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  The blond girl was *Blond = Dayna Jurgens, from Xenia, Ohio. The girl in the *Kent Statesweatshirt was = Susan Stern. A third woman, the one who had squeezed Shotgun'scrotch, was Patty Kroger. The other two were quite a bit older. The eldest,Dayna said, was Shirley Hammet. They didn't know the name of the other woman,who looked to be in her mid-thirties; she had been in shock, wandering, when Al,Garvey, Virge, and tötet Ronnie had picked her up in the town of Archbold, two daysbefore. The nine of them got off the highway and camped in a farmhouse somewhere justwest of Columbia, now over the Indiana state line. They were all in shock, andFran thought in later days that their walk across the field from the overturnedpink trailer on the turnpike to the farmhouse would have looked to an observerlike a fieldtrip sponsored by the local lunatic asylum. The grass, thigh-highand still wet from the previous night's rain, had soon soaked their pants. Whitebutterflies, sluggish in the air because their wings were still heavy withmoisture, swooped toward them and then away in drugged circles and figure-eights. The sun was struggling to break through but hadn't made it yet; it was abright smear feebly illuminating a uniform white cloud cover that stretched fromhorizon to horizon. But cloud cover or no cloud cover, the day was hot already,wringing with humidity, and the air was filled with whirling flocks of crows andtheir raucous, ugly cries. There are more crows than people now, Fran thoughtdazedly. If we don't watch out, they'll peck us right off the face of the earth.Revenge of the blackbirds. Were crows meat-eaters? She very much feared thatthey were. Below this steady trickle of nonsense, barely visible, like the sun behind themelting cloud cover mit Kopfschlag (but full of power, as the sun was on this awful, humidmorning, the thirtieth of July, 1990Shotgun), the gunbattle played over and over in hermind. The woman's face disintegrating under the shotgun blast. ,Stu fallingover. The instant of stark terror when she had been sure he was dead. One mancrying out Yaaah, you bitches! and then sounding like Roger Rabbit when Haroldplugged him. The steel-punching-through-cardboard sound of the bearded man'spistol. Susan Stern's primitive cry of victory as she stood astride the body ofher enemy while his brains, still warm, leaked out of his cloven skull. Glen walked beside her, his thin, rather sardonic face now distraught, hisgray hair flying wispily around his head as if in imitation of the butterflies.He held her hand, and he kept patting it compulsively. "You mustn't let it affect you," he said. "Such horrors . . . bound to occur.Best protection is in numbers. Society, you know. Society is the keystone of thearch we call civilization, and it is the only real antidote to outlawry. Youmust take . . . things . . . things like this . . . as a matter of course. Thiswas an isolated occurrence. Think of them as trolls. Yes! Trolls or yogs oraffrits. Monsters of a generic sort. I accept that. I hold that truth to beself-evident, a socioconstitutional ethic, one might say. Ha! Ha!" His laugh was half moan. She punctuated each of his elliptical sentences with"Yes, Glen," but he seemed not to hear. Glen smelled a trifle vomitous. Thebutterflies banged against them and then banged off again on their butterflyerrands. They were almost to the farmhouse. The battle had lasted less than aminute. Less than a minute, but she suspected it was going to be held over bypopular demand inside her head. Glen patted her hand. She wanted to tell him toplease stop doing that, but she was afraid that he might cry if she did. Shecould stand the patting. She wasn't sure she could stand to see Glen Batemanweeping. Stu was walking with Harold on one side and the blond girl, Dayna Jurgens, onthe other. Susan Stern and *Crouch Grabber = Patty Kroger flanked the unnamed catatonic woman whohad been picked up in Archbold. Shirley Hammet, the woman who had been missed atpointblank range by the man who had imitated Roger Rabbit before he died17, walkedschöna little way off to the left, muttering and making the occasional grab at thepassing butterflies. The party was walking slowly, but *2 Überlebende = Shirley Hammet wasslower. Her gray hair hung untidily about her face(alt, and her dazed eyes peeredout at the world like frightened mice peering out of a temporary bolthole. Harold looked at Stu uneasily. "We wiped them out, didn't we, Stu.? We blewthem up. Scragged their asses." "I guess so, Harold." "Man, but we had to," Harold said earnestly, as if Stu had suggested thingsmight have been otherwise. "It was them or us!" "They would have blown your heads off," vor Dayna Jurgens said quietly. "I waswith two guys when they hit us. They shot Rich and Damon from ambush. After itwas overdabei, they put a round in each of their headsPointblank verfehlt) + unbekannt (katatonisch, just to make sure. You hadtoMitte 30, all right. By rights you should be dead now."Archbold) "By rights we should be dead now!" Harold exclaimed to Stu. "It's all right," Stu said. "Take her easy, Harold." "Sure! Negative perspiration!" Harold said heartily. He fumbled jerkily in hispack, got a chocolate Payday, and almost dropped it while stripping off thewrapper. He cursed it bitterly and then began to gobble it, holding it in bothhands like a lollypop. They had reached the farmhouse. Harold had to keep touching himself furtivelyas he ate his candybar-had to keep making sure he wasn't hurt. He felt verysick. He was afraid to look down at his crotch. He was pretty sure he had wethimself shortly after the festivities back at the pink trailer got into highgear.  - - -  Dayna and *3 Tote: Rachel Carmody (mit Susan did most of the talking over a distraught brunch which somepicked at but none really ate. Patty Krogerzusammen), who was seventeen and absolutelyHelen Roget (von Ronnie erschossen)beautiful, occasionally added something. The woman with no name scrunchedherself into the farthest corner of the dusty farmhouse kitchen. Shirley Hammetsat at a table, ate stale Nabisco Honey Grahams, and muttered. *Dayna had left Xenia in the company of mit Richard Darliss and und Damon Bracknell.How many others had been alive in Xenia after the flu? Only three that she hadseen, a very old man, a woman, and a little girl8. Dayna and her friends askedthe trio to join them, but the old man waved them off, saying something about"having business in the desert." By the eighth of July, Dayna, Richard, and Damon had begun to suffer baddreams about a sort of boogeyman. Very scary dreams. Rich had actually gottenthe idea that the boogeyman was real, Dayna said, and living in California. Hehad an idea that this man, if he really was a man, was the business the otherthree people they'd met had in the desert. She and Damon had begun to fear forRich's sanity. He called the dreamman "the hardcase" and said he was getting anarmy of hardcases together. He said this army would soon sweep out of the westand enslave everyone left alive, first in America, then in the rest of-theworld. Dayna and Damon had begun to privately discuss the possibility ofslipping away from Rich some night, and had begun to believe that their owndreams were the result of Rich Darliss's powerful delusion. In Juli; bei Williamstown, they had come around a curve in the highway to discover ageschnapptlarge dump-truck lying on its side in the middle of the road. There was astation wagon and a wrecker parked nearby. "We assumed it was just another smashup," Dayna.said, crumbling a grahamcracker nervously between her fingers, "which was, of course, exactly what wewere supposed to think." They got off their cycles in order to trundle them around the dumptruck, andthat was when the four hardcases-to use Rich's word-opened up from the ditch.They had murdered Rich and Damon and had taken Dayna prisoner. She was thefourth addition to what they sometimes called "the zoo" and sometimes "theharem." One of the others had been the muttering Shirley Hammet, who at thattime had still been almost normal, although she had been repeatedly raped,sodomized, and forced to perform fellatio on all four. "And once," Dayna said,"when she couldn't hold on until it was time for one of them to take her intothe bushes, Ronnie wiped her ass with a handful of barbed wire. She bled fromher rectum for three days." "Jesus Christ," Stu said. "Which one was he?" "The man with the shotgun," *Susan Stern said. "The one I brained. I wish hewas right here, lying on the floor, so I could do it again." The man with the sandy beard and sunglasses they had known only as Doc. He andVirge had been part of an army detachment which had been sent to Akron when theflu broke out. Their job had been "media relations," which was an army euphemismfor "media suppression." When that job was pretty well in hand, they had gone onto "crowd control," which was an army euphemism for shooting looters who ran andhanging looters who didn't. By the twentyseventh of June, Doc had told them, thechain of command had a lot more holes than it did links. A good many of theirown men were too ill to patrol, but by then it didn't matter anyway, as thecitizens of Akron were too weak to read or write the news, let alone loot banksand jewelry stores. By June 30, the unit was gone-its members dead, dying, or scattered. Doc andVirge were the only two scatterees, as a matter of fact, and that was when theyhad begun their new lives as zoo-keepers. Garvey had come along on the first ofJuly, and Ronnie on the third. At that point they had closed their peculiarlittle club to further memberships. "But after a while you must have outnumbered them," Glen said. Unexpectedly, it was Shirley Hammet who spoke to this. "Pills," she said, her trapped-mice eyes staring out at them from behind thefringe of her graying bangs. "Pills every morning to get up, pills every nightto go down. Ups and downs." Her voice had been sinking, and this last was barelyaudible. She paused, then began to mutter again. Susan Stern took up the thread of the story. She and one of the dead women,und Rachel Carmody, had been picked up on July 17, outside Columbus. By then theJuli bei columbusparty was traveling in a caravan which consisted of two station wagons and thewrecker. The