1

GARY hugged the shadows along the shore and waited for the sound of the shot, for the sharp crack of a carbine. The old woman had been a fool to think she could sneak across the bridge, either starved to the point of desperation or a fool. The darkness of the night couldn't hide her, not any more, not with the troops guarding the other end of the bridge with infrared lamps and sniperscopes on their rifles.

This was the only bridge left intact along a six or seven hundred mile stretch of the Mississippi, and American troops would be concentrated in strength on the other end. The old woman had no more chance of slipping across to the Iowa shore than a snowball in a cyclotron.

Gary crawled around a concrete abutment and waited. He was careful not to show his body on the roadway, not to cross to the other side of the two-lane bridge. He was too far away from the troops to be in real danger, but some gun-happy soldier just might catch him in his 'scope and fire.

The old woman didn't know the army, didn't know their equipment as he did. In her foolish, hungry mind she must have thought she could cross over under cover of darkness. She should have known better; she should have known what to expect after a year of it. Or perhaps she no longer cared. The old woman surely knew she couldn't live to reach the other side. No one from the contaminated area crossed the Mississippi and lived more than a few seconds, a few minutes. If you were among the lucky millions living in the western two-thirds of the nation, you gave thanks to your god. But if you were among the unlucky thousands still struggling for an existence east of the river, you remained there until you died. There was no other choice, no other future.

Stay where you were and die slowly. Make an attempt to reach the clean, unbombed country west of the Mississippi and die quickly under the sights of a carbine. The trooper's heart might not be in it — he might hesitate the fraction of a second, but you'd die. No contamination cases wanted.

The rifle cracked in the blackness.

Gary lay still, waiting. There was no other sound for long minutes. He knew the routine, had watched it often in the daylight. Some soldier garbed in a white radiation suit would walk out onto the bridge, move the body with a toe of his boot, searching for a spark of life. If there was still movement he would put a pistol shot through her head. Finally he would pick up the body and hurl it over the guardrail.

He seemed to hear a faint splash. The wind was in the wrong direction and he couldn't be sure, but the hungry old woman was undoubtedly floating down stream by now.

He crawled backward off the bridge approach and sought the sanctuary of a near-by field, seeking out the hollow depression where he had been lying when the woman passed him a half hour before. Curiosity had made him follow her, the morbid curiosity of an onlooker who knows the game will end in disaster. She had been carrying no food, he saw that in his first swift scrutiny; had she been carrying anything to eat he would have forcibly taken it from her. But her arms had been bare and there were no bulges to her pockets. So he had let her go to the bridge, silently following for no real reason.

He had known what would happen to her, and surely she did. In all likelihood she no longer cared. You get so old, you grow so hungry — and finally you seek a way out. The bridge was always a way out. Or downstream where the bridges had been dynamited, a rowboat. The troops were continuously on the prowl and the river watch never ended.

Gary knew there were many thousands of them, a large portion of what remained of the United States Army, stationed all along the western bank of the Mississippi, all the way from the delta northward to Lake Winnibigoshish in Minnesota, and from that point still northward overland to Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba. Still north of that body of water, the Mounted Patrol or the terrain stopped you.

He could have been among those lucky troops on the other side of the river, the safe side. If he hadn't gotten blind drunk a year ago. Hadn't waked up in that hotel.

Corporal Russell Gary, with a Fifth Army patch on his shoulder and nothing more strenuous than recruiting duty in downstate Illinois. Veteran of the Salerno campaign — he lasted five days on the beach before shrapnel pushed him off; veteran of the French and German thrusts — he was promoted to a tech-sergeancy in the early days of the Normandy invasion and busted again before he reached the Rhine. Experienced and unscrupulous black-marketeer, junior grade; turned a tidy sum dealing in military gasoline, rations, soap, foodstuffs. He elected to stay in the army after the war because he had no home to speak of, and on his thirtieth birthday he was celebrating ten years of khaki with a monumental binge.

He figured the army owed him a year's pay.

When he woke up he was on the wrong side of the river, the bombed and contaminated side…

2

CORPORAL GARY sneezed and opened his eyes.

The dirty wallpaper only half clinging to the ceiling seemed ready to come loose and drop on him at any moment. He sneezed again and rolled his eyes to see the equally sad paper peeling from the side walls. The layer peeling off wore faded pink roses and below that was another of dirty blue feathers. A battered old telephone hung on the wall near the door, screwed to the cracking plaster. His rumpled trousers were on the floor beside the bed.

“Mother of Moses!” the corporal complained, “another stinking firetrap.”

He fought away a nagging ache in his back and a dull pain in his head to sit up. The movement sent a fine cloud of dust flying, and he sneezed again. Instinctively he reached under the pillow for his wallet and dislodged a whisky bottle. Savagely throwing the pillow and the bottle across the room, he snatched up his trousers from the floor and searched the pockets. His wallet was tucked in one of them, empty.

The corporal shouted one word and hurled the wallet after the pillow and the bottle.

Swinging his legs to the floor, he swore loudly when his naked toes made contact rather violently with another bottle. Gary peered down at it, was vaguely disappointed to find it empty, and saw still another one lying part way under the bed.

“That,” he said to the dirty carpet, “must have been one hell of a toot!”

The room contained a toilet and a wash basin in one corner, half concealed behind a wooden screen. Another empty floated in the stool. A thin layer of dust and powdered plaster lay over every surface. Gary twisted the single tap jutting out over the basin but no water came out. He repeated the single, shouted word with added emphasis and stalked across the room to the ancient wall telephone.

“Hey, down there! What the hell goes on here? I want some water.”

The instrument did not answer him.

“Hell of a note,” he complained, and let the earpiece bang against the wall. Behind the wallpaper some loose plaster dribbled down. “Hell of a note.”

