He put an arm around her. She started a little and he felt her stiffen. Her hand and shoulder were warm.

"I wish you wouldn't," she said uncomfortably.

"You don't want me to?"

"No. I don't."

He drew his arm back, baffled. She did did want him to, that was the thing; he could feel her wanting coming off her in mild but clearly receivable waves. Her color was very high now, and she was looking desperately down at her hands, which were fiddling together in her lap like a couple of hurt spiders. Her eyes were shiny, as if she might be on the verge of tears. want him to, that was the thing; he could feel her wanting coming off her in mild but clearly receivable waves. Her color was very high now, and she was looking desperately down at her hands, which were fiddling together in her lap like a couple of hurt spiders. Her eyes were shiny, as if she might be on the verge of tears.

"Nadine-"

(honey, is that you?) She looked up at him and he saw she was past the verge of tears. She was about to speak when Joe strolled up, carrying his guitar case in one hand. They looked at him guiltily, as if he had found them doing something rather more personal than talking.

"Lady," Joe said conversationally.

"What?" Larry asked, startled and not tracking very well.

"Lady!" Joe said again, and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder.

Larry and Nadine looked at each other.

Suddenly there was a fourth voice, highpitched and choking with emotion, as startling as the voice of God.

"Thank heaven!" it cried. "Oh thank heaven!"

They stood up and looked at the woman who was now half running up the street toward them. She was smiling and crying at the same time.

"Glad to see you," she said. "I'm so glad to see you, thank heaven-"

She swayed and might have fainted if Larry hadn't been there to steady her until her dizziness passed. He guessed her age at about twenty-five. She was dressed in bluejeans and a plain white cotton blouse. Her face was pale, her blue eyes unnaturally fixed. Those eyes stared at Larry as if trying to convince the brain behind them that this was not a hallucination, that the three people she saw were really here.

"I'm Larry Underwood," he said. "The lady is Nadine Cross. The boy is Joe. We're very happy to meet you."

The woman continued to stare at him wordlessly for a moment, and then walked slowly away from him and toward Nadine.

"I'm so pleased ..." she began, "... so pleased to meet you." She stumbled a little. "Oh my God, are you really people?"

"Yes," Nadine said.

The woman put her arms around Nadine and sobbed. Nadine held her. Joe stood in the street by a stalled pickup truck, his guitar case in one hand, his free thumb in his mouth. At last he went to Larry and looked up at him. Larry held his hand. The two of them stood that way and watched the women solemnly. And that was how they met Lucy Swann.

She was eager to go with them when they told her where they were headed, and that they had reason to believe there were at least two other people there, and possibly more. Larry found a medium-sized knapsack for her in the Enfield Sporting Goods, and Nadine went down to her house on the outskirts of town to help her pack ... two changes of clothes, some underwear, an extra pair of shoes, a raincoat. And pictures of her late husband and daughter.

They camped that night in a town called Quechee, now over the state line and into Vermont. Lucy Swann told a tale which was short and simple and not much different from the others they would hear. The grief came built-in, and the shock, which had driven her at least within hailing distance of madness.

Her husband had sickened on the twenty-fifth of June, her daughter the next day. She had nursed them as well as she had been able, fully expecting to come down with the rales, as they were calling the sickness in her corner of New England, herself. By the twenty-seventh, when her husband had gone into a coma, Enfield was pretty much cut off from the outside world. Television reception had become spotty and queer. People were dying like flies. During the previous week they had seen extraordinary movements of army troops along the turnpike, but none of them had business in such a little place as Enfield, New Hampshire. In the early morning hours of June twenty-eighth, her husband had died. Her daughter had seemed a little bit better for a while on the twenty-ninth, and then had taken an abrupt turn for the worst that evening. She had died around eleven o'clock. By July 3, everyone in Enfield except her and an old man named Bill Dadds had died. Bill had been sick, Lucy said, but he seemed to have thrown it off entirely. Then, on the morning of Independence Day, she had found Bill dead on Main Street, swollen up and black, like everyone else.

