"I guess I know why," she said. "No fear."
She got up and shuffled over to the bureau. On the second shelf above it was a plastic jar, and in it two denture plates floated in cloudy liquid like a medical exhibit.
She fished them out and rinsed them with a dipper of water.
"Lord God I have suffered," Mother Abagail said balefully, and popped the plates in.
"We got to talk," she said. "You two are the head ones, and we got some things to sort out."
"Well," Ralph said, "it ain't me. I was never much more than a full-time factory worker and a part-time farmer. I've raised a helluva lot more calluses than idears in my time. Nick, I guess he's in charge."
"Is that right?" she asked, looking at Nick.
Nick wrote briefly and Ralph read it aloud, as he continued to do.
"It was my idea to come up this way, yes. About being in charge, I don't know."
"We met June and Olivia about ninety miles south of here," Ralph said. "Day before yesterday, wasn't it, Nick?"
Nick nodded.
"We was on our way to you even then, Mother. The women were headed north, too. So was Dick. We all just threw in together."
"Have you seen any other folks?" she asked.
"No," Nick wrote. "But I've had a feeling - Ralph has, too - that there are other people hiding, watching us. Afraid, I guess. Still getting over the shock of what's happened."
She nodded.
"Dick said that the day before he joined us, he heard a motorcycle somewhere south. So there are other people around. I think what scares them is seeing a fairly big group all together."
"Why did you come here?" Her eyes, caught in their nets of wrinkles, stared at him keenly.
Nick wrote: "I have dreamed of you. Dick Ellis says he has once. And the little girl, Gina, was calling you 'grammylady' long before we got here. She described your place. The tire swing."
"Bless the child," Mother Abagail said absently. She looked at Ralph. "You?"
"Once or twice, ma'am," Ralph said. He wet his lips. "Mostly what I dreamed about was just... just that other fella."
"What other fella?"
Nick wrote. Circled what he had written. Handed it to her directly. Her eyes were not much good for close work without her specs or the lighted magnifying glass she'd gotten in Hemingford Center last year, but she could read this. It was writ large, like the writing God had put on the wall of Belshazzar's palace. Circled, it gave her a cold chill just looking at it. She thought of weasels squirming across the road on their bellies, yanking at her towsack with their needle-sharp killers' teeth. She thought of a single red eye opening, disclosing itself in the darkness, looking, searching, now not just for an old woman but a whole party of men and women... and one little girl.
The two circled words were: dark man.
"I've been told," she said, folding the paper, straightening it, then folding it again, for the time being unmindful of the misery of her arthritis, "that we're to go west. I've been told in a dream, by the Lord God. I didn't want to listen. I'm an old woman, and all I want to do is die on this little piece of land. It's been my family's freehold for a hundred and twelve years, but I wasn't meant to die here any more than Moses was meant to go over into Canaan with the Children of Israel."
She paused. The two men watched her soberly in the lamplight, and outside the rain continued to fall, slow and ceaseless. There was no more thunder. Lord, she thought, these dentures hurt my mouth. I want to take them out and go to bed.
"I started having dreams two years before this plague ever fell. I've always dreamed, and sometimes my dreams have come true. Prophecy is the gift of God and everyone has a smidge of it. My own grandmother used to call it the shining lamp of God, sometimes just the shine. In my dreams I saw myself going west. At first with just a few people, then a few more, then a few more. West, always west, until I could see the Rocky Mountains. It got so there was a whole caravan of us, two hundred or more. And there would be signs... no, not signs from God but regular road-signs, and every one of them saying things like BOULDER, COLORADO, 609 MILES or THIS WAY TO BOULDER."
She paused.
"Those dreams, they scared me. I never told a soul I was havin em, that's how scared I was. I felt the way I guess Job must have felt when God spoke to him out of the whirlwind. I even tried to pretend they was just dreams, foolish old woman runnin from God the way Jonah did. But the big fish has swallowed us up just the same, you see! And if God says to Abby, You got to tell, then tell I must. And I always felt like someone would come to me, someone special, and that's how I'd be in the way of knowin the time had come."