town will be burned and dead. Soon, we'll all be dead."

Ken kneeled on the ground beside him, as if before some strange object
from a foreign land. "What were you?" he asked. "Before, I mean."

The man coughed heavily and blood covered his mouth and thick growth of
beard. The bullet must be in his lungs, Ken thought. He helped wipe away
the blood and brushed the man's mouth with a handful of snow.

"You're crazy," the nomad said again. "I guess we're all crazy. You're
just a kid, aren't you? You want to know what I was a million years ago,
before all this?"

"Yes," Ken said.

The man attempted a smile. "Gas station. Wasn't that a crazy thing? No
need of gas when all the cars quit. I owned one on the best little
corner in Marysvale."

"Why are you with them?" Ken nodded in the darkness toward the distant
attackers.

The man glared, twisting with the pain. Then his glance softened. "You'd
have done it, too. What else was there? I had a wife, two kids. No food
within a hundred miles after we used what was in our own pantry and
robbed what we could from the supermarket downtown.

"We all got together and went after some. We got bigger as we went
along. We needed men who were good with rifles. We found some. We kept
going. People who had food fought to keep it; we fought to take it.
That's the way it had to be.

"We heard about your town with its big hoard of food. We decided to get
it."

"Did you know you burned half of it this morning?"

"No. That's tough. That's tough all the way around. Don't look at me
that way, kid. You would have done the same. We're all the same as you,
only we didn't live where there was plenty of food on hand. We were all
decent guys before. Me, those guys out in the street that you knocked
off. I guess you're decent, too."

"Where's your family now?"

"Twenty miles down the valley, waiting with the rest of the women and
children for us to bring them food."

Ken rose slowly to his feet. The man was bleeding heavily from the
mouth. His words were growing muffled. "What are you going to do?" he
asked.

"Get on with what has to be done," said Ken wearily. He felt sure he
must be walking in a nightmare and in just a little while he would
awaken. "If there's a chance, I'll try to send somebody after you."

"Never mind me!" the nomad said with sudden fierceness. "I'm done for.
You've finished me. If our outfit should be unlucky enough to lose, see
my wife and try to do something fo