“Okay. Hey. Okay.”

He clenched his fists slowly. “I was shouting at you. I’m sorry. I had no right to do that, Frannie.”

“It’s all right. You weren’t the one who opened Pandora’s box.”

“We’re all opening it, I guess,” he said dully, and got another cigarette from the pack in the dresser. “Anyhow, when I gave him that… what do you call it? When I said he should kill any one person that got in his way, a kind of frown came over his face. It was gone right away. I don’t even know if Ralph or Nick saw it. But I did. It was like he was thinking, ‘Okay, I understand what you mean, but I’ll make up m’own mind on that when the time comes.’”

“I’ve read that you can’t hypnotize someone into doing something they wouldn’t do when they were awake. A person won’t go against his own moral code just because they’re told to do it when they’re under.”

Stu nodded. “Yeah, I was thinking of that. But what if this fellow Flagg has got a line of pickets strung down the whole eastern length of his border? I would, if I were him. If Tom runs into that picket line going west, he’s got his story to cover him. But if he’s coming back east and runs into them, it’s going to be kill or get killed. And if Tom won’t kill, he’s apt to be a dead duck.”

“You may be too worried about that one part of it,” Frannie said. “I mean, if there is a picket line, wouldn’t it have to be strung pretty thin?”

“Yeah. One man every fifty miles, something like that. Unless he’s got five times the people we do.”

“So unless they’ve got some pretty sophisticated equipment already set up and running, radar and infrared and all that stuff you see in the spy movies, wouldn’t Tom be apt to walk right through them?”

“That’s what we’re hoping. But—”

“But you’ve got a bad attack of conscience,” she said softly.

“Is that what it comes down to? Well… maybe so. What did Harold want; honey?”

“He left a bunch of those survey maps. Areas where his Search Committee has looked for Mother Abagail. Anyhow, Harold’s been working on that burial detail as well as supervising the Search Committee. He looked very tired, but his Free Zone duties aren’t the only reason. He’s been working on something else as well, it seems.”

“What’s that?”

“Harold’s got a woman.”

Stu raised his eyebrows.

“Anyway, that’s why he begged off on dinner. Can you guess who she is?”

Stu squinted up at the ceiling. “Now who could Harold be shackin with? Let me see—”

“Well, that’s a hell of a way to put it! What do you think we’re doing?” She threw a mock-slap at him, and he drew back, grinning.

“Fun, ain’t it? I give up. Who is it?”

“Nadine Cross.”

“That woman with the white in her hair?”

“That’s her.”

“Gosh, she must be twice his age.”

“I doubt,” Frannie said, “that it’s a concern to Harold at this point in his relationship.”

“Does Larry know?”

“I don’t know and care less. The Cross woman isn’t Larry’s girl now. If she ever was.”

“Yeah,” Stu said. He was glad Harold had found himself a little love-interest, but not terribly interested in the subject. “How does Harold feel about the Search Committee, anyway? Did he give you any idea?”

“Well, you know Harold. He smiles a lot, but… not very hopeful. I guess that’s why he’s putting in most of his time on the burial detail. They call him Hawk now, did you know that?”

“Really?”

“I heard it today. I didn’t know who they were talking about until I asked.” She mused for a moment, then laughed.

“What’s funny?” Stu asked.

She stuck out her feet, which were clad in low-topped sneakers. On the soles were patterns of circles and lines. “He complimented me on my sneakers,” she said. “Isn’t that dippy?”

“You’re dippy,” Stu said, grinning.

Harold woke up just before dawn with a dull but not entirely unpleasant ache in his groin. He shivered a little as he got up. It was getting noticeably colder in the early mornings, although it was only August 22 and fall was still a calendar month away.

But there was heat below his waist, oh yes. Just looking at the delectable curve of her buttocks in those tiny see-through underpants as she slept was warming him up considerably. She wouldn’t mind if he woke her up… well, maybe she would mind, but she wouldn’t object. He still had no real idea of what might lie behind those dark eyes, and he was a little afraid of her.

Instead of waking her up, he dressed quietly. He didn’t want to mess around with Nadine, as much as he would have liked to.

What he needed to do was go someplace alone and think.

He paused at the door, fully dressed, carrying his boots in his left hand. Between the slight chilliness of the room and the prosy act of getting dressed, his desire had left him. He could smell the room now, and the smell was not terribly appealing.

It was just a little thing, she had said, a thing they could do without. Perhaps it was true. She could do things with her mouth and hands that were nearly beyond belief. But if it was such a small thing, why did this room have that stale and slightly sour odor that he associated with the solitary pleasure of all his bad years?

Maybe you want it to be bad.

Disturbing thought. He went out, closing the door softly behind him.

Nadine’s eyes opened the moment the door was closed. She sat up, looked thoughtfully at the door, and then lay down again. Her body ached in a slow and unrelieved cycle of desire. It felt almost like menstrual cramps. If it was such a small thing, she thought (with no idea of how close to Harold’s her own thoughts were), why did she feel this way? At one point last night she’d had to bite her lips together to stifle the cries: Stop that fooling around and STICK me with that thing! Do you hear me? STICK me with it, cram me FULL of it! Do you think what you’re doing is doing anything for me? Stick me with it and let’s for Christ’s sake—or mine, at least—end this crazy game!

He had been lying with his head between her legs, making strange noises of lust, noises that might have been comic had they not been so honestly urgent, so nearly savage. And she had looked up, those words trembling behind her lips, and had seen (or only thought she had?) a face at the window. In an instant the fire of her own lust had been damped down to cold ash.

It had been his face, grinning savagely in at her.

A scream had risen in her throat… and then the face was gone, the face was nothing but a moving pattern of shadows on the darkened glass mingled with smudges of dust. No more than the boogeyman a child imagines he sees in the closet, or curled up slyly behind the chest of toys in the corner.

No more than that.

Except it was more, and not even now, in the first cold rational light of dawn, could she pretend otherwise. It would be dangerous to pretend otherwise. It had been him, and he had been warning her. The husband-to-be was watching over his intended. And the bride defiled would be the bride unaccepted.

Staring at the ceiling, she thought: I suck his cock, but that’s not defilement. I let him stick himself up my ass, but that isn’t defilement, either. I dress for him like a cheap streetwalking slut, but that’s perfectly okay.

It was enough to make you wonder what sort of man your fiancé really was.

Nadine stared up at the ceiling for a long, long time.

Harold made instant coffee, drank it with a grimace, and then took a couple of cold Pop-Tarts out onto the front step. He sat down and ate them while dawn crept across the land.

In retrospect, the last couple of days seemed like a mad carnival ride to him. It was a blur of orange trucks, of Weizak clapping him on the shoulder and calling him Hawk (they all called him that now), of dead bodies, a never-ending moldy stream of them, and then coming home from all that death to a never-ending flow of kinky sex. Enough to blur your head.