The smoke on the streets in town didn't look that bad. When Eric looked up, the swirls of ash turned the sky gray, and the stench of burning rubber and insulation seared his throat. He covered his nose and mouth with a bandanna. None of the houses or stores he pa.s.sed on this side street were damaged, but boards covered many windows, and locks secured the gates. The buildings had a closed, protected look to them, as if they cowered in the face of the destruction. He couldn't hear any birds. Since he'd entered town, he hadn't heard a bird, a dog, a car horn or a siren. Nothing. He heard only his own sounds. Eric pushed his bike, approached an intersection slowly, peered both ways, then hurried across. He had no idea where the hospital or police station might be, the logical places to look for Dad. The light "ping" of a loose spoke every revolution of the wheel made him nervous. What if somebody heard him? What could he say? If people were shooting at each other on the highway the night before, maybe he would be mistaken for a thief or arrested for violating a "stay inside" order. His eyes watered, and half in frustration and half in fear he angrily wiped them with the heel of his hand. A gla.s.s-part.i.tioned public phone kiosk on the next corner was vandalized, the gla.s.s shattered, and all that remained of the receiver was a nub of protruding wires. In the phone book he found an address for both the hospital and the police station, but there was no map, and the street names didn't mean anything to him.

A white van roared down the street. Eric pushed himself against the remains of the phone, trying to disappear. A man in the pa.s.senger's seat looked right at him. His eyes were small and cold, like a beetle's. His mouth was straight and hard. Eric was glad they didn't stop. He wouldn't want to meet a man who looked like that.

Pieces of paper swirled in the wake of the van; its tail-lights flashed when it turned the corner a couple of blocks away. Eric rested his cheek against the phone booth's cool metal. A minute later, a police cruiser with darkly tinted windows turned onto the street. He started to step out, to wave, then fear welled up, making him weak. Across the sidewalk, he saw a deep doorway to duck into, but there was no way to get there without being seen. He stayed in the kiosk and tried to act like he was busy, which felt ridiculous since the phone was broken. He opened the directory to the yellow pages and studied them. The car stopped at the curb, and the window rolled down.

A tired voice from inside said, "Sir, would you mind stepping next to the car?" Eric looked behind him. n.o.body had ever called him "Sir" before.

"Me?" he said.

The voice deepened, became threatening. "Don't make me get out." Eric moved by the cruiser and bent so he could see in the window. What he noticed first was in the back seat, a stack of what he took to be heavy, black plastic tarps. Eric didn't understand why tarps would have zippers on them though. Then he saw the officer's revolver. His stomach gripped into a tight ball. The revolver rested on the seat, and the officer's hand was on it. His mirrored sungla.s.ses reflected a distorted picture. "Give me the stereo," he said.

For a second Eric didn't move. He didn't know what the officer meant, then he unclipped the ca.s.sette player from his belt, disconnected the headphones and offered the player to the policeman. When he didn't stir, Eric dropped it on the seat. It bounced once. Without moving his head, the officer's hand floated from the gun and picked up the ca.s.sette player. He held it in front of his gla.s.ses, then floated it back to the seat. His movements were smooth and careful. Eric didn't want to make him angry. The man made Eric think of a snake, a meticulous, cautious predator, ready to burst into motion any second.

"Now, the backpack," he said.

Eric shucked the strap off his shoulder and placed it next to the ca.s.sette. The hand drifted from the gun, undid the straps and explored the contents. He lifted each item out and placed it carefully on the seat until the empty bag sagged beside him.

During the process, Eric thought about fidgeting, but he held himself still. He knew he should be frightened, but now he felt detached, almost meditative about what was happening, as if he were hovering above the sidewalk watching the scene unroll. Maybe the event was too surreal, like one of those weird paintings he'd seen in art books where mountains levitated in living rooms and watches melted over tree branches.

