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hands.
    “What about our supplies?” Eliza asked.
    “Since you’re returning home, I figure you don’t need them.”
    Miriam tensed. Eliza seized her wrist to restrain her. “Forty miles—that’s going to take us three days on foot. We’re not leaving without the contents of that trunk.”
    “I could kill you all,” Kemp said. “It’s what you deserve.”
    “In cold blood? After we gave you food and medicine?”
    “My mother is dead. Her body was in one of those wagons. What’s left of her now?” His voice caught. When he spoke again, the leaden tone had dropped, replaced by barely restrained fury. “This is all your doing. Your fault.”
    “So you will kill us?”
    She’d said all of this in a voice loud enough to reach the back of the bus. People were muttering, and she knew that some, at least, would be thinking this over. Desperate or not, it was a tough thing to rob and murder four people.
    “Bring up the trunk,” he said.
    They dragged it down the center aisle. Of course it was too big to carry on the road, but Eliza had planned to abandon it all along. It was only meant to keep the saddlebags safely locked away until Kemp had smuggled them out of the valley.
    When it was up front, Kemp pointed at Eliza. “You have the key. Open it.”
    “Outside.”
    “No, here.”
    “So you can rob us?”
    “I’ll get it open with or without you. Use a crowbar if I have to. Open it now and I’ll share out what I find.”
    “And steal the rest.”
    He shrugged.
    Eliza glanced at her companions, but they would be no help. Trost looked like he was suffering a concussion. Miriam would take the hardest line possible. Grover looked on the verge of puking. She fished the key from her pocket.
    When it was open, Kemp and two other men rummaged through the saddlebags. Most of the goods disappeared into the back of the bus: their rifles and ammunition, bandages, pills for sterilizing water, bedrolls, silver bullion coins, binoculars, matches, and most of the food. In the end, all that was left was a single cook set, a single box of matches, two full canteens, and enough food for maybe two meals. Eliza looked on in dismay.
    “We’ll never make it three days on that.”
    “It will take you two days, tops. And the food is a courtesy. My thanks for your so-called assistance. You could make do without.”
    “How are we supposed to defend ourselves?”
    “Try not to get in any gunfights. Now take your crap and get off my bus.”
    Miriam was shaking with fury by the time the four companions from Blister Creek stood on the pavement. Eliza fought down her own anger and tried to feel grateful. They were alive.
    The doors closed on the school bus. It rolled forward, slower this time now that the refugees weren’t fleeing for their lives. Traveling at no more than ten miles an hour, it took a few minutes until it disappeared onto the shimmering horizon. The four of them watched until it was gone.
    “They will burn when the Lord returns in his glory,” Miriam said.
    “They were trying to survive. So are we.” Eliza let out a long sigh. “Officer Trost, are you badly hurt?”
    “My head is killing me. But I think . . . think I’ll be okay.”
    She looked into his eyes, trying to remember what her brother had said about concussions. Were his pupils dilated? Yes, she thought so.
    “Grover?”
    “It blew up,” the boy said. “Sweet heaven, my brother. Bill.”
    Eliza squeezed his wrist. “You were brave, the way you rode after the bus.”
    “They killed him.”
    “I’m so sorry.”
    “It could have been me. I was at the bunker—I only just left. Bill sent me to warn you. I didn’t know—” He stopped, swallowed hard. “My dad, is he—?”
    “He’s alive. I saw him crawling off the road. Jacob is with him. He’s a doctor.”
    A shuddering sob worked its way up in Grover’s chest. For a moment he looked twelve years old, not eighteen.
    “Hold it together,” Miriam said. She scanned the sky.
    “Have