"So I buried my people, and Bill too," she said as they sat around the crackling fire. "It took all of one day, but I put them to rest. And then I thought that I better go on down to Concord, where my mother and father live. But I just ... never got around to it." She looked at them appealingly. "Was it so wrong? Do you think they would have been alive?"

"No," Larry said. "The immunity sure wasn't hereditary in any direct way. My mother ..." He looked into the fire.

"Wes and me, we had to get married," Lucy said. "That was the summer after I graduated high school-1984. My mom and dad didn't want me to marry him. They wanted me to go away to have the baby and just give her up. But I wouldn't. My mom said it would end in divorce. My dad said Wes was a no-account man and he'd always be shiftless. I just said, 'That may be, but we'll see what happens.' I just wanted to take the chance. You know?"

"Yes," Nadine said. She was sitting next to Lucy, looking at her with great compassion.

"We had a nice little home, and I sure never thought it would end like this," Lucy said with a sigh that was half a sob. "We settled down real good, the three of us. It was more Marcy than me that settled Wes down. He thought the sun rose and set on that baby. He thought ..."

"Don't," Nadine said. "All that was before."

That word again, Larry thought. That little two-syllable word.

"Yes. It's gone now. And I guess I could have gotten along. I was, anyway, until I started to have all those bad dreams."

Larry's head jerked up. "Dreams?"

Nadine was looking at Joe. A moment before, the boy had been nodding out in front of the fire. Now he was staring at Lucy, his eyes gleaming.

"Bad dreams, nightmares," Lucy said. "They're not always the same. Mostly it's a man chasing me, and I can never see exactly what he looks like because he's all wrapped up in a, what do you call it, a cloak. And he stays in the shadows and alleys." She shivered. "I got so I was afraid to go to sleep. But now maybe I'll-"

"Brrr-ack man!" Joe cried suddenly, so fiercely they all jumped. He leaped to his feet and held his arms out like a miniature Bela Lugosi, his fingers hooked into claws. "Brrack man! Bad dreams! Chases! Chases me! 'Cares me!" And he shrank against Nadine and stared untrustingly into the darkness.

A little silence fell among them.

"This is crazy," Larry said, and then stopped. They were all looking at him. Suddenly the darkness seemed very dark indeed, and Lucy looked frightened again.

He forced himself to go on. "Lucy, do you ever dream about ... well, about a place in Nebraska?"

"I had a dream one night about an old Negro woman," Lucy said, "but it didn't last very long. She said something like, 'You come see me.' Then I was back in Enfield and that ... that scary guy was chasing me. Then I woke up."

Larry looked at her so long that she colored and dropped her eyes.

He looked at Joe. "Joe, do you ever dream about ... uh, corn? An old woman? A guitar?" Joe only looked at him from Nadine's encircling arm.

"Leave him alone, you'll upset him more," Nadine said, but she was the one who sounded upset.

Larry thought. "A house, Joe? A little house with a porch up on jacks?"

He thought he saw a gleam in Joe's eyes.

"Stop it, Larry!" Nadine said.

"A swing, Joe? A swing made out of a tire?"

Joe suddenly jerked in Nadine's arms. His thumb came out of his mouth. Nadine tried to hold him, but Joe broke through.

"The swing!" Joe said exultantly. "The swing! The swing!" He whirled away from them and pointed first at Nadine, then at Larry. "Her! You! Lots!"

"Lots?" Larry asked, but Joe had subsided again.

Lucy Swann looked stunned. "The swing," she said. "I remember that, too." She looked at Larry. "Why are we all having the same dreams? Is somebody using a ray on us?"

"I don't know." He looked at Nadine. "Have you had them, too?"

"I don't dream," she said sharply, and immediately dropped her eyes. He thought: You're lying. But why? You're lying. But why?

"Nadine, if you-" he began.

"I told you I don't dream!" I don't dream!" Nadine cried sharply, almost hysterically. "Can't you just leave me alone? Do you have to badger me?" Nadine cried sharply, almost hysterically. "Can't you just leave me alone? Do you have to badger me?"

She stood up and left the fire, almost running.

