Nick nodded.

They trundled their bicycles back to the highway, using the path of uprooted grass and torn soil that the tornado had made. It had touched down on the west side of Rosston, had cut across US 283 on a west-to-east course, throwing guardrails and connecting cable into the air like piano wire, had skirted the barn to their left and ploughed directly through the house which stood-had stood-in front of it. Four hundred yards farther along, its track through the field abruptly ceased. Now the clouds had begun to break up (although it was still showering, lightly and refreshingly) and birds were singing unconcernedly. stood-in front of it. Four hundred yards farther along, its track through the field abruptly ceased. Now the clouds had begun to break up (although it was still showering, lightly and refreshingly) and birds were singing unconcernedly.

Nick watched the hefty muscles under Tom's shirt work as he lifted his bike over the jumble of guardrail cable on the verge of the highway. That guy saved my life, he thought. I never saw a twister in my life before today. If I'd left him behind back there in May like I thought about doing, I'd be as dead as a doornail right about now.

He lifted his bike over the frayed cables and clapped Tom on the back and smiled at him.

We've got to find somebody else, Nick thought. We've got got to, just so I can tell him thanks. And my name. He doesn't even know my name, because he can't read. to, just so I can tell him thanks. And my name. He doesn't even know my name, because he can't read.

He stood there for a moment, bemused by this, and then they mounted their bikes and rode away.

They camped that night in left field of the Rosston Jaycees' Little League ballfield. The evening was cloudless and starry. Nick's sleep came quickly and was dreamless. He woke up at dawn the next morning, thinking how good it was to be with someone again, what a difference it made.

There really was a Polk County, Nebraska. At first that had given him a start, but he had traveled all over the last few years. He must have talked to somebody who mentioned Polk County, or who had come from Polk County, and his conscious mind had just forgotten it. There was a Route 30, too. But he couldn't really believe, at least not in the bright day of this early morning, that they were actually going to find an old Negro woman sitting on her porch in the middle of a field of corn and accompanying herself on a guitar while she sang hymns. He didn't believe in precognition or in visions. But it seemed important to go somewhere, to look for people. In a way he shared Fran Goldsmith's and Stu Redman's urge to regroup. Until that could be done, everything would remain alien and out of joint. There was danger everywhere. You couldn't see it but you could feel it, the way he thought he had felt the presence of the dark man in that cellar yesterday. You felt that danger was everywhere, inside the houses, around the next bend in the highway, maybe even hiding beneath the cars and trucks littered all over the main roads. And if it wasn't there, it was in the calendar, hidden just two or three leaves down. Danger, every particle of his being seemed to whisper it. BRIDGE OUT. FORTY MILES OF BAD ROAD. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR PERSONS PROCEEDING BEYOND THIS POINT BRIDGE OUT. FORTY MILES OF BAD ROAD. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR PERSONS PROCEEDING BEYOND THIS POINT.

Part of it was the tremendous, walloping psychological shock of the empty countryside. As long as he had been in Shoyo, he had been partially protected from it. It didn't matter if Shoyo was empty, at least not too much, because Shoyo was so small in the scheme of things. But when you got moving, it was as if ... well, he remembered a Walt Disney movie he had seen as a kid, a nature thing. Filling the screen was this tulip, this one tulip, so beautiful it just made you want to hold your breath. Then the camera pulled back with dizzying suddenness and you saw a whole field filled with tulips. It knocked you flat. It produced total sensory overload and some internal circuit breaker fell with a sizzle, cutting off the input. It was too much. And that was how this trip had been. Shoyo was empty and he could adjust to that. But McNab was empty, too, and Texarkana, and Spencerville; Ardmore had burned right to the ground. He had come north on Highway 81 and had only seen deer. Twice he had seen what were probably signs of living people: a campfire perhaps two days old, and a deer that had been shot and neatly cleaned out. But no people. It was enough to screw you all up, because the enormity of it was steadily creeping up on you. It wasn't just Shoyo or McNab or Texarkana; it was America America, lying here like a huge discarded tin can with a few forgotten peas rolling around in the bottom. And beyond America was the whole world whole world, and thinking of that made Nick feel so dizzy and sick that he had to give up.

He bent over the atlas instead. If they kept rolling, maybe they would be like a snowball going downhill, getting bigger. With any luck they would pick up a few more people between here and Nebraska (or be picked up themselves, if they met a larger group). After Nebraska he supposed they would go somewhere else. It was like a quest with no object in view at the end of it-no Grail, no sword plunged into an anvil.