He couldn't see the man's eyes, but it suddenly occurred to him that they wouldn't be malicious eyes, not the eyes of a killer; they would be crazed eyes. Below the officer's sungla.s.ses, even in the tinted window shadows in the car, Eric saw deep, purple circles like twin bruises. The man's face sagged from his cheekbones. His hair, brown streaked with gray, stuck out in uncombed angles from under his hat. Crumpled fast food sacks and crushed Styrofoam cups covered the floor of the cruiser. The car smelled strongly of old coffee and sweaty clothes. Eric knewa"he didn't know howa" that the rigidity of the man's posture, the unnaturally precise hand movements, masked exhaustion and madness. For the first time in his life, Eric felt like he understood something about someone else. He felt a connection to him, an empathy, as if for this instant they were sharing the same thoughts. The policeman must have been patrolling for days, maybe never getting out of the car, just driving and looking and upholding the law because he didn't know what else to do. Eric felt very sorry for the policeman, though Eric knew he was a hair's width away from being shot.

He wanted to say some kind thing to him, but he didn't know how to start.

The officer said, his voice gravelly and no less threatening than before, "Looters don't last in this town."

"Yes, sir. I'm just looking for my dad," said Eric.

The man started to replace Eric's goods to his backpack. His hand shook slightly as he lifted a can of peaches.

"Let me help," said Eric as he leaned into the car and reached for the can. The peaches dropped from the policeman's hand, and in it he held the gun. He was very fast. Eric tried to swallow, couldn't. The end of the barrel, only a foot from his face, looked a mile wide and infinitely deep. Trapped, his head in the car and off balance, Eric heard the policeman's hard and heavy breath. The man said, "Do you know Gloria?" The gun didn't waver.

Eric tried to answer, but he couldn't force a word through his throat. He shook his head no. The gun sank to the backpack, and the officer gazed out the front window, turning away from Eric. His voice became distant and soft. "She's about your age. At the hospital with her mom now. They got a touch of something," the policeman said. He focused suddenly on Eric, and his voice became business-like. "I thought maybe you went to school with her."

Cupped loosely around the pistol grip, the man's hand fascinated Eric. He tried to speak again and squeaked out, "I go to Littleton High."

"A Littleton Lion." The policeman slid the gun onto his lap and stuck it between his legs so the barrel pointed down and the grip was still visible. "I was a Golden High Knight. Played football." He licked his lips.

Eric let out a long breath silently and realized he hadn't been breathing. "Uh huh," he said.

"Thousand people buried in that football field now." The policeman gripped the steering wheel. He was wearing a black glove on his left hand. "Don't think the Knights will have a good season this year," he said.

He plucked the radio microphone from the dash and held it to his lips. "Tanner, this is Buck. I'm on 12th and Jackson talking to a Littleton Lion. What you got?"

The radio crackled feebly.

He rested the microphone on his lap and continued to stare out the front window. "Gloria thinks she might be a cheerleader. She's a little bony, but she can do the gymnastics. Eight years of lessons." His chest expanded as he took a deep breath, and when he finally let it out, it shook. "Her mother's real proud. Bought us shirts that say Gloria's Mom and Gloria's Dad. '" He tried the radio again. In the quiet of the car, the steady hiss sounded baleful and lonely. "n.o.body home," said the policeman. "Burnt to the ground ..." He paused and took another deep breath. ". .. just like the hospital. Forgot for a second."

His chin dropped to his chest as if he were too tired to hold it up any longer. "I'm a ghost cop," he said.

"Except I'm alive and the city died." Then he waved his hand vaguely in Eric's direction. "You can go."

Quickly, Eric filled his backpack and grabbed his headphones and ca.s.sette player. The policeman didn't move. When Eric backed his head out of the window, he started to thank the mana"he felt like he shoulda"but then Eric realized the policeman had fallen asleep. His face looked peaceful, and Eric made a sudden connection, an' understanding of the policeman in a different role. Eric shook with it, the empathy was so strong. The policeman looked like a man at halftime at a football game, tired from his day's work, but at the game because his daughter was going to cheer. Eric wished that he could tell him the day was okay, that his bony daughter dazzled the crowd, jumping high, clapping her hands, throwing back flips for the team as it entered the field.