Lucy looked after her uncertainly for a moment and then stood up. "I'll go after her."

"Yes, you better. Joe, stay with me, okay?"

"Kay," Joe said, and began to unsnap the guitar case.

Lucy came back with Nadine ten minutes later. They had both been crying, Larry saw, but they seemed to be on good terms now.

"I'm sorry," Nadine said to Larry. "It's just that I'm always upset. It comes out in funny ways."

"It's all right."

The subject did not come up again. They sat and listened to Joe run through his repertoire. He was getting very good indeed now, and in with the hootings and grunts, fragments of the lyrics were coming through.

At last they slept, Larry on one end, Nadine on the other, Joe and Lucy between.

Larry dreamed first of the black man on the high place, and then of the old black woman sitting on her porch. Only in this dream he knew the black man was coming, striding through the corn, knocking his own twisted swathe through the corn, his terrible hot grin spot-welded to his face, coming toward them, closer and closer.

Larry woke up in the middle of the night, out of breath, his chest constricted with terror. The others slept like stones. Somehow, in that dream he had known. The black man had not been coming emptyhanded. In his arms, borne like an offering as he strode through the corn, he held the decaying body of Rita Blakemore, now stiff and swollen, the flesh ripped by woodchucks and weasels. A mute accusation to be thrown at his feet to scream his guilt at the others, to silently proclaim that he wasn't no nice guy, that something had been left out of him, that he was a loser, that he was a taker.

At last he slept again, and until he woke up the next morning at seven, stiff, cold, hungry, and needing to go to the bathroom, his sleep was dreamless.

"Oh God," Nadine said emptily. Larry looked at her and saw a disappointment too deep for tears. Her face was pale, her remarkable eyes clouded and dull.

It was quarter past seven, July 19, and the shadows were drawing long. They had ridden all day, their few rest stops only five minutes long, their lunch break, which they had taken in Randolph, only half an hour. None of them had complained, although after six hours on a cycle Larry's whole body felt numb and achy and full of pins.

Now they stood together in a line outside a wrought-iron fence. Below and behind them lay the town of Stovington, not much changed from the way Stu Redman had seen it on his last couple of days in this institution. Beyond the fence and a lawn that had once been well kept but which was now shaggy and littered by sticks and leaves that had blown onto it during afternoon thunderstorms, was the institution itself, three stories high, more of it buried underground, Larry surmised.

The place was deserted, silent, empty.

In the center of the lawn was a sign which read:

STOVINGTON PLAGUE CONTROL CENTER.

THIS IS A GOVERNMENT INSTALLATION!.

VISITORS MUST CHECK IN AT MAIN DESK.

Beside it was a second sign, and this was what they were looking at.

ROUTE 7 to RUTLAND EVERYONE HERE IS DEADROUTE 4 to SCHUYLERVILLE WE ARE MOVING WEST TO NEBRASKAROUTE 29 to I-87 STAY ON OUR ROUTEI-87 SOUTH TO I-90.

WATCH FOR SIGNSI-90 WESTHAROLD EMERY LAUDER.

FRANCES GOLDSMITH.

STUART REDMAN.

GLENDON PEQUOD BATEMANJULY 8, 1990.

"Harold, my man," Larry murmured. "Can't wait to shake your hand and buy you a beer ... or a Payday."

"Larry!" Lucy said sharply.

Nadine had fainted.

CHAPTER 45.

She tottered out onto her porch at twenty to eleven on the morning of July 20, carrying her coffee and her toast with her as she did every day that the Coca-Cola thermometer outside the sink window read over fifty degrees. It was high summer, the finest summer Mother Abagail could recollect since 1955, the year her mother had died at the goodish age of ninety-three. Too bad there ain't more folks around to enjoy it, she thought as she sat carefully down in her armless rocking chair. But did they ever enjoy it? Some did, of course; young folks in love did, and old folks whose bones remembered so clearly what the death-clutch of winter was. Now most of the young folks and old folks were gone, and most of those in between. God had brought down a harsh judgment on the human race.