He stopped to survey the room. Except for the dust it was no different from a dozen other cheap hotels he had previously frequented for one purpose or another. The room hadn't been cleaned for a week — and hell, he hadn't been sleeping that long. One or two days was the limit on this sort of thing. Say two days — and that was stretching it. He shoved a bottle with his toe and tried to recall events. Quite plainly he hadn't been miserly with the liquor — he must have pitched a king-sized bitch. Ten years in the damned army, thirty years old and still reasonably healthy, and if that didn't call for a birthday celebration, nothing did. So all right, he had shot the works. But he couldn't have been out for more than two days.

Somebody would have missed him by now, and he'd be on the carpet for sure.

“Hell of a note,” he said again and reached for his trousers.

They were the only article of clothing in the room. Gary searched carefully, quickly, his anger growing, but there were no shoes or socks, no underwear, shirt or cap. He pulled on the wrinkled trousers and kicked at the wallet, cursing the unknown thief who had rolled him and then stolen his clothing while he slept. In nothing but the trousers he yanked open the bedroom door and strode into the narrow hall. His room number told him he was on the third floor.

Without hesitation he walked to the stairway, dust flying from the worn carpet with each angry footfall. Approaching the dimly lighted stairs, he passed a room whose door hung open and absently looked in.

Shocked, he stopped, took a step backward, and stared again. She lay naked on the bed.

Gary turned quickly, searched the hail behind him and the stairway beneath, to find he was still alone. Silently then he moved just inside the room.

The room was dusty and unclean like his own, but it also held an offensive odor that stung his nostrils, an odor he had known and lived with long ago. The woman's clothing was scattered about the floor, her open and ransacked purse had been tossed under the bed. A cheap suitcase had been split open and thrown aside. Gary stared at her body.

She was a nondescript woman, thirty or forty years of age — it was difficult to tell now. Not pretty, not ugly, but obviously a tramp. She fitted into the cheap and smelly room, into the run-down hotel. There were old and new scars on her thin body, and a dried trickle of blood on one ear where an earring had been torn away.

Gary moved nearer the bed, ignoring the odor, to confirm his first startled suspicion. A G.I. bayonet protruded from between her bony ribs.

He hesitated only a second longer and ran from the room. The hallway remained empty. He sped for the stairs, half jumping them in his eagerness to descend, to get away from the third floor. The second floor landing and corridor were equally bare of sound or movement and he continued down without pause, seeking the lobby.

It was a small lobby, dirty, dusty, empty.

“Hey,” he shouted nervously, “wake up!” He ran to the desk. “It's me, Corporal Gary!”

There was no answer, no appearance.

He hit the old desk with his fist, pounding on its scarred surface. Dust flew upward and he sneezed. The lobby remained empty of life. A calendar pad caught his eye and he snatched it up, blowing a fine film of dust from its surface. Wednesday, June 20th. The day after his birthday, the day after the evening on which he had begun the celebrated binge. But the calendar couldn't be right because he knew damned well he had not gotten drunk only the night before. That had been two or three days ago, maybe more, and he had slept it off upstairs. It was two or three days ago. The calendar had dust on it. To hell with the calendar!

He hurled the metal base and its papers through a lobby window, hearing the shards of glass sprinkle the pavement outside.

“I'm in here!” he shouted after the calendar.

Silence.

In sudden anger he picked up a heavy inkwell from the desk and tossed it through a second window, with the same negative result. No one came to investigate. Gary waited until he had counted fifty, aloud, and turned away from the desk. Sunlight shining through the unwashed glass of a street door caught his eye. He crossed the lobby, pushed through the door and stood on the sidewalk outside. The hot sun felt good on his half naked body but the pavement was uncomfortable to his feet.

He saw only a mongrel dog trotting along the gutter. The dog and a car.

Gary ignored the dog and concentrated on the car. The nose and radiator of the car were rammed through a plate glass window of a clothing store, the front tires flat and shredded where they had exploded upon violent contact with first the curb and then the building. Both fenders were crumpled and the windshield cracked and shattered to the limit of its resistance. A window dummy had toppled forward across the hood, while within the car another lifeless body hung across the wheel, impaled. The odor he had found in the room upstairs was multiplied here on the street.

Gary walked slowly from the hotel, fighting to read some kind of sense into what he had found. The bomb crater stopped him, shocked him. And then he knew.

The round, uneven crater occupied the whole width of the street and a truck had tumbled into it, unable to stop. The driver of the truck was still in the cab, dead. Beyond that was another crater, and he quickly saw the signs of an air strike that had been so familiar eight to ten years before. Show windows shattered, buildings chipped and battered, the street a crazy tangle of automobiles and debris. The city had been bombed. Bombed while he slept like a drunken fool.

But bombs — here, in Illinois! Towns and cities like this were common in Italy, in France, in Germany. He had been through hundreds of them, fought through and helped raze scores of them — in Italy, in France, in Germany. But not here in Illinois! Who would bomb Illinois? Who would make war on the United States?

This was why the hotel was empty of life, this was why the murdered woman lay up there on the third floor bed. The city had been bombed, the survivors evacuated.

The survivors?

Gary ran along the street, searching for a living man. Some automobiles stood at the curb, unoccupied, while others were smashed in their flight. None contained anything living. Debris littered the street and only an occasional breeze moved a bit of trash, a discarded newspaper. Eagerly he snatched up the newspaper, scanned the headlines. Nothing. The paper held no mention of war, no hint of war, no threat of a bombing, no clue or forewarning to any sort of catastrophe — to America. The front page and the others inside mirrored only the day-to-day violence of usual nature at home and abroad. The date?

Like the dusty calendar. Wednesday, June 20th. The day after his birthday.

He dropped the paper and ran to the nearest automobile, reached inside and snapped on the radio. The battery was dead. Running along the street, Gary paused at another car parked alongside the curb, tried the radio. It hummed into life. The airwaves were dead — either dead or deliberately silent. He slowly worked the dial from one end to the other, hoping to catch even the faintest whisper of sound, a spoken word or a bit of music, but there was nothing.

