Her legs ached protestingly, but she forced herself to run. She realized she had been away from the house much too long. Big Luke would be angry—and his anger manifested itself in heavy blows of his big, bony hands.
The Becker house was a large frame building, weather-beaten and fallen into disrepair. Fran hated the sight of it, but it was the only home she could recall having had. Once, during a summer evening in town, Fran had heard a group of men talking about Luke Becker. She had kept in the shadows at the side of the general store, and they hadn't seen her. The Becker house, it seemed, had once been owned by a prosperous farmer, a lonely widower whose sons had died in the war. Big Luke, a refugee from the city after the first atom bomb raids, had taken shelter at the house with his two small sons.
Fran's mother had taken shelter there also, and stayed on. There had been no place else to go. None of the refugees ever went back to the city, or to any of the other cities that had been bombed. There was a sort of light in the cities, a light you couldn't see. It burned you, and you died. The light had filled the ruined cities for a long time, and would continue to fill them for a long time to come. Men—the men who were left after the bombing raids—lived in small towns now, and on farms. Farming was one of the few ways to make a living that were left.
The farmer who had taken Big Luke in had died. An accident, the man on the porch of the general store had said in his carefully low-pitched voice. And he had laughed without humor. One of the farmer's machines had killed him, and Big Luke had stayed on at the farm. It had been an unsettled time, men were law unto themselves, and Big Luke, with his powerful body, had gone unchallenged.
There was a hint of something evil in the story Fran had heard, suggested to her by the soft, meaningful tone of the man on the porch of the general store. She wasn't quite certain what it was, but she knew Big Luke was capable of anything sinister and cruel. And Sammy was very much like his father. Davey ... well, Davey was not quite right in the head. She guessed Davey would be friendly enough in his own way, if Sammy didn't keep leading him on.
Silence lay over the house, extending to the couple of smaller buildings behind it and the big barn and the silos off to one side. Fran could see nothing of Davey and Sammy. She had been careful to avoid being discovered by them again, and evidently they had taken more time about returning.
She slipped into the kitchen. Big Luke was not there, but after a moment she heard the creak of springs in the parlor, followed by shuffling footsteps. Big Luke appeared in the hall doorway, swaying unsteadily on his feet as he scowled at her. A sickly reek, familiar to Fran, announced that he had been drinking again. He always seemed to be drinking.
Big Luke had once been a heavy-fleshed man, but constant drunkenness had left him gaunt and shrunken. Dark hollows lay under his cheekbones, and loose skin sagged around his mouth. He looked at Fran with blood-shot eyes, his dark, unkempt hair streaked with gray and the sallowness of his face emphasized by a heavy growth of beard.