When he got back the boy was steel asleep. He pulled the blue pastic tarp off of him and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup. He spread the small tarp they used for a table on the ground  and laid everything out and he took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat watching the boy sleep. He´d pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried somewhere in the blankets.
He watched the boy and he looked out through the trees toward the road. This wasn´t a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day. The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.

I´m right here.
I know

An hour later they were on the road. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case the had to abandon the cart and make a run for it. Clamped to the handle of the cart was a chrome motorcycle mirror that he used to watch the road behind them. He shifted the pack higher on his shoulders and looked out over the wasted country. The road was empty, below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. you okay? he said. They boy nodded. then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling though the ash, each the other´s world entire.

They crossed the river by an old concrete birdge and a few miles on they came upon a roadside gas station. They stood in the road studied it. I think we should check it out, the man said. Take a look. The weeds they forded fell to dust about them. They crossed the broken asphalt apron and found the tank for the pumps.  The cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale. He stood and looked over the building. The pumps standing with hoses oddly still in place. The windows intact.
The door to the service bay was open and he went in. A standing metal toolbox against one wall. He went through the drawers but there was nothing there that he could use. Good half-inch drive sockets. A ratchet. He stood looking around the garage. A metal barrel full of trash. He went into the office. Dust and ash everywhere. The boy stood in the door. A metal desk, a cashregister. Some old auto motive manuals, swollen and sodden. The linoleum was stained and curling from the leaking roof. he crossed to the desk and stood there. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father´s house in that long ago. the boy watched him. What are you doing. he said.

The plane flew over him just after he passed Jim Rennie´s used Cars, a place for which Barbie had no love. No that he´d bought a lemon there (he hadn´t owned a car in over a year., had sold the last one in Punta Gorda. Florida). It was just that Jim Rennie Jr. had been one of the fellows that night in Dipper´s parking lot. A frat boy with something to prove, and what he could not prove alone he would prove as part of a group. That was the way the Jim Junior of the world did business, in Barbie´s experience.
But it was behind him now. Jim Rennies, Jim Junior, Sweetbriar rose (Fried Clams Out Specialty! always "Whole" Never "strips" Angie McCAin, Andy Sanders. The whole deal, , including dipper´s. Beatings Administered in the Parking Lot Our Specialty!) All behind him. And ahead of him? why, the gates of America. Goodbye smalltown Maine, hello Big Sky.
Or maybe, hell, he´d head down south again. No matter how beautiful this particular day, winter was lurking a page or two over on the calendar. The south might be good. He´d never been to Muscle Shoads, and he liked the sound of the name. That was goddam poetry Muscle Shoals was, and the idea so cheered him that when he heard the little plane approaching, he looked up and gave a big old exuberant wave. He hope for a wing-waggle in return, but didn´t get one, although the plane was slowpoking at low attitude. Barbier´s guess was sightseers - this was a day for them, with the trees in full flame - or maybe some young kid on his learner´s permit, too worried about screwing up to bother with ground lings like Dale Barbara. But he wished them well. Sightseers or a kid still six weeks from his first solo cruise, Barbie wished them very well. It was a good day, and every step way from Chester´s Mill made it better. Too many assholes in The Mill, and beside: Travel was good for the soul.
Maybe moving on in October should be a law, he thought. new national motto: EVERYBODY LEAVES IN OCTOBER. You get your packing permit in august, give your required week´s notice in mid-September then - 

He stopped. Not too far ahead of him, on the other side of the blacktop highway, was a woodchuck. a damned fat one. Sleek and sassy, too. Instead of scurrying off into the high grass, it was coming on ahead. There was a fallen birch sticking its top half out onto the shoulder of the road, and Barbie was betting the wood chuck would scurry under there and wait for the big bad Two-Legs to go by. If not, they would pass each other like the ramblin guys they were, the one on four legs headed north, the one on two headed south. barbie hoped that would happen. It would be cool.

These thoughts went through Barbie´s mind in seconds; the shadow of the airplane was still between him a the chuck, a black cross racing along the highway. Then two things happend almost simultaneously.
The first was the woodchuck. It was whole, then it was in two pieces. Both were twitching and bleeding. Barbie stopped, mouth hanging open on the suddenly lax hinge of his lower jaw.  It was as if an invisible guillotine blade had dropped. And that was when, directly above the severed woodchuck, the little airplace exploded.

