Strangers

attend another gathering.
        Squeezing back her tears, Ginger said, "All right, enough already, let's get the hell out of here."
        With Ned driving, the seven who would go to Chicago and Boston left first, crammed in the Cherokee. The fine snow was falling so fast and heavy that the Cherokee was half-lost to sight within a hundred feet and became only a ghostly form within a hundred and fifty. Nevertheless, it did not head straight up the hills, for fear of being spotted by the observers Jack had located with his heat-reading device. Instead, the Cherokee entered the sloping folds of land by way of a narrow glen. Ned would stay in glens, vails, and gulleys as long as he could. The sound of the engine was swallowed up in the greater howl of the wind even before the Jeep began to vanish in the snow.
        Ginger, Dom, and Jack climbed into the cab of the Servers' pickup and followed in the tracks of the Cherokee. But with its headstart, the Jeep soon disappeared into the white turmoil that claimed the land. As they thumped, jolted, tilted, and rocked upward through the glen, Ginger sat between Jack and Dom, looking through the windshield and past the beating wipers, wondering if she would ever see those in the Jeep again. In a few days, Ginger had come to love them all. She was afraid for them.
        We care. That is what differentiates us from the beasts of the field. That's what Jacob had always said. Intellect, courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy - each of those qualities was as important to the human species as all the others, Jacob had said. Some people thought only intellect counted: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. All were important factors that had contributed to the ascendancy and supremacy of humankind, yes, but the many functions of intellect were insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy. We care. It is our curse. It is our blessing.
        

        
        At first Parker Faine was afraid that the pilot of the ten-seat feeder flight would not descend through the storm front and attempt a landing but would instead divert to another airfield farther south in Nevada. When, after all, the plane descended through the leading edge of the storm, Parker almost wished they had diverted. The buffeting wind and blinding snow seemed too hazardous even for a veteran pilot accustomed to instrument landings. Then they were safely on the ground, one of the last planes in before the Elko County Airport shut down.
        The small airport provided no covered ramp for debarkation. Parker hurried across the snow-patched macadam toward the door of the small terminal, wincing as his bare face was stung by wind-driven snow like thousands of tiny cold needles.
        After his Air West flight from Monterey had landed in San Francisco earlier today, he bought scissors and an electric razor at an airport gift shop and hastily shaved off his beard in the men's room. He had not seen his own unadorned visage in a decade. It was much prettier than he had expected. He trimmed his hair, too. When he was in the midst of this transformation, another guy in the men's room, washing his hands at the next sink, said jokingly, "On the run from the cops, huh?" And Parker said, "No, from my wife." And the guy said, "Yeah, me, too," as if he meant it.
        To avoid leaving a credit-card trail, he paid cash for a ticket on an Air Cal jet to Reno. After a forty-five-minute trip over the Sierra Nevada to the Biggest Little City in the World, he had the good fortune to find a feeder line with a single empty seat on a flight departing for Elko in twelve minutes. He paid cash again, leaving only twenty-one dollars in his wallet. For two hours and fifteen minutes, he endured a frequently turbulent journey east across the Great Basin, toward the higher country of northeastern Nevada, where he sensed his friend was in desperate trouble.
        By the time he pushed through the doors into the humble but clean little building that served as the Elko County Airport's offices and public terminal, Parker should have felt wrung-out both because of the horrible experience in Monterey and because of his hectic travels. Strangely, however, he felt vital, energetic, brimming with purpose and overflowing with determination. He saw himself as a bull, storming into a field to deal with a fox that had been frightening