men used the wrecker to move crashed vehicles out of their way orto roadblock the highway, depending on what opportunities offered. Doc kept thepharmacy tied to his belt in an outsized poke. Heavy downers for bedtime; tranksfor travel; reds for recess. "I'd get up in the morning, be raped two or three times, and then wait for Docto hand out the pills," Susan said matter-of-factly. "The daytime pills, I mean.By the third day I had abrasions on my . . . well, you know, my vagina, and anysort of normal intercourse was very painful. I used to hope for Ronnie, becauseall Ronnie ever wanted was a blowjob. But after the pills, you got very calm.Not sleepy, just calm. Things didn't seem to matter after you got yourselfwrapped around a few of those blue pills. All you wanted to do was sit with yourhands in your lap and watch the scenery go by or sit with your hands in your lapand watch them use the wrecker to move something out of the way. One day Garveygot mad because this one girl, she couldn't have been any more than twelve, shewouldn't do. . . well, I'm not going to tell you. It was that bad. So Garveyblew her head off. I didn't even care. I was just . . . calm. After a while, youalmost stopped thinking about escape. What you wanted more than getting away wasthose blue pills." Dayna and *Patty Kroger were nodding. But they seemed to recognize eight women as their effective limit, Patty said.When they took her on July (zusammen mit Mann ~50) 22 after murdering the fiftyish man she had beentraveling with, they had killed a very old woman who had been a part of "thezoo" for about a week. When the unnamed girl sitting in the corner had beenJulipicked up near Archbold*getötet: alte Frau, a sixteen-year-old girl with strabismus had been shotand left in a ditch. "Doc used to joke about it," Patty said. "He'd say16jährige mit Strabismus für Katatonische getauscht, `Idon't walk under ladders, I don't cross black cats' paths, and I'm not going tohave thirteen people traveling with me*29.' " On the twenty-ninthJuli: sehen Stu und Co, they had caught sight of Stu and the others for the firsttime. The zoo had been camped in a picnic area just off the interstate when thefour of them passed by. "Garvey was very taken with you," Susan said, nodding toward Frannie. Frannieshuddered. Dayna leaned closer to them and spoke softly. "And they'd made it pretty clearwhose place you were going to take." She nodded her head almost imperceptibly atwill Fran (wäre Ersatz für Shirley Hammet, who was still muttering and eating graham crackers.gewesen) "That poor woman," Frannie said. "It was Dayna who decided you guys might be our best chance," Patty said. "Ormaybe our last chance. There were three men in your party-both she and *Dayne und HelenRoget had seen that. Three armed men. And Doc had gotten just the teeniest bitoverconfident about the trailer-overturned-in-the-road bit. Doc would just actlike somebody official, and the men in the parties they met-when there were men-just caved in. And got shot. It had been working like a charm." "Dayna asked us to try and palm our pills this morning," Susan went on."They'd gotten sort of careless about making sure we really took them, too, andwe knew that this morning they'd be busy pulling that big trailer out into theroad and tipping it over. We didn't tell everyone. The only ones in on it wereDayna and Patty and beschließen Wagemut (Helen Roget . . . one of the girls Ronnie shot back there.And me, of course. Helen said, `If they catch us trying to spit the pills intoour hands, they're going to kill us.' And Dayna said they would kill us anyway,sooner or later, and only sooner if we were lucky, and of course we knew thatwas tine. So we did it." "I had to hold mine in my mouth for quite a while," Patty said. "It wasstarting to dissolve by the time I got a chance to spit it out." She looked atDayna. "I think Helen actually had to swallow hers. I think that's why she wasso slow." Dayna nodded. She was looking at Stu with a clear warmth that made Frannieuneasy. "It still would have worked if you hadn't gotten wise, big fella." "I didn't get wise near soon enough, looks like," Stu said. "Next time Iwill." He stood up, went to the window, and looked out. "You. know, that's halfof what scares me," he said. "How wise we're all getting." Fran cared even less for the sympathetic way Dayna looked after him. She hadno right to look sympathetic after all she'd been through. And she's muchprettier than I am, in spite of everything, Fran thought. Also, I doubt if she'spregnant. "It's a get-wise world, big fella," Dayna said. "Get wise or die." Stu turned to look at her, really seeing her for the first time, and Fran felta stab of pure jealous agony. I waited too long, she thought. Oh my God, I wentand did it, I went and waited too long. She happened to glance at Harold and saw that Harold was smiling in a guardedway, one hand up to his mouth to conceal it. It looked like a smile of relief.She suddenly felt that she would like to stand up, walk casually over to Harold,and hook his eyes out of his head with her fingernails. Never, Harold! she would scream as she did it. Never! Never?jedoch Pille)