Double Helix Ch. 16

That fit with the scattered pieces of what I could recall, but there was still a glaring hole in my recollections. "What actually happened back there, after Tilly came in?"

Nock looked at me sidelong. "Guess you missed a few things. While you were chasing the bad guy, Tilly came over the radio and told me you were heading to the room at the northeast corner, and to listen carefully and be ready to act. Then she locked her transmit button, and I realized that she was going in unarmed. When she called out relative positions, I realized that she was telling me where to aim from the top and side of the window. I put a bullet through the window where she told me to, and that's what killed our bad guy.

I stared in disbelief. "You took a blind shot and managed to hit him with that girl just inches away? You could have killed her."

"It was the only way," Tilly said, and sniffled. "And it was mostly basic trigonometry and linear equations. I knew the angles and distances were good, and fifty yards is child's play for Nock."

"You're damned right," he said. "We're a hell of a team." He put out a fist. Chuckling, Tilly bumped her knuckles against his.

The thought of the risks they had both taken still bothered me, but I couldn't argue with the results.

Sometime later, the others joined us out on the porch. Alice and the kids had changed out of their bloodstained clothing, and all four of them were obviously emotionally drained. "We'll need to bury the—the bodies," she said, stumbling over her words. "Stan here suggested that y'all could help with that."

"Sure," I answered, though I really shouldn't lift a shovel personally. I had stopped bleeding, but I knew that anything strenuous would break upon my wounds again. I really needed to bandage them, and I wasn't even ready to think yet about those three pieces of shot still embedded in my side.

"After that, we'll pack up and drive east, and you folks can head back home."

"Do you have a place to go?" I asked.

Alice looked at me and sighed. "Well, nothing solid. Got some old friends that lived over near the Idaho border that I thought I might look up."

"Then you should come back with us. We settled on a big farm over by Corvallis and we're even producing our own food. There's a farm next to ours that you could move into. The house needs some repairs, but we can help with that."

"Well, that's..." she gave a ghost of a smile. "That's mighty generous of you, but I don't intend to freeload off you nice folks."

"Oh, there's plenty of work in the greenhouse," Stansy said.

"And we need someone to conduct business with the outside world," I added. "I've been doing it, but my face still comes up in the news from time to time, so it's only a matter of time before someone realizes who I am." I looked at the mangled bodies of the deputy that I had shot. "Looks like it's already happened once."

"It's a pity you don't need a chemical engineer," she said. "Fat lot of good that degree did me for years until after the Ban and we hit upon the idea of making drugs."

"Actually," Nissi said, giving her shoulder a squeeze. "That might just come in handy. Do you have any experience with organic chemistry?"

The others worked with picks and shovels to dig a hole in an empty field a few hundred yards behind the barn. We stripped the bodies of the two deputies and the petty crooks they had hired of their identification and dropped them down into a pile, then shoveled dirt unceremoniously back over them.

Jack got a more dignified burial further back in the ranch property, with a little cross made from sticks to mark the spot. Alice and the kids had gone off somewhere private for a while afterward, coming back a short while later to tell us that they had agreed to go back with us. We spent the rest of the afternoon stripping the solar panels, wiring, and associated electronics to take with us back to Corvallis.

It was well after dark when we pulled into the driveway with our two trucks. Alice followed in her sedan and Stan drove the SUV that had belonged to Jack. They would stay with us in our house until we could get their new place habitable and supplied with power and water. Wendy and Gabrielle became almost instant friends, or at least it seemed to me, with the former seated in front of the couch talking to the young girl animatedly while the latter braided her long, blonde hair.

Tilly helped me to clean and bandage my wounds while the others made our new guests feel welcome downstairs. She helped me crawl painfully into bed and then went for a shower. My body throbbed with so many aches that I was sure I would never get to sleep. As it turned out, I was out before Tilly made it back.