"No, Ryan. I don't believe I can. Perhaps the truth might be found in a certain arcane volume, bound in human skin, written by the mad Arab, Alhazred." He smiled gently. "Then again, Ryan, my very dear friend, perhaps it might not."

"So, which way?" J.B. asked. "Could do with shelter with the night closing in."

"Where there is a sign, then once there has been a road," Donfil said. "Where there is a road, then there are life and people. Even if much has gone, we shall find something." He stooped and picked his way around for a few paces. "Here. The road ran that way. Blacktop. Other was only dirt." He pointed farther along the green path. "Another sign."

This one hadn't faded to illegibility: Consequence, Maine. Population 843.

"Hope there aren't any of those inbred oddities you talked about, Doc," Krysty muttered.

"Old hot spot," J.B. commented, checking the small rad counter on his lapel. "Only just touches orange. This gotta be the edge of one of the original craters. Don't see that many you can tell so easy. Like a damned big dish carved out of the stone."

It looked as if it had been a stray, medium-sized Russian missile. Maybe an AS.B.18, launched from one of the old Oscar-class submarines lurking off the Atlantic seaboard.

The saucer-shaped hole was a little more than six hundred yards across, dipping around fifty feet deep. A pond of stagnant water had collected at its bottom, reflecting the orange glow of the setting sun. Unusually, there was little vegetation sprouting from the shattered stone.

"That can't have done much for the population of 843 in the ville of Consequence," Ryan observed.

It looked as though Consequence, Maine hadn't ever amounted to much. One road ran in and the same road ran out again. The derelict ruins of a light engineering factory were set back to the left, and a smaller workshop specializing in brake linings for tractors was opposite.

The Peter Pan Adult Motel — quadruple X-rated movies and one water bed — had its flat roof folded in like a concertina. Its neighbor was the Church of the Last Coming, linked with the Fellowship of the Blessed Saint Bubo of Ishmaelia. That roof was utterly gone, all four walls tipped in on one another, rotting from the bottom up. What looked to have been a general store was flattened completely.

The seven began to wander cautiously through the ruins, and Ryan looked down through the dusty glass of an unbroken window. There was a hand-lettered notice.

Waltzes and shuffles. Down-home music for friends and neighbors. Milt Tyson and His Cowboy Quartet. Pies and punch. For Claggartville General's Scan Fund. Tickets — five dollars. Doors open at Church Hall at seven o'clock. Last day of January 2001. Be there or...

The corner of the poster was missing.

"Be there or be dead," Ryan finished. "World died a week before they had their dance."

He turned and gazed up what must have been the main street of Consequence. There was hardly a house left standing, time and weather continuing what the missile had started.

"Getting cool," Krysty observed, threading her arm through his.

"Road goes up, then down. Any blast might've been deflected by that. Best chance of shelter's over the ridge."

"Found old wag!" Jak called.

Ryan was sometimes surprised at how few vehicles survived from before the long whiter. There must have been tens of millions of wags around, but all anyone ever saw were rusted wrecks. Only the wealthiest barons with access to a gas supply could now afford to drive for pleasure.

This vehicle was like the others. It looked as though a garage had once sheltered the pickup truck, but that had gone and the winters had stripped off the layers of paint. Tires had rotted; the gas tank had been hacked open; the glass shattered; seats removed. What remained was only the shell of a Chevy K2200.

The others gathered around the wag in silence. Somewhere out in the woods they all heard the mournful cry of some hunting animal. The reminder that night was near prompted Ryan into action.

"No time to hang around here," he said. "Best keep together now and get shelter."

The temperature was dropping fast. Once the sun had gone there was the first frosting of ice lipping the puddles. Breath streamed out like wood smoke, hanging in the still air. The sky was fading to a velvety purple-black.

Ryan's guess was right. Once they were over the hill, several of the houses looked better preserved. The street eventually petered out in a dead end, the overgrown remnants of a dirt road winding up into the forest to their left.

"One of these?" Lori asked, shoulders huddled against the cold.

"Yeah."

"I dream of stumbling over some old, long-lost ville," J.B. said, "and finding in a sealed garage a mint, fresh, oiled and gassed-up Jeep. Figure I never will, but it's nice to think on."

Ryan looked at his old comrade, jaw dropping. It was so unusual to hear the Armorer talk about anything other than weapons or food that he didn't know what to say.

Consequence didn't look as if there'd been an awful lot of money working there. Apart from a couple of old frame houses, which had suffered particularly badly from the weather, most of the dwellings were single-story shacks or cabins. The one exception stood foursquare at the end of the road, as though daring it to go any farther.

It was based on granite, gray and strong, wood-framed, with screened windows and pointed turrets to the four corner bedrooms on the third floor. The porch was pillared and ran the whole length of the front of the building. From the scraps of paint that cowered in sheltered crevices, it seemed that the house had been dark brown and cream. The gravel path was bordered with shrubs, rampant, and on either side of the wrought-iron gate were rusting columns of metal, each carrying an iron ball the size of a man's head.

"Looks like the Baron Big of Consequence must have lived there," Ryan said. "Good enough for him, good enough for us."

All the windows on the top floor had been broken, but most of those lower down were intact, which must have been a result of the blast pattern of the missile that had left the crater down the way.

"How come it's not been ripped apart?" Donfil asked. "Place like this must have had its share of freak survivors. Why didn't they hole up in this house? Built like a fort."

"Could be that this is one of the regions that lost all the population. The way it looks from outside, the house might be empty," Ryan suggested.

It was.

The main lock on the front door had been kicked in, but the interior was completely stripped — not a stick of furniture on any of the floors. Ryan assumed that anyone coming in after the nuking wouldn't even have bothered to vandalize the house.

"There's some junk mail here," Doc said, pointing to a corner of the entrance hall behind the door. "All dated December and January. Just before they... you know. The owners must have moved out and maybe put the place on the market. Never found a buyer."

"You mean letters from that long ago?" Krysty exclaimed. "I've never..."

The old man stooped with a sigh, picking up the dry, dusty, scattered envelopes. "Junk, my dear. All junk." He ripped them open and threw the contents to the cracked parquet. "Reader's Digest, Time-Life Books, magazines and ceedees. A restaurant opening in Claggartville. The town's only about ten miles off from this sketch map, unless it was nuked to ashes."

Ryan took some of the envelopes from Doc's hands, looking at them himself, intrigued by this odd little peephole into the long-dead past.

There were invitations to buy this and that — ceramic statues of shepherdesses; facsimile clocks from Europe; devices to make your rooms dryer or less dry; books that would make you richer, happier, sleep better, make love with endless energy, read faster; flesh-colored Christs that were luminous when you turned out the lights; blasters of all sizes and shapes and prices. "Protect your home and the ones you love. A dead intruder won't be back."