Just before dark, while there was still a rosy light around the high slope of the human Artifact, Tim Belanger unhooked the camper-trailer from the rear of his pickup truck and went roaring away east. He escaped, Beth thought, just like Tom Kindle—another refugee.

Another one gone, Beth thought sadly.

Nine of us left altogether.

She wished it had been Joey who left.

She found him damping the fire in back of the farmhouse. The fire had been the only significant light on this prairie, and she was sorry to see it flicker out.

Joey wore his ancient skull-and-roses T-shirt and a leather jacket to keep away the night chill. His pistol was tucked under his belt. It was a small-caliber pistol, but Beth thought it was reckless of Colonel Tyler to have given Joey any kind of gun. It was a miracle Joey hadn’t blown his own balls off with it.

She hadn’t come looking for him. She wanted to walk a distance into the Connors’ grazing land and be by herself… watch the stars come out and try to make some sense of everything that had happened. But Joey waved her over.

“Sit down,” he said.

“I was going somewhere,” Beth said, aware of how pathetic it sounded.

“Taking in a movie? Goin’ down to the mall, Beth?” He laughed. “It’s a fuckin’ desert out here. Everywhere we go is some kind of desert or other. Doesn’t it rain anywhere but Buchanan?”

“It rains in Ohio.”

“Ohio,” Joey said scornfully.

He poured another bucket of sand over the embers until even that faint light was lost. “Some wild events this morning.” She nodded.

“I saw the whole thing. Two shots.” He cocked his index finger. “Bam, the chest. Bam, the head. You don’t want to know what it looked like. It was obvious the kid wasn’t human. Inside, he was like—shit, I don’t know. Like a watermelon full of motor oil.”

“Christ, Joey!”

He smiled at her. “Facts of life.”

“Is Abby Cushman still under guard?”

“Jacopetti’s outside her door. Not that he could stop her from coming out. I take over from him when I’m done here. It doesn’t really matter—where’s she gonna go?”

“Like Tom Kindle or Tim Belanger, maybe. Just leave.”

“Nope. I pulled the distributor cable out of her engine.”

“Does Colonel Tyler know that?”

“He said it showed initiative.” Big grin.

Beth resented Joey’s access to the Colonel. It was Joey’s influence that had caused most of their problems, she was sure of it. She remembered Tyler’s hand on her shoulder this morning. Familiar hand. She had memorized the sensation.

His touch was like a token of everything she’d gained since Contact, and Joey was everything she wanted to forget. The two of them together… it was an unbearable combination.

“Bam” Joey said, reminiscing. “I’ll tell you one thing there’s less of now. There’s less bullshit.”

It was a callous, stupid thing to say, and it made her angry. “The end of the world is a good thing because you get to carry a gun for the first time in your life? Sounds like bullshit to me.”

“If the world hadn’t ended, I wouldn’t be carrying a pistol. True. If the world hadn’t ended, you wouldn’t be fucking a doctor.”

She flushed with anger. “You don’t know who I sleep with. You don’t have a clue.”

“All I’m saying is don’t act superior when you’re out there with a Tor Sale’ sign between your legs.”

Maybe the rage she felt had been inside her all along, and maybe it wasn’t even Joey she was mad at. But, oh, Christ, after a long and fucked-up day when somebody had died, for God’s sake, to have Joey Commoner call her a slut, to be sneered at by him—it erased everything she had pretended to achieve; it was unspeakable, and she hated him for it.

She blinked back tears. Joey was watching her, was maddeningly attentive, his face calm and slack in the starlight, and suddenly Beth recalled a dream she had once had:

Joey as a wild horse. Beth the rider. She rides him to the top of some high cliff. He balks, and she spurs him. And he jumps.

Shut up, Beth. Just close your mouth. Don make it worse.

She felt light-headed, utterly weightless.

This cliff, she thought. This desert.

“Bastard,” she said. “You don’t know everything that goes on in this camp.”

“Try me,” Joey said.

Chapter 34

Precipice

Matt was not quite asleep when the knock came at the door of his camper.

He sat up and peered out the window at prairie night. The stars were the color of ice and there was a milky glow on the eastern horizon where the moon was about to rise.

Beth? he wondered. But it was late even for Beth.

And it hadn’t sounded like her knock. Not that reckless. Three discreet taps. Dear God, he thought wearily, what now?

He pulled on a T-shirt and briefs and stumbled to the door.

Tap tap tap.

“All right! Christ’s sake! Hold on!”

He opened the door and stood mute in a river of night air.

“Matthew,” Tom Kindle said. “Lemme in before I freeze my balls off.”

Kindle didn’t look good. He wasn’t hurt, but he looked chastened. Matt tried to remember where he had seen that look on Tom Kindle before.

Of course: it was when he came into the hospital with his broken leg, raving about monsters. About a thousand years ago.

Matt kept the light low and poured his friend a cup of lukewarm coffee from a thermos. “You didn’t get too damn far, did you? Not much farther than Laramie, I’ll bet.”

Kindle put aside his rifle and shrugged. His eyes were lost among wrinkles like crevices. “I took a little trip south. Toward that, uh, that thing—”

“The new Artifact.”

“I admit I was curious about it. Aren’t you? Even sitting on the horizon, it’s big enough to fill half a sky.” He took a long, noisy sip of coffee. “And it’s strange, Matthew. It draws the attention. You ever been down to Moab? The canyonlands around there? Same kind of strangeness. Red rock, blue sky, and everything’s too big. Maybe a person loses some judgment. I looked at that thing a long time, and then I started to wonder if I could get up close to it.”

“Did you?”

“Get close? No, not very.” He shook his head. “Close enough, though. The air gets foul. It smells like sulphur and it burns your lungs. The ground isn’t too steady, either. Matthew—the thing is rooted to the earth! Literally, it looks like it put down roots, roots made of some kind of stone. Black sandstone or maybe pumice. Miles wide. And, Matthew, in the shadow of those roots, there were certain things moving around.…”

“Things?”

“Machines. I guess. Or animals. Or both, somehow. But they were big enough to see from miles away. Hazy in the distance, the way you might see a city from across a lake—they were as big as that. Big as a city and taller than they were wide, and different shapes, like giraffes, or gantries, or spiders, or cranes.” He shuddered. “They must have built that entire thing since last August—have you thought about that? A thing the size of a mountain in half a year? God Almighty! And, Matthew… while I was watching those creatures move around, a thought occurred to me. They must be about finished their work, I thought. It doesn’t look like a half-made thing. And it’s a spaceship, right? When it’s ready, it goes into orbit. Spaceship the size of Delaware. And here we are sitting practically on its tail. I came back north this morning and found you folks still parked here, and I don’t think that’s too intelligent.”

“It’s Tyler,” Matt said. “He claims there was a radio message. Some bad weather east of here. So we’re staying put.”