We'll cut northeast, he thought, up into Kansas. Highway 35 would take them to another version of 81, and 81 would take them all the way to Swedeholm, Nebraska, where it intersected Nebraska Route 92 at a perfect right angle. Another highway, Route 30, connected the two, the hypotenuse of a right triangle. And somewhere in that triangle was the country of his dream.

Thinking about it gave him a queer, anticipatory thrill.

Movement at the top of his vision made him look up. Tom was sitting, both fists screwed into his eyes. A cavernous yawn seemed to make the whole bottom half of his face disappear. Nick grinned at him and Tom grinned back.

"We gonna ride some more today?" Tom asked, and Nick nodded. "Gee, that's good. I like to ride my bike. Laws, yes! I hope we never stop!"

Putting the atlas away Nick thought: And who knows? You may get your wish.

They turned east that morning and ate their lunch at a crossroads not far from the Oklahoma-Kansas border. It was July 7, and hot.

Shortly before they stopped to eat, Tom brought his bike to its customary skidding halt. He was staring at a signpost which had been sunk into a cement plug half-buried in the soft shoulder at the side of the road. Nick looked at it. The sign said: YOU ARE LEAVING HARPER COUNTY, OKLAHOMA-YOU ARE ENTERING WOODS COUNTY, OKLAHOMA YOU ARE LEAVING HARPER COUNTY, OKLAHOMA-YOU ARE ENTERING WOODS COUNTY, OKLAHOMA.

"I can read that," Tom said, and if Nick had been able to hear, he would have been partly amused and partly touched by the way Tom's voice climbed into a high, reedy, and declamatory register: "You are now going out of Harper County. You are now going into Woods County." "You are now going out of Harper County. You are now going into Woods County." He turned to Nick. "You know what, mister?" He turned to Nick. "You know what, mister?"

Nick shook his head.

"I never been out of Harper County in my life, laws, no, not Tom Cullen. But once my daddy took me out here and showed me this sign. He told me if he ever caught me t'other side of it, he'd whale the tar out of me. I sure hope he don't catch us over there in Woods County. You think he will?"

Nick shook his head emphatically.

"Is Kansas City in Woods County?"

Nick shook his head again.

"But we're going into Woods County before we go anyplace else, ain't we?"

Nick nodded.

Tom's eyes gleamed. "Is it the world?"

Nick didn't understand. He frowned ... raised his eyebrows ... shrugged.

"The world world is the place I mean," Tom said. "Are we going into the is the place I mean," Tom said. "Are we going into the world, world, mister?" Tom hesitated and then asked with hesitant gravity: "Is Woods the word for world?" mister?" Tom hesitated and then asked with hesitant gravity: "Is Woods the word for world?"

Slowly, Nick nodded his head.

"Okay," Tom said. He looked at the sign for a moment, then wiped his right eye, from which a single tear had trickled. Then he hopped back onto his bike. "Okay, let's go." He biked over the county line without another word, and Nick followed.

They crossed into Kansas just before it got too dark to ride any farther. Tom had turned sulky and tired after supper; he wanted to play with his garage. He wanted to watch TV. He didn't want to ride anymore because his bum hurt from the seat. He had no conception of state lines and felt none of the lift Nick did when they passed another sign, this one saying YOU ARE NOW ENTERING KANSAS YOU ARE NOW ENTERING KANSAS. By then the dusk was so thick that the white letters seemed to float inches above the brown sign, like spirits.

They camped a quarter of a mile over the line, beneath a water tower standing on tall steel legs like an H. G. Wells Martian. Tom was asleep as soon as he crawled into his sleeping bag. Nick sat awhile, watching the stars come out. The land was utterly dark, and for him, utterly still. Shortly before crawling in himself, a crow fluttered down to a fencepost nearby and seemed to be watching him. Its small black eyes were rimmed with half-circles of blood-reflection from a bloated orange summer moon that had risen silently. There was something about the crow Nick didn't like; it made him uneasy. He found a big dirt-clod and pegged it at the crow. It fluttered its wings, seemed to fix him with a baleful glare, and was gone into the night.

That night he dreamed of the man with no face standing on the high roof, his hands stretched out to the east, and then of the corn-corn higher than his head-and the sound of the music. Only this time he knew knew it was music and this time he it was music and this time he knew knew it was a guitar. He awoke near dawn with a painfully full bladder and her words ringing in his ears: it was a guitar. He awoke near dawn with a painfully full bladder and her words ringing in his ears: Mother Abagail is what they call me ... you come see me anytime. Mother Abagail is what they call me ... you come see me anytime.

