Death Magic

THIRTY-SEVEN

IN the flat, grassy plains of northeastern Colorado, the sky was barely tinged with pink in the east. Three modest late-model cars pulled off onto the shoulder of State Highway 14 between Raymer and Stoneham, about twenty-five miles south of the Nebraska border.

Headlights shut off. Doors opened. Seven women stepped out into the darkness. Seven small globes of light sprang into being, holding back some of that dark.

The women looked nothing alike; in age they ranged from early thirties to over eighty, and they were as varied in build, hair, and coloring as they were in age. They weren’t quite as dissimilar in dress. All wore jackets, and three had hats. October mornings are chilly in the Colorado plains. Six of the seven wore jeans. One wore a beautifully embroidered dashiki and an elaborately wound headscarf with her jeans. The seventh wore a battered leather aviator’s jacket over an eye-searing muumuu with enormous fuchsia flowers on a green and turquoise background.

They gathered and talked for a few minutes, sounding variously calm, keyed up, worried, or pragmatic. The one in the dashiki didn’t speak. Now and then a fifty-ish woman with a dramatic silver streak in her black hair would take the silent woman’s hand, smiling and nodding at her, then would relate something to the others as if the silent woman had spoken.

The one in the muumuu was the oldest and heaviest of them. She seemed to be in charge. Her eyes were as milky white as her hair. “Enough chitchat. They’ll be here when they get here,” she told the others. “We’d best be where we need to be when they arrive. Come on.”

“You know where to head, then?” asked a tall, husky woman with milk-chocolate skin and a thick southern drawl. “I can’t see a thing.”

The oldest of them chuckled. “Dark, light, it’s all the same to me. The feel of the place is clear enough—thick metal doors over a big hollow tube going straight down. Susan, you might take my arm. I won’t be paying attention to what’s up close, so I could trip over a twig and embarrass myself.”

A mild-looking woman in her early thirties took the old woman’s arm, and all seven set off into the grass, the little lights bobbing along with them . . . headed directly for the underground missile silo.

“Oh,” said the one in the muumuu. “Here’s Sam now.”