As soon as Mouse saw the suits he knew something wasn't right. Two young guys with bad haircuts, wearing those ridiculous twentieth-century business uniforms, shabby ones at that, had to be potential trouble. They'd drawn a sparse crowd of stragglers and idlers in front of the general store and were handing out some sort of leaflets.
Mouse slipped the amulet from around his neck and put it in his pocket, then headed for the store. Without it he was indistinguishable from the rest of the desert rats the two interlopers had attracted, dressed in wrinkled cotton drawers, a dirty shirt, sandals, and a broad-brimmed straw hat.
"Are you ready for the fire to come, brother?" one of them asked him as he approached the door.
Mouse shrugged. "Thought about it," he said, and took the folded paper that was thrust at him. Mouse couldn't read, but he recognized the symbol on the leaflet's lower right-hand corner, a red and yellow fish impaled on a spear.
"Knew it," he thought to himself, "Lord's Burning Rain. When did they get here?"
"You'd better do more than just think about it, brother," the suit said, his voice half way between a command and a shout. "When Jesus comes for you, he'll be coming with the sword in his mouth."
The Lord's Burning Rain was an especially hard-edged and violent cult, even for Christians, and Mouse knew they had a particular hatred of Durgans like himself. He figured they must have come up from the ruins on the coast, and there were sure to be more than just these two.
Charles always said that Christians were people who hated the human race.
Mouse slipped quickly into the cool interior of the store, which smelled strongly of burlap. There were fans running inside -- old Wong had a generator out back that ran on kerosene or propane or something. Mouse stepped up to the counter and began to count out a small pile of greasy bills. He had to carry fifty pounds of beans back to Charles and the others, a little over ten miles through mostly sandy terrain and over the Big Road, and he didn't have time for any trouble with Christians or anybody else. Even though it was only mid-April, the desert was already heating up. He'd be lucky to get back by two.
With the load of pinto beans strapped to his back, he slipped discreetly through the knot of people clustered in front of the store and headed north over the sandy track, past the hulks of abandoned hotels and apartments. Probably half of them were burnt out; squatters had accidentally set them ablaze them with cooking fires, and now they sat like scorched mummies, their vacant, burnt-out windows looking sightlessly over the ruins. A lot of the tract houses -- the ones that still had roofs -- had people living in them, because this place still had, and would always have water. But there was no commercial activity except for Wong's and the Camel Bar across the street, and all the old storefronts sat vacant, in various stages of decay and collapse.
A coyote followed him for a short stretch. Mouse didn't worry about just one, and eventually the dog veered off to the east.
When he came to the Big Road Mouse was cautious. There was no traffic, but the plutes still used the highway, and since they ran well over a hundred miles an hour they could come out of nowhere. They thought no more of squashing a sandrat like Mouse than they would running over a bug.
They almost always traveled in pairs; the first car had the armed guards and the second carried the plutes, usually a couple, sometimes a whole family. They were the only ones who had the money for the gas, and they used this road to travel between their enclaves on the coast and their resorts in Nevada. It wasn't easy to waylay and rob them any more, and anyway they seldom had anything of value with them other than the car. And if the sheriff's deputies caught you with a car you were done, so it was best to just steer clear of them.
On the other side of the road was the hardest part -- the hills. With the temperature at ninety or so and the fifty pounds of pintos cutting off the circulation in his shoulders and arms, Mouse clambered up the south side and looked down from the top. About a mile and a half away he saw the three trailers drawn up, with the tents clustered around them like small potatoes. Tonight they'd prepare for traveling and Charles would give everybody specific instructions for the trip. Afterward, around the fire, Claudia would sing the stories of Durga and they'd chant. Mouse loved the chanting, even though he couldn't understand a word. When they chanted, he was home. The tribe was the only real home he had ever known.
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