"We don't mean you no harm," Brother Deaver said, or started to say, anyway, when the one mobber got off his horse and whipped him across the face with his pistol, knocking him down.
"That's our speech," said the mobber, "and we do all the talking, got it? Everybody lie down—on your bellies."
"Look at what they got in the way of women, Zack, if that ain't pitiful."
"That blond one—"
"Keep your hands off her," said Pete. He started to get up. The taller one with the long beard gave him a kick that looked like it might tear his head off.
"She's dessert," said the tall one. "We got dark meat for dinner."
Marie thought she was already as scared as she could be, but now when the cold barrel of a shotgun was pressed against her forehead, pressing down real heavy, she tasted terror for the first time in her life.
"Please," whispered Rona.
"Now you just hold still while I get this off you, honey, and open wide for papa, or Zack's gonna blow your girlfriend's head clean off."
"I'm a good girl!" Rona whined.
"I'll make you even better," said the long-bearded man.
"No!" Rona screamed.
Marie felt the painful motion of the gun as Zack drew a charge into the chamber. "Don't fight with them, Rona," said Marie. She knew it was a cowardly thing to say, but Rona didn't have the gun at her head.
"You little kids best close your eyes," said Zack. "Wouldn't want you finding out the facts of life too young."
Marie could hear the other one set down his shotgun and start unzipping himself, mumbling to himself about how if she gave him a disease he'd hang her head from his saddle, which told Marie that she did see what she thought she saw. It made her gag all over again.
"Hold still," said Zack, "or it won't go so nice for you when I—"
Suddenly the gun barrel jammed sharp into her head as Zack slumped on it; not even a second later she heard the crack of a gun going off not far away. Zack's shirt blossomed open and spattered blood; Marie grabbed the shotgun barrel and tore it away from her face.
The other mobber muttered something and fumbled for his gun, but then another cracking sound and he was down, too.
"Teague!" Marie shouted. She got to her feet, her head bleeding. Everybody was getting up. Pete had Zack's shotgun in a second and pointed it at the two mobbers—but they were stone dead, each killed with one shot.
"Catch the horses!" Teague was shouting that. And he was right, had to catch the horses, they could pull the carts, they could carry stuff, had to catch them, but Marie couldn't find them, not with blood pouring down into her eyes—
"Marie honey, here, are you all right?" Sister Monk was dabbing at her with a cloth. It stung like hell.
"Did he shoot Marie?" It was one of the little boys.
"Just jammed his gun in her head when he was dying is all—Donna Cinn, you get the little ones back to the side of the road." Sister Monk taking charge as usual. And as usual everybody hopped to do it. Only this time Marie didn't mind at all, didn't mind those big old hands dabbing at the blood on her face.
Then she noticed Rona making a grunting noise, and she turned to look. Brother Deaver was tugging at Rona's sleeve, but Rona wouldn't quit stomping her foot down on the bearded mobber's face. It wasn't even human anymore, but she kept stomping and now the skull broke through and her shoe sank down in a ways.
Now Teague came up, leading one horse. He handed the reins to Deaver, stepped astride the dead man's body, and took Rona in his arms and just held her, saying, "You're OK, you're OK now, you're safe."
"Took you damn long enough," said Pete. He had the other horse, and he sounded more scared than mad.
"Came as soon as I heard the horses. Had to make sure it was only the two before I started shooting. Rona, I'm sorry, I'm sorry you got so scared, I'm sorry he treated you so bad, but I had to wait until he set his gun down, don't you see."
"It's OK, he didn't do nothing," said Annalee.
Rona screamed into Teague's shirt.
"I don't call it nothing to have her lying there with her skirt up like that," said Teague.
"I just meant he didn't—"
"If it didn't happen to you then you just shut up about what's nothing or not," said Teague.
Brother Deaver held out a little blue swatch of cloth. "Here's your underwear, Rona—"
Rona turned away. Sister Monk snatched the panties out of Brother Deaver's hand. "For heaven's sake, Brother Deaver, use some sense. He touched these! She isn't going to put them back on."