3

Barbie looked up. Falling from the sky was a squashed Bizarro World version of the pretty little airplane that had passed over him seconds before. Twisting orange-red petals of fire hung above it in the air, a flower that was still opening, an American Disaster rose. smoke billowed from the plummeting plane. 
Something clanged to the road and sprayed up clods of asphalt before spinning drunkenly into the high grass to the left. A propeller. 
If that had bounced my way -
Barbie had a brief image of being cut in two - like the unfortunate woodchuck - and turned to run. Something thudded down in from of him and he screamed. But it wasn´t the other propeller; it was a man´s leg dressed in denim. He could see no blood, but the side-seam had been blown wide open, revealing white flesh and wiry black hair.
There was no foot attached.
Barbie ran in what felt like slow motion. He saw one of his own feet, clad in an old scuffed workboot, stride out and clap down. Then it disappeared behind him as his other foot strode out. All slow, slow. Like watching the baseball replay of a guy trying to steal second.


There was a tremendous hollow clang from behing him, followed by the boom of a secondary explosion, followed by a blast of heat that struck him from heels to nape. It shoved him on his way like warm hand. Then all thoughts blew away and there was nothing but the body´s brute need to survive. 
Dale Barbara ran for his life. 

4

A hundred yards or so down the road, the big warm hand became a ghost hand, although the smell of burning gas - plus a sweeter stench that had to be a mixture of melting plastic and roasting flesh  - was strong, carried to him on a light breeze. Barbie ran another sixty yards, then stopped and turned around. He was panting. He didn´t thing it was the running; he dind´t smoke, and he was in good shape (well ... fair; his ribs on the right side still hurt from the beating in Dipper´s parking lot(. He thought it was terror and dismay. He could´ve been killed by falling pieces of airplane  not just the runaway propeller - or burned to heath it was only blind luck that he hadn´t been. 

Then he saw something that made his rapid breathing stop in mid-gasp. He straightened up, looking back at the site of the accident. The road was littered with debris- it really was a wonder that he hadn´t been struck and at least wounded. A twisted wing lay on the right; the other wing was poking out of the uncut timothy guass on the left, not far from where the runaway propeller had come to rest. In addition o the bluejeans - clad leg, he could see a severed hand and arm. The hand seemed to be pointing at a head, as if to say. That´s mine. A woman´s head, judging from the hair. the power lines runnin beside highway had been severed. They lay cracking and twisting on  the other shoulder.

Beyond the head and arm was the twisted tube of the airplanes´ fuselage. Barbie could read NJ3. If there was more, it was torn way. But none of this was what had cought his eye and sopped his breath. The disaster rose was gone now, but there was still fire in the sky. Burning fuel, certainly. But . . .
But it was runing down the air in a thin sheet. Beyond it and though it, Barbie could see the Maine countryside - still peaceful, not yet reacting,  but in motion nevertheless. Shimmering like the air over an incinerator or a burning-barrel. It was as if someone had splashed gasoline over a pane of glass an then set it alight. 
Almost hypnotized - that was what it felt like, anyway - Barbie started walking back toward the scene of the crash.   

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All the needles of the control panel dropped dead.
"What the hell?" Claudie Sanders said. She turned to chuck. Her eyes were wide, but there was no opanic in them, only bewilderment.
There was no time for panic.
Chuck never saw the control panel. He saw the Seneca´s nose crumple toward him. Then he saw both propellers disintegrate.
There was no time to see more. Not time for anything. The Senca exploded over Route 119 and rained fire on the countryside. It also rained body parts. A smoking forearm - Claudette´s landed with a thump beside the neatly divided woodchuck.
It was October twenty-first.

