Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [249]
"Okay, we don't need the story of every meal you scrounged," Christopher growled.
"Sorry. The next part's important, though. Jerry was telling me weird things. Did you know he was wanted by the FBI and everyone else too? He was a general—in the"—Hugo paused—"New Brotherhood Liberation Army." Hugo paused to let it sink in.
"New Brotherhood," Al Hardy mused. "I guess that does fit."
"I think so," Hugo said. "Anyway, he was using the Shire as a hideout. He kept his mouth shut and we never knew, until after Hammerfall. We were probably in Mr. Wilson's territory, and I was thinking about ditching Jerry. Being slowed down didn't bother me, but how was I going to join Mr. Wilson's crew if Jerry wanted to start a people's revolution? If I'd seen so much as a lighted window I'd have been gone, and Jerry'd never have known where.
"But we didn't see anything much. A truck once, but it didn't stop. And barricaded farmhouses, where they set the dogs on us if we tried to get close. So we kept going south and getting hungrier, and about the third or fourth day we saw this scraggly-looking bunch of people. Every one of them looked like he'd lost his last chance, but there were at least fifty of them, and they didn't look like they were starving.
"I was thinking about running, but Jerry walked right up to them. He called to me to come on with him, but they didn't look like any outfit I wanted to join. I thought it might be the cannibals Harry told us about, but they didn't look dangerous, they just looked finished."
"No Army uniforms? No guns?" Deke Wilson asked.
"I didn't get close enough to see what weapons they had, but there sure as hell weren't any Army uniforms," Hugo Beck said.
"Then that wasn't the New Brotherhood Army—"
"Just listen," Harry interrupted. "He's not finished yet."
Eileen came in with a tray. "Here's your tea, Harry." She poured a cup and set it on the table next to the mailman. "And yours, Senator."
Beck looked at Harry's tea, then sipped at his glass of water. "Well, Jerry went in with that outfit, and I split. I figured I'd seen the last of him, and I could get back up to Mr. Wilson's turf again. Instead I ran into an old lady and her daughter. They lived in a little house in the middle of an almond grove, and they didn't have any guns. Nobody'd bothered them because they lived way off the road, and they hadn't been out since Hammerfall. The girl was seventeen, and she wasn't in good shape. She had fever, bad, probably from the water. I took care of them." Hugo Beck said it defiantly. "And I earned my keep, too."
"What did you live on?" Mayor Seitz asked.
"Almonds, mostly. Some canned stuff the old lady had put up. And a couple of bushels of potatoes."
"What happened to them?" George Christopher demanded.
"I'm coming to that." Hugo Beck shuddered. "I stayed there three weeks. Cheryl was pretty sick, but I made them boil all the water, and she came out of it. She was looking pretty good, when—" Beck broke off, and visibly fought for self-control. There were tears in his eyes. "I really got to like her." He broke off again. Everyone waited.
"We couldn't go anywhere because of Mrs. Horne. Cheryl's grandmother. Mrs. Horne kept telling us to light out, leave before somebody found us, but we couldn't do that." Beck shrugged. "So they found us. First a jeep went by. It didn't stop, but the people in it looked tough. We thought we'd make a run for it, but we hadn't got a mile when a truck came up to the house, and people got out of it looking for us. I guess they tracked us, because it wasn't long after that about ten people with guns came and grabbed us. They didn't talk to us at all. They just threw Cheryl and me in the truck and drove. I think some of the others moved