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north.
The others all stood still in the ankle-deep snow, staring after her.
Jim broke the shocked silence. "Nanci?"
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She answered him over her shoulder, not even bothering to check her stride.
"What?"
"Where are you going?"
"North."
"Why?"
This time she ignored him, walking steadily away, starting to dip down along
the coastal side of the slope.
Jeff raised his voice. "Nanci! Where the fuck are you going? What's
happening?"
She stopped and turned slowly around. She looked straight into the face of the
ex-
reporter, holding his gaze until he slowly dropped his eyes.
"Why Zelig wants you people defeats me. You have the collective brain of a
barn door. If you all worked together for a few days, then I imagine that you
might just be capable of changing a spent light bulb."
"I thought we were going to try and get us a tractor, Nanci?" said Paul
McGill, puzzled.
"Yes," she allowed, not bothering to conceal her exasperation. She spoke
slowly and very clearly, as though she were dealing with a half-wit. "Likely
they have some useful tractors down in that Mannheim spread. But they have a
fortress. You following me?
Good. We go down and when we're about fifty yards away from the building
they'll open up with the Lord knows how much firepower. Half a picosecond and
we'd all get to be dead. Terrific. So we go on north until we find another
spread that won't prove an impossible nut for us to crack."
She swung off again, leaving a clear trail through the snow. The rest of them
were silent for a few moments, the sniffling of Sukie McGill the only sound.
"I reckon& " began Jeff Thomas, stamping his boots like a petulant child. Then
there was a tiny whoomping noise, and a small spray of powdery snow erupted a
few yards below him, followed by a little trail of gray smoke from one of the
fireports down in the wall of the farmhouse. Then came the crack of the rifle.
"That's to warn you!" shouted Nanci. "Tell you that they could probably hit
you at that
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This time they didn't need to think about it. They scurried along in a raggedy
line after
Nanci's upright figure. She never once looked behind to see whether or not
anyone was following her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
"Yes."
"Got the same sort of defenses that the Mannheim place had back yonder," said
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Henderson McGill.
Nanci glanced at him. "You got real good eyes and ears and a halfway decent
brain, Mac.
How come you so rarely bother to use any of them?"
"What am I missing?"
The woman turned to the others, who were standing in a ragged circle at the
center of a grove of dead, brittle sycamores above a large spread that lay
below them like a child's construction toy. "Any of you found a use for your
mind other than stopping you falling over every time you take a step forward?"
Everyone suddenly found a fascination in their own snow-caked feet, looking
away from her startlingly pale eyes. Paul fumbled with the straps on the
makeshift backpack that held his little sister, Sukie. She seemed to be
recovering already from the high temperature and sniffling cold.
Heather Hilton was the only one who answered Nanci. "I don't hear a generator
going,"
she said.
"Excellent. Take a team point, child. Collect fifty of them, and you get a
beautifully illustrated edition of the gospels for children, meaningfully
edited." She shook her head at the others. "Really, people! We're around three
hundred and fifty yards from that farm.
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And, like little Heather notices, there's no sound of a generator. There's the
outward show of power and defense, just like before. But nothing much beside.
No smoke from a chimney. No footmarks between the main house and the
outbuildings. Just plenty of nothing...." She paused. "And you better believe
that nothing's plenty for me."
Despite her optimism, Nanci Simms wasn't the kind of woman who took pointless
chances.
"Jim and Mac and Carrie with me. Paul, stay here and keep a good lookout. All
the way around, and don't forget the skies. Keep watching the skies, son."
"How come the kid gets to be in charge and not me, Nanci?" whined Jeff Thomas.
"He's good and you're not, Jefferson." She patted him on the shoulder with a
mock display of affection. "Well, you're real good at some things, but I don't
need them right now."
Nanci led the three others down the hill, instructing them to spread out into
a skirmish line, fifteen paces apart. She motioned to them to have all their
weapons ready. She handed the Heckler & Koch to Carrie, telling her to keep
the little .22 bolstered. "This'll be more of a stopper, if you need it. Mac,
watch what you're doing with that 16-gauge."
"Sure. Maybe I should have had the P-111 rather than the scattergun."
"No. I have a feeling that they might have abandoned the place some time ago."
She looked carefully down at the picturesque, snow-covered scene below them.
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