“Listen to me,” she says gently. “I can’t tend to you like this. I’m going to bring the van over here and lift you into it. I’ve got some medicines and other supplies that will help you. Do you understand?”

Silence. The eyes fixed on her remain huge and black. Kirsten begins to wonder if there’s a concussion along with the other injuries, or if the girl is deaf. But she can speak; that is certain. Damn. “Okay, you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. Can you raise your raise your hand if you understand me?”

Nothing. Then, very slowly, two fingers rise up out of the snow.

Kirsten lets out a long breath. “Good. I’ll only be gone a minute. This is Asimov.” She points to the dog, where he sits on the girl’s other side, tongue lolling and a happy-idiot expression on his face as he watches the ravens. “He’ll keep the birds away from you. He is not a wolf.” No matter what he might think.

It takes Kirsten more time than she would like to maneuver the truck to within a couple feet of her patient. Once alongside, she slides open the side door and clears out a spot on the floor. Her task is easier than it would have been a few days ago, and she frowns. Her supplies are getting low. She has enough gas in the jerry cans to get her across the rest of Minnesota and half of North Dakota, with maybe a tank and a half to spare. She cannot take this waif with her; neither can she spend much of her precious fuel looking for a safe haven.

In this sparsely populated country, there would have been fewer droids than in the cities. Somewhere she had read—National Geographic? Scientific American? —that there were still bands of Mennonites here on the northern plains who had refused to come out of the nineteenth century even so far as to use electricity, much less modern farm machinery. In the last hundred miles, Kirsten had seen the occasional tracks of a wheeled vehicle, even more occasionally a thin column of smoke from a chimney. Almost any group of survivors ought to be glad of another pair of hands, even if they come accompanied by a young and healthy appetite.

They ought to be willing to take a good, well-trained dog, too.

The idea comes unbidden. It is something she has been trying very hard not to think about, though she has known from the beginning that she cannot take Asimov where she is going. Simply abandoning him is unthinkable, just as leaving him behind had been. Far in the back of her mind is the even harder choice she had known she might face. With a bit of luck, now, it will not come to that.

The thought is almost enough to make her feel kindly toward the Nameless One as she spreads out a sleeping bag, then tops it with a blanket-covered tarp as a makeshift treatment table. Kirsten also lays out a box of bandages; an ampoule of Penicillin, still a staple drug after three-quarters of a century; a 5 cc syringe and a precious vial of Demerol. Perhaps, she thinks, she can leave the drugs, too, with anyone willing to give Asimov a home. Even an aspirin should be worth its weight in diamonds, now.

Worth more. Worth lives to those fortunate enough to have it.

The world has changed irrevocably, and she knows it. Even if she succeeds in stopping the droids, even if there are enough surviving chemists, physicists, microbiologists, AI wonks like herself to rebuild the technology, the life she has known is gone. The social order likely to emerge from the ruins will be radically different, with few men and almost no elders. Nations are destroyed. What will rise in their stead she fears even to imagine. City-states? Tribes? The Empire of Miami?

She gives her head a shake to force herself back to the present. Whatever comes, she probably will not live to see it.

Carefully she lets herself down into the snow next to the Nameless One. “Listen to me,” she says softly. “I’m going to lift you up and back and into the truck. I need you to help me if you can. Do you understand?”

This time there is a nod. Progress.

Kirsten straddles the girl’s body, getting a firm grip under her arms. “Okay, on the count of three.”

Another nod.

At “Three!” Kirsten straightens and heaves, stepping forward in the same motion to sit the girl in the open door of the van. It is easier than she expected, with the Nameless One able to take some of her own weight on her good leg and support herself with her uninjured arm.

After that it is Emergency First Aid 101.

Kirsten cuts away the right half of the girl’s jeans and applies pressure compresses until the wound stops bleeding. The exit hole is larger than the entry, but not measurably worse; not a military round then, or a dum-dum. She pours it full of antiseptic and winds bandages around the leg. The arm is more difficult. An enormous purple bruise and swelling above the elbow indicate a fracture. Kirsten does not have the skill to set the bone, so she splints it with triple thicknesses of cardboard cut from a carton of dog food and straps it to the girl’s side to immobilize it. She replaces the stained blanket under her patient with a fresh one. Finally she pumps 500 units of Penicillin into her. The repairs have taken the better part of two hours. The light is fading as Kirsten reaches for the Demerol.

The girl has borne the pain in silence, all the while watching her with those great dark eyes. Kirsten uncaps another syringe with her teeth and inserts it into the ampoule of painkiller. “I’ll give you something that will make you sleep, now. I can’t promise you’ll feel better when you wake up, but at least you’ll have a fighting chance. We need to find someone I can leave you with, though.” Gently she slides the needle home. “I can’t take you where I’m going.”

“Where’s that?”

The girl’s voice is hardly more than a breath, but it startles Kirsten so that she straightens suddenly. “Well,” she says, after a moment. “So you are going to talk to me.”

“Sorry. I was scared.”

“Of course you were.” Kirsten gives the girl’s unbroken arm an awkward pat. “Can you tell me what happened to you? And what do I call you?”

“Lizzie. Lizzie Granger. My folks call me Elizabeth, but, . . ..” Lizzie chokes suddenly, turning her face away. “Oh God, they’re all dead. My mom, my dad, my baby brother. The Beast’s locusts killed them.”

“Beast? Locusts?”

“The Beast. You know, the Beast. 666.”

