She pumped the gas pedal twice in rapid succession and turned the ignition again.

Nothing, not even the sound of a dying battery struggling for life.

She turned the key again several times in rapid succession, but there was not even enough action to flood the motor. She looked at the gas gauge.

Half full.

The trouble obviously lay elsewhere.

She thought about Carl Bugenhagen and Michael Morgan, and how they had died, and she felt a chill that had absolutely nothing to do with the cold.

She suddenly realized what the trouble might be.

Resigned to the fact that it would probably do no good, she stopped trying to start the car. But she was resigned to nothing else. She was extremely agitated; her pulse was racing, her blood pounding in her veins, as she turned over the various possibilities in her mind. She knew she was in grave danger, and she was determined to find a way out of it.

She looked all around, hoping for a sign of life: a car coming, some smoke rising from a distant chimney, even a single cow grazing on the horizon. Anything.

But there was nothing.

She looked in both rear-view mirrors and found the landscape equally bleak and unpromising. The silence was terrifying. Nervously, she switched on the car radio, frustratedly punching one station after another on the dashboard buttons, switching them almost before she had a chance to hear what was on.

She didn't even stop to think that if the battery was as dead as it appeared to be, the radio shouldn't have worked at all.

Just before one station flashed by, she heard a snatch of 'Over The Rainbow' and it made her think of all the times the song had lifted her spirits—had made her feel hopeful and happy. Now it filled her with deep fear, making her feel all the more alone and abandoned.

The next station brought her a fire-and-brimstone politician, rabid, shouting, determined to frighten his listeners into fear of his rivals and into mailing a large check to his own worthy cause. Suddenly his ravings sounded like a foreign language to Joan, like one of the hundreds of voices that were heard at the Tower of Babel, preaching confusion and nonsense.

She felt as if she was going insane.

She switched off the radio and sat there, anxiously drumming her gloved fingers on the steering wheel. She began murmuring under her breath, hardly aware of what she was saying, or even that she was actually praying: 'Our Father who art in heaven,' she whispered, 'hallowed by Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done…' Her voice drifted off.

She looked up and down the road again. Still no sign of life.