Instead, Eric stepped back quietly. Brightness of the sun through the smoke, after the darkness of the car, made him blink back tears.

Smoldering ruins dominated the north end of Golden, and the closer he pedaled to the Coors plant, the fewer intact buildings he found. Two jewelry stores side by side, A Touch of Gold and a Zales, had been cleaned out. A spray of velvet display pads littered the sidewalk. After a few blocks, he turned and headed south, but he had no idea where to go now. Should he return to the cave and wait for Dad? How long should he wait before searching again? The image of his mother's body lying still under the plastic chilled him. Thinking about crawling into the cave again to face that lump under the black visqueen made him shake his head. He would ride the bike to Littleton. Dad might have gone there, though he couldn't think of a reason that he would. What really decided him, was the idea of being home. He imagined his bedroom, the posters on the walls, the books lined neatly on the shelves, and his bed, a place of safety and normality. If he could just get home, things would be all right. All of this would go away. He wouldn't have to think about policemen who lost their daughters or cars filled with frightened, angry people being shot at a road block.

At the bottom of Jackson Street, he reached the high school. "Have a good summer!" read the marquee in front of the school. A pair of unattended backhoes squatted on the torn up remains of the football field. One goal post lay on its side. The other stood, a solitary sentinel. He turned onto 24th Street, hoping that it would take him back to U.S. 6 and out of town.

24th ended at Illinois Ave and he could see the highway at the crest of the hill to his right. In the distance, a long way up the hill with several smaller hills between, the two roads intersected. Breaths came hard in the smoky air as he struggled to pedal up the slope. Because he kept his eyes closed part of the time, or stared at the goose neck of the bike so he wouldn't have to look at the hill in front of him, he missed the first black shapes lying on the road's shoulder to his left. When his legs were too tired to push the pedals any farther, he leaned the bike and rested. Then he saw the body bags, hundreds of them like black seed pods lined side by side along the road, stretching to the top of the hill. At first, he thought they were trash bags, as if the Highway Department had been running gra.s.s cutting crews along the roads and were storing the clippings. But when he put the bike down and stood over the closest bag, he knew the truth.

He blinked slowly. His eyes ached from the smoke, and he took a long time to realize what he was looking at. Sun glinted dully off the slick plastic, and the bag was unzipped. Inside, he saw a glimpse of pink flannel. The womana"though the bag covered her face, he guessed it must be a womana"had died in her pajamas. Her hands lay on top each other on her stomach. The top hand was disfigured; it was missing the ring finger.

Eric looked down the long row of bags to his left, toward town. All the bags were unzipped. Hands dangled over the sides of many, and even from here he could see others without ring fingers. He stepped to the next bag. A man's well-tanned arm sprawled across the plastic as if he had tried to extricate himself and then died in mid-effort. A pale band of skin circled his wrist where he must have worn a watch.

Eric knew he should feel something about all these bodies, some sadness or revulsion, but he couldn't. He walked up the hill, pushing his bike. In some bags he saw faces, eyes open or closed, mouths gaping or neatly shut. Some bodies were naked; one man wore a three piece suit. A few bags had more than one body in them, mostly children. All the bags were open, and all Eric felt was a mild curiosity about why.

Near the crest of the hill he heard an engine idling and then a voice. He put the bike down and, bending low, scurried to the top. In the little valley below, thirty yards away, the white van was parked in the middle of the road. A man, the beetle-eyed one he'd seen earlier, unzipped a bag, reached in, pulled out the body's hands, inspected them, then moved to the next one. A gun in a shoulder holster swung from his chest when he bent over. He held a three foot long pair of bolt cutters. He unzipped againa"the harsh rasp reached Erica"and grabbed a hand.

