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produced a soft whining sound as he bumped Capelli’s leg. Then, having announced his presence, he surged forward to take up a position roughly fifty feet ahead.
    They went on like that for another ten minutes when the bulk of a barely seen building blotted out a section of stars. Capelli gave a low whistle to let Rowdy know that he was turning off the road, then activated the shotgun’s light as a church loomed in front of him.
    They climbed a few stairs, the blob of white light playing across the gaping door and probing the chapel beyond. It revealed signs of a battle: spent casings, the projectile-riddled pews, and what might have been dried bloodstains. Then, as Capelli made his way down the center aisle, he saw that some words had been painted to the right of the altar.
“Why, God, why?”
    It was a good question. One that Capelli couldn’t answer.
    Locke gave the only eulogy the people who had taken refuge in the church were likely to receive. “Poor bastards.”
    “Yeah,” Capelli agreed as he spotlighted the choir loft above. “See that? We’ll spend the rest of the night there. Then, immediately after daybreak, we’ll follow U.S. Route 40 east.”
    Locke looked from the loft down to the man next to him. “So you’ll take me to Haven?”
    “Yes.”
    “But you said you wouldn’t.”
    “That was then,” Capelli answered. “This is now. Let’s get some rest.”
    No matter where Capelli found himself, he was almost always able to get a reasonable amount of rest since Rowdy’s finely tuned senses were on duty twenty-four hours a day. That night the dog, a half German shepherd, half Rhodesian ridgeback mix, gave no warnings, so both Capelli and Locke were able to log six hours of sleep. But it seemed like only a matter of minutes before a beam of bright sunlight slanted down through a dirty window and threw a carpet of gold across the choir loft’s wooden floor.
    That woke Capelli, who wiggled out of his sleeping bag and slipped the Magnum back into its shoulder holster. Both Locke and Rowdy were awake and watchinghim. “I’m going to climb up into the tower and take a look around,” Capelli announced as he laced his boots. “Assuming the area is clear I’ll be back down. Then we’ll make breakfast and hit the road.” If Locke resented taking orders from what amounted to an employee, he showed no signs of it as he began the process of extricating himself from his bedroll.
    After retrieving a pair of binoculars from his pack Capelli went over to a narrow door, pulled it open, and began to climb the twisting-turning stairs. The stairs delivered him to a small platform just below a large pair of church bells. Four vertical windows allowed Capelli to scan the area without being seen. The air was cold, but the clear sky suggested that the day would warm up later.
    After about ten minutes of peering out through the narrow slits, he saw that with the exception of a wispy column of smoke spiraling up into the sky from town, there were no signs of life, Chimeran or otherwise. Having eaten their fill and resterilized the town, it appeared that the stinks had left for parts unknown.
    Satisfied that there weren’t any imminent threats to worry about, Capelli returned to the choir loft. Locke was in the midst of preparing breakfast for the two of them, black coffee and thick oatmeal, with some precious raisins thrown in, all brewed over a can of Sterno. The meal was followed by half a Tootsie Roll each.
    Haute cuisine it wasn’t, but Capelli felt pleasantly full after the meal, and ready to begin the thirty-five-mile hike to the city of Goodland. He figured it would take about two days, unless the weather turned bad or some stinks got in the way.
    After checking the surrounding landscape, the threesome left the church and made their way east onto Route 40. The two-lane blacktop led them through mostly flat farmland with overgrown wheat fields on both sides of the highway. Houses could be seen here and there,