"June Brinkmeyer," the redhead said.

"Well, you c'n sleep with me, June, unless you've some other mind. The bed ain't big enough for two, and I don't think you'd want to sleep with an old bundle of sticks like me even if it was, but there's a mattress put away overhead that should do you if the bugs ain't got into it. One of these big men will get it down for you, I guess."

"Sure," Ralph said.

Olivia carried Gina, who had already fallen asleep, away to bed. The kitchen, now more populated than it had been for years, was filling up with dusk. Grunting, Mother Abagail got to her feet and lit three oil-lamps, one for the table, one which she set on the stove (the cast-iron Blackwood was now cooling and ticking contentedly to itself), and one for the porch windowsill. The darkness was pushed back.

"Maybe the old ways are best," Dick said abruptly, and they all looked at him. He blushed and coughed again, but Abagail only chuckled.

"I mean," Dick went on a little defensively, "that's the first home-cooked meal I've had since ... well, since June thirtieth, I guess. The day the power went off. And I cooked that myself. What I do could hardly be called home cooking. My wife, now ... she was one hell of a good cook. She ..." He trailed off blankly.

Olivia came back in. "Fast asleep," she said. "That was a tired girl."

"Do you bake your own bread?" Dick asked Mother Abagail.

"Course I do. Always have. Of course, it ain't yeast bread; all the yeast has gone over. But there's other kinds."

"I crave bread," he said simply. "Helen ... my wife ... used to make bread twice a week. Just lately it seems to be all I want. Give me three slices of bread and some strawberry jam and I think I could die happy."

"Tom Cullen's tired," Tom said abruptly. "M-O-O-N, that spells tired." He yawned bone-crackingly.

"You can bed down in the shed," Abagail said. "It smells a bit musty, but it's dry."

For a moment they listened to the steady rustle of the rain, which had been falling for almost an hour now. Alone, it would have been a desolate sound. In company it was a pleasant, secret sound, closing them in together. It gurgled from the galvanized tin gutters and plopped in the rain barrel Abby still kept on the far side of the house. Thunder muttered far away, back over Iowa.

"I guess you got your campin gear?" she asked them.

"All kinds," Ralph said. "We'll be fine. Come on, Tom." He stood up.

"I wonder," Abagail said, "if you and Nick would stay a bit, Ralph."

Nick had been sitting at the table through all of this, on the far side of the room from her rocking chair. You would think, she mused, that if a man couldn't talk he would get lost in a roomful of people, that he would just sink from view. But something about Nick kept that from happening. He sat perfectly still, following the conversation as it traveled around the room, his face reacting to whatever was being said. That face was open and intelligent, but careworn for one so young. Several times as the talk went on she saw people look at him, as if Nick could confirm what he or she was saying. They were very much aware of him, too. And several times she had seen him looking out the window into the dark, his expression troubled.

"Could you get me that mattress?" June asked softly.

"Nick and I will get it," Ralph said, standing up.

"I don't want to go out in that back shed all by myself," Tom said. "Laws, no!"

"I'll go out with you, hoss," Dick said. "We'll light the Coleman lamp and bed down." He rose. "Thanks again, ma'am. Can't tell you how good all this has been."

The others echoed his thanks. Nick and Ralph got the mattress, which proved to be bug-free. Tom and Dick-needing only a Harry to fill em up, Abagail thought-went out to the shed, where the Coleman lantern soon flared. Not long after, Nick, Ralph, and Mother Abagail were left alone in the kitchen.

"Mind if I smoke, ma'am?" Ralph asked.

"Not so long as you don't tap ashes on the floor. There's an ashtray in that cupboard right behind you."

Ralph got up to get it, and Abby was left looking at Nick. He was wearing a khaki shirt, bluejeans, and a faded drill vest. There was something about him that made her feel she had known him before, or had always been meant to know him. Looking at him, she felt a quiet sense of knowledge and completion, as if this moment had been simple fate. As if, at one end of her life there had been her father, John Freemantle, tall and black and proud, and this man at the other end, young, white, and mute, with that one brilliant, expressive eye looking at her from that careworn face.