"Got one," he said to the hidden driver in the van. Beetle-Eyes pinned the hand to the body with his foot, maneuvered the bolt cutters into position, then, without pause, snipped off a finger. Eric heard the click of the bolt cutters closing.

The man stripped the ring from the finger, then tossed the finger beyond the body bags into the long weeds beside the road. He put the ring into a heavy sack that hung from his belt and moved to the next bag.

Eric pressed the side of his face to the pavement and closed his eyes. Sun-warmed asphalt burned him, but he didn't move. The enormity of what he was seeing boggled his imagination and sickened him. Surely nothing can top this, he thought. Nothing could be as gross.

He wondered how he was going to get past the van. He couldn't see just riding by, and he thought about going back and finding another way to the highway, but he also wanted to stop them, to turn them in maybea"whatever it would take to get them to leave the bodies alone.

He heard another loud snip. The van rolled a few feet forward to keep up with Beetle-Eyes, who moved from bag to bag with ghoulish efficiency. He unzipped another one and looked the body over speculatively. "Nice t.i.ts," he said, then threw the ringless hands back in the bag in disgust. "Why don't I drive for a while?" he said. A voice from the van murmured back. Beetle-Eyes shrugged his shoulders. As the van move farther away and higher on the hill, Eric crept backwards to stay out of sight. He could no longer hear them, but he saw the pantomime as Beetle-Eyes crouched, opened, inspected, stood and cut, taking rings and watches as he found them, bag after bag.

Finally the van topped the next hill. Eric mounted his bike and rode past the abused bodies, still unsure of what to do, but determined to do something. Once again he was within earshot. Zippers whisked open. Bolt cutters clicked together. Beetle-Eyes cursed the driver's squeamishness. "You'll like what this stuff will buy later," he said. Another finger flew into the weeds. "You got to cut bait to fish." Eric felt his gorge rise.

From the bottom of his backpack, Eric grabbed his slingshot and a handful of ball bearings. Without thinking, he folded the leather patch around the first bearing, stood, drew back, and fired at Beetle-Eyes. The bearing missed but whanged off the van leaving a very satisfying dent. The man yelled something and hit the asphalt. Flying end over end, the bolt cutters vanished into the weeds. Eric loaded and fired. The shot zinged off the pavement a foot from Beetle-Eye's head, who was trying to crawl backwards under the van. He hadn't seen Eric yet.

Eric placed a third bearing in the slingshot, then Beetle-Eyes spotted him. He unsnapped his gun from its holster and started to aim it, but the van moved forward a foot and Beetle-Eyes panicked, dropped the gun, rolled to his back and pounded on the side of the van. "Stop, you stupid s.h.i.t. Stop!" he yelled. "I'm under here!" Brake lights flared red.

He glared malevolently at Eric and slid himself from under the van. Without breaking his stare, he reached for the gun.

Eric drew the bearing to his ear; his arm was straight and steady. "Don't do it," he said. Forty yards separated them.

Beetle-Eyes froze, his hand a foot from the pistol. "I don't have to kill you, kid," he said. "You can put that squirrel shooter away and walk right now, but if you try to hurt me again, I'm going to pick up this gun here and blow your head off." His hand inched downward.

Sweat trickled down Eric's face. One good shot, one perfect shot, and Beetle-Eyes would be done, but if he missed, he wouldn't have time to reload. Far away, a bird sang. Eric thought, meadow lark, and released the shot.

He missed.

Beetle-Eyes came up with the gun and straightened from his crouch. Holding it in front of him, he walked toward Eric. "You stupid little kid," he said, then clicked the hammer back. The meadow lark trilled through his song again. Eric's dad had taught him many bird calls. He couldn't believe that the last thought he would ever have would be the name of a bird song. Beetle-Eyes stopped. "Oh, s.h.i.t."

A rumble behind Eric startled him and he stepped aside. Like a black and white boat, the police cruiser flowed past Eric. Through the tinted windows, Eric saw the glint of mirrored sungla.s.ses. The car's brakes screeched loudly when it stopped. Beetle-Eyes stepped backwards, gun at his side, until he b.u.mped into the van.