"Rona, I'm sorry, but we've got to get moving," said Teague. "Right now, right this second. Those gunshots are bound to call more of them—these two might have twenty more a mile behind them."
Rona turned away from him, staggered to Sister Monk. Marie didn't mind much, having Sister Monk switch from nursing her to comforting Rona. It was plain Rona was in worse shape.
Teague got the other two men to help him hoist the corpses onto the horses.
"Leave them here," said Annalee.
"Got to bury them," said Teague.
"They don't deserve it."
Pete explained, real gentle. "So nobody finds the bodies and chases after us to get even."
A minute later they were off the road and cutting along the edge of some farmer's field, half-screened by trees. Teague pushed them to go faster, and quieter, too, his voice just a whisper. Finally they were down a hill in a hollow. Teague had Brother Deaver and Brother Cinn dig a single large grave, while Annalee kept the children away from the horses."
"Bury these, too," said Teague.
That was the first time Marie noticed that both saddles had heads tied to them. They looked even worse close up than the heads Marie had seen from a distance.
"I'll take them down," said Rona. She set right to untying the thongs from the saddle.
"Me too," said Marie. She didn't even let herself wonder whether it had been a girl or a boy, a man or a woman.
Teague took his rifle and went back up the hill to keep a watch on the road.
Marie didn't puke and neither did Rona. Mostly Marie was just thinking about how grateful she was that her head wasn't on the horse. Then Marie helped Sister Monk strip the corpses and empty the pockets of everything. Three dozen shotgun shells. All kinds of matches and supplies. They stuffed it all in the saddlebags, which were already near full of stuff the mobbers no doubt stole from other folks just today. In twenty minutes both corpses were in the hole, dressed in their ragged underwear, the heads tucked around them, their limp, filthy clothes tossed in on top of them. Only Marie had noticed how Sister Monk wrapped Rona's blue panties inside one of the dead men's shirts. Rona insisted on helping then, tossing dirt onto the bodies until they were covered up.
Marie couldn't keep from speaking. "They were poor."
"Everybody's poor," said Pete. "But they kept alive by stealing the little that others had and likely killing them, too."
"Feels wrong, having their victims' heads buried with them," said Sister Monk.
"The victims don't mind," said Brother Deaver, "and we didn't have time to dig more holes. Marie, can you get up the hill real quiet and tell Brother Teague that we're done here?"
But Teague had already seen from up the hill, and he slid down the slope. "Nobody coming. These two might've been alone," he said. "It's getting late enough, maybe we ought to camp farther on down the hollow here. If I remember right there's water. The horses'll need that. We can work the rest of the afternoon rigging up some kind of harness for the horses to pull the bikes." Teague looked at the grave. "Get some dead leaves on here. Something to make the soil not look so fresh-turned. And if this happens again, save out their clothes. Dead people don't need them."
"We'd never wear them," said Brother Deaver.
"You would, if it got cold enough, and you got naked enough."
"I've never been that naked," said Brother Deaver.
Teague shrugged.
"Brother Teague," s
aid Marie.
"Yeah?"
"I was wrong about not wanting you to kill for me."
"I know," said Teague. And that was all he said to her. "Mr. Deaver, Mr. Cinn, you got any objection to hanging on to those shotguns?"
"If they do, I don't," said Sister Cinn.
Brother Deaver and Brother Cinn kept to themselves any objections they might have had. They slung the shotguns over their shoulders. Brother Cinn dropped a few shells in his pocket; then he dropped some in Brother Deaver's pocket. Brother Deaver looked at him in surprise, then embarrassment. Marie was a little disgusted. Didn't college professors know anything?
Mostly, though, Marie watched Teague. That's why she was the only one who saw how Teague kept clenching and unclenching his jaw. How his hand shook a little. And late that night, she was the only one who woke up when he took a walk in the moonlight.
She got up and followed him. He stood beside the grave, looking nowhere in particular, his hands jammed in his pockets. He showed no sign of noticing she was there, but she knew he had heard her coming from the minute she got up from the ground.
"You're such a liar," said Marie. "You didn't kill your parents."
He didn't say a thing.