She looked out the window and saw the glow of the Coleman battery lamp drifting out of the shed window and lighting a little piece of her dooryard. She wondered if that shed still smelled of cow; she hadn't been out there for close on to three years. No need to. Her last cow, Daisy, had been sold in 1975, but in 1987 the shed had still smelled of cow. Probably did to this day. No matter; there were worse smells.

"Ma'am?"

She looked back. Ralph was sitting next to Nick now, holding a sheet of notepaper and squinting at it in the lamplight. On his lap, Nick was holding a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen. He was still looking at her closely.

"Nick says ..." Ralph cleared his throat, embarrassed.

"Go ahead."

"His note says it's hard to read your lips because-"

"I guess I know why," she said. "No fear."

She got up and shuffled over to the bureau. On the second shelf above it was a plastic jar, and in it two denture plates floated in cloudy liquid like a medical exhibit.

She fished them out and rinsed them with a dipper of water.

"Lord God I have suffered," Mother Abagail said balefully, and popped the plates in.

"We got to talk," she said. "You two are the head ones, and we got some things to sort out."

"Well," Ralph said, "it ain't me. I was never much more than a full-time factory worker and a part-time farmer. I've raised a helluva lot more calluses than idears in my time. Nick, I guess he's in charge."

"Is that right?" she asked, looking at Nick.

Nick wrote briefly and Ralph read it aloud, as he continued to do.

"It was my idea to come up this way, yes. About being in charge, I don't know."

"We met June and Olivia about ninety miles south of here," Ralph said. "Day before yesterday, wasn't it, Nick?"

Nick nodded.

"We was on our way to you even then, Mother. The women were headed north, too. So was Dick. We all just threw in together."

"Have you seen any other folks?" she asked.

"No," Nick wrote. "But I've had a feeling-Ralph has, too-that there are other people hiding, watching us. Afraid, I guess. Still getting over the shock of what's happened."

She nodded.

"Dick said that the day before he joined us, he heard a motorcycle somewhere south. So there are other people around. I think what scares them is seeing a fairly big group all together."

"Why did you come here?" Her eyes, caught in their nets of wrinkles, stared at him keenly.

Nick wrote: "I have dreamed of you. Dick Ellis says he has once. And the little girl, Gina, was calling you 'grammylady' long before we got here. She described your place. The tire swing."

"Bless the child," Mother Abagail said absently. She looked at Ralph. "You?"

"Once or twice, ma'am," Ralph said. He wet his lips. "Mostly what I dreamed about was just ... just that other fella."

"What other fella?"

Nick wrote. Circled what he had written. Handed it to her directly. Her eyes were not much good for close work without her specs or the lighted magnifying glass she'd gotten in Hemingford Center last year, but she could read this. It was writ large, like the writing God had put on the wall of Belshazzar's palace. Circled, it gave her a cold chill just looking at it. She thought of weasels squirming across the road on their bellies, yanking at her towsack with their needle-sharp killers' teeth. She thought of a single red eye opening, disclosing itself in the darkness, looking, searching, now not just for an old woman but a whole party of men and women ... and one little girl.

The two circled words were: dark man. dark man.

"I've been told," she said, folding the paper, straightening it, then folding it again, for the time being unmindful of the misery of her arthritis, "that we're to go west. I've been told in a dream, by the Lord God. I didn't want to listen. I'm an old woman, and all I want to do is die on this little piece of land. It's been my family's freehold for a hundred and twelve years, but I wasn't meant to die here any more than Moses was meant to go over into Canaan with the Children of Israel."

She paused. The two men watched her soberly in the lamplight, and outside the rain continued to fall, slow and ceaseless. There was no more thunder. Lord, she thought, these dentures hurt my mouth. I want to take them out and go to bed.