He decided they were maintaining radio silence. The absence of living people around him was proof they had been evacuated, that authority still existed somewhere. But that authority was keeping a rigid silence on the air, still fearing attack. He turned off the radio and slumped in the seat, wondering what he should do.

He supposed he was technically classed as a deserter by this time — that or listed as missing in action. The absence of a comparatively unimportant recruiting corporal would be noticed after two or three days. But for the moment it didn't make much difference; sooner or later he would find a military post and report in. Where? Might as well go back to Chicago — he was known there. How? He'd have to help himself to a car and drive — he rather doubted that trains would still be running. The enemy always goes for the rail lines first.

His feet burned. So first he'd have to find some shoes. And after that, something to eat…

* * *

Corporal Gary sat on the deserted curb before a grocery store, watching the tired sun go down and eating his supper from an assortment of pilfered cans and jars. He had helped himself to the food, there being no one in the store to either help or hinder him. The absence of clerks led him to suspect the bombing had happened at night; the display windows were smashed and the door hung askew but there were no bodies within the store itself. The grocery offered itself to him.

The bread he passed by because it was beginning to glaze over with a green mold, the fruit and vegetables were inedible. The big refrigerators had been neutralized with the failure of electricity, and the meats, milk and cheeses within them made unsafe. Angrily he had slammed the doors on the odor. He had discovered and pulled from a slowly thawing freezer a whole chicken, which now lay wrapped in a sack on the pavement beside him. There had been other foods in the freezing unit but they were much too hard to eat now, and did not represent the value of the chicken to his mind. They could wait. Cans, jars, and a wax-sealed box of crackers made up his meal. Unable to locate running water, he drank canned juices and bottled soda water.

And then he threw an empty can across the wide street, listening to its clatter in the stillness. When the noise had died away he ripped open a carton of cigarettes and lit one.

“A hell of a note!” he said to the oncoming evening.

A borrowed automobile stood at the curb a few feet away, its radio humming. He had set the dial at what he thought to be one of the most popular Chicago wavebands, and let it run. As yet there had been no rewarding voice.

During the remainder of the afternoon he had driven around the town, ranging it from one end to the other in search of any living thing. He had found no one, the city was dead or deserted. It did occur to him belatedly that there might be someone there, someone who would hide at the sound of the approaching car. Looters, the thieves and murderers who had stolen his money and killed the woman, lost survivors like himself. But no living person had made himself seen. The dead were everywhere, lying in the street, slumped on the porches of homes, folded up in smashed automobiles. Nothing alive moved, other than himself. And that straggling dog he had first seen when he emerged from the hotel.

And during the afternoon another strange thing had occurred to him, a thought that quietly took shape and grew in his mind as he drove along the rubbled streets. The bombing hadn't been heavy. The few bomb craters that pockmarked the city hadn't been nearly enough to wipe out the population, hardly enough to account for the dead he found everywhere. The city may have panicked and fled, yes. Any American city, never before subjected to enemy fire, would quickly panic and run at the first few bombs. The city may have been hurriedly evacuated by the military, yes. But how to account for the large number of dead? There were bodies lying in streets that contained no craters, no evidence of war at all.

“Holy Mother of Moses! Gas!” And then he paused. No, not gas. Gas would have found him in his third floor room unless it were some strange new kind that clung to the surface, did not rise. He stooped and sniffed the street, the grass growing on the lawns. There was no odor of gas. And that dog was still alive. Not gas then. What?

Atomic radiation? Bacterial bombs? He didn't know; he knew nothing about them. He knew as much about them as any other G.I. did, which was next to nothing. But those craters could have been made by special, hellish bombs that killed without steel splinters, without shrapnel. It could account for those lifeless bodies lying far from the craters, could account for the dead and deserted city. How did you go about looking for radiation? Oh yes — Geiger counters.

Gary didn't have a counter, wouldn't know where they could be found, wouldn't know how to use one if he had it. Bacteria? Germs of some kind. You can't fight germs. If his induction shots didn't protect him, to hell with it.

He was still alive. So he was immune to whatever hit the city, or the stuff didn't reach to the third floor. He was still alive in a city of the dead.

The jarring crash of a plate glass window brought him to his feet. Someone else was alive.

The sound had come from somewhere off to his left, surprisingly near, and after a moment of frozen surprise and indecision, he leaped for the car. A following thought stopped him. The sound of the motor might scare them away, might scare them — whoever they were — into hiding. He turned from the car and ran lightly up the street, swinging his eyes from side to side. Broken glass lay everywhere and it was impossible to determine which window had been breached. He slowed, trotting cautiously, eyes and ears alert.

He came to a cross street, peered up and down its length without seeing anything, and crossed over to continue his route. The darkness of evening was closing in. Slowly now he paced along the street, avoiding the glass that might crunch underfoot and betray him, sidestepping the rubble that barred his way. He hurried along to the next cross street, and the next after that, until he felt that he had come too far. It was like the house-to-house searches in those bombed-out French towns — you sometimes sensed the presence of humans and again you knew beforehand that a house was empty. He realized now, with a surprising return of that old sense, that he had passed the person who smashed the window.

Gary turned and retraced his route, cautiously.

He spotted the brief flicker of a flashlight ahead of him and dropped to the street, studying the building as he approached it. Quite apparently a jewelry shop. Looters then — but the whole city lay open for the taking. What was the especial crime of this one act? In a sense he had looted a grocery and a clothing store himself. Somebody wanted the valuable stuff.

The light flicked on again, scanning a row of display cases along one wall. He caught a faint silhouette created by the small light. He crept nearer, was rising to his feet when he heard the joyous exclamation.

