“Jesus,” Freddy said. “Lookit his gut, boss. Rising like a loaf of bread.”

“Deep breaths,” Kurtz said, and patted Pearly’s shoulder with a benevolent hand. Ahead of them, the plow had begun to move again. “Deep breaths, laddie. Relax. You just relax and think good thoughts.”

Forty miles to Derry. Forty miles between me and Owen, Kurtz thought. Not bad at all. I’m coming for you, buck. Need to take you to school. Teach you what you forgot about crossing the Kurtz Line.

Twenty miles later and they were still there-this according to both Freddy and Perlmutter, although Freddy seemed less sure of himself now. Pearly, however, said they were talking to the mother-Owen and the other one were talking to the mother. The mother didn’t want to let him go.

“Let who go?” Kurtz asked. He hardly cared. The mother was holding them in Derry, allowing them to close the distance, so God bless the mother no matter who she was or what her motivations might be.

“I don’t know,” Pearly said. His guts had been relatively still ever since Kurtz’s conversation with the plowman, but he sounded exhausted. “I can’t see. There’s someone, but it’s like there’s no mind there to look into.”

“Freddy?” Freddy shook his head. “Owen’s gone for me. I can barely hear the plow guy. It’s like… I dunno… like losing a radio signal.”

Kurtz leaned forward over the seat and took a close look at the Ripley on Freddy’s cheek. The stuff in the middle was still bright red-orange, but around the edges it appeared to be turning an ashy white.

It’s dying, Kurtz thought. Either Freddy’s system is killing it or the environment is. Owen was right. I’ll be damned.

Not that it changed anything. The line was still the line, and Owen had stepped over it.

“The plow guy,” Perlmutter said in his tired voice.

“What about the plow guy, buck?”

Only there was no need for Perlmutter to answer. Up ahead, twinkling in the blowing snow, was a sign reading EXIT 32-GRANDVIEW/GRANDVIEW STATION. The plow suddenly sped up, raising its blade as it did so. All at once the Humvee was running in slippery powder again, better than a foot of it. The plowman didn’t bother with his blinker, simply took the exit at fifty, yanking up a tall rooster-tail of snow in his wake.

“Follow him?” Freddy asked. “I can run him down, boss!” Kurtz mastered a strong urge to tell Freddy to go ahead-they’d run the long-eyed Yankee son of a bitch to earth and teach him what happened to folks who crossed the line. Give him a little dose of Owen Underhill’s medicine. Except the plow was bigger than the Hummer, a lot bigger, and who knew what might happen if they got into a game of bumper cars?

“Stay on the pike, laddie,” Kurtz said, settling back. “Eyes on the prize.” Still, he watched the plow angling off into the frigid, windy morning with real regret. He couldn’t even hope the damn Yankee had caught a hot dose from Freddy and Archie Perlmutter, because the stuff didn’t last.

They went on, speed dropping back to twenty in the drifts, but Kurtz guessed conditions would improve as they got farther south. The storm was almost over.

“And congratulations,” he told Freddy.

“Huh?”

Kurtz patted him on the shoulder. “You appear to be getting better.” He turned to Perlmutter. “I don’t know about you, laddie-buck.”

A hundred miles north of Kurtz’s position and less than two miles from the junction of back roads where Henry had been taken, the new commander of the Imperial Valleys-a woman of severe good looks, in her late forties-stood beside a pine tree in a valley which had been code-named Clean Sweep One. Clean Sweep One was, quite literally, a valley of death. Piled along its length were heaps of tangled bodies, most wearing hunter orange. There were over a hundred in all. If the corpses had ID, it had been taped around their necks. The majority of the dead were wearing their driver’s licenses, but there were also Visa and Discover cards, Blue Cross cards, and hunting licenses. One woman with a large black hole in her forehead had been tagged with her Blockbuster Video card.

Standing beside the largest pile of bodies, Kate Gallagher was finishing a rough tally before writing her second report. In one hand she held a Palm Pilot computer, a tool that Adolf Eichmann, that famous accountant of the dead, would certainly have envied. The Pilots hadn’t worked earlier, but now most of the cool electronics gear seemed to be back on-line.

Kate wore earphones and a mike suspended in front of her mouth-and-nose mask. Occasionally she would ask someone for clarification or give an order. Kurtz had chosen a successor who was both enthusiastic and efficient. Totting up the bodies here and elsewhere, Gallagher estimated that they had bagged at least sixty per cent of the escapees. The John Q’s had fought, which was certainly a surprise, but in the long run, most of them just weren’t survivors. It was as simple as that.

“Yo, Katie-Kate.”

Jocelyn McAvoy appeared through the trees at the south end of the valley, her hood pushed back, her short hair covered by a scarf of green silk, her burp-gun slung over her shoulder. There was a splash of blood across the front of her parka.

“Scared you, didn’t I?” she asked the new OIC.

“You might have raised my blood pressure a point or two.”

“Well, Quadrant Four is clear, maybe that’ll lower it a little.” McAvoy’s eyes sparkled. “We got over forty. Jackson has got hard numbers for you, and speaking of hard, right about now I could really use a hard-”

“Excuse me? Ladies?”

They turned. Emerging from the snow-covered brush at the north end of the valley was a group of half a dozen men and two women. Most were wearing orange, but their leader was a squat tugboat of a man wearing a regulation Blue Group coverall under his parka. He was also still wearing his transparent face-mask, although below his mouth there was a Ripley soul-patch which was definitely non-reg. All of the newcomers had automatic weapons.

Gallagher and McAvoy had time to exchange a single wide-eyed, caught-with-our-pants-down look. Then Jocelyn McAvoy went for her burp-gun and Kate Gallagher went for the Browning she had propped against the tree. Neither of them made it. The thunder of the guns was deafening. McAvoy was thrown nearly twenty feet through the air. One of her boots came off.

“That’s for Larry!” one of the orange-clad women was screaming. “That’s for Larry, you bitches, that’s for Larry!”

When the shooting was over, the squat man with the Ripley goatee assembled his group near the facedown corpse of Kate Gallagher, who had graduated ninth in her class at West Point before running afoul of the disease that was Kurtz. The squat man had appropriated her gun, which was better than his own.

“I’m a firm believer in democracy,” he said, “and you folks can do what you want, but I’m heading north now. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to learn the words to “O Canada", but I’m going to find out.”

“I’m going with you,” one of the men said, and it quickly became apparent that they were all going with him. Before they left the clearing the leader bent down and plucked the Palm Pilot out of a snowdrift.

“Always wanted one of these,” said Emil “Dawg” Brodsky. “I’m a sucker for the new technology.”

They left the valley of death from the direction they’d entered it, heading north. From around them came isolated pops and bursts of gunfire, but for all practical purposes, Operation Clean Sweep was also over.