The police car's door clicked open and Gloria's Dad, the ghost cop, unfolded himself from the driver's seat, his gun gripped in his right hand, the black glove on his left.

Without looking at Beetle-Eyes, he walked to a body bag. Caked mud clung to his boots. Eric wondered if it were from the football field.

The ghost cop bent, inspected the bag, pulled a mangled hand out, then, holding the hand gently in his, bent farther, briefly pressed his forehead to the dead person's hand, then tucked it back into the bag. He zipped it shut and stood.

"We just got here," shouted Beetle-Eyes. "The kid will tell you!" He pointed his gun at Eric, as if he'd forgotten that he held it.

The ghost cop brought his revolver up and fired. Echoes bounced back. Eric had seen many movies. He'd seen a million shootings, but this wasn't like anything he'd seen. The shot was sharper, more crisp, but less loud than he'd imagined. A very distinct puff of smoke drifted away from the gun. He followed it until it dissipated.

Beetle-Eyes sat, his legs spread in a V, his head resting against the b.u.mper. Tears slicked his cheeks.

"You didn't have to do that," he said. Eric couldn't see any blood on Beetle-Eyes, but a single rivulet of red streaked the white van where he had stood. He sniffed, "I wasn't doing anything." His sack had ruptured at the bottom and rings and watches reflected sunlight in a pile beside him. The ghost cop dug into his back pocket and brought out a pair of hand cuffs. Keeping his gun trained on Beetle-Eyes, he clipped one wrist and reached for the other.

Out of sight from the cop, but where Eric could see, the pa.s.senger door swung quietly open. Slowly, a sneakered foot, then a bare leg slid into view. The ghost cop struggled to cuff the other hand, but the mechanism seemed jammed. Beetle-Eyes blubbered, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Don't hurt me." Stunned by the nearness of his own death, by the violence of the shooting, Eric watched slack jawed, as if the event were television. Whatever anger had motivated him to confront Beetle-Eyes was gone. A short-skirted woman hefting a baseball bat emerged from the door. She raised the bat above her head and ran around the corner of the van where the ghost cop knelt over Beetle-Eyes. Eric snapped out of his lethargy. "Watch out!"

Arching her back like a woodsman, the woman paused before swinging the bat. The ghost cop rolled, fired; the woman fell.

Beetle-Eyes stretched for his gun, got it, swung it around.

The ghost cop fired.

Two puffs of smoke floated away like carnival balloons.

Dusting his pants off, the ghost cop trudged back to the cruiser, gun hanging from his hand as if it weighed a hundred pounds. From the back of the car he took two of the black plastic tarps Eric had seen earlier and unfolded them. They were body bags.

As Eric watched, the cop uncuffed Beetle-Eyes, fitted a bag over him and rolled him over so he could close it; then he bagged the woman. He tossed her bat in the bag with her and drug both of them to the side of the road along with the other bodies. Everything he did, he did tiredly, seeming to barely have the strength to move himself from place to place.

Stooping over the last bag Beetle-Eyes had robbed, the ghost cop placed the hands inside and zipped it up. He moved to the next one and did the same.

Eric turned and looked behind him at the hundreds of open bags and beyond them where oily black smoke poured into the sky from the Coors plant. A meadow lark lilted through its notes again and the sun shimmered in waves off the road. Eric went to the nearest bag. Trying not to look in, he gripped the large, square zipper tab and pulled it shut. Soon the cop caught up with him and, not speaking, they worked together moving from body bag to body bag, softly putting hands back inside and closing them. An hour or so later, when they finished, Eric straightened painfully and rubbed his back. The cop's face was an agony of exhaustion lines, the skin sallow and muscleless.

Eric said, "Maybe you should go home." The mirrored sungla.s.ses reflected blankly back at him.

"n.o.body will know."

Wind flicked hair across Eric's eyes. He brushed it back. The cop said, "I haven't been relieved." And that seemed to settle it for him.