The looter was a woman.

Gary sank back to the pavement, thinking better of rushing her. The woman on the hotel's third floor had been murdered by a thief; this feminine looter could be well armed. She might misinterpret his approach and shoot him. He had no desire to stop her, to prevent her from taking what she wanted. He was interested only in her, not in what she was doing. She was the only living thing he had found in the town except for the dog, and the dog wouldn't make good company. He stayed in the street, waiting.

The woman in the shop took her time, picking over the stock, obviously enjoying herself. Once or twice she flicked off the light and stepped to the broken window, searching the street for people. Gary was only another shapeless bundle of nothing on the black street. She did not see him. He heard the tinkle of gems and rings as she gathered them up in a bundle.

When she had satisfied herself and at last came out of the shop she was carrying a brown paper sack stuffed with loot. She briefly switched on the light to find her footing and left the store as she had entered, through the gaping hole knocked in the heavy window. Gary tensed his muscles and waited. She turned toward him. Holding the sack clutched tightly in one hand and the flash in the other, she made her way along the street as he had done, avoiding the rubble. Accepting his flattened body as just another obstacle, she was steering a course around him when he leaped.

The woman screamed in terror and struck out with the flashlight. He knocked it from her hand and shoved her backward, crooking one foot behind her legs as she stumbled. She fell back, sprawling and screaming, the paper sack bursting as it hit the pavement.

He was on her in an instant, pinning her down, trying vainly to clamp a hand over her month to throttle the screams.

“Shut up!” he shouted. He got a palm over her mouth and she bit it. “Shut up — I won't hurt you!”

“You're a cop…” Her voice was girlish and shrill with terror. “You're a cop!”

“I'm not a cop. Dammit, shut up. Shut up! ”

He caught a piece of cloth from her dress collar and stuffed it in her mouth, holding it down with his hand. The screams were cut short. She tried to kick but he threw his legs over hers, holding her to the ground. A hand came up and pointed fingernails raked his cheek agonizingly. He slapped her then, slapped her sharply and with force across the face. She went limp. He didn't relax his grip but cautiously kept her pinned down, alert for any trick. In the uncertain darkness her body seemed small and frail.

When he saw she was choking, he pulled the gag from her mouth to discover she was crying.

“Oh hell, shut that up! That's worse than screaming.”

“Take it, take it,” she shrilled at him. “I can't stop you. Take it and leave me alone!”

“Stop it, will you? Listen to me. I'm not going to hurt you.”

The crying continued. “You're a cop.”

“I'm not a cop but if you don't stop that damned blubbering I'll make you wish I was.” He balled a fist and pushed it into her face, shoved it so close to her eyes that she couldn't mistake it even in the darkness. “Stop it — now.”

She stopped. The stopping was drawn out like a motor choked off with a fouled feed line, but she stopped. He rolled off her body and sat up to watch her.

She made no move, simply lay there in the street staring up at his dark shape against the sky. The silence of the street and the city fell around them.

“What do you want?” she asked finally.

“You.”

“I can't stop you,” she threw back sarcastically.

“Don't act stupid. You.” He thrust a pointed finger at her shoulder. “You're alive — you're the only one left alive in this man's town. You're alive and I'm alive. Does that make sense to you?”

“I suppose so.” Her voice was small, faraway.

Acting on a sudden suspicion, he groped around in the street for the flashlight, found it and put the beam on her face. The face was white with the last lingering traces of her fright, her eyes wide and brilliant blue in the darkness. She flinched under the probing beam.

“Mother of Moses — you're just a kid!”

“I'm not,” she snapped. “I'm nineteen.”

“You're a liar. You're just a kid, fifteen or sixteen maybe.”

“I'm nineteen,” she insisted. “I can prove it.”

“How?” he asked skeptically, dousing the flash.

“I'm in college — a junior.”

“That doesn't mean a thing to me.” He stared along the street, alert for any movement in the night. Turning over her answer, he admitted grudgingly: “Well, maybe seventeen.”

“Nineteen,” she still insisted.

“Skip it.” He got to his knees. “Are you going to behave? What's your name?”

“Irma. Irma Sloane. What's yours?”

“Call me Gary. Are you going to behave now?”

“Gary what?”

“Russell Gary. Answer me.”

“All right, don't get mad.” She sat up, felt around on the pavement for the scattered jewelry. “Look what you made me do!” Abruptly she was on her knees and frantically searching the street. “Help me find them. I want them, I want them all. Help me!”

He held the light for her, contemptuously watching and sweeping it around in ever widening circles as she scrabbled over the street gathering up the spilled loot. When she had recovered all that could be found in the light's dim beam, she brought the double handful of gems over to dump them in his trouser pockets.

“We'll have to come back here tomorrow. I know I've missed some.”

“To hell with that,” he told her. “There's other stores around here.”

“Yes!” She paused in pleased surprise. “That's right. There are many of them; I know where they all are. We'll find them tomorrow, you and I.”

He contradicted her. “We'll get the devil out of here tomorrow, and fast. Don't you know what this city will be like this time tomorrow night?”

“But Russell, my jewelry — What will it be like?”

“What do you think, with those bodies under two or three days of baking sun?”

“Oh…” She was silent, and took the flashlight from his hand to direct the beam up into his face. He squinted against the sudden light and heard her indrawn breath.

“What's the matter?”

“Nothing, Russell. But you need a shave.”

He took the light from her hand and shut it off. “Let's get away from here.”

“Where are we going?”

He hesitated. Where were they going?

They stood like silent sentinels in the middle of a dead, deserted city, an odorous city lying lifeless under a black night sky — the victim of some enemy's bombs. They alone, for all he knew, among uncounted dead. They and a stray dog. Where to go? Certainly not back to that place where he had spent the previous nights. Were it not for the girl he knew what he would have preferred, what he would have done. A pair of blankets from the first shop offering such merchandise, and a bunk in the fields outside of town, out of reach of the smell and reminder of death. Or a vacant farmhouse whose occupants had left before disaster struck.

