"Brother Adam, I want you to ride out with Sofia and have Benjamin return to help us with the burial of these people," Aronson said. "Tell Willem we will camp by the lake for the night and resupply from the Walmart depot in the morning. Make sure he knows to be alert for more road agents… or Texas Defense Force patrols." He turned to Miguel. "How long do you think it has been since the agents were through here?"

The vaquero rubbed the back of his neck and scowled as he examined the nearest of the hanging corpses, trying to see it only as a thing, not a person.

"I cannot say for certain, but given the state of those bodies, maybe two weeks. They are still black and wet, but they have ruptured from the gases. In cattle that can take ten days. There are many insects on them that you do not see on dry bodies in the desert. So yes, maybe two weeks."

Adam was now looking decidedly green and quickly excused himself to be about his duties back at the camp.

"I'd better get going," he muttered. "Before it gets too dark."

Sofia looked hollow-eyed as she joined Adam.

"Be careful," Miguel called out after them as he hurried back to his horse. He did not like being separated from Sofia, but he was certain now the agents had not been here for some time. It was a short ride back to the main party. They were both armed. And woe betide any fool who made the mistake of assuming Sofia would not pull a trigger on him to defend herself.

The fat drops of icy rain thickened and fell more quickly, forcing the two men across the street and down some, where they could shelter in the recessed doorway of a sports club. It was a large three-story building, the upper floors faced with simple sheets of corrugated iron adorned with giant sun-faded plastic stars. It somehow added an even greater sense of melancholy to the scene. Aronson shivered and hugged himself against the wind, which was now blowing scraps of paper and plastic and drifts of dead leaves up the road.

"Do you think the gang we took on back in Crockett could have been responsible for this?" he asked. There was hopefulness in his question if you looked past the grim tone.

"I'm afraid not," Miguel said, hating to dash the other man's spirits. "This… this makes no sense. The agents in Crockett would have taken your women as slaves, but they would have let them live. Here they have killed women and children without reason that I can see beyond the pleasure of killing itself."

"Ethnic cleansing," Aronson said darkly.

Miguel was not familiar with the term but thought he understood what it meant.

"We are a good forty miles from Crockett," he said, "which was as far north as that band of agents ever ventured according to their camp whores. No, I think this is another group."

Aronson's face grew even longer.

"That would mean that as we head north, we're moving into the realm of the men who did this."

"Yes," Miguel said. "We are."

The rain intensified, solid and heavy enough to raise a roar as it sheeted down on the iron roof of the sports club. Miguel had a sudden urge for a smoke. He had given up the cheap cigarillos of his youth after boarding the golfer's yacht with Miss Julianne and her people. What was that now, three or four years ago? It was a lifetime. There had been a small supply of very fine Cohibas on board, and he remembered fondly sharing a few with the big friendly gringo who called himself a rhinoceros. But they ran out halfway across the Pacific, and there had been no such indulgences in the refugee camps and on the work farm in Australia. So he had learned to do without and been glad of it, too. He breathed much more freely these days. But now, huddled in the doorway of a darkened tomb festooned with plastic stars, watching the obscene and rotting black fruit strung up by road agents swinging in the wind, he suddenly felt a terrible need to fill his mouth and lungs with fresh, strong smoke, as if it might burn him clean of the corruption he had breathed in Palestine.

"Of course," said Aronson, "if it was ethnic cleansing, it would be the case that things went… different… up here because these people were…"

He trailed off, unable to find a polite way of saying it.

"Because they were beaners," Miguel finished for him. "Wetbacks."

The Mormon grimaced but nodded.

"You are correct," Miguel said. "It may be that they treat their white captives differently. But the men in Crockett would still have killed you, no? And in the end we are all the same color."

He nodded at the gently swinging corpses, ruptured and black and crawling with flies and maggots. The rain didn't help matters. The first corpse dropped to the ground with a solid thump as Miguel sliced through the rope, only to explode across the asphalt. That necessitated another trip to collect brooms, shovels, heavy-duty trash bags, and masks. The masks didn't help much, but the Vicks VapoRub under the nostrils did.

"I saw it in a movie once," Aronson said. "Don't ask me which one."

Miguel didn't. He really didn't want to know if the movie featured entrails and flesh smeared into the greasy road surface. Each scrape of the shovel against the tarmac to collect another body part caused his stomach to twist and gurgle ominously, pushing the bile to the back of his throat. He choked it back down and continued with the task of dumping the body into the heavy bag Aronson held open for him. It was a task that did not get any easier with each thump of the next corpse against the asphalt. Fortunately, most of them came to the ground in more or less one piece.

More or less.

The three men to whom the task fell all wore long and forbidding expressions by the time Benjamin smacked the horses on their rumps to drag away a charred wooden beam that was propping up the last wall. It came free with a giant crack and the deep thunder of tumbling brickwork. The rain had finally eased off an hour earlier, but the mass grave was so thoroughly soaked that the collapse raised no dust.

"We shall pray for them, if you don't mind, Miguel," said Cooper Aronson.

"I shall add my Hail Marys before sleeping tonight," he answered, "but now I will clean up."

Ben Randall looked up from where he'd been untethering the horses.

"If you head on down Main Street, across from the rail yards, that Trudi Jessup was setting up to boil water in a big white shed down yonder. A sign-writin' business, as I recall. She's got soap, clean clothes, and boots, too. Got 'em from the Walmart. I think your daughter and Sally were helping her, too. Finding dry wood for a boiler."

"Thank you," Miguel said, his mood lifting at the prospect of cleaning the remains of the settlers from his body. That Miss Jessup had attended to the preparations also gave his mood some reason to improve. As the only non-Mormon in the camp-besides the whores, of course, who did not count because they could not be trusted-Miss Jessup had proved to be a relief from the sometimes stern and moralizing company of the Saints.

He picked up his rifle from where it leaned against a wall and bade the other two men good-bye as they prepared for another of their strange baptisms for the dead. At this rate, thought Miguel, Mormon heaven would fill up with their dead converts long before they reached Kansas City.

Leading Flossie by the reins, he set off parallel to Main, walking past the sports center where the blue silhouettes of basketballers leapt across the tinted windows. He shivered as what little warmth was left in the day quickly bled away into the gathering dark, reminding him of how wet and filthy his clothes were. He would have to dump them. They were beyond any laundering. Over the road, the windows of the Silver Lady jewelry shop were smashed, and the counters inside upturned and ransacked. A couple of cars parked outside sat on their rims, their tires having deflated long ago. He crossed at Magnolia and Oak, marveling at how the streets of Palestine were so free of car crashes compared with other towns he'd been through. At the next intersection, however, he was forced to divert south by a tree that had fallen and blocked most of the intersection. He was wondering how long it would take to find the place where the ladies had prepared bathing facilities for them, but after cutting diagonally across an open lot, he saw the golden flicker of an open fire outside a big white shed a few hundred yards away.