Late that afternoon, moving east through Comanche County on Highway 160, they sat astride their bikes in amazement, watching a small herd of buffalo-a dozen in all, perhaps-walking calmly back and forth across the road in search of good graze. There had been a barbed wire fence on the north side of the road, but it appeared the buffalo had butted it down.

"What are they?" Tom asked fearfully. "Those ain't cows!"

And because Nick couldn't talk and Tom couldn't read, Nick couldn't tell him. That day was July 8, 1990, and they slept that night in flat open farm country forty miles west of Deerhead.

It was July 9, and they were eating their lunch in the shade of an old, graceful elm in the front yard of a farmhouse which had partially burned down. Tom was eating sausages from a tin with one hand and driving a car in and out of his service station with the other. And singing the refrain of a popular song over and over again. Nick knew the shape it made on Tom's lips by heart: "Baby, can you dig your man-he's a rahteous ma-yun-baby, can you dig your man?"

Nick was depressed and slightly overawed by the size of the country; never before had he realized how easy it was to stick out your thumb, knowing that sooner or later the law of averages was going to favor you. A car was going to stop, usually with a man driving, and with a can of beer resting comfortably in the fork of his crotch more often than not. He would want to know how far you were going and you would hand him a slip of paper which you'd kept handy in your breast pocket, a slip of paper which read: "Hello, my name is Nick Andros. I'm a deaf-mute. Sorry about that. I'm going to ____. Thanks very much for the ride. I can read lips." And that would be that. Unless the guy had a thing about deaf-mutes (and some people did, although they were a minority), you hopped in and the car took you where you wanted to go, or a good piece in that direction. The car ate road and blew miles out its tailpipe. The car was a form of teleportation. The car defeated the map. But now there was no car, although on many of these roads a car would have been a practical mode of transportation for seventy or eighty miles at a stretch, if you were careful. And when you were finally blocked, you would only have to abandon your vehicle, walk for a while, and then take another. With no car, they were like ants crawling across the chest of a fallen giant, ants trundling endlessly from one nipple to the other. And so Nick half wished, half daydreamed, that when they finally did meet someone else (always assuming that would happen), it would be as it had been in those mostly carefree days of hitchhiking: there would be that familiar twinkle of chrome rising over the top of the next hill, that sunflare which simultaneously dazzled and pleased the eye. It would be some perfectly ordinary American car, a Chevy Biscayne or a Pontiac Tempest, sweet old Detroit rolling iron. In his dreams it was never a Honda or Mazda or Yugo. That American beauty would pull over and he would see a man behind the wheel, a man with a sunburned elbow cocked cockily out the window. This man would be smiling and he would say, "Holy Joe, boys! Ain't I some glad sumbitch to see you guys! Hop in here! Hop in and let's us see where we're goin!"

But they saw no one that day, and on the tenth it was Julie Lawry they ran across.

The day was another scorcher. They had pedaled most of the afternoon with their shirts tied around their waists, and both of them were getting brown as Indians. They hadn't been making very good time, not today, because of the apples. The green apples.

They had found them growing on an old apple tree in a farmyard, green and small and sour, but they had both been deprived of fresh fruit for a long time, and they tasted ambrosial. Nick made himself stop after two, but Tom ate six, greedily, one after the other, right down to the cores. He had ignored Nick's motions that he should stop; when he got an idea in his head, Tom Cullen could be every bit as attractive as a wayward child of four.

So, beginning around eleven in the morning and continuing through the rest of the afternoon, Tom had the squats. Sweat ran off him in small creeks. He groaned. He had to get off his bike and walk it up even shallow hills. Despite his irritation at the poor time they were making, Nick couldn't help a certain rueful amusement.

When they reached the town of Pratt around 4 P.M., Nick decided that was it for the day. Tom collapsed gratefully on a bus-stop bench in the shade and dozed off at once. Nick left him there and went along the deserted business section in search of a drugstore. He would get some Pepto-Bismol and force Tom to drink it when he woke up, whether Tom wanted to or not. If it took a whole bottle to cork Tom up, so be it. Nick wanted to make up some time tomorrow.

He found a Rexall between the Pratt Theater and the local Norge. He slipped in through the open door, and stood for a moment smelling the familiar hot, unaired, stale smell. There were other odors mixed in, strong and cloying. Perfume was the strongest. Perhaps some of the bottles had burst in the heat.