They walked back to the cruiser. Eric collected his bike and backpack from the road. When he left, the cop was sitting in the car, door open, his hands wrapped around the steering wheel. At the top of the hill, where Illinois Ave. met U.S. 6, Eric looked back. The line of body bags stretched almost to town, a black border on the road. Distinctly, Eric heard a car door slam and an engine start. Then the cruiser rose out of a valley in the road and headed for Golden's smoke and fire and emptiness. Eric watched until it vanished from sight.

Chapter Nine.

THE FLATS.

Our fourth morning, Eric thought, and we're still in good spirits. Dodge led, dashing from side to side to pick flowers, Indian Paint Brush and Rocky Mountain Bee Plants. Rabbit hung back and whistled tunelessly. Eric strode up the highway, pleased by the hardness in his leg muscles that a few days of activity had given him. He did a skip step. Highway 93 roller-coasted generally uphill north out of Golden in front of him along the foothills to Boulder. Eric compared the landscape to what they had pa.s.sed through before; this was the first that had not been a part of the suburbs. Ruins of shopping malls, subdivisions and shopettes dominated the ten miles west from the Platte River, and the fifteen miles north to Golden. But here, he hiked through real country. Clean of brick walls, concrete foundations, or houses in varied states of decay, the gra.s.ses dropped away from the road through a gentle valley to lap against a scrub pine sh.o.r.eline at the foothills a mile away.

He rubbed his sun-warmed right cheek. Four days of stubble scratched his palm. He felt poetic. Perfect weather, he thought.

Sun rises . . . like a great red whale.

Mid-afternoon: cloudless, arching blue storm builds on mountain cool breeze wipes the day.

He shook his head at that last part. Weather poems, he thought, are never as good as the weather. That bit about a red whale, though, that's nice.

He remembered last night's sunset. The clouds broke and bands of color flowed from the west, first yellow, then orange and red, then indigo and violet. What a spectacle! As he hiked, he found himself thinking about dust in the atmosphere. The dawn and evening displays this year reminded him of the first few years after ... plague, when the sun rose and set in sullen glory, which he attributed to ashes from fires in cities filled with the dead.

By midmorning, Eric's legs that he'd been so proud of burned with fatigue. He bit his lip and struggled not to limp. He envied the boys' energy to run back and forth across the road in front of him, showing each other things they had found: a length of PVC pipe, a gla.s.s telephone line insulator, a rusted hammer head without a handle. They're as fresh as the first day, he thought.

Pain rose for another half hour, each step driving spears into his hips and calves. Small fires embered behind his knee caps. Head down, he watched his foot placement. A flat step hurt less, but any roll to either side flared new pains. I'm just plain old, he thought. Old and out of gas. The phrase made him smile. Dodge used it occasionally, so did Troy. Neither knew what it meant. Several expressions came to him: "Run it up the flag pole and see who salutes." "Give me a ring." "Drop me a line." "That does not compute." He said aloud, "Put the pedal to the metal boys." Dodge looked back at him. Eric shook his head. "Nothing, son. just a thought."

He concentrated on walking. Heat radiated off the buckled and fractured asphalt, and the weeds that grew with such enthusiasm a few miles earlier, looked dispirited. Everything about the landscape now seemed beaten down and tired. By the road, large parcels of caked and cracked ground were free of gra.s.ses altogether. He imagined how the dust must kick up here on windy days. Only bushes, laurels and what his dad used to call greasewood, thrived. He struggled with why the look of the land would change so drastically in just a couple of hours of walking, but his legs' pains messed up his concentration. Step, step, step, he thought; even the sky has lost its color. It pressed down like a slab of gray slate, and the sun pulsed in its midst, its edges fuzzy. He kept his eyes down, watching his feet. Dust covered the road. Little puffs marked each footfall. Dodge's small sneakers left perfect imprints and made Eric think of black and white photographs from the moon, where he supposed the astronauts' footprints still existed around the pile of unrusting equipment they'd left behind.