She put a small hand in his, anxiously waiting.

“Do you live here?” he asked. “Do you know the town?”

“I've lived here all my life. I know it all.”

“Find us a hotel,” he directed then, “a big one.”

She hesitated only a moment and he could guess what she might be thinking. “Where are we now?” she asked him.

They picked their way to the nearest intersection and he turned the light on the street sign.

“Oh, yes,” she said then. “This way.”

* * *

The lobby seemed empty. He searched it carefully in the beam of the flashlight before advancing across it. The desk clerk was slumped on the floor behind his desk.

“This bombing,” Gary said, “did it come at night?”

“The bom — oh, yes. In the early evening. The radio said some planes had been shot down, and something about long-range rockets. It wasn't very clear.”

He went behind the clerk's desk and scanned the key rack, finally taking several of them from their slots. “How did you escape? Where were you?”

“Oh, I wasn't here. I was with my class in Havana. Do you know where that is?”

“No.”

“A small town south of here; my class was on an archeological field trip. There are Indian mounds at Havana.”

“Still sticking to your story?”

“I am nineteen!” she declared with anger.

“I won't argue about it; I don't give a damn how old you are. Come on.” He walked to the stairs. “What happened to the rest of the class?”

“I don't know. When we heard the news on the radio, I came home. Home was… home was…”

“Bombed out?” He led her up the stairway.

“No. It hadn't been touched. But inside, Mother was… dead. Her body had turned color, sort of purple.”

“Purple?”

“Bluish-purple. I can't describe it. It was ugly.”

“I can't figure that one out. Some disease? It worked fast, damned fast. Say — when did this happen, this bombing? Wednesday night?”

“I think so. Yes, Wednesday evening.”

“And this is Friday.” He shook his head.

They continued to climb the carpeted stairs. At the second floor landing he paused only long enough to send the light flashing down the corridor, to assure himself that it was empty, and started upward again, pulling the girl along. He believed the third or the fourth floor would be the safest, away from the street. The silent city might contain other prowlers besides themselves.

“What have you been doing since Wednesday night?”

“I don't know. Honestly I don't.” She shuddered. “I came home and found — It was unpleasant. I cried a lot, and I was sick. Every time I attempted to eat I was sick. I guess I've lived on canned juices, and soup. There was no electricity, no running water.”

“Power station must be out,” he explained. “Either a bomb struck it or something went wrong and the machinery shut itself off. Automatic cutouts, things like that. Nobody was around to start it again. That explains the water, too. The pumping stations are run by electricity. I'm surprised the whole damned town isn't burning down.” He thought about her remarks on food. “Soup?” he asked.

“The gas stove worked, after a fashion. The flame was very low.”

“Pressure giving out. It'll be gone in a day or so.”

“What will we do then?”

“We won't be here,” he assured her. “We're getting out of this town tomorrow.”

“There's no place to go.”

When they reached the fourth floor he paused to examine the keys he carried in his hand, and then flicked the light along the door numbers. The keys directed them away from the stairway toward the rear of the building. The first room he unlocked and kicked open proved to be a narrow one, holding but a single bed; the following two were replicas of the first. On the next try a large room having a double bed stood revealed in the gleam, and adjoining that a similarly large room with twin beds. He pulled her inside, locked the hall door, unlocked the connecting door between the rooms and locked the remaining outside doorway of the other bedroom.

“This is where we bunk,” he told her.

She watched him, saying nothing.

He waggled his thumb at the connecting door. “Which room do you want?”

Irma shook her head, not answering.

“Come on, kid, pick your room. I'm not robbing the cradle!” He put the flash down on the bureau top, still lit, and emptied his pockets of the stolen jewels. They made dim fires in the weak light. Belatedly he remembered to pull down the shades to prevent the light from betraying them. When he turned away from the windows she was still standing in the center of the room, watching him. “Which room?” he asked sharply.

“I'm frightened.”

“Not that frightened.”

“I'm afraid to sleep in another room.”

“To hell with that. I locked the doors.”

“I will not sleep in a separate room,” Irma declared. Her voice climbed with an hysterical note. “This place is… is… dead! ”

Russell Gary studied her youthful face briefly in the light of the torch, wondering what he was to do with her. He'd like to leave her, walk off and pretend he'd never found her, be rid of her… but he couldn't just abandon a child. In sudden decision he snapped off the light. “Suit yourself. I'm taking the bed by the window.” And he sat down on it.

He undressed, taking off everything but the twin dog tags hanging around his neck. It was the way he usually slept; he hadn't even considered adding pajamas to his wardrobe when he had helped himself in that clothing store during the afternoon. After long minutes spent in relaxing on the hotel sheets, he reached out to raise the shade and pry open the window a few inches.

There was the quiet sound of the girl moving on the opposite bed.

* * *

His mouth was dry with a consuming thirst and he got up in the darkness for water, only to remember there was none. Swearing, he climbed back into bed.

Irma laughed at him with unconcealed satisfaction.

“Now,” she said boastfully, “am I nineteen?”

3

HE AWOKE with the sun shining on his face, spilling through the open window he had raised the night before. The room was quiet and unmoving, a large and clean room in sharp contrast to that other squalid cell in which he had awakened the previous day. After a few moments the quiet and unmoving street below the window came to his attention, and he remembered where he was and what had happened to him. Nothing had happened to him — that was the surprising thing. He lived. He didn't move, didn't get up and rush to the window to see if the city had changed itself overnight, to see if the dead had returned to life and were moving about the streets in normal fashion. There would be no magical change, no overnight erasing of the nightmare that had killed a city. Yesterday and last night were too real, too much like those towns in Italy and France. This city was gone. His immediate concern was to find out how many others had died with it, how many others had fallen under enemy bombs.

