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Ian snatched at Piper’s arm as she staggered beside him. They’d walked through the pre-dawn hours and into the morning, taking shelter only when the temperature soared well over a hundred degrees and the sun climbed brutally overhead to beat down on them.

They’d each gotten about four ounces of water from their makeshift condensation still, but they needed thirty times that much to survive for long in this oven. He was starting to see things—lakes of water just ahead. People running towards them. Trees and birds where there could be none.

He knew hallucinations came with the latter stages of dehydration. Next up would be unconsciousness, and then, of course, death. If only he could find something, anything, that indicated where a trace of moisture could be found.

The gods might have given them last night together, but today, the gods were feeling cruel. There was no water. Anywhere.

He’d stopped worrying about the greater good of the residents of Las Vegas, and his entire world had narrowed down to just this moment. The two of them. Taking another step.

The sun finally set, and they moved out again. His muscles should have felt marginally rested after the break, but every hour the dehydration deepened, his feet and legs cramped more severely, and the pain in his head and eyeballs become more unbearable.

Every step was a herculean struggle to lift his foot and force it to slide forward. Piper wasn’t in any better shape. They were just about to the end of their ropes. He feared they’d missed Overton, shooting too far to one side or the other of the small town and continuing to walk out into the great desert of central Nevada.

He’d pretty much decided that it was time to sit down, get comfortable, and give up the ghost when he saw it. A square shape on the horizon that was not nature-made.

Another mirage?

He squinted at the low, black rectangle. “Do you see something?” he asked Piper cautiously.

She peered at where he was pointing feebly. “Is that a house?” she rasped.

He let out a breath of relief he didn’t know he’d been holding. He was not crazy, and he was not seeing things. Thank God. It was a building of some kind, tucked at the base of the ridge they’d been paralleling for the past hour. Odds were it was abandoned, but it meant shelter, at least, for the two of them.

“Is that a farm of some kind?” she asked.

“Hope so.”

“Do you think it has a phone?”

“Hell, I’ll be thrilled if it has a well.”

“Good point.” A pause. “How far away is it?”

He eyed the low shape, which had resolved into two structures, both long and low, one larger than the other. House and barn, maybe? “Half-mile,” he guesstimated. “Twenty minutes.” At full strength, they could make it in ten. But at the shambling pace they were managing now, not a chance.

That turned out to be a good estimate. And, indeed, a dilapidated house and a more dilapidated barn rose out of the desert grit. If nothing else, a pale ribbon of driveway wound in the other direction in the moonlight, presumably joining up with a road of some kind. They were close to civilization. Or at least, they knew how to find it, now.

“Looks abandoned,” Piper announced, sounding disappointed.

“It would be too easy if we just walked up to a house and were able to call for help,” he replied. No shitty mission like this ever caught a break like that.

The closer they got, the more abandoned the place looked. The window panes were cracked and the front door wasn’t hanging quite right. He knocked anyway and shouted a hello. Only the blowing wind whispered back to him. He pushed the front door open.

Oh, yeah. It was abandoned. A few pieces of cobweb and dust covered furniture remained, but trash littered the floor along with plentiful rat droppings.

“Great,” Piper commented drolly. “If we don’t die of Yusef’s virus, we can catch hantavirus from the rat poop in here and die from that, instead.”

He grinned over at her in the dark space and headed for the kitchen. If there was a phone or water to be had, that would be where they found both. An old rotary phone did hang on the wall, but there was no dial tone. Not that he was surprised. He was more disappointed when a twist of the faucets on the sink yielded no water.

“Let’s try the barn,” he suggested.

They went back outside and headed for the other building. The faint moonlight made this place look even spookier than it already would have with its falling down fences and odd tumbleweed drifting through, ghostlike.

He put his good shoulder into shoving open the big sliding door and Piper slipped past him as he took a minute to gasp in pain.

“Bingo!” she crowed.

He stepped into the gloom. Sonofagun. A tractor. Old, rusty, and cobweb covered, but a tractor.