He b.u.mped into Dodge, who had stopped. I'll never get momentum again, he thought, and almost snapped at the boy until he looked up and saw what was in their way. Three wooden poles jutted from the asphalt, and impaled on their tops at eye height, animal skulls. Suddenly grateful for the rest, Eric fingered one, a cow skull, bleached and toothless. A fringe of bone pieces dangled on short strings threaded through holes bored in the back of the skull. He stuck a finger through an eye socket and wiggled it for Dodge mid Rabbit to see. The bone fragments clattered against each other.

"Don't," said Rabbit. "It belongs to somebody."

Eric wiped his hand on his shirt. Totems, he thought. Every hundred yards in both directions, other poles held their bones to the sky. An uninterrupted line stretched east across the plain into the city, and to the west the line vanished into the pines. "We have to go this way," he said, and shivered when he stepped across the boundary the totems drew across the road.

Somber now, Dodge stayed close to Eric, whose leg pains had been replaced by a loose, empty feeling. Eric feared he might fall any moment. Rabbit quit whistling and walked next to the side of the road like a coyote ready to bolt. The gra.s.ses, what few patches there were, hissed in a hot breeze that didn't dry the sweat on Eric's forehead, and he caught himself weaving as he walked.

The bones, he thought, mean something to someone. Something primitive. He imagined how wind must moan through the bone holes in the bone heads, how lonely it would be to walk upon them if he'd been by himself. He looked back. Heat waves shimmered off the road, and the skulls in the distance wavered and danced. Eric stumbled.

A hand grasped Eric's wrist, steadying him. Dodge's eyes met his, and Eric could see the worry. "I'm okay," said Eric, but Dodge held firmly, and Eric let him support some of his weight. Dodge's fine-boned fingers reminded Eric of Troy at two, walking along the river. Troy loved to throw rocks in the water, and they'd spent hours making splashes. Dodge's clasp on his wrist brought the memory back like it was all new again, and Eric's eyes' watered.

"Maybe we should camp early today, Grandfather," said Dodge. Rabbit looked back at them and nodded.

Eric didn't argue, and let himself be led to a shaded spot part way up a hill above the road. Cottonwoods will keep the sun off my head, he thought, and after a lunch that seemed bland and a little nauseating, he laid back, enduring his legs' throbbing. Dodge gathered leaves to spread under their sleeping bags. Eric pressed the heels of his hands into the tops of his thighs, rolling the muscle down to his knees. He bit back a cry. How can so little muscle hurt so much?

Closing his eyes and pushing hard, he started the ma.s.sage. again. Then he felt hands on his. Rabbit bent over him, his long hair obscuring his scars, and rubbed Eric's legs. His strong hand kneaded the calf muscles, pressing them against the bones hard enough to hurt. He winced, and Rabbit let up a bit. Such a strange boy, Eric thought. So quiet, so distant, and he does this for me. Eric rested his hand on Rabbit's shoulder. The boy didn't look up, but he didn't shrug the hand away either. After a few minutes Eric relaxed; the pain subsided to waves of comfort, and not soon after, he fell asleep. Something punched him, and Eric roused himself from a dream of a cop car appearing at the crests of hills, then disappearing until it was just a dot that blended into the burning town at the end of the road.

"We're not alone," whispered Dodge.

Blue-gray predawn shadows colored the bushes and cotton-woods. Dodge huddled against him. "I'm scared," he said.

"What is it?" Eric said as he groped in his backpack for the slingshot. He sat up and looked around. Only the faintest blush of light of the horizon told him it was other than night. The trees stood starkly in their shadows. The gra.s.ses were a wash of gray.

Dodge pointed. "Can't you see them?"

A gust rustled the cottonwoods. Eric shivered. At the edge of where a cooking fire would cast light if it were lit, sitting or crouching in the gra.s.ses, a dozen still figures surrounded their camp site.

"Are they men?" asked Dodge.