Ed looked around the untidy interior of the wagon. There was a wire coat-hanger in back, and he leaned over the seat to reach for it. He heard a snap, like someone slamming a book shut, and at first he thought it was his seat mounting, clicking into place. But then he looked up and saw Dyson huddled up on the road beside the Cadillac, with a dark river of blood already sliding across the dusty blacktop from a wound in his head.

Ed immediately ducked low in his seat, and reached for his automatic. He couldn’t find it. Either it had slid backwards into the garbage on the floor, or someone had taken it. Peter Kaiser, maybe, when he wasn’t looking? There was another snap, and a high-powered bullet pinged off the hub of the offside front wheel.

Inch by inch, Ed raised his head, until his eyes appeared over the sill of the Chevy’s window. It was impossible to see where the shooting was coming from, although he guessed the sniper was concealed in the old asbestos house. He could hardly see Dyson now, in the gloom of the evening, but there wasn’t any question at all that he was dead. Half of his head was lying on the road.

Ed started up the Chevy’s engine, released the parking-brake, and slowly rolled away down the street, keeping his head down behind the door. Only when he was well around the corner did he sit up straight, and drive with howling tyres back to the highway, where the rest of the convoy were waiting.

‘Where’s Dyson?’ asked Della, as Ed stepped down. ‘Did he get us a car?’

‘He’s dead,’ said Ed. ‘There’s a sniper in one of the houses back there – hit him when he was trying to open a car door.’

‘A sniper?’ asked one of the farmhands, a tough little Nebraskan in faded overalls. ‘Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go smoke him out!’

Ed shook his head. ‘There’s no point. He’d probably pick off two or three of us before we could get anyplace near him. I don’t want anybody else dead, and that’s it. It’s serious enough, losing Dyson.’

‘What are we going to do about a car?’ asked a pale-faced woman, holding a sleeping two-year-old in her arms.

‘Well, we have a choice,’ said Ed. ‘Either you seven find somewhere to bed down for the night, and we’ll go on ahead and see if we can’t find another car for you, and send someone back with it; or else you can squeeze into the vehicles we have left.’

The woman said, ‘Mr Hardesty, I’d rather stay. We’ve been travelling all day, we’re exhausted. And, besides, if we leave now, we’re going to have to abandon all of our food, and I don’t think we ought to do that.’

‘She’s right,’ said her husband. ‘Who knows when we’re going to fend anything else to eat? We can’t afford to abandon fifty or sixty cans of meat It could keep us alive for weeks.’