Six. The Road.

They were three hours in, cruising on a grassy freeway, when one of the crates whimpered.

Hitch looked at Ira, who looked at Cutter.

“Did we all hear that?”

“The bottom right crate.”

“West, there anything living among our rations?”

“Of course not!” West replied.

Cutter got down in front of the crate and studied it. “If somebody’s in there, by God, say so right now or I’ll—”

“All right!” came the sharp cry, followed by barking as Lucy and her puppy came through the crumbling crate wall and fell into a fetal roll on the floor of the van.

“What? What?” West was yelling. Amanda, looking back, had a half-smile as she cried “Jesus Christ Lucy.”

“Holy shit,” Hitch breathed. Cutter just laughed.

“Why’d you do it?” Ira shouted. Lucy put on a pout and cradled the puppy to her chest. “Why, Lucy? What were you thinking? Oh, your father’s going to be beside himself!”

“He’ll just be sleeping like always,” Lucy said. “I wanted to come.”

Amanda slipped out of her seat and came back, hugging Lucy. “Baby, this is a dangerous trip. It’s not for fun.”

“What’re we gonna do, West?” Ira yelled.

“I’m fucking driving!” West yelled back.

“Well, stop!”

They stopped, in the middle of the freeway somewhere in Illinois or maybe Wisconsin, West couldn’t be sure with most of the signs being eaten by rust. They stopped and got out in the pleasant May weather.

“We absolutely cannot turn back,” West fumed. “There’s no way of notifying them that – dammit – why would she—”

Amanda held Lucy’s hand and walked across the freeway, looking at the sun and the sky and the plains. “It’s beautiful,” Lucy said.

“Yes it is.”

“I want to live up here.”

“That’s what we’re hoping to do,” Amanda said, kneeling to touch Lucy’s face and pet the dog.

“We don’t have supplies for an extra person. We certainly can’t accommodate the fucking dog.”

“Wait, West,” Hitch said, circling Ira who was doing his best to do nothing while Cutter stretched his limbs on the freeway shoulder. “Hell, we may find some supplies along the way. We could even stop to hunt, did you think of that? Was that in your plan?”

“She wasn’t in my plan!”

“Well, she is now, so we have to roll with it. C’mon Mike, I know you can improvise in a crunch.”

“Oh, it’s Mike again,” West spat. “Back to best friends?”

“I’m just trying to hold our shit together!”

“This is all my shit!” West slapped the front of the van and kicked a tumbleweed down the lane. “My plan! I made this! For us, all of us! And I don’t want it coming apart!”

“All right!” Hitch shouted. “Lucy isn’t going to be a wrench in the gears, Mike. We’ll make do. We’ll be fine. The Plan goes on.”

“I think he’s right,” Ira offered.

“Might as well just get a move on,” Cutter muttered, climbing back into the van. “Worse comes to worst, we’ll eat the dog.”

“Thank God Lucy didn’t hear that,” Ira said, always a bastion of the obvious.

Hitch and West stared at each other, on that overgrown stretch of asphalt and concrete with a light western wind moving the grass.

“So are we set?” Hitch asked.

“Why do I feel like God is working against me?” West grumbled.

“You think about God?”

“All the time. If Nightmare’s out there you know our God is.”

“Then where in the hell is He?”

“I don’t know.” West was crestfallen. He leaned on the van and shook his head. “Maybe He gave up, some time ago. Or maybe it’s just up to us to work things out, but – against the gods, Hitch! Other gods! Where’s that in the Old Book?”

“Guess He thought it wasn’t relevant.”

“It’s become pretty goddamn relevant. They’re muscling in on His shit and He’s not here to help us.”

“He gave us free will,” Hitch shrugged. “We do with it what we want.”

“This is being done to us!”

“Maybe we brought it on ourselves.”

“Oh. No. Have you ever heard even the suggestion that we summoned Nightmare and the Harvesters? That we wanted this to happen to us?”

“I’m not saying we did it wittingly! Jesus Christ, you’re the doctor, stop and think! I don’t know, what if our dreams became so mad and dark that it was just the right time – we were ripe?”

“We’ll never know,” West said, throwing his arms in the air.

“People like Mandy might know.”

“You mean people who can connect with Nightmare? Would you trust anything that came from that...thing?”

Hitch could only brush back his oily hair and hold out a wet palm. “Seems to me that we’ve got the better minds. It envies us, Mike. Maybe it would tell us the truth, if it thinks it can get what it wants.”

“Well, I’m not putting Mandy’s sanity on the line to bargain for information,” West said. “I just want her to keep us appraised on Nightmare’s mood...I don’t expect this year’s Harvest just yet but it’s not a science. Can’t be predicted.”

“Chaos.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll drive for a while.”

“Really?”

“We’re just continuing along on this freeway, why not take a load off? You and Amanda can sit in the back. Be nice to Lucy.”

“All right, all right.” Trudging over to Hitch, West said, “They say the Lord works in mysterious ways. Maybe this Lucy thing’ll turn out to be a benefit.”

“We’re gonna be okay.”

“Let’s roll then.”

#

About a half-mile back, Jack DaVinci put down a beaten-up set of binoculars and leaned back in his seat. He tried raising Gotham on the radio again. Static.

His jar of cortices was secure in the glove box. No one knew about his little friends, those seeds of inspiration that time and again had made him the best cop in North America. He swallowed a couple of pickled nodules, waited for the rush, and tried the radio again.

“Anybody read me? This is DaVinci.”

“DaVinci?”

“Yes! Who’s this?”

Static.

Son of a bitch. Jack rolled his head over his shoulders and relaxed. At least he knew they were still alive.

#

“Let’s make it a small strike team,” Bruce said to Delmar. “You, me, Cinnamon and Macendale. We’ll pick up DaVinci and come back. He knows where other hives are. He moves from city to city. We’ll catch him on the road and then we’ll have them all.”

Bruce nuzzled his dog and looked to the sky, gray with black towers of smoke.

Nightmare, see this. Another crop you won’t reap. We are more efficient and we are always on task. You will lose. Stop now.

And...

Then...