“Unless we can find horses or other pack animals. I covered five hundred klicks on a cow last year, when I hurt my leg.”
“Which one?”
“The right.”
“Looks pretty good now.” Gianelli’s voice had a leer in it.
“It’s fine. And you can keep your hands off!”
Alec turned and said evenly. “There could be five hundred raiders in those trees. Play some other time.”
Gianelli’s face reddened and his mouth squeezed down into a hard line. But he moved away from the girl. Angela looked at Alec for a wordless moment. Then he turned away.
Up ahead he could see the first buildings of the town. His hands suddenly felt clammy, shaky. He tightened his grip on the edge of the fender with one hand, shifted the machine pistol’s belt across his shoulder with the other. He’s here. Somewhere among these buildings... Every sense in him peaked, brightened. Alec could hear his pulse throbbing in his ears, feel his breath quicken. He’s here! But deep within him, something was telling him to run, to get away, anything but this one place. Journey across the whole face of the planet, travel back to the Moon, get away, anywhere, anyplace.
Yet he was impatient to meet the man he had come to find.
Alec knew from his history tapes that this was a small town. Yet it still dwarfed the lunar community. All these buildings, aboveground, out in the open! And their variety: one floor, three floors, brick fronts, wooden slats, something that looked like stone blocks. Windows staring down at him, empty, mysterious, dark. Street after street after street, branching and intersecting every hundred meters or so.
But empty. Dead. No one lived here. No one was on the streets. No vehicles. Nothing in sight except the silent buildings and windblown dust billowing through the empty streets.
He looked across to Will, perched on the opposite fender.
“Town’s been deserted since the sky burned,” Will said. “People come by once in a while, but nobody lives here permanently. Too tough to grow food here; too hard to defend the town against raiders.”
“How do you know which building my father’s in?”
Will grinned hugely. “Oh, Douglas’ll be in his usual place.”
It turned out to be a one-story red-brick building with a sign spanning its width: U.S. POST OFFICE—COALFIELD, TENN.—37719.
Will suggested that the trucks be spread around the building in a defensive perimeter. Alec passed the order on to Jameson, then the truck he was on trundled into the parking lot behind the Post Office building. Nestled under a protective overhang sat a squarish, squat, open-topped vehicle. Alec recognized it from his teaching tapes as a jeep.
As he climbed down from the truck, Alec wondered where his father found the fuel to propel a jeep. If he can cover long distances in it, then he must have fuel depots spotted along the way. Then Will Russo came around, grabbed Alec by the arm and ushered him through a doorway that had long ago lost its door.
It was dark inside. They walked down a narrow corridor, turned a corner.
And there he was.
He was standing in the center of a big room, surrounded by empty shelves and broken, shattered wooden desks and tables. The roof was partially gone, so the sunlight streamed in, dust motes drifting lazily in the still air. The room was large and open, but Douglas Morgan seemed to fill it. He was big, hulking, broad-shouldered and thickbodied. Will Russo was almost as big, Alec realized. But where Will was a grinning, happy oversized puppy, Douglas Morgan was a towering, lumbering gray bear.
His face was square-jawed and strong, with iron-gray hair rising in a bristling shock from his broad forehead and framing his powerful jaw with an iron-gray spade-shaped beard. His blue eyes were like gunmetal. They stared straight at Alec now, unblinking, pinning him where he stood.
I don’t look anything like him, Alec heard his own inner voice saying. No wonder he hates me.
“You’re Alec, eh?” His voice was strong, demanding, even in normal conversational tone. “You have your mother’s genes, all right.”
And not yours? Alec wondered. “I’m Alec,” he said.
“Well, come over here and let me see you. I’m not going to bite you.”
Alec walked slowly toward his father. The man was a giant, a mountainous man, with a powerful commanding voice to match.
They stood confronting each other. Neither offered a hand. Neither smiled. Despite the sunlight beaming down through the broken roof, Alec felt cold, numbed to his core.
“He’s a good fighter,” Will’s voice broke the staring match between them. “Helped me take a nasty mortar nest. Handled himself very well.”
Douglas nodded. “That’s something.”
“I vomited afterward,” Alec snapped.
Douglas’s heavy eyebrows went up. “Did you? A sensitive soul, eh? Well... killing a man’s no joke. But be glad you were the one who was still alive to get sick, not the one somebody else got sick over.”
Will said, “Why don’t we sit down and have something to drink? It’s been a dusty ride up here, and I sort of feel like celebrating.”
“Celebrating what?” Douglas asked.
“Family reunion!”
“Oh. That.” He smiled sardonically. “Sure. Obviously you’ve found some liquid lightning along the way. So uncork it and we’ll have a little party. Just the three of us.”
“It’s in my pack.” Will bounded back toward the door.
“Sorry we haven’t had the place dusted and decorated for the big occasion,” Douglas said to Alec. “Eh... the furniture’s a bit nonexistent. Care to sit over here?”
He gestured elaborately toward the floor next to a scarred, battered wooden counter that ran across the front of the room. Alec shrugged and dropped down onto his heels. He watched as Douglas stiffly, slowly sank down into a sitting position. He leaned his back against the sagging partitions under the countertop with an audible sigh.
“Caught a cold in my back during the spring rains,” he said, without turning to look at his son. “Makes it merry hell to bend.”