"You never killed a living soul before today."
"Believe what you like," he said.
"You never."
He just stood there with his hands in his pockets until she went back to the camp. She lay there wondering why a man might want other folks to think he was a murderer when he wasn't. Then she wondered why she wanted so bad to believe a man wasn't a murderer when he said right out that he was. She lay awake a long time, but he didn't come back until after she was asleep.
As for Rona, Marie was sure that girl really did have a crush on Jamie Teague, before. Seeing how Teague saved her from rape and probably from having her head bounce along on some mobber's saddle, you'd think she'd be totally in love with him now. But no, not Rona. From then on it was like Teague didn't even exist, except as just another grown-up. Like he was nothing special.
There's just no understanding some people, Marie decided. Maybe Rona just couldn't be grateful and in love at the same time. Maybe she couldn't forgive Teague for waiting to kill the mobbers till they had her panties off. Or maybe Rona just couldn't ever be married to a man that watched her stamp a dead man's head to mush. Rona never told her, and Marie never asked.
Marie carried a scar on her forehead to the end of her life. She'd touch it now and then, and from the start she was glad to have it. She always remembered that it could have been much worse for her than a gun barrel leaning on her head. She could've been in Rona's place.
Day after next they came to the mountains, where the road sloped upward so steep that they had to stop and rest every twenty minutes or so. Pete was grateful they had the horses now, to pull the carts, though he didn't say so out loud; it didn't do to start saying it was a good thing to have the horses, not with Rona still so upset about how they got them.
Pete concentrated on the children, his own and the orphans. They were the ones who suffered most, he knew that. The youngest of them, Scotty Porter and Valerie Letterman, they weren't even born when the first plague struck. The famous Six Missiles had already fallen before Scotty and Valerie said their first words. He murmured to Annalee one time, "Think there's any chance of getting them into a college-prep kindergarten?" But she'd either forgotten all that craziness from the old days, or else she didn't think it was funny. She didn't think much was funny these days. Neither did Pete, for that matter. But at least he tried now and then. Sometimes, for hours, maybe even days at a time, he didn't think about his father killed in the missile that got D.C., or his stepfather shot by looters, or his mom and Annalee's folks and all their brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews crammed into the cultural hall at the stake center, not being sure what was going to happen to them, but knowing deep down all the time, knowing and being terrified. I was in plays on the stage where the guys with the guns stood. I played basketball on the floor where the bullets gouged up the wood finish and blood soaked in under the polish. I was baptized in the font behind the stage, where the men from the city hooked up the hoses to wash out the blood. The Baptists were already talking about making it a Christian library when Pete went there to lay flowers in the parking lot where he had first kissed Annalee after a dance, where now his kin and his friends lay in a jumbled heap of broken bodies under the dirt.
That was the whole world to these children. It had always been in turmoil—did they even realize that things weren't supposed to be this way? Would they ever trust anything again, now that their parents had been taken away from them?
Teague asked him once, when they were alone together, leading the horses. "Whose kids are those?"
"Donna, the big one, she's mine, and so's Nat, he's my boy."
"Any fool can see that, they're so blond," said Teague.
"Mick and Scotty Porter, Valerie Letterman, Cheri Ann Bee, they're orphans."
"Why'd you bring them along? Wasn't there anybody in Greensboro who could've took care of them?"
"That's what took us so long leaving. Fighting everybody to get the right to take them with us."
"But why? Don't you know how much faster we'd go, how much safer we'd be without them?"
Pete held himself back, kept himself from being angry, like he always tried to do and almost always succeeded.
"It's like this, Teague. If we left them, they would've been raised up Baptists."
"That ain't so bad," said Teague.
Pete held himself back again, a long time, before he could answer quiet and calm. "You see, Teague, it was mostly Baptist preachers who spent fifteen years telling people how Mormons were the anti-Christ, how we had secret rituals in the temple where we worshiped Satan. How we and Jesus and the devil were brothers, and how we weren't Christians but pretended to be so we could steal away their children, how we Mormons owned everything and made sure we got rich while good Christians stayed poor. And then when bad times came, all those Baptist preachers washed their hands and said, 'We never told anybody to kill Mormons.' Well, that's true. They never taught murder. But they taught hate and fear, they told lies and they knew they were doing it. Now, Teague, do you see why we wouldn't let these Mormon kids get raised by people who'd tell such lies about the religion their parents died for?"
