The young man, Underwood, was standing at the base of the steps, and his face was like a thundercloud.

“Why were you like that?” he asked the woman, and although he’d lowered his voice, Mother Abagail could still hear perfectly well.

The woman paid no attention. She went by him without a word. The boy looked at Underwood in a beseeching way, but the woman was in charge, at least for the time being, and the little boy let her bear him along, bear him away.

There was a moment of silence, and she suddenly felt at a loss to fill it, although it needed to be filled—

–didn’t it?

Wasn’t it her job to fill it?

And a voice asked softly, Is it? Is that your job? Is that why God brought you here, woman? To be the Official Greeter at the gates of the Free Zone?

I can’t think, she protested. The woman was right: I AM tired.

He comes in more shapes than his own, the small interior voice persisted. Wolf, crow, snake… woman.

What did it mean? What had happened here? What, in God’s name?

I was sitting here complacently, waiting to be kowtowed to—yes, that’s what I was doing, no use denying it—and now that woman has come and something has happened and I’m losing what it was. But there was something about that woman… wasn’t there? Are you sure? Are you sure?

There was an instant of silence, and in it they all seemed to be looking at her, waiting for her to prove herself. And she wasn’t doing it. The woman and the boy were gone from sight; they had left as if they were the true believers and she nothing but a shoddy, grinning Sanhedrin they had seen through immediately.

Oh, but I’m old! It’s not fair!

And on the heels of that came another voice, small and low and rational, a voice that was not her own: Not too old to know the woman is —

Now another man had approached her in hesitant, deferential fashion. “Hi, Mother Abagail,” he said. “The name’s Zellman. Mark Zellman. From Lowville, New York. I dreamed about you.”

And she was faced with a sudden choice that was clearcut for only an instant in her groping mind. She could acknowledge this man’s hello, banter with him a little to set him at his ease (but not too much at ease; that was not precisely what she wanted), and then go on to the next and the next and the next, receiving their homage like new palm leaves, or she could ignore him and the rest. She could follow the thread of her thought down into the depths of herself, searching for whatever it was that the Lord meant her to know.

The woman is —

–what?

Did it matter? The woman was gone.

“I had me a great-nephew lived in upstate New York one time,” she said easily to Mark Zellman. “Town named Rouse’s Point. Backed right up against Vermont on Lake Champlain, it is. Probably never heard of it, have you?”

Mark Zellman said he sure had heard of it; just about everyone in New York State knew that town. Had he ever been there? His face broke tragically. No, never had. Always meant to.

“From what Ronnie wrote in his letters, you didn’t miss much,” she said, and Zellman went away beaming broadly.

The others came up to make their manners as the other parties had done before them, as still others would do in the days and weeks to come. A teenage boy named Tony Donahue. A fellow named Jack Jackson, who was a car mechanic. A young R.N. named Laurie Constable—she would come in handy. An old man named Richard Farris whom everyone called the Judge; he looked at her keenly and almost made her feel uncomfortable again. Dick Vollman. Sandy DuChiens—pretty name, that, French. Harry Dunbarton, a man who had sold spectacles for a living only three months ago. Andrea Terminello. A Smith. A Rennett. And a great many others. She spoke to them all, nodded, smiled, and put them at their ease, but the pleasure she had felt on other days was gone today and she felt only the aches in her wrists and fingers and knees, plus the gnawing suspicion that she had to go use the Port-O-San and if she didn’t get there soon she was going to stain her dress.

All of that and the feeling, fading now (and it would be entirely gone by nightfall), that she had missed something of great significance and might later be very sorry.

He thought better when he wrote, and so he jotted down everything which might be of importance in outline, using two felt-tip pens: a blue and a black. Nick Andros sat in the study of the house on Baseline Drive that he shared with Ralph Brentner and Ralph’s woman, Elise. It was almost dark. The house was a beauty, sitting below the bulk of Flagstaff Mountain but quite a bit above the town of Boulder proper, so that from the wide living room window the streets and roads of the municipality appeared spread out like a gigantic gameboard. That window was treated on the outside with some sort of silvery reflective stuff, so that the squire could look out but passersby could not look in. Nick guessed that the house was in the $450,000–$500,000 range… and the owner and his family were mysteriously absent.

On his own long journey from Shoyo to Boulder, first by himself, then with Tom Cullen and the others, he had passed through tens of dozens of towns and cities, and all of them had been stinking charnel houses. Boulder had no business being any different… but it was. There were corpses here, yes, thousands of them, and something was going to have to be done about them before the hot, dry days ended and the fall rains began, causing quicker decomposition and possible disease… but there were not enough corpses. Nick wondered if anyone other than he and Stu Redman had noticed it… Lauder, maybe. Lauder noticed almost everything.

For every house or public building you found littered with corpses, there were ten others completely empty. Sometime, during the last spasm of the plague, most of Boulder’s citizens, sick or well, had blown town. Why? Well, he supposed it really didn’t matter, and maybe they would never know. The awesome fact remained that Mother Abagail, sight unseen, had managed to lead them to maybe the one small city in the United States that had been cleared of plague victims. It was enough to make even an agnostic like himself wonder where she was getting her information.

Nick had taken three rooms on the basement level of the house, and nice rooms they were, furnished in knotty pine. No urging on Ralph’s part had moved him to enlarge his living space—he felt like an interloper already, but he liked them… and until his trip from Shoyo to Hemingford Home he hadn’t realized how much he had come to miss other faces. He hadn’t gotten his fill yet.

And the place was the finest one he’d ever lived in, just as it was. He had his own entrance by the back door, and he kept his ten-speed parked under the door’s low, overhanging eave, where it stood axle-deep in generations of fragrantly rotting aspen leaves. He had the beginnings of a book collection, something he had always wanted and never been able to have in his years of wandering. He had been a great reader in those days (during these new days, there rarely seemed to be time to sit and have a good long conversation with a book), and some of the books on the shelves—shelves which were still largely empty—were old friends, most of them originally borrowed from lending libraries at two cents a day; in the last few years he had never spent enough time in one town to get a regular library card. Others were books he hadn’t yet read, books the lending library books had led him to look for. As he sat here with his felt-tip pens and paper, one of these books sat on the desk beside his right hand—Set This House on Fire, by William Styron. He had marked his place with a ten-dollar bill he had found on the street. There was a lot of money in the streets, blowing along the gutters in the wind, and he was still surprised and amused at how many people—himself among them—still stopped to pick them up. And why? The books were free now. The ideas were free. Sometimes that thought exhilarated him. Sometimes it frightened him.