“You mean the one from the Bible? The Anti-Christ?” .

“No, no. The one that comes before the Anti-Christ. You’re not a Christian, are you?”

“I was raised Methodist. Does that count?”

“Christian. Gotta be a real Christian.” The girl’s voice is slurring with the action of the Percodan. “Not like me. Not good enough. The locusts came, the ones with faces like men but with lions’ teeth. Breastplates of iron. Stings. Killed them all.”

This is, Kirsten decides, the most bizarre conversation she has had in decades. Not even the Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to the door when her dad was stationed in Corpus Christi, the ones who thought the United Nations was the Devil’s own bureaucracy and the flag was an idol, were quite this weird. Droids running out of control and the girl is worried about grasshoppers. Grasshoppers with human faces and metal bodies and . . . oh bloody hell, of course. “Droids,” she says. “You mean droids?”

“Droids,” Lizzie murmurs. “Good droids. Took my cousin and her kids. There was this. Bright, bright light. And the angels. Took them up. To meet. Jesus. In the. Air.” Her voice is fading. “Ran. Scared. Got left. Behind. Left. . . .”

Lizzie’s eyes slide closed and her breathing deepens. It is still faster than it should be, and shallower, but she is in no immediate danger. That will come later.

For all of them.

Kirsten drapes a blanket over the girl’s unconscious form and climbs back into the front seat. She whistles Asimov up beside her, puts the truck in gear and heads again into the west, into the settling darkness.

3

“Go back to sleep. It’s still the middle of the night.”

The soft, deep voice startles Maggie from her rapt, if a bit sleepy, moonlit contemplation of surely the most perfect body that God, in His infinite Wisdom, had ever created. Feeling warmth steal over her face, she’s glad of the darkness. “How did you—?”

“Know you were awake? I have my ways.”

“Mm,” Maggie all-but-purrs. “I’ll testify to that.”

When the expected chuckle doesn’t follow, the Colonel scoots up in the bed until her back is resting against the headboard and the blanket is comfortably wrapped around her chest. There she returns to her inspection, though this time with a more professional eye. She notices the new lines of tension stretched across the broad shoulders and along the column of Koda’s elegant spine. “Is something wrong?” she hazards, knowing it’s a crap shoot as to whether or not she’ll get an answer.

After a long moment of silence, Dakota releases a small sigh, fogging slightly the polarized window. “What are your plans?”

The question pulls the Colonel up short. There are several shades of meaning behind the all too forthright words. “You mean…with my troops?”

Koda nods, still looking out the window. “Yes.”

It’s Maggie’s turn to sigh. “Much as I don’t like it, I think I’m going to have to split them into smaller squads.”

“Why?”

“Well, while you were busy patching and sewing, I was talking to the acting base Commander, Major General Hart. There’s been a small, but steady line of survivors coming in since the ‘incident’, as he calls it. Mostly men and children. Some older women. One or two younger women, but that’s all.” Maggie pauses for a moment, ordering her thoughts. “Word is that the droids are taking the young women, all of child-bearing age, like we guessed, and housing them in the local jails. Nobody knows why, or what they’re doing to them in there. But it can’t be pretty, whatever it is.”

“So you’re going after them. Try to break them out.”

Maggie nods. “That’s the plan, yes.” She looks down at her hands. “Most of the jails down in this part of the state are, as you know, pretty damn small. And it’s a damn sure bet that the droids are armed to their beady glass eyeballs with whatever weapons they can get their hands on. Which means that if we send out huge squads, they’ll likely shoot the prisoners before we can even break through the front door. With fewer people, we just might be able to do it.”

“Sounds like fun.”

Maggie’s mouth drops open in shock. Koda turns from the window, giving a little smirk that tells the Colonel that she’s not entirely joking. Maggie can’t help but grin back, that part of her that’s been a soldier since she was a little girl suddenly warming to the challenge. “Well, I’m not exactly used to being this up close and personal with the enemy, but…yeah, it could be fun at that.” With a sexy little smile, she draws the blanket down so that just the tops of her full breasts show. “Care to join me?”

Another question with a variety of meanings.

Koda, regretfully, declines all of the offers. “I need to go north.”

Maggie hides her disappointment. “Worried about your family?”

Shaking her head, Dakota smiles a little. “My family can take care of themselves.”

“Then why north?”

Dakota looks at her so long and so penetratingly that she’s afraid she’s crossed an invisible line. She finds herself holding her breath as she waits for an answer, all the while praising God that this intent, intense woman is on her side.

“I had a dream.” Koda’s voice is only a whisper, but in the otherwise tomb-silent room, Maggie has no trouble hearing the words. The phrase is so incongruous to her that she finds herself flipping back to the age of seven, sitting in the front row of Mrs. Dobbin’s Country Day class and watching the monitor as an ancient, grainy image of a dark-skinned man mouths those same words from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Looks like your dream finally came true, Rev. King, Maggie thinks. Thank God you’re not around to see the result.

Pushing the maudlin thought away, she comes back into herself and realizes that Koda is still pinning her with those too-brilliant gemcut eyes. The aura of tension has returned, strumming around the Vet’s body like an electrical charge.

“And in this dream, you’re headed north?”

Koda nods, the tension still swirling around her body. Maggie swears she can feel the fine hairs on her arms prick up.

“It must be very important to you, then.”

Like the breaking of a vacuum seal, the tension immediately dissipates from the room. Maggie knows she’s answered correctly.

Dakota nods. “It is.”

“How far will you go?”