"I started having dreams two years before this plague ever fell. I've always dreamed, and sometimes my dreams have come true. Prophecy is the gift of God and everyone has a smidge of it. My own grandmother used to call it the shining lamp of God, sometimes just the shine. In my dreams I saw myself going west. At first with just a few people, then a few more, then a few more. West, always west, until I could see the Rocky Mountains. It got so there was a whole caravan of us, two hundred or more. And there would be signs ... no, not signs from God but regular road-signs, and every one of them saying things like BOULDER, COLORADO BOULDER, COLORADO, 609 MILES MILES or or THIS WAY TO BOULDER THIS WAY TO BOULDER."

She paused.

"Those dreams, they scared me. I never told a soul I was havin em, that's how scared I was. I felt the way I guess Job must have felt when God spoke to him out of the whirlwind. I even tried to pretend they was just dreams, foolish old woman runnin from God the way Jonah did. But the big fish has swallowed us up just the same, you see! And if God says to Abby, You got to tell, You got to tell, then tell I must. And I always felt like someone would come to me, someone special, and that's how I'd be in the way of knowin the time had come." then tell I must. And I always felt like someone would come to me, someone special, and that's how I'd be in the way of knowin the time had come."

She looked at Nick, who sat at the table and regarded her solemnly with his good eye through the haze of Ralph Brentner's cigarette smoke.

"I knew when I saw you," she said. "It's you, Nick. God has put His finger on your heart. But He has more fingers than one, and there's others out there, still comin on, praise God, and He's got a finger on them, too. I dream of him, him, how he's lookin for us even now, and God forgive my sick spirit, I curse him in my heart." She began to weep and got up to have a drink of water and a splash. Her tears were the human part of her, weak and flagging. how he's lookin for us even now, and God forgive my sick spirit, I curse him in my heart." She began to weep and got up to have a drink of water and a splash. Her tears were the human part of her, weak and flagging.

When she turned back, Nick was writing. At last he ripped the page off his pad and handed it to Ralph.

"I don't know about the God part, but I know something is working here. Everyone we've met has been moving north. As if you had the answer. Have you dreamed about any of the others? Dick? June or Olivia? Maybe the little girl?"

"Not any of these others. A man who doesn't talk much. A woman who is with child. A man of about your age who comes to me with a guitar of his own. And you, Nick."

"And you think going to Boulder is the right thing?"

Mother Abagail said, "It's what we're meant meant to do." to do."

Nick doodled aimlessly on his pad for a moment and then wrote, "How much do you know about the dark man? Do you know who he is?"

"I know what he's about but not who he is. He's the purest evil left in the world. The rest of the bad is little evil. Shoplifters and sexfiends and people who like to use their fists. But he'll call them. He's started already. He's getting them together a lot faster than we are. Before he's ready to make his move, I guess he'll have a lot more. Not just the evil ones that are like him, but the weak ones ... the lonely ones ... and the ones that have left God out of their hearts."

"Maybe he's not real," Nick wrote. "Maybe he's just ..." He had to nibble at the top of his pen and think. At last he added: "... the scared, bad part of all of us. Maybe we are dreaming of the things we're afraid we might do."

Ralph frowned over this as he read it aloud, but Abby grasped what Nick meant right off. It wasn't much different from the talk of the new preachers who had got on the land in the last twenty years or so. There wasn't really any Satan, that was their gospel. There was evil, and it probably came from original sin, but it was in all of us and getting it out was as impossible as getting an egg out of its shell without cracking it. According to the way these new preachers had it, Satan was like a jigsaw puzzle-and every man, woman, and child on earth added his or her little piece to make up the whole. Yes, all that had a good modern sound to it; the trouble with it was that it wasn't true. And if Nick was allowed to go on thinking that, the dark man would eat him for dinner.

She said: "You dreamed of me. Ain't I real?"

Nick nodded.

"And I dreamed you. Ain't you real? Praise God, you're sittin right over there with a pad o paper on your knee. This other man, Nick, he's as real as you are." Yes, he was real. She thought of the weasels, and of the red eye opening in the darkness. And when she spoke up again, her voice was husky. "He ain't Satan," she said, "but he and Satan know of each other and have kept their councils together of old.

