looked out across the creek to where the first plane they'd shot down had crashed—the one Jim claimed to have got by his lonesome. They'd buried what they found of the pilot, and cleared away every last bolt and nut and scrap of aluminum, but the long scar in the ground remained. Ben looked at it, all broken up by rocks and flowers and bushes the old people had transplanted so it wouldn't show from the air; and he looked at the cemetery a hundred feet beyond at which the scar pointed like an arrow—the cemetery that wasn't a cemetery, because it didn't have headstones; just bodies. A town that was dead shouldn't have a lot of new graves—the dead don't bury themselves. A pilot might see a hundred graves he hadn't seen before and wonder—and strafe.

So Ben looked at the flat ground where those hundred bodies lay, with only small rocks the size of a man's fist with names scratched on them to mark who lay beneath; and he thought of his daughter May, and Owen Urey's son George who'd married May, and their three kids, and he remembered burying them there; he remembered their faces. The blood from eyes, nose, ears, mouth—his blood it was, part of it.

Then Ben looked up. "We ain't looking for trouble," he said to the empty blue bowl of sky. "But if you do come, we're ready. Every day we're ready. If you stay up high, we'll hide. But if you come down low, we'll try to get you, you crazy murderers."

His house was only a few yards farther on; he got there by sticking under the trees, walking quickly from one to the next, his ears cocked for the jetsound that would flatten him against a trunk. Way off to his left, across a long flat of sunflowers and goldenrod, he saw Windy Harris down on the creekbank, by the bridge. He yelled, "They biting?"—and Windy's faint "Got two!" reminded him of all old Jim had said, and he shook his head. He left the trees and walked fast up his front path.

His house was in pretty good shape. All four houses on the outskirts had come off standing—his and Windy's and Jim's and Owen Urey's. They'd needed just a little bracing here and there, and they were fine—except Owen's. Owen had stomped around in his, and listened to the sounds of it, and said he didn't trust it—and sure enough, the first big storm it had gone down.

Now Ben and his wife Susan lived downstairs in his house; Joe Kincaid and his wife Anna lived on the second floor; and Tom Pace lived in the attic, claiming that climbing the stairs was good for his innards.

Anna Kincaid was sitting on the 

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