Some might argue with such a harsh judgment, but Mother Abagail was not among their number. He had done it once with water, and sometime further along, He would do it with fire. Her place was not to judge God, although she wished He hadn't seen fit to set the cup before her lips that He had. But when it came to matters of judgment, judgment, she was satisfied with the answer God had given Moses from the burning bush when Moses had seen fit to question. Who are she was satisfied with the answer God had given Moses from the burning bush when Moses had seen fit to question. Who are you? you? Mose asks, and God comes back from that bush just as pert as you like: I Mose asks, and God comes back from that bush just as pert as you like: I Am, Am, Who I AM. In other words, Mose, stop beatin around this here bush and get your old ass in gear. Who I AM. In other words, Mose, stop beatin around this here bush and get your old ass in gear.

She wheezed laughter and nodded her head and dipped her toast into the wide mouth of her coffee cup until it was soft enough to chew. It had been sixteen years since she had bid hail and farewell to her last tooth. Toothless she had come from her mother's womb, and toothless she would go into her own grave. Molly, her great-granddaughter, and her husband had given her a set of false teeth for Mother's Day just a year later, the year she herself had been ninety-three, but they hurt her gums and now she only wore them when she knew Molly and Jim were coming. Then she would take them from the box in the drawer and rinse them off good and stick them in. And if she had time before Molly and Jim came, she would make faces at herself in the spotty kitchen mirror and growl through all those big white fake teeth and laugh fit to split. She looked like an old black Everglades gator.

She was old and feeble, but her mind was pretty much in order. Abagail Freemantle was her name, born in 1882 and with the birth certificate to prove it. She'd seen a heap during her time on the earth, but nothing to match the goings-on of the last month or so. No, there never had been such a thing, and now her time was coming to be a part of it and she hated it. She was old. She wanted to rest and enjoy the cycle of the seasons between now and whenever God got tired of watching her make her daily round and decided to call her home to Glory. But what happened when you questioned God? The answer you got was I Am, Who I AM, and that was the end. When His own Son prayed that the cup be taken from His lips, God never even answered ... and she wasn't up to that snuff, no how, no way. Just an ordinary sinner was all she was, and at night when the wind came up and blew through the corn it frightened her to think that God had looked down at a little baby girl poking out between her mother's legs back in early 1882 and had said to Himself: I got to keep her around a goodish time. She's got work in 1990, on the other side of a whole heap of calendar pages. I got to keep her around a goodish time. She's got work in 1990, on the other side of a whole heap of calendar pages.

Her time here in Hemingford Home was coming to an end, and her final season of work lay ahead of her in the West, near the Rocky Mountains. He had sent Moses to mountain-climbing and Noah to boatbuilding; He had seen His own Son nailed up on a Tree. What did He care how miserably afraid Abby Freemantle was of the man with no face, he he who stalked her dreams? who stalked her dreams?

She never saw him; she didn't have to see him. He was a shadow passing through the corn at noon, a cold pocket of air, a gore-crew peering down at you from the phone lines. His voice called to her in all the sounds that had ever frightened her-spoken soft, it was the tick of a deathwatch beetle under the stairs, telling that someone loved would soon pass over; spoken loud it was the afternoon thunder rolling amid the clouds that came out of the west like boiling Armageddon. And sometimes there was no sound at all but the lonely rustle of the nightwind in the corn but she would know he he was there and that was the worst of all, because then the man with no face seemed only a little less than God Himself; at those times it seemed that she was within touching distance of the dark angel that had flown silently over Egypt, killing the firstborn of every house where the doorpost wasn't daubed with blood. That frightened her most of all. She became a child again in her fear and knew that while others knew of him and were frightened was there and that was the worst of all, because then the man with no face seemed only a little less than God Himself; at those times it seemed that she was within touching distance of the dark angel that had flown silently over Egypt, killing the firstborn of every house where the doorpost wasn't daubed with blood. That frightened her most of all. She became a child again in her fear and knew that while others knew of him and were frightened by by him, only she had been given a clear vision of his terrible power. him, only she had been given a clear vision of his terrible power.