Where No Sun Shines

by Gardner R. Dozois

Robinson had been driving for nearly two days, across Pennsylvania, up through the sooty barrens of New Jersey, pushing both the car and himself with brutal desperation. Exhaustion had stopped him once in a small, rotting coast town, filled with disintegrating clapboard buildings and frightened pale faces peering from behind tight-closed shutters. He had moved slowly through empty streets washed by a tide of crumpled newspapers and dirty candy wrappers, rolling and rustling in the bitter sea wind. On the edge of town he’d found a deserted filling station and gone to sleep there with doors locked and windows rolled up, watching moonlight glint from a rusting gas pump and clutching a tire iron in his hands. He had dreamed of sharks with legs, and once banged his head sharply on the roof as he lunged up out of sleep and away from ripping teeth, pausing and blinking afterward in the hot, sweat-drenched stuffiness of the closed car, listening to the hungry darkness.

In the drab, pale red clarity of morning, a ragged comber of refugees from Atlanta had washed through town and swept him along, metallic driftwood. He had driven all day by the side of the restless sea, oily and cinder-flecked as a tattered gray rug, drifting through one frightened shuttered town after another, watching the peeling billboards and the boarded-up store fronts.

It was late evening now, and he was just beginning to really believe what had happened, accept it with his bowels as well as his mind, the hard reality jabbing his stomach like a knifeblade. The secondary highway he was following narrowed, banked, and Robinson slowed to take the curve, wincing at the scream of gears as he shifted. The road straightened and he stamped on the accelerator again, feeling the shuddering whine of the car’s response. How long will this crate hold up, he thought numbly. How long will my gas last? How many more miles? He stamped uselessly harder on the accelerator, trying to avoid the inevitable next thought, trying to blank out the picture that had floated under his eyelids for days—a picture of a figure sprawled brokenly across a pile of rubble, the loved body blackened and charred, cracked skin sooty black as carbon paper, striped with congealing blood—

He bit his lip until his own blood flowed. Anna, he thought, Jesus, oh sweet Jesus, Anna—Exhaustion was creeping up on him again; a sledgehammer wrapped in felt, isolating him even from the aching reality of his own nerves.

There was a wreck ahead, on his side, and he drifted out into the other lane to avoid it. Coming past Philadelphia the highway had been choked with a honking, aimless mass of cars, but he knew the net of secondary roads better than most of them and had outstripped the herd. Now the roads were mostly empty. Sane people had gone to ground.

He pulled even with the wreck, passed it. It was a light pickup truck, tipped on its side, gutted by fire. A man was lying in the road face down, across the white dividing line. Except for the pale gleam of face and hands, it might have been a discarded bundle of rags. There were bloodstains on the worn asphalt. Robinson let his car slide more to the left to keep from running over the man, started to skid slightly, corrected it. Beyond the wreck he swerved back into his own lane and speeded up again. The truck and the man slid backward, lingered in his rear-view mirror for a second, washed by his taillights, and were swallowed by darkness.

A few miles down the road, Robinson began to fall asleep at the wheel, blacking out in split-second dozes, nodding and blinking. He cursed, strained his eyes wide open and rolled his window down. Wind screamed through the crack. The air was muggy, sodden with coal smoke and chemical reeks, the miasma of the industrial nightmare that choked upper New Jersey,

Automatically, Robinson reached for the radio, switched it on, and began turning the selector-knob with one hand, groping blindly through the invisible world for something to keep him company. Static rasped at him. Almost all the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh stations were off the air now; they’d been hit hard down there. The last Chicago station had sputtered off the air at dusk, after an outbreak of fighting had been reported outside the studio. For a while, some of the announcers had been referring to “rebel forces,” but this had evidently been judged to be bad PR, because they were calling them “rioters” and “scattered anarchists” again.

