One thing is for certain, Sonja's little ploy was not going to provoke me to return a minute sooner than I wanted. If necessary, I would deliver her a... far as the Larson's ranch, but I was coming back.Once we cleared the cultivated fields in close to the town, Lucy took a side trail that she said was rougher, but shorter than the main road. We had been traveling about two hours, and were a good ten miles from New London, when a device on Lucy's belt started chirping. She snatched it off her. ’ BRUSSELS Laura finished tallying the week’s figures and turned the computer off thankfully. She stretched to get the stiffness out of her neck and shoulders and wondered what to do next. Jeanne was on the desk and there were no more chores till the morning. She stretched again and wished the English teacher was back from wherever he’d gone for Christmas. Now would have been just the moment to see if he had a couple of hours to spare for a friend with privileges. She thought, not for the first. While Rick seemed to enjoy the drunk sex at first, eventually, my drinking wore on him. After a month of living with him, Rick told me I would need to move out. He gave me some money for a security deposit and I moved into an apartment in North Palm Beach.It was a one-bedroom apartment in Lake Worth. The building had four floors and mine was on the bottom level. I had requested an apartment on either of the top two floors, but there were no vacancies on those floors. A ground floor apartment. Several towns had been raided. Some had been destroyed and the status of their inhabitants was unknown. Refugees clogged the roadways on both sides of the Blue Ridge Mountains, coming in droves from the ruined cities to the north and east of the valley.Taking in all of the bad news, Arabella took a deep breath. She had been staring at the ceiling, thinking about her friend and mentor "Granny Safi." Granny's hometown was back in the mountains and, if Captain Pete was right, was sure to be cut of.