Ken nodded.
"You'll be cut off. Well, it won't matter much anyway. By tomorrow your town will be burned and dead. Soon, we'll all be dead."
Ken kneeled on the ground beside him, as if before some strange object from a foreign land. "What were you?" he asked. "Before, I mean."
The man coughed heavily and blood covered his mouth and thick growth of beard. The bullet must be in his lungs, Ken thought. He helped wipe away the blood and brushed the man's mouth with a handful of snow.
"You're crazy," the nomad said again. "I guess we're all crazy. You're just a kid, aren't you? You want to know what I was a million years ago, before all this?"
"Yes," Ken said.
The man attempted a smile. "Gas station. Wasn't that a crazy thing? No need of gas when all the cars quit. I owned one on the best little corner in Marysvale."
"Why are you with them?" Ken nodded in the darkness toward the distant attackers.
The man glared, twisting with the pain. Then his glance softened. "You'd have done it, too. What else was there? I had a wife, two kids. No food within a hundred miles after we used what was in our own pantry and robbed what we could from the supermarket downtown.
"We all got together and went after some. We got bigger as we went along. We needed men who were good with rifles. We found some. We kept going. People who had food fought to keep it; we fought to take it. That's the way it had to be.