Teague thought about that for a while. "How come these kids got out alive? I heard the Christian Soldiers went through killing the wounded."
So Teague had heard the story. "These four went to Guilford Primary. When the Christian Soldiers were going around arresting people, they got to Guilford Primary school, and Dr. Sonja Day, the principal, she met them at the door. Didn't have a gun or anything. She just shows them the ashes of the school records, still smoldering. She says to them, 'All the children in this school are Mormon today, and me and all the faculty. If you take anybody, you take us all.' Faced them down and they finally went away."
"Guts."
"Think about it, Teague. Mormon kids were ripped out of class in fifty schools in the county. If more principals had guts—"
"One out of fifty's above average, Cinn."
"That's why America deserves all that's happened to her. That's why the Lord hasn't saved us. America turned to loving evil."
"Maybe they were just afraid," said Teague.
"Afraid or weak or evil, all three roads lead to hell."
"I know," whispered Teague.
His whisper was so deep and sore that Pete knew he'd touched some wounded place in Teague. Pete wasn't one to push deeper at a time like that. He backed off, let a man be. You don't go poking into a wound, that just gets it all infected. You keep hands off, you let it heal up, you give it time and air and gentleness.
"Teague, I wish you'd take me with you when you scout around or go hunting or whatever."
"I need you to stay with the rest. I don't figure Deaver to be much good with a shotgun."
"Maybe no
t," said Pete. "But if you don't go with us beyond these mountains, somebody's got to be able to do some of what you do."
"I been walking the woods for ten years now, long before the plagues started."
"I got to start sometime."
"When we get to the Blue Ridge Parkway, I'll start to take you hunting with me. But you carry no gun."
"Why not?"
"Take it or leave it. Can you throw?"
"I pitched hardball."
"A rock?"
"I suppose."
"If you can't hunt with a rock, you can't hunt. Bullets are for killing things big enough to kill you. Because when the bullets run out, there won't be no more."
The higher they got into the mountains, the more relaxed Teague got. After a while, he stopped having them look for sheltered, hidden places to camp in; they camped right out in the open. "Mobbers don't come up this high," said Teague.
"Why not?"
"Because when they do, they don't come back."
At the Blue Ridge Parkway, Teague laid out a whole new set of rules. "Walk spaced apart, not bunched up. Stay on the pavement or close to it. Nobody goes off alone. Don't hold anything in your hand, not even a rock. Keep your hands in plain sight all the time. If somebody comes, don't move your hands above your waist, not even to scratch your nose. Just keep walking. Above all, make plenty of noise."
"I take it we're not afraid of bushwhackers anymore," said Brother Deaver.
"These are mountain people around here, and Cherokees beyond Asheville. They don't rob people, but they also don't ask a lot of questions before they kill strangers. If they think you might, just might cause them any trouble, you're dead where you stand. So make it plain that you aren't trying to sneak up on anybody and you stay visible all the time."
"We can sing again?" asked Sister Monk.
"Anything but that 'walked and walked and walked and walked' song."
It was a glorious time then. The Blue Ridge Parkway crested the hills, so they had sky all round them, and the mountains were as pretty as Pete had ever seen them. His real Dad took them along the parkway most autumns when he was growing up. One year they drove it clear from Harper's Ferry down to the Cherokee Reservation. Pete and his brother griped the whole way till their dad was promising to amputate limbs if they didn't shut up, but now the trip was glorious in memory. Sometimes Pete forgot he was a grown-up, walking along here, especially when he walked on ahead so he couldn't see any of them. It wasn't autumn yet, though autumn wasn't far off; still, it felt good, felt like coming home. He'd heard other folks say that, too, about the Blue Ridge. About the Appalachians in general. Felt like coming home even if they grew up in some desolate place like California or North Dakota.