For a moment he picked up a strong Boston station, broadcasting a placating speech by some official, but it faded in a burst of static and was slowly replaced by a Philadelphia station relaying emergency ham messages. There were no small local stations anymore. Television was probably out too, not that he missed it very much. He hadn’t seen a live broadcast or a documentary for months now, and even in Harrisburg, days before the final flareup, they’d stopped showing any newcasts at all and broadcast nothing but taped situation comedies and old 1920’s musicals. (The happy figures dancing in tails on top of pianos, unreal as delirium tremens in the flickering wavering white glow of the television’s eye, as tinny music echoed and canned laughter filled the room like the crying of mechanical birds. Outside, there was occasional gunfire…)

Finally he settled for a station that was playing uninterrupted classical music, mostly Mozart and Johann Strauss.

He drove on with automatic skill, listening to a bit of Dvorak that had somehow slipped in between Haydn and “The Blue Danube.” Absorbed in the music, his already fuzzy mind lulled by the steady rolling lap of asphalt slipping under his wheels, Robinson almost succeeded in forgetting—

A tiny red star appeared on the horizon.

Robinson gazed absently at it for a while before he noticed it was steadily growing larger, blinked at it for a moment more before he figured out what it was and the bottom dropped out of his stomach.

He cursed, soft and scared. The gears screamed, the car lurched, slowed. He pumped the brakes to cut his speed still more. A spotlight blinked on just under the red star, turned the night white, blinded him. He whispered an obscenity, feeling his stomach flatten and his thighs tighten in fear.

Robinson cut the engine and let the car roll slowly to a stop. The spotlight followed him, keeping its beam focused on his windshield. He squinted against the glare, blinking. His eyes watered, blurred, and the spotlight blossomed into a Star of David, radiating white lances of light. Robinson winced and looked down, trying to blink his eyes back into focus, not daring to raise a hand. The car sighed to a stop.

He sat motionless, hands locked on the wheel, listening to the shrill hissing and metallic clicks as his engine cooled. There was the sound of a car door slamming somewhere, an unintelligible shouted order, a brief reply. Robinson squinted up sideways, trying to see around the miniature nova that was the spotlight. Feet crunched through gravel. A figure approached the car, becoming a burly, indistinct silhouette in front of the windshield, a blob of dough in roughly human shape. Something glinted, a shaft of starlight twisting in the doughy hands, trying to escape. Robinson felt the pressure of eyes. He bit his lip and sat very still, blinking… .

The dough-figure grunted and half-turned back toward the spotlight, its outlines tumbling and bulging. “Okay,” it shouted in a dough-voice. A clang, and the spotlight dulled to a quarter of its former intensity, becoming a glazed orange eye. Detail and color washed back into the world, dappled by a dancing overlay of blue-white afterimages. The dough-figure resolved itself into a middle-aged police sergeant, dumpy, unshaven, graying. He held a heavy-gauge shotgun in his hands, and highlights blinked off and on along the barrel, making the blued steel seem to ripple. The muzzle was pointed loosely in the direction of Robinson’s throat.

Robinson risked a sly glance around, not moving his head. The red star was the slowly pulsing crashlight on the roof of a big police prowlcar parked across the road. A younger policeman (still rookie enough to care; spit-polished boots; see the light shimmer from the ebony toes) stood by the smoldering spotlight that was mounted near the junction of windshield and hood. He was trying to look grim and implacable, the big regulation revolver awkward in his hand.

Motion on the far side of the road. Robinson swiveled his eyes up, squinted, and then bit the inside of his lip. A mud-caked MARC jeep was parked halfway up the grassy embankment. There were three men in it. As he watched, the tall man in the passenger’s seat said something to the driver, swung his legs over the side and slid down the embankment on his heels in a tiny avalanche of dirt and gravel. The driver slipped his hands inside his field jacket for warmth and propped his elbows against the steering wheel, eyes slitted and bored. The third man, a grimy corporal, was sitting in the back of the jeep, manning a .50 caliber machinegun bolted to the vehicle. The corporal grinned at Robinson down the machinegun barrel, his hands fidgeting on the triggers.

The tall man emerged slowly from the shadow of the road shoulder, walked past the nervous rookie without looking at him and entered the pool of light. As he walked toward Robinson’s car, he slowly metamorphosed from a tall shadow into a MARC lieutenant in a glistening weatherproofed parka, hood thrown back. A brown leather patch on his shoulder read MOVEMENT AND REGIONAL CONTROL in frayed red capitals. He held a submachine gun slung under one arm.

