"Half for you and half for me, big guy, okay?"
Fifteen minutes later he pulled the rabbit off the fire and managed to rip it in half without burning his fingers too badly. The meat was burned in places, half-raw in others, but it put the canned ham from Great Western Markets in the shade. He and Kojak gulped it down... and as they were finishing, a bone-chilling howl drifted down the wash.
"Christ! " Stu said around a mouthful of rabbit.
Kojak was on his feet, hackles up, growling. He advanced stiff-legged around the fire and growled again. Whatever had howled fell silent.
Stu lay down, the hand-sized stone by one hand and his opened pocket knife by the other. The stars were cold and high and indifferent. His thoughts turned to Fran and he turned them away just as quickly. That hurt too much, full belly or not. I won't sleep, he thought. Not for a long time.
But he did sleep, with the help of one of Glen's pills. And when the coals of the fire had burned down to embers, Kojak came over and slept next to him, giving Stu his heat. And that was how, on the first night after the party was broken, Stu ate when the others went hungry, and slept easy while their sleep was broken by bad dreams and an uneasy feeling of rapidly approaching doom.
On the twenty-fourth, Larry Underwood's group of three pilgrims made thirty miles and camped northeast of the San Rafael Knob. That night the temperature slid down into the mid-twenties, and they built a large fire and slept dose by it. Kojak had not rejoined them.
"What do you think Stu's doing tonight?" Ralph asked Larry.
"Dying," Larry said shortly, and was sorry when he saw the wince of pain on Ralph's homely, honest face, but he didn't know how to redeem what he had said. And after all, it was almost surely true.
He lay down again, feeling strangely certain that it was tomorrow. Whatever they were coming to, they were almost there.
Bad dreams that night. He was on tour with an outfit called the Shady Blues Connection in the one he remembered most clearly on waking. They were booked into Madison Square Garden, and the place was sold out. They took the stage to thunderous applause. Larry went to adjust his mike, bring it down to proper height, and couldn't budge it. He went to the lead guitarist's mike, but that one was frozen, too. Bass guitarist, organist, same thing. Booing and rhythmic clapping began to come from the crowd. One by one, the members of the Shady Blues Connection slunk off the stage, grinning furtively into high psychedelic shirt-collars like the ones the Byrds used to wear back in 1966, when Roger McGuinn was still eight miles high. Or eight hundred. And still Larry wandered from mike to mike, trying to find at least one he could adjust. But they were all at least nine feet tall and frozen solid. They looked like stainless steel cobras. Someone in the crowd began to yell for "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" I don't do that number anymore, he tried to say. I stopped doing that one when the world ended. They couldn't hear him, and a chant began to arise, starting in the back rows, then sweeping the Garden, gaining strength and volume: "Baby Can You Dig Your Man! Baby Can You Dig Your Man! BABY CAN YOU DIG YOUR MAN! "
He awoke with the chant in his ears. Sweat had popped out all over his body.
He didn't need Glen to tell him what kind of dream that had been, or what it meant. The dream where you can't reach the mikes, can't adjust them, is a common one for rock musicians, just as common as dreaming that you're on stage and can't remember a single lyric. Larry guessed that all performers had a variation on one of those before -
Before a performance.
It was an inadequacy dream. It expressed that one simple overriding fear: What if you can't? What if you want to, but you can't? The terror of being unable to make the simple leap of faith which is the place where any artist - singer, writer, painter, musician - begins.
Make it nice for the people, Larry.
Whose voice was that? His mother's?
You're a taker, Larry.
No, Mom - no I'm not. I don't do that number anymore. I stopped doing that one when the world ended. Honest.
He lay back down and drifted off to sleep again. His last thought was that Stu had been right: The dark man was going to grab them. Tomorrow, he thought. Whatever we're coming to, we're almost there.
But they saw no one on the twenty-fifth. The three of them walked stolidly along under the bright blue skies, and they saw birds and beasts in plenty, but no people.
"It's amazing how rapidly the wildlife is coming back," Glen said. "I knew it would be a fairly rapid process, and of course the winter is going to prune it back some, but this is still amazing. It's only been about a hundred days since the first outbreaks."
"Yeah, but there's no dogs or horses," Ralph said. "That just doesn't seem right, you know it? They invented a bug that killed pretty near all the people, but that wasn't enough. It had to take out his two favorite animals, too. It took man and man's best friends."