That, and get back to the army.

Meanwhile, what would he do with the girl? Take her along and turn her over to the Red Cross — or walk out on her, leave her here in the city where she lived? He turned his inquiring eyes toward the other bed and found it empty.

Gary sat up, startled. Had she left him?

He stepped out of bed and padded across the rug in his bare feet, to pause before the bureau. The flashlight was still there but the stolen jewelry was gone. Turning, he quickly crossed the room to the outer door, tugged at the knob and found it locked. The key was not there. The girl had left him and locked the door from the outside, taking her loot with her. He stood at the door, thinking of her.

Nineteen… and she could prove it. Had proved it. He looked back at her rumpled bed and said aloud, “Hell of a note!” And then he went into the bathroom.

The mirrored cabinet set in the wall was empty but for a few tiny bars of hotel soap and he slammed the lid shut in disgust. A dirty, bearded face stared back at him. The water taps above the sink still refused to run and he was on the point of turning to leave the room when his eyes found the water closet. Lifting off the porcelain lid and twisting the floating ball back out of the way, he scooped his hands into the box and washed his face. The water felt good on his skin and he poured handfuls over his head, letting it run down his body. A half dozen untouched towels hung near-by. As he was drying himself he caught sight of his beard in the mirror again, and stopped.

Gary quit the bathroom and walked to the door, forgetting it was locked until the knob resisted his hand. He muttered an impatient threat to the absent girl under his breath and crossed through the connecting doorway to the adjoining room, to let himself out into the hotel corridor. Going downstairs, he noted the room numbers nearest the lobby and on reaching the ground floor, scooped from the clerk's rack several keys to those rooms. Searching about the lobby he found a drugstore opening off it, and picked up a heavy chair to hurl through its locked door. The drugstore shelves offered him his choice of shaving equipment and he picked up a handful, taking the things up to the second floor and the nearer rooms.

The first room he unlocked was a sample room and he backed out of it, impatient at the minor delay. The next two rooms he opened contained bodies in the beds and he vacated them just as quickly. Finally locating an empty one, he closed the door and locked it with the bolt, to dump his supplies in the bathroom. Lifting off the lid of the water box, he used his hands to scoop out water and fill the sink. Then he shaved.

Afterwards he lay down on the bed and ripped open a package of cigarettes taken from the drugstore, smoking two in succession before the taste in his mouth satisfied him. It was then that he discovered he had forgotten to dress. Cursing his own forgetfulness, Gary swung off the bed and unlocked the door, to climb two flights of stairs to the fourth floor and his own room.

Both doors hung open — the one he had left open and the other that the girl had locked. He checked his stride and listened. Irma Sloane was inside, crying hysterically.

Gary paused in the doorway, saw her lying across his bed.

“Stop that bawling, dammit!” he said with a sharp and husky voice.

She swung around quickly, raised her head to stare at him, and then with a happy cry sped across the floor to throw herself at his chest. He caught her in selfdefense, braced himself to prevent her lunge from pushing him backward. Irma clung to him fiercely, still crying.

“Stop it, I said! Stop it.” He shook her.

“I thought you'd gone.” Her words were muffled, her mouth pressed against his chest. “I thought you'd left me!” Her arms encircled his waist possessively.

“That's what I thought about you.”

She raised her face to his. “What?”

“Where did you go?”

“Oh, Russell… you've shaved.”

“Where did you go? When I woke up you were gone.”

She smiled at him and turned her head to the bed, pointing. “Look what I have. Oh, I have lots of pretty things.”

He saw the sack, an extra large grocery sack, its brown seams bulging with whatever was packed and crammed inside it. “What is it?”

She released him then, straightened up from him and ran over to the bed, to dump the contents of the sack across the rumpled sheet. He stared half-believing at her loot.

“Mother of Moses! Why do you keep picking up that junk? You can't eat it.”

“They're mine! I'm going to keep them, keep them all!” She dipped her fingers into the pile of jewelry, letting the pieces trickle sensuously through her fingers. “Aren't they pretty, Russell?”

“You can't eat them,” he repeated, “and if you want to stay alive you had damned well better begin collecting food. Why didn't you bring something to eat?”

“I've never had so many nice things before… they are so pretty.” She looked up at him, and then at his body, to laugh gaily. “Hadn't you better put some clothes on, Russell?”

He picked up his clothing from the floor and stalked into the adjoining room, slamming the door behind him.

* * *

They ate breakfast in the same manner in which he had eaten the night before: from cans, sitting on the curb before a grocery store. It was less than satisfying. Afterwards he asked about cars. He wanted a new car from some dealer's showroom or garage, and he wanted a light one that did not consume too much gas. She led him on a tour of automobile agencies and he picked a Studebaker sedan, a demonstrator with slightly under a thousand miles on its meter.

“Why are you so fussy?” she asked impatiently. “Why not take one of those cars out in the street? There's no one here to stop us. Where are we going?”

“God only knows! We're getting out of this town fast but I don't know where we're going. Chicago? What if it has been bombed out? Supposing we have to go all the way to New York, or out to California? How much of the country has been bombed, do you know? Where will we find living people?”

“I don't know.” She was frightened now.

“I don't either, but we've got to look somewhere. The army or the Red Cross is somewhere and we want to find them. The whole damned country can't be dead!” He climbed in the car and started the motor, listening to it. “I want a car that will give me mileage, I want provisions for a long haul, and then we're moving. Get in. Find a gun shop.”

“A gun shop?”

“Guns — rifles. Find me a store that sells them.”

“I don't know of any,” she told him helplessly.

“Sporting goods,” he snapped at her, “a big hardware store or a—”

“Oh, yes,” she interrupted. “I know of a place where you can buy fishing equipment, boats, things like that.”

