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Rose stared up into the darkness, hearing the fading voices of the runners, the faithless ones.
At the door came a soft, timid knock. Rose lay silent for a moment or two, considering, then
swung her legs out of bed.
“Come.”
She was naked but made no attempt to cover herself when Silent Sarey crept in, shapeless inside
one of her flannel nightgowns, her mouse-colored bangs covering her brows and almost hanging in her
eyes. As always, Sarey seemed hardly there even when she was.
“I’m sad, Loze.”
“I know you are. I’m sad, too.”
She wasn’t—she was furious—but it sounded good.
“I miss Andi.”
Andi, yes—rube name Andrea Steiner, whose father had fucked the humanity out of her long before
the True Knot had found her. Rose remembered watching her that day in the movie theater, and how,
later, she had fought her way through the Turning with sheer guts and willpower. Snakebite Andi
would have stuck. Snake would have walked through fire, if Rose said the True Knot needed her to.
She held out her arms. Sarey scurried to her and laid her head against Rose’s breast.
“Wivvout her I lunt to die.”
“No, honey, I don’t think so.” Rose pulled the little thing into bed and hugged her tight. She was
nothing but a rack of bones held together by scant meat. “Tell me what you really want.”
Beneath the shaggy bangs, two eyes gleamed, feral. “Levenge.”
Rose kissed one cheek, then the other, then the thin dry lips. She drew back a little and said, “Yes.
And you’ll have it. Open your mouth, Sarey.”
Sarey obediently did so. Their lips came together again. Rose the Hat, still full of steam, breathed
down Silent Sarey’s throat.
15
The walls of Concetta’s study were papered with memos, fragments of poems, and correspondence that
would never be answered. Dan typed in the four-letter password, launched Firefox, and googled the
Bluebell Campground. They had a website that wasn’t terribly informative, probably because the
owners didn’t care that much about attracting visitors; the place was your basic front. But there were
photos of the property, and these Dan studied with the fascination people reserve for recently
discovered old family albums.
The Overlook was long gone, but he recognized the terrain. Once, just before the first of the
snowstorms that closed them in for the winter, he and his mother and father had stood together on the
hotel’s broad front porch (seeming even broader with the lawn gliders and wicker furniture in
storage), looking down the long, smooth slope of the front lawn. At the bottom, where the deer and
the antelope often came out to play, there was now a long rustic building called the Overlook Lodge.
Here, the caption said, visitors could dine, play bingo, and dance to live music on Friday and Saturday
nights. On Sundays there were church services, overseen by a rotating cadre of Sidewinder’s men and
women of the cloth.
Until the snow came, my father mowed that lawn and trimmed the topiary that used to be there. He said
he’d trimmed lots of ladies’ topiaries in his time. I didn’t get the joke, but it used to make Mom laugh.
“Some joke,” he said, low.
He saw rows of sparkling RV hookups, lux mod cons that supplied LP gas as well as electricity.
There were men’s and women’s shower buildings big enough to service mega-truckstops like Little