Nick glanced around, looking for the stomach medicines, trying to remember if Pepto-Bisrnol went over in the heat. Well, the label would say. His eyes slipped past a mannequin and two rows to the right he saw what he wanted. He had taken two steps that way when he realized that he had never before seen a mannequin in a drugstore.

He looked back and what he saw was Julie Lawry.

She was standing perfectly still, a bottle of perfume in one hand, the small glass wand you used to daub the stuff on in the other. Her china-blue eyes were wide in stunned, disbelieving surprise. Her brown hair was drawn back and tied with a brilliant silk scarf that hung halfway down her back. She was wearing a pink middy sweater and bluejeans shorts that were almost abbreviated enough to be mistaken for panties. There was a rash of pimples on her forehead and a hell of a good one right in the middle of her chin.

She and Nick stared at each other across half the length of the deserted drugstore, both frozen now. Then the bottle of perfume dropped from her fingers, shattered like a bomb, and a hothouse reek filled the store, making it smell like a funeral parlor.

"Jesus, are you real?" she asked in a trembling voice.

Nick's heart had begun to race, and he could feel his blood thudding crazily in his temples. Even his eyesight had begun to wham in and out a little, making dots of light race across his field of vision.

He nodded.

"You ain't a ghost?"

He shook his head.

"Then say somethin. If you ain't a ghost, say somethin."

Nick put a hand across his mouth, then on his throat.

"What's that s'posed to mean?" Her voice had taken on a slightly hysterical tone. Nick couldn't hear it ... but he could sense it, see it on her face. He was afraid to step toward her, because if he did, she would run. He didn't think she was afraid of seeing another person; what she was afraid of was that she was seeing a hallucination, and she was cracking up. Again, he felt that wave of frustration. If he could only talk- Instead, he went through his pantomime again. It was, after all, the only thing he could do. This time understanding dawned.

"You can't talk? You're a mute?"

Nick nodded.

She gave a high laugh that was mostly frustration. "You mean somebody finally showed up and it's a mute guy?"

Nick shrugged and gave a slanting smile.

"Well," she said, coming down the aisle to him, "you ain't bad-looking. That's something." She put a hand on his arm, and the swell of her breasts almost touched his arm. He could smell at least three different kinds of perfume, and under all of them the unlovely aroma of her sweat.

"My name's Julie," she said. "Julie Lawry. What's yours?" She giggled a little. "You can't tell me, can you? Poor you. " She leaned a little closer, and her breasts brushed him. He began to feel very warm. What the hell, he thought uneasily, she's only a kid.

He broke away from her, took the pad from his pocket, and began to write. A line or so into his message she leaned over his shoulder to see what he was writing. No bra. Jesus. She had sure gotten over her scare quick. His writing became a little uneven.

"Oh, wow," she said as he wrote-it was as if he was a monkey capable of doing a particularly sophisticated trick. Nick was looking down at his pad and didn't "read" her words, but he could feel the tickling warmth of her breath.

"I'm Nick Andros. I'm a deaf-mute. I'm traveling with a man named Tom Cullen, who is lightly retarded. He can't read or understand many of the things I can act out unless they're very simple. We're on our way to Nebraska because I think there might be people there. Come with us, if you want."

"Sure," she said immediately, and then, remembering that he was deaf and shaping her words very carefully, she asked, "Can you read lips?"

Nick nodded.

"Okay," she said. "I'm so glad to see someone, who cares if it's a deaf-mute and a retard. Spooky here. I can hardly sleep nights since the power went off." Her face set in martyred lines of grief more appropriate to a soap opera heroine than a real person. "My mom and dad died two weeks ago, you know. Everybody died but me. I've been so lonely." With a sob she threw herself into Nick's arms and began to undulate against him in an obscene parody of grief.

When she drew back from him, her eyes were dry and shiny.

"Hey, let's make it," she said. "You're sort of cute."

Nick gawped at her. I can't believe this, he thought.

But it was real enough. She was tugging at his belt. "Come on. I'm on the pill. It's safe." She paused for a moment. "You can, can't you? I mean, just because you can't talk, that doesn't mean you can't-"

He put his hands out, perhaps meaning to take her by the shoulders, but he found her breasts instead. That was the end of any resistance he might have had. Coherent thought left his mind as well. He lowered her to the floor and had her.

Afterward, he went to the door and looked out as he buckled his belt again, checking on Tom. He was still on the park bench, dead to the world. Julie joined him, fiddling with a fresh bottle of perfume.

"That the retard?" she asked.