“That's what I want.” He drove the Studebaker out of the garage, listening to the performance of the motor.

While she stood absently watching him, Gary chose from the store's wall rack a heavy .30-30 and a Marlin .22. He loaded the girl down with ammunition for the two rifles, had her pack it on the rear floor of the car. Afterwards they drove by the grocery where they had taken two meals, to load the trunk with food. He stumbled over debris on the floor that hadn't been there when they visited the place for breakfast, and searched the store carefully before allowing the girl to enter. She would have chosen light, fancy and almost useless goods had not he vetoed the choices, instead filling her arms with canned soups and meats, a variety of vegetables, fruits and juices. On a second thought he picked up a case of canned milk.

She was quick to complain. “Oh — Russell! Do we have to take all this now? Why can't we simply stop somewhere when we want to eat?”

“Lift your nose,” he said sharply. “Smell the air. Do you want to come back into this stink every day to eat? And it'll get worse.”

Casting another look at the litter left on the floor by some other prowler, Gary drove back to the gun shop once more and picked up a .38 revolver.

“Now what's that for? You going to fight someone?”

He poked a finger at the bulging paper sack she held tightly in her lap. “What if somebody takes a notion to loot us? ”

“Oh.”

He left town quickly, picking up and following a marked route that he knew led to Chicago. Occasionally he was forced to detour around a blocked street where a falling bomb had gouged out a great crater, or a tangle of wrecked automobiles made passage difficult. The suburbs were less badly hit, with only an occasional crater revealing where some stray bomb had come down. But the suburbs were as lifeless. And still he didn't understand why, didn't comprehend why a few scattered bombs should so completely wipe out a population. Momentarily he switched on the car's radio, but the band was silent.

Either the army was continuing radio silence — or the entire nation was off the air permanently. Optimistically he told himself it was not the latter. Sudden and unexpected bombs had fallen a few days ago: more might come, or an enemy force might follow them to establish a bridgehead and dig in for counterattack. In either event radio stations would remain off the air to prevent information from leaking to the enemy, to deny him radio beams on which to track more bombs, or his planes. The lack of information was harmful to the country, to what remained of it, but radio silence was of paramount importance. When the radios again came back on the air, the danger would be over. He looked at his watch, mentally laying out an hourly schedule for listening.

“Look — look, there's a man!”

He slowed the car. “Where?”

“There — that farmhouse ahead.”

Gary put his foot on the brake and one hand on the horn, pulling up sharp at the mouth of a lane leading up to a cluster of farm buildings.

“Hey there!” He leaned out the window.

To his astonishment the farmer whirled and ran into the nearer barn, to emerge a moment later brandishing a double-barreled shotgun. Immediately behind him the barn door ejected two boys, the taller of the two carrying another gun and wearing on his frightened face a stamp of determination.

The red-faced farmer waved his weapon. “Git out of here!”

“Hey — now wait!” Gary shouted at him. “All I want is information.”

“You ain't getting nothing here but buckshot. Now git!” He hoisted the shotgun into firing position, and beside him the older boy did likewise. “I've had enough of you double-damned thieves!”

Gary slipped the idling motor into gear and poised for a quick getaway. “Information,” he shouted once more. “Where is the army?”

“Ain't seen no army!” And the shotgun blasted the air.

The Studebaker's rear tires spun madly, throwing a shower of dirt and gravel into the air. Gary piloted it a fast mile down the highway before taking his foot from the gas, and then he slowed to a stop, to climb out and circle the car looking for damage. The buckshot had missed them. He settled behind the wheel to light a cigarette.

“Sort of mad, wasn't he?” he asked mildly.

“What in heaven's name was the matter with him?” She reached over and helped herself to a cigarette.

His answering laugh was bitter. “You looters are giving us decent people a bad name.”

“Well, we certainly didn't get any information from him.”

“On the contrary,” Gary corrected her, “we did. We learned that the countryside is already overrun with looters. That means people from the cities, the survivors running into the open country to get away from… well, from the city. That farmer has had so much food stolen from him he won't talk to anybody. Shoot first and answer questions afterward.” He reached into the back seat for the revolver.

She watched him. “You aren't going to—”

“I'm not going to what? Go back and fight it out with him? Don't be silly.” Methodically he opened a box of cartridges and loaded the revolver, to lay it on the floor between his feet. “We also learned that people in the open country have survived; that was his family behind him. The bombs — and whatever death they carried — didn't fall here, didn't spread their gas or radiation or germs out here. Only the cities. Maybe only the big cities. We'll find out soon, when we come to some whistle stop.”

“What are we going to do? I mean — about this?”

He studied her childish face, dwelling on the almost mature mind that existed behind it, the almost mature body that existed below it. She had dumbfounded him last night.

“I'm going back to the army,” he told her, “as soon as I can find it. I'm supposed to be there right now. I'm going to locate a command post somewhere and report in. And when that happens, they'll outfit me with clothing and equipment and ship me off to someplace. That's the end of it.”

“But it isn't the end of it! What about me?”

“You? I can't take you along, Irma.”

She laughed at him again, an echo of last night's wild laughter which had burned his ears, made him ashamed of himself. “I'm nineteen… and I could be a nice mascot.”

“Hell's fire, you'd have the army on its ear and I'd be in the guardhouse for life. If you want to do something, the Red Cross people could put you to work.”

“I don't want the Red Cross people,” she snapped at him peevishly, “I want you.”

He flicked away his half-smoked cigarette. “Tough, sister. The army saw me first.”

“Russell…” She turned to him, easily forcing the tears into her eyes. “Russell, supposing I'm in trouble?”

He eyed her silently, contemptuously.

“Well,” she wavered, “I was only supposing…”

“You can get out and walk any time you want to, Irma.”

“I won't talk about it any more, Russell. I promise. Russell… will you really leave me?”

