“Rachel!”

Asleep, he dreamed that she did come out.

He dreamed that the Helper changed, that its contours melted, that it became the shape of his daughter, Rachel, as if carved from black ice, black against a gray sky, rain on the polished skin of her like dew.

He dreamed that she touched Beth, touched Matt himself, and the touch was warm.

He dreamed that she said a word to him: some wonderful, comforting word he could not understand, because the language she spoke was not a human language.

Chapter 39

Direction

As soon as he thought it would be safe to leave Matt for a few hours, Tom Kindle located a functioning automobile—a Honda that had been buried under ash but washed more-or_:less clean by the rain—and drove north to Casper.

His leg nagged him relentlessly. The bullet wound was a knob of fire in the meat of his calf. But it had been a clean wound, and Matt had bandaged it well, and Kindle found he was able to move around all right if he favored the leg. He wondered how he looked with a limp.

Like a lopsided old son of a bitch, he supposed. Which was approximately true.

A wave of cool, dry Canadian air had chased the rain away. He drove an empty road north beyond the limits of the ashfall. He marveled at how good it was to see some green grass again. Wildflowers were blooming in the gullies.

He saw a number of dead animals along the way. The departure of the human Artifact had killed a lot of livestock. Did they know? Did they care, the so-called heirs of mankind? But Kindle guessed it was no worse than a natural disaster—a unique event, unlike the perpetual hardships human beings had imposed on the animal kingdom since the year zip. The herd animals would come back quickly now that so many of the range fences were down.

In Casper he picked up a ham radio he believed would operate from a twelve-volt car battery. He wasn’t sure how to hook it up, but it came with instructions—he could probably figure it out. He could have used Joey’s help, however.

As daylight faded, Kindle hunted for water. Water was a scarce commodity since the taps had ceased to work. A supermarket, its big windows shattered in the quake, yielded a dozen plastic gallon jugs of distilled H₂0.

He loaded them into a new car for the trip back: a Buick wagon with a nearly full tank of gas. Gas pumps didn’t work any better than the plumbing, but there was plenty of this old Detroit rolling stock free for the taking.

Night fell. He drove with the Buick’s heater running, with the smell of hot metal and a pine-scent air freshener, south toward that glow on the horizon, the smoldering volcanic crater, as if 1-25 crossed a border into the western precincts of Hell.

In Cheyenne the next morning Kindle assembled two wooden crosses from lumber stock and loose nails.

When the crosses were solid, Kindle used a nail to scratch a letter deep into the horizontal board of the first of the two markers. It was awkward, clumsy work. But he persisted.

He wrote the letters A, B, B.

Then he paused to think. Would she prefer Abigail or Abby? Or Abbey, or Abbie, come to that?

He had only ever known her as Abby, and in the end he inscribed the simplest version of her name:

And on the second cross:

And he took the two crosses out and hammered them into the ash-gray lawn in front of the ruins of the Wyoming state capitol building, next to the statue of Esther Hobart Morris. Of course Joey and Abby weren’t buried here; their bodies were lost. But they deserved some memorial more dignified than the burned-out hulk of a Glendale motor home.

As for Jacopetti, Ganish, Makepeace, Colonel Tyler—Let ’em rot.

He went back to the camper and stood vigil over the inert forms of Matthew Wheeler and Beth Porter.

Matthew seemed to be asleep. His hands appeared to be gloved: they were encased in a glossy substance the color of bituminous coal.

“Matthew?” Kindle said. “Matthew, can you hear me?”

But the doctor didn’t answer—as he had not answered yesterday or the day before.

Beth was covered from the waist up in the same inert black material. Kindle didn’t speak to her. Why bother? Her head was all enclosed. Her nose, her mouth.

He built a fire and watched the smoke rise up into the blue twilight.

Probably no one would recognize the signature of a campfire in Cheyenne. Much of the city was still smoldering. But he would have to be careful out on the rangelands where it would be easy to spot a man’s fire at night. There might be other people who hadn’t chosen the option of Ohio. There might be more like Colonel Tyler.

Matt was awake in the morning.

The black substance had left his hands. Kindle wondered where it had gone. Had it been absorbed by the body? Had it evaporated into the air? “Thirsty,” Matt said.

Kindle brought him some water. The skin on the doctor’s hands was pink and new.

“I dreamed about Beth,” Matt said. “I dreamed they fixed her.”

“Maybe they did,” Kindle said.

Matt helped him build the evening’s fire. They brewed coffee and sat huddled at the flickering warmth.

“I thought maybe you had gone over,” Kindle said. “Maybe you’d end up an empty skin, like everybody else.”

Matt shook his head: No, that wasn’t the decision he had made.

Kindle allowed the silence to grow to its natural length. The stars had come out tonight, all these bright Wyoming stars. He said, “I talked to Ohio.”

“Hooked up a radio?”

He nodded. “Their Helpers are working again. I gather they weren’t for a while. Everything went down when the Traveller Artifact left. Power went down. The Travellers had been running all the turbines and so forth, keeping electricity on line, I guess all over the country—all over the world. Now it’s back on. But only in Ohio, the man says, a certain perimeter around that encampment. And a few similar places on other continents.”

“A perimeter?”

“Not a fence. But I gather, if you stray too far, you’re on your own. No power, no water, no guarantees.”

“It’s a safe place,” Matt said.

“Eden,” Kindle said. “Can you think of a better name for it? Kind of a garden. Live there, you’re taken care of. God looks after you for your natural span. God makes the sun shine, God makes the grass grow.”

“They’re not God,” Matt said.

“Might as well be.”

“But only in Ohio,” Matt said. “Maybe only as long as the Artifact stays in orbit.”

“Artifact might not leave. Guy in Ohio says it’s not decided yet, according to the Helpers.”

“War in Heaven?”

“An argument, at least.”

Matt looked across the gray lawn of the capitol building, at the local Helper, their Helper—the pillar to which he had prayed. “If we talked to it—”

“It was alive for a while, Matthew, but I think it’s not anymore. I think if you want to talk to a Helper you have to go to Ohio.”

Matt nodded. Periodically, he looked at his hands—his new, raw hands.