Nick nodded, not liking the word. It seemed like a cruel word.

She began to talk about herself, and Nick discovered to his relief that she was seventeen, not much younger than he was. Her mamma and her friends had always called her Angel-Face or just Angel for short, she said, because she looked so young. She told him a great deal more in the following hour, and Nick found it next to impossible to separate the truth from the lies ... or the wish-fulfillment, if you preferred. She might have been waiting for someone like him, who could never interrupt the endless flow of her monologue, all her life. Nick's eyes got tired just watching her pink lips push out the shapes of words. But if his eyes wandered for more than just a moment, to check on Tom or to consider the crashed-out plate-glass window of the dress shop across the street, her hand would touch his cheek, bringing his eyes back to her mouth. She wanted him to "hear" everything, ignore nothing. He was annoyed with her at first, then bored with her. In the space of an hour, incredibly, he found himself wishing he hadn't found her in the first place, or that she would change her mind about coming with them.

She was "into" rock music and marijuana and had a taste for what she called "Colombian short rounds" and "fry-daddies." She'd had a boyfriend, but he'd gotten so pissed off at the "establishment system" running the local high school that he had quit to join the Marines last April. She hadn't seen him since then, but still wrote him every week. She and her two girlfriends, Ruth Honinger and Mary Beth Gooch, went to all the rock concerts in Wichita and had hitched all the way to Kansas City last September to see Van Halen and the Monsters of Heavy Metal in concert. She claimed to have "made it" with the Dokken bassist, and said it had been "the most bitchin-groovy experience of my life"; she had just "cried and cried" after the deaths of her mother and father within twenty-four hours of each other, even though her mother was a "bitchy prude" and her father "had a stick up his ass" about Ronnie, her boyfriend who had left town to join the Marines; she had plans to become either a beautician in Wichita when she graduated high school, or to "truck on out to Hollywood and get a job with one of those companies that do the homes of the stars, I'm bitchin-groovy at interior decoration, and Mary Beth said she'd come with me."

At this point she suddenly remembered Mary Beth Gooch was dead, and that her opportunity to become a beautician or an interior decorator to the stars had passed with her ... and everyone and everything else. This seemed to strike her with a more genuine sort of grief. It was not a storm, however, but only a brief squall.

When the flow of words had begun to dry up a little-at least for the time being-she wanted to "do it" (as she so coyly put it) again. Nick shook his head and she pouted briefly. "Maybe I don't want to go with you after all," she said.

Nick shrugged.

"Dummy-dummy-dummy," she said with sudden sharp viciousness. Her eyes shone with spite. Then she smiled. "I didn't mean that. I was just kidding."

Nick looked at her, expressionless. He had been called worse names, but there was something in her that he very much did not like. Some restless instability. If she got angry with you, she wouldn't yell or slap your face; not this one. This one would claw you. It came to him with sudden surety that she had lied about her age. She wasn't seventeen, or fourteen, or twenty-one. She was any age you wanted her to be ... as long as you wanted her more than she wanted you, needed her more than she needed you. She came across as a sexual creature, but Nick thought that her sexuality was only a manifestation of something else in her personality ... a symptom. Symptom was a word you used for someone who was sick, though, wasn't it? Did he think she was sick? In a way he did, and he was suddenly afraid of the effect she might have on Tom.

"Hey, your friend's waking up!" Julie said.

Nick looked around. Yes-Tom was now sitting on the park bench, scratching his crow's nest hair and goggling around pallidly. Nick suddenly remembered the Pepto-Bismol.

"Hi, y'all!" Julie trilled, and ran down the street toward Tom, her breasts bouncing sweetly under her tight middy top. Tom's goggle had been big to begin with; now it grew bigger still.

"Hi?" he said-asked slowly, and looked at Nick for confirmation and/or explanation.

Masking his own unease, Nick shrugged and nodded.

"I'm Julie," she said. "How you doin, cutie-pie?"

Deep in thought-and unease-Nick went back into the drugstore to get what Tom needed.

"Uh-uh," Tom said, shaking his head and backing away. "Uh-uh, I ain't gonna. Tom Cullen doesn't like medicine, laws no, tastes bad."

Nick looked at him with frustration and disgust, holding the three-sided bottle of Pepto-Bismol in one hand. He looked to Julie and she caught his gaze, but in it he saw that same teasing light as when she had called him dummy-it was not a twinkle but a hard mirthless shine. It is the look that a person with no essential sense of humor gets in his or her eye when he or she is getting ready to tease.