“I haven't any choice. When I meet up with the army, we say good-bye.”

She settled back in the seat as he started the car. “All right, Russell.”

“We'll try Chicago first.”

They did not drive into Chicago. Gary drove near the metropolis, moving slowly and incredulously through the small fringe-area towns which infest every major highway leading into the city. He was turned back by the fire and the smell of death borne on the night wind. The wind whipped the odor south, to where he finally stopped the car on the highway and got out to stare at the flames in the night sky. The fire had evidently been burning for days and now it was eating rapidly toward them, pushed on by the torrid winds. The unholy red glow of it stretched from one horizon to the other, indicative of methodical and widespread bombardment, making the city a vast crematorium. Chicago: bottleneck and major target, terminus of every railroad north of Saint Louis, possessor of the only waterway connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi and the Gulf, headquarters of a vast defensive ring designed to protect the nation from invasion from the north. Chicago: obsolete now in the strictest sense.

Gary clung to the car door and stared at the fiery spectacle in the sky, unable even to utter the curse on his tongue. It shocked him as that first city never had.

“Russell…” the girl inched toward him on the Seat, staring forward through the windshield. “Russell, isn't it dangerous? If atom bombs did that, isn't is dangerous for us to be here?”

He shook his head. “I don't know. The radiation is supposed to disappear after a few days… but I don't know. Mother of Moses! What they must have poured on that place!” He had read descriptions, had seen the army films of the destruction caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki… and as he remembered it, something like sixty percent of the cities were obliterated and over a hundred thousand had died in those two places. One bomb on each city. And Chicago with a population of almost four million had quite apparently received many direct hits.

“Let's leave, Russell. I'm afraid.”

He slowly turned the car around, staring first through the open window and then in the rear-vision mirror at the towering flames. Driving south again, away from the vanishing city, he couldn't help from turning his head to look behind. The glow persisted, hung in the sky after they had traveled many miles. It left him with a deep sense of despair that he could not shake off, plunged him into a mood and a silence so deep that the girl was forced to speak twice to make herself heard.

“Russell! I said, where shall we sleep?”

“I don't know. Anywhere.”

“We passed some motor courts.”

“I'm not turning around. Find another one.”

* * *

Sunrise the following morning was no better than the two previous dawns, no different from those other two unpleasant awakenings to a changed world. He rolled his head on the twisted pillow, trying to clear away the ghastly memory of the burning city. The image of the flames persisted and he found himself wondering if anything alive still moved in Chicago's streets, wondering what it would be like to be in their shoes. The picture would not erase itself. He had gone to sleep with the fire burning fitfully behind his eyelids, had dreamed of it, talked aloud of it in the night, and awakened in the morning with the red sky still fresh in his mind. It shouldn't be! Chicago was different from those cities in Europe, big and little cities that had undergone brutal destruction from the skies. Chicago was ours … and our cities were not meant to be touched. Chicago was not at all like those foreign towns that belonged to strangers.

Chicago hurt him.

He arose and dressed, ignoring the sleeping girl, to walk outside and scan the sky.

* * *

Gary turned the car west toward the Mississippi.

His reasoning was that the east was dead or deserted like the towns they had driven through, that the large cities crowding the eastern sections of the country must by now be only counterparts of the death and silence they found everywhere. Or else they were like Chicago. Deeper in the west there was more room, more space, and cities were greater distances apart. The place to find sane, living people, to find the army was somewhere in the west. He filled the gas tank from an abandoned station and started.

The countryside they traversed was the same as the day before, the road and the few people unchanged from the previous unfriendly attitudes. Disaster had overtaken the nation and strangers were regarded with open Suspicion. Occasionally Gary discovered an isolated farmer still working his fields, and more often a few men and boys hovering close to their farm buildings with shotguns very much in evidence. Some few farmhouses were silent with an air of desertion, while one had burned to the ground, smoking embers the only remaining trace of it. The small towns and villages along the highway were fast becoming islands of feudalism.

Some, like the farms, were empty, the population having gone elsewhere. Others only appeared to be empty as the automobile passed the length of the one, long main street. Gary saw signs of unfriendly people behind the curtained windows, the closed doors. Storekeepers were armed. And in one a heavily armed delegation met him at the village limits, stopped him. He explained his mission, his desired destination, and showed them the army identification tags hanging about his neck. After a while they allowed him to proceed through the village, one of the armed townsmen riding in the back seat to make certain they did not stop. The man had no news to offer, apparently knew no more of the general situation that Gary had already discovered for himself.

The airwaves remained dead.

In a town near the river he had his first piece of luck. Some country printer had issued a newspaper, a small and hastily assembled two-page journal turned out on a flat-bed press. The newspaper had cost him a half dollar and an unending series of questions shot at him by the printer — questions which revealed the sources of the news stories in the sheet. With the radio silent, the mails unmoving and the wire services long dead, the printer had obtained his news from travelers such as they.

It wasn't much, and much of it wasn't news.

Chicago was treated in some detail because its nearness made it important and because a local family had attempted to reach it, seeking relatives. Every city of respectable size in that area had been bombed, bombed by some mysterious enemy — speculations all pointed at one enemy but no one knew for a certainty. The survivors of those cities were pillaging farms and towns and many of them had been shot. There were not many survivors — Chicago and Peoria had died under atomic bombs, but the other cities had been hit by something else, something unknown, like a gas that killed as it spread. Sometimes the survivors of those cities had wandered into the country to die later; they apparently carried the death with them, living a few days longer only because they were physically able to withstand the original treatment.

When he could, Gary put a question to the printer.

The old man stared at him. “The army? Yeah, the army's out there.” He pointed westward. “My son saw ’em.”

“Where?”

“T'other side of the river.”

“Thanks — I've got to get going.”

The old fellow shook his head. “Can't get across.”

“No? Why not?”