"Want to share my rock and watch the sun go down?"
She joined him, her heartbeat quickening a little. But after all, why else had she come out here? She had known which way he left camp, just as she knew that Harold and Glen and two of the girls had gone into Brighton to look for a CB radio (Glen's idea instead of Harold's for a change). Patty Kroger was back in camp babysitting their two combat-fatigue patients. Shirley Hammett showed some signs of coming out of her daze, but she had awakened them all around one this morning, shrieking in her sleep, her hands clawing at the air in warding-off gestures. The other woman, the one with no name, seemed to be going in the other direction. She sat. She would eat if she was fed. She would perform the functions of elimination. She would not answer questions. She only really came alive in her sleep. Even with a heavy dose of Veronal, she often moaned and sometimes shrieked. Frannie thought she knew what the poor woman was dreaming of.
"It seems like a long way still to go, doesn't it?" she said.
He didn't answer for a moment, and then he said: "It's further than we thought. That old woman, she's not in Nebraska anymore."
"I know - " she began, and then bit down on her words.
He glanced at her with a faint grin. "You've been skippin your medication, ma'am."
"My secret's out," she said with a lame smile.
"We're not the only ones," Stu said. "I was talkin to Dayna this afternoon" (she felt that interior dig of jealousy - and fear - at the familiar way he used her name) "and she said neither she nor Susan wanted to take it."
Fran nodded. "Why did you stop? Did they drug you... in that place?"
He tapped ashes into his bare earth ashtray. "Mild sedatives at night, that was all. They didn't need to drug me. I was locked up nice and tight. No, I stopped three nights ago because I felt... out of touch." He meditated for a moment and then expanded. "Glen and Harold going to get that CB radio, that was a real good idea. What's a two-way for? To put you in touch. This buddy of mine back in Arnette, Tony Leominster, he had one in his Scout. Great gadget. You could talk to folks, or you could holler for help if you got in a jam of trouble. These dreams, they're almost like having a CB in your head, except the transmit seems to be broken and we're only receiving."
"Maybe we are transmitting," Fran said quietly.
He looked at her, startled.
They sat quiet for a while. The sun peered through the clouds, as if to say a quick goodbye before sinking below the horizon. Fran could understand why primitive people worshiped it. As the gigantic quiet of the nearly empty country accumulated on her day by day, imprinting its truth on her brain by its very weight, the sun - the moon, too, for that matter - began to seem bigger and more important. More personal. Those bright skyships began to look to you as they had when you were a child.
"Anyway, I stopped," Stu said. "Last night I dreamed about that black man again. It was the worst yet. He's setting up somewhere out in the desert. Las Vegas, I think. And Frannie... I think he's crucifying people. The ones who give him trouble."
"He's doing what?"
"That's what I dreamed. Lines of crosses along Highway 15 made out of barn-beams and telephone poles. People hanging off them."
"Just a dream," she said uneasily.
"Maybe." He smoked and looked west at the red-tinged clouds. "But the other two nights, just before we run on those maniacs holding the women, I dreamed about her - the woman who calls herself Mother Abigail. She was sitting in the cab of an old pickup truck parked on the shoulder of Highway 76. I was standing on the ground with one arm leaning on the window, talking to her just as natural as I'm talking to you. And she says, 'You got to move em along faster still, Stuart; if an old lady like me can do it, a big tough fella from Texas like you should be able to.'" Stu laughed, threw down his cigar, and crushed it under his heel. In kind of an absent way, as if not knowing what he was doing, he put an arm around Frannie's shoulders.
"They're going to Colorado," she said.
"Why, yes, I think they are."
"Has... has either Dayna or Susan dreamed of her?"
"Both. And last night Susan dreamed of the crosses. Just like I did."
"There's a lot of people with that old woman now."
Stu agreed. "Twenty, maybe more. You know, we're passing people nearly every day. They just hunker down and wait for us to go by. They're scared of us, but her... they'll come to her, I guess. In their own good time."
"Or to the other one," Frannie said.
Stu nodded. "Yeah, or to him. Fran, why did you stop taking the Veronal?"
She uttered a trembling sigh and wondered if she should tell him. She wanted to, but she was afraid of what his reaction might be.
"There's no counting on what a woman will do," she said at last.
"No," he agreed. "But there are ways to find out what they're thinking, maybe."