 Barbie

1

Barbie started feeling beter as soon as he passed Food City and left downtown behind. When he saw the sign reading YOUR ARE LEAVING THE VILLAGE OF CHESTER´S MILL COME BACK REAL SOON!, he felt better still. He was glad to be on his way, and not just because he had taken a pretty good beating in the Mill. It was plain old moving on that had lightened him up. He had been walking around under his own little gray cloud for at least two week before getting his shit handed to him in the parking lot of Depper´s.
"Basically, I´m just a ramblin guy" he said, and laughed. "A ramlin guy on his way to the Big Sky" And hell, why not? Montana! Or Wyoming. Fucking Rapid City, South Dakota. Anyplace but here.
He heard an approaching engine, turned around - walking back ward now - and stuck out his thumb. What he saw was a lovely combination: a dirty old Ford pickemup with a fresh young blonde behind the wheel.  Ash blonde, his favorite blonde of all. Barbie offered his most engaging smile. The girl driving the pickemup responde with one of her own, an oh my Lord if whe was a ticktock over nineteen, he´d eat his last paycheck from Sweetbriar Rose. Too young for a gentleman of thirty summers, no doubth but perfectly street legal, as they´d said back in the days of his cornfed Iowa youth.
The truck slowed, he started toward it... and then it sped up again. She gave him one more brief look as she went past. The smile was still on her face, but it had turned regretful. I had a brain-cramp there for a minute, the smile said, but now sanity has reasserted itself.
And Barbie thought he recognized her a little, alhough it was impossible to say with certainly; Sunday mornings in Sweetbriar were always a madhouse. But he thought he´d seen her with a older man, probably her dad, both of them with their faces mostly buried in section of the sunday Times. If he could have spoken to her as she rolled past, Barbie would have said: If you trusted me to cook your sausages and eggs, surely you can trust me for a few miles in the shotgun seat.
But of course he didn´t get the chance, so he simply raised his hand in a little no-offense-taken salute. The truck´s taillights flickered, as if she were reconsidering. Then they went out and the truck sped up.
During the following days, as things in The Mill started going from bad to worse, he would reply this little moment and the warm October sun again and again. It was that second recosidering flicker of the taillinghts he thought of . . .  as if she had recognized him, after all. That´s the cook from Sweetbriar Rose, I´m almost sure. Maybe I ought to -
But maybe was a gulf better men than him had fallen into. If she had reconsidered, everything in  his life thereafter would´ve changed. Because she must´ve made it out; he never saw the fresh -face blonde or the dirty old Ford F-150 again. She must´ve crossed the border over the Chester´s Mill town line minutes (or even seconds) before the border slammed shut. If he´d been with her, he would have been out and safe.
Unless, of course, he´d think later, when sleep wouldn´t wome, the stop to pick me up was just long enough to be too long. In that case, I probably still wouldn´t be here. And neither would she. Because the speed limit out that way on 119 is fifty miles an hour. And at fiftly miles an hour . . .
At this point he would always think of the plane.

The woodchuck came bumbling along the shoulder of Route 119, headed in the direction of Chester´s Mill, althought the town was still a mile and a half away and even Jim Rennie´s Used Cars was only a series of twinkling sunflashes arranged in rows at the place where the highway curved to the left. The chuck planned (so far as a woodhcuck can be said to plan anything) to head back into the woods long before he got that far. But for now; the shoulder was fine. He´d come farther from his burrow than he ment to, but the sun had been warm on his back and the smells were crisp in his nose, forming rudimentary images - no quite pictues - in his brain.
He stopped and rose on his back paws for an instand. his eyes weren´t as good as they used to be but good enought to make out a human up there, walking in his direction on the other shoulder.
The chuck decided he´d go a little farther anyway. Humans sometimes left behind good things to eat.
He was a old fellow, and a fat fellow. He had raided many garbage cans in his time, and knew the way to the Cherster´s Mill landfill as well as he knew the three tunnerls of his own burrow; always good things to eat at the landfill. he waddled a complacent old fellow´s waddle, watching the human walking on the other side of the road.
The man stopped. The chuck realized he had been spotted. To his right and just ahead was a fallen birch.  He would hide under there, wait for the man to go by, then investigate for any tasty -
The chuck got that far in his thoughts - and another there waddling steps - althought he had been cut in two. Then he fell apart on the edge of the road. Blood squited and pumped; guts tumbled into the dirt; his rear legs kicked rapidly twice, then stopped.
His last thought before the darkness that comes to us all, chucks and humans alike: what happened?

When he woke in the woods

When he woke in the woods in the dark the cold of the night he´d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyong the darkness and the days more day each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. 

He pushed away the pastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the sinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he´d wakened he had wadered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playin g over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward part of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. 

And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rock behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn´t sure. He hadn´t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There´d be no surviving another winter here.

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below.  Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anythinf of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew ony that the child was his warrat.
He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.