"The Bible, it don't say what happened to Noah and his family after the flood went down. But I wouldn't be surprised if there was some awful tussle for the souls of those few people-for their souls, their bodies, their way of thinking. their way of thinking. And I wouldn't be surprised if that was what was on for us. And I wouldn't be surprised if that was what was on for us.

"He's west of the Rockies now. Sooner or later he'll come east. Maybe not this year, no, but when he's ready. And it's our lot to deal with him."

Nick was shaking his head, disturbed.

"Yes," she said quietly. "You'll see. There's bitter days ahead. Death and terror, betrayal and tears. And not all of us will be alive to see how it ends."

"I don't like any of this," Ralph muttered. "Aren't things hard enough without this guy you and Nick are talkin about? Ain't we got enough problems, with no doctors or electricity or nothing? Why did we have to get stuck with this damn doorprize?"

"I don't know. It's God's way. He don't explain to the likes of Abby Freemantle."

"If this is His way," Ralph said, "why, I wish He'd retire and let somebody younger take over."

"If the dark man is west," Nick wrote, "maybe we ought to pick up stakes and move east."

She shook her head patiently. "Nick, all things serve the Lord. Don't you think this black man serves Him, too? He does, no matter how mysterious His purpose may be. The black man will follow you no matter where you run, because he serves the purpose of God, and God wants you to treat with him. It don't do no good to run from the will of the Lord God of Hosts. A man or woman who tries that only ends up in the belly of the beast."

Nick wrote briefly. Ralph studied the note, rubbed the side of his nose, and wished he didn't have to read it. Old ladies like this didn't cotton to stuff like what Nick had just written. She'd likely call it a blasphemy, and shout it loud enough to wake everyone in the place, too.

"What's he say?" Abagail asked.

"He says ..." Ralph cleared his throat; the feather stuck in the band of his hat jiggled. "He says that he don't believe in God." The message relayed, he looked unhappily down at his shoes and waited for the explosion.

But she only chuckled, got up, and walked across to Nick. She took one of his hands and patted it. "Bless you, Nick, but that don't matter. He He believes in believes in you." you."

They stayed at Abby Freemantle's place the next day, and it was the best day any of them could remember since the superflu had drawn away, like the waters going down from Mount Ararat. The rain had stopped sometime during the early hours of the morning, and by nine o'clock the sky was a pleasant Midwest mural of sun and broken clouds. The corn twinkled away in all directions like a ransom of emeralds. It was cooler than it had been for weeks.

Tom Cullen spent the morning running up and down the rows of corn, his arms outstretched, scaring up droves of crows. Gina McCone sat contentedly in the dirt by the tire swing, playing with a large number of paper dolls Abagail had found at the bottom of a trunk in her bedroom closet. A little earlier, she and Tom had had a pleasant game of cars and trucks around the Fisher-Price garage Tom had taken from the five-and-dime in May, Oklahoma. Tom did what Gina wanted him to do willingly enough.

Dick Ellis, the vet, came diffidently to Mother Abagail and asked her if anyone in the area had kept pigs.

"Why, the Stoners always had pigs," she said. She was sitting on the porch in her rocker, chording her guitar and watching Gina at play in the yard, her broken leg in its cast stuck out stiffly in front of her.

"Think any of them might still be alive?"

"You'd have to go see. Might be. Might be they've bust down their pens and gone hogwild." Her eyes gleamed. "Might also be I know a fella who dreamed about pork chops last night."

"Could be you do," Dick said.

"You ever slaughtered a hog?"

"No, ma'am," he said, grinning broadly now. "Wormed a few, but haven't slaughtered ary hog. I was always what you'd call nonviolent."

"Do you think you and Ralph there could stand a woman foreman?"

"Could be," he said.

Twenty minutes later the three of them were off, Abagail riding between the two men in the Chevy's cab with her cane planted regally between her knees. At the Stoners' they found two yearling pigs in the back pen, healthy and full of beans. It appeared that, when the feed had given out, they had taken to dining on their weaker and less fortunate pen-mates.