresh hippo steaks, believe it or not, a few weeks back," Curtiz said. He smiled and exhaled a billow of smoke.

Remembering what Ryan had told him, Martin asked nonchalantly, "Is this the first woman survivor you've found?"

Curtiz took a slow deep drag from his cigar. "You don't see any others, do you?" he said easily.

"What are you going to do with her? There's something wrong with her, you know."

"Dinner at eight-thirty, Martin." He tapped his teeth. "And I make the executive decisions."

"No problem there."

They looked into each other's eyes a moment longer than Martin knew was safe.

"Independent creative thought, I appreciate," Curtiz said. "Defiance, I do not. I detect an undercurrent of defiance, Marty. We could work together here. There's a lot in this for people like us. You may not realize how much of a chance I'm giving you. But it's your choice. Think about it." He stood there and watched him. "There's only one good choice."

Martin knew that, but it wasn't Curtiz' choice.

On the burners and in the microwave, the food bubbled and crackled. Its oily smell blended with Curtiz's aftershave and the car exhaust that still wafted through the window.

"I've been thinking about my choices," Martin said. "I want to help out, but it would be easier, you know, if every order didn't have a death sentence behind it."

"Whatever," Curtiz said, disinterested. He turned and began walking away. "Think of it however you want. It's your choice."

Indeed, Martin thought.

Chapter 19.

It grew dark as Isha loped along, making a wide circling search in the opposite direction. It drizzled off and on and then began to rain steadily, soaking her long hair and making it lie heavy and cold next to her skin.

The rain washed away most smells so that most of what she breathed in was only the sand-smell of concrete and the sharp chemical odor of asphalt.

She crossed canal bridges and smelled the still, algae-thickened water, and further yet, she passed near the hot steaming dung of a tall humpbacked animal that plodded serenely down the street in front of her. She ran up a walkway and waited in the shelter of someone's porch until the animal was gone. She shook herself several times to get the cold water away from her skin, but still she shivered and it was raining harder and there was no trace of the man she sought.

She loped further down the dark street, able to hear nothing now but the falling rain as it splattered on the asphalt around her, made dull plops on her matted hair and rattled on the metal tops and hoods of the cars parked in driveways. The rain ran into her eyes and blurred her vision, and all at once she was afraid.

Strange animals could be anywhere nearby, watching her, and she wouldn't know until it was too late. She stopped in the middle of the street, rain running out of her hair in streams. She could smell nothing but water, she could hear nothing but rain. She shivered.

She turned and ran back the direction she had come, remembering the troop of animals she had seen and the dog in the street that had been killed, practically torn out of its skin. She thought of the cat, her pet - it would be wandering through the house, alone, as she had been alone - yet she needed to find the man that had left her....

She ran up one street - suddenly knew it was the wrong street - backtracked, crossed a canal bridge that was utterly unfamiliar to her, backtracked again, and now saw nothing familiar at all, and stood panting in the middle of the street, quick billows of steam rolling out of her mouth, dripping wet, completely lost.

She caught her breath and when she began to shiver, she moved on, loping at a steady pace, letting her brain tell her where to turn.

Chapter 20.

Everyone except the brown-skinned help was at dinner. Max had been brought out, still wearing his dirty white t-shirt, jeans, and red tennis shoes. In the pocket of his jeans, Martin saw the lump of his plastic Superman, and the boy kept his fingers on it, twisting it through the fabric of his pants as he was led to the table. Both nervous and curious, he sat next to Martin and stared at the silent woman with wide eyes. She had been led in and placed on Curtiz's right, with Ryan next to her.

The woman was now dressed in a black leather miniskirt, a pink silk blouse opened to show her cleavage, and a yellow scarf which had been crookedly knotted around her neck. Beneath the scarf were several pearl and gold link necklaces, and her hair, still wet, was weirdly combed - straight in places, angularly combed in others, and sprinkled with glitter. Several clips had been stuck in at various places to hold it all together. But her face was blank, utterly devoid of expression, with purple smudges smeared over her eyes and very red lipstick coating her lips. She might have been a nice-looking woman - full lips and teak-colored eyes. Martin could imagine that if she ever smiled, her expression would be warm and friendly. But now there didn't seem to be anyone living inside her.

Stewart was back, sitting at the far end of the table, opposite Curtiz. He wore his perpetual half-witted grin, a huge expensive wristwatch on each wrist, a purple silk shirt, and had a pair of stereo phones hanging around his neck. Stewart's head wobbled loosely on his shoulders and he seemed to have trouble estimating the distance from his hand to his wine glass. He was probably drunk. He flung one hand in the direction of the woman.

"How'd I do on her, man? Don't she look great?"

"She looks fine," Curtiz said, reaching over and touching her shoulder. She could have been made of latex. One of the combs loosened and slid out of her wet hair. Curtiz didn't seem to notice.

"I had to go to some of the other houses around here to get the jewelry," Stewart said. "Don't she look fine? Can I have the next one we find? Mr. Curtiz?"

Curtiz ignored Stewart and gazed at the woman, a little smile on his lips.

Ryan ignored everything and was inattentive and jittery. He sat on his hands and his unfocused eyes pointed straight ahead at the blank wall behind the table. Curtiz was probably holding out on him till after dinner.

The five other men, all grim, unshaved, and wearing an assortment of ill-fitting sport shirts, sat along one side of the table. Martin noted the sweat beading on their foreheads and dark spots soaking out from their armpits. Curtiz was probably holding out on all of them.

Martin leaned down and whispered to Max, "Have you eaten today?"

The boy shook his head no.

"Well," Curtiz said, both hands flat on the table next to his plate, "here we all are. The people of the new beginning. Considering what we've all been through in the last months, this is a happy moment for us, a momentous moment for us."

Martin was torn between ridicule and sadness. Except for Stewart, who looked near passing out, only Curtiz was having a good time.

"I propose a toast to us," Curtiz said, lifting his filled wine glass. "A toast to New America in the New Times." He stood and held his glass high - an official toast.

After a pause, Ryan also stood, but he looked at his glass as though it contained a toxin.

Martin and the other men stood. By then Stewart figured out what was happening and grabbed his glass and got up. The woman did not move; Curtiz didn't seem to care.

"To us, pioneers of the New Times!" Curtiz announced, and then drank.

Martin sipped the wine - it was sickeningly sweet - and he noted that Ryan only touched the rim of the glass to his lips. Stewart emptied his glass in a swallow.

Curtiz sat and the others imitated. When the food began circulating, Curtiz put a few pieces on the silent woman's plate, but she showed no interest.

Martin passed each dish to Max, who took only the smallest amounts of each thing on his plate. Ryan and the other men put little on their plates, which they looked at uncomfortably.

Martin felt exceedingly grim. But, he thought, at the end of the world, what could he expect?

Through all this, the woman at Curtiz's side remained silent and could have been comatose, except that she sat up and had her eyes open which blinked every half minute.

Off and on, hesitantly, Max nibbled on a piece of chicken. He had been only picking at his food and Martin thought perhaps he was ill. He whispered to Max, "Do you feel all right?"

The boy nodded.