“Seriously, Stu—what do you want to know?”

“Same things that mute guy Andros wants to know, I guess. What’s going to happen next. I don’t know how to put it any better than that.”

“There’s going to be a society,” Glen said slowly. “What kind? Impossible to say right now. There are almost four hundred people here now. I’d guess from the rate they’ve been coming in—more every day—that by the first of September there’ll be fifteen hundred of us. Forty-five hundred by the first of October, and maybe as many as eight thousand by the time the snow flies in November and closes the roads. Write that down as prediction number one.”

To Glen’s amusement, Stu did indeed produce a notebook from the back pocket of his jeans and jotted down what he had just said.

“Hard for me to believe,” Stu said. “We came all the way across the country and didn’t see a hundred people all told.”

“Yes, but they’re coming in, aren’t they?”

“Yes… in dribs and drabs.”

“In what and whats?” Glen asked, grinning.

“Dribs and drabs. My mother used to say that. You shitting on my mom’s way of talking?”

“The day will never come in when I lose enough respect for my own hide to shit on a Texan’s mother, Stuart.”

“Well, they’re comin in, sure. Ralph’s in touch with five or six groups right now that will bring us up to five hundred by the end of the week.”

Glen smiled again. “Yes, and Mother Abagail sits right there with him in his ‘radio station,’ but she won’t talk on the CB. Says she’s afraid she’ll get an electroshock.”

“Frannie loves that old woman,” Stu said. “Part of it is because she knows so much about delivering babies, but part of it is just… loving her. You know?”

“Yes. Most everybody feels the same.”

“Eight thousand people by winter,” Stu said, returning to the original topic. “Man oh man.”

“It’s just arithmetic. Let’s say the flu wiped out ninety-nine percent of the population. Maybe it wasn’t that bad, but let’s use that figure just so we have a place to put our feet. If the flu was ninety-nine percent fatal, that means it wiped out damned near two hundred and eighteen million people, just in this country.” He looked at Stu’s shocked face and nodded grimly. “Maybe it wasn’t that bad, but we can make a pretty good guess that figure’s in the ballpark. Makes the Nazis look like pikers, doesn’t it?”

“My Lord,” Stu said in a dry voice.

“But that would still leave over two million people, a fifth of the pre-plague population of Tokyo, a fourth of the pre-plague population of New York. That’s in this country alone. Now, I believe that ten percent of that two million might not have survived the aftermath of the flu. Folks who fell victims to what I’d call the—aftershock. People like poor Mark Braddock with his burst appendix, but also the accidents, the suicides, yes, and murder, too. That takes us down to 1.8 million. But we suspect there’s an Adversary, don’t we? The dark man that we dreamed about. West of us somewhere. There are seven states over there that could legitimately be called his territory… if he really exists.”

“I guess he exists, all right,” Stu said.

“My feeling, too. But is he simply in dominion of all the people over there? I don’t think so, any more than Mother Abagail is automatically in dominion over the people in the other forty-one continental United States. I think things have been in a state of slow flux and that that state of affairs is beginning to end. People are cohering. When you and I first discussed this back in New Hampshire, I envisioned dozens of little tinpot societies. What I didn’t count on—because I didn’t know about it—was the all but irresistible pull of these two opposing dreams. It was a new fact that no one could have foreseen.”

“Are you saying that we’ll end up with nine hundred thousand people and he’ll end up with nine hundred thousand?”

“No. First, the coming winter is going to take its toll. It’s going to take it here, and it’s going to be even tougher for the small groups that don’t make it here before the snow. You realize we don’t even have one doctor in the Free Zone yet? Our medical staff consists of a veterinarian and Mother Abagail herself, who’s forgotten more valid folk medicine than you or I will ever have a chance to learn. Still, they’d look cute trying to put a steel plate in your skull after you took a fall and bashed in the back of your head, wouldn’t they?”

Stu snickered. “That ole boy Rolf Dannemont would probably drag out his Remington and let daylight through me.”

“I’d guess the total American population might be down to 1.6 million by next spring—and that’s a kind estimate. Of that number, I’d like to hope we’d get the million.”

“A million people,” Stu said, awed. He looked out over the sprawling, mostly deserted city of Boulder, now brightening as the sun began to hoist itself over the flat eastern horizon. “I just can’t picture that. This town would be busting at the seams.”

“Boulder couldn’t hold them. I know that boggles the mind when you walk around the empty streets downtown and out toward Table Mesa, but it just couldn’t. We’d have to seed the communities around us. The situation you’d have is this one giant community and the rest of the country east of here absolutely empty.”

“Why do you think we’d get most of the people?”

“For a very unscientific reason,” Glen said, riffling his tonsure of hair with one hand. “I like to believe most people are good. And I believe that whoever is running the show west of us is really bad. But I have a hunch…” He trailed off.

“Go on, spill it.”

“I will because I’m drunk. But it stays between us, Stuart.”

“All right.”

“Your word?”

“My word,” Stu said.

“I think he’s going to get most of the techies,” Glen said finally. “Don’t ask me why; it’s just a hunch. Except that tech people like to work in an atmosphere of tight discipline and linear goals, for the most part. They like it when the trains run on time. What we’ve got here in Boulder right now is mass confusion, everyone bopping along and doing his own thing… and we’ve got to do something about what my students would have called ‘getting our shit together.’ But that other fellow… I’ll bet he ’s got the trains running on time and all his ducks in a row. And techies are just as human as the rest of us; they’ll go where they’re wanted the most. I’ve a suspicion that our Adversary wants as many as he can get. Fuck the farmers, he’d just as soon have a few men who can dust off those Idaho missile silos and get them operational again. Ditto tanks and helicopters and maybe a B-52 bomber or two just for chuckles. I doubt if he’s gotten that far yet—in fact, I’m sure of it. We’d know. Right now he’s probably still concentrating on getting the power back on, re-establishing communications… maybe he’s even had to indulge in a purge of the fainthearted. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and he’ll know that. He has time. But when I watch the sun go down at night—this is no shit, Stuart—I get scared. I don’t need bad dreams to scare me anymore. All I have to do is think of them over there on the other side of the Rockies, busy as little bees.”

“What should we be doing?”

“Should I give you a list?” Glen responded, grinning.

Stuart gestured at his battered notebook. There were two dancers in silhouette and the words BOOGIE DOWN! on its hot pink cover. “Yup,” he said.

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I ain’t. You said it, Glen, we got to start getting our shit together someplace. I feel it, too. It’s getting later every day. We can’t just sit here jacking off and listening to the CB. We may wake up some morning to find that hardcase waltzing into Boulder at the head of an armored column, complete with air support.”

“Don’t look for him tomorrow,” Glen said.

“No. But what about next May?”

“Possible,” Glen said in a low voice. “Yes, quite possible.”