The police sergeant glanced back as the lieutenant drew even with the hood. The muzzle of the shotgun didn’t waver from Robinson’s chest. “Looks okay,” he said. The lieutenant grunted, passed behind the sergeant, came up to the window on the driver’s side. He looked at Robinson for a second, expressionless, then unslung his submachine gun and held it in the crook of his right arm. His other hand reached out slowly and he tapped once on the window.

Robinson rolled the window down. The lieutenant peered in at him, pale blue eyes that were like windows opening on nothing. Robinson glanced once down the small, cramped muzzle of the machinegun, looked back up at the lieutenant’s thin, pinched lips, white, no blood in them. Robinson felt the flesh of his stomach crawl, the thick hair on his arms and legs stir and bristle painfully against his clothing. “Let me see your card,” the lieutenant said. His voice was clipped, precise. Slowly, slowly, Robinson slid his hand inside his rumpled sports jacket, carefully withdrew it and handed his identification and travel control visa to the lieutenant. The lieutenant took the papers, stepped back and examined them with one hand, holding the submachine gun trained on Robinson with the other. The pinched mouth of the automatic weapon hung only a few inches away, bobbing slightly, tracing a quarter-inch circle on Robinson’s chest.

Robinson worked his dry tongue against his lips and tried unsuccessfully to swallow. He looked from the coolly appraising eyes of the lieutenant to the doughy, tired frown of the sergeant, to the nervously belligerent glances of the rookie, to the indifferent stare of the jeep driver, to the hooded eyes and cruel grin of the corporal behind the .50 caliber. They were all looking at him. He was the center of the universe. The pulsing crashlight threw long, tangled shadows through the woods, the shadows licking out and then quickly snapping back again, like a yo-yo, pulse-flick, flick-pulse. On the northern horizon, a smoldering red glow stained the clouds, flaring and dimming, pulse-flick. That was Newark, burning.

The lieutenant stirred, impatiently trying to flip a tacky page of the travel visa with his free hand. He muttered, planted a boot on the side of Robinson’s hood, braced the submachine gun on his knee and used his teeth to help him open the sticky page. Robinson caught the rookie staring at the lieutenant’s big battered combat boot with prim disapproval, and started to laugh in spite of the hovering machinegun. He choked it down because it had a ragged hollow sound even inside his throat; it was hysterical laughter, and it filled his chest like crinkly dead leaves, like smoky moths. The lieutenant removed his foot and straightened up again. The boot made a dry sucking sound as it was pulled free, and left a blurred muddy footprint on the side of the hood. You son of a bitch, Robinson thought, suddenly and irrationally furious.

A nightbird went screeaaaa somewhere among the trees. A chilly wind came up, spattering the cars with gravel, a hollow metallic wind full of cinders and deserted train-yards, tasting of burnt umber. The wind flapped the pages of the travel visa, rumpled the fur on the lieutenant’s parka hood, plucked futilely at his close-cropped hair. The lieutenant continued to read with deliberation, holding the rippling pages down with his thumb. You son of a bitch, Robinson raged silently, choked with fear and anger. You sadistic bastard. The long silence had become heavy as rock. The crashlight flicked its red shadows across the lieutenant’s face, turning his eyes into shallow pools of blood and draining them, turning his cheeks into gaping deathhead sockets, filling them out again. He flipped pages mechanically, expressionless.

He suddenly snapped the visa closed.

Robinson jerked. The lieutenant stared at him for a smothering heartbeat, then handed the visa back. Robinson took it, trying not to snatch. “Why’re you traveling,” the lieutenant said quietly. The words tumbled clumsily out: business trip—no planes—had to get back—wife—(Better to say wife. Oh, Anna—) The lieutenant listened blankly, then turned and gestured to the rookie.

The rookie rushed forward, hurriedly checked the back seat, the trunk. Robinson heard him breathing and rustling in the back seat, the car swaying slightly as he moved. Robinson looked straight ahead and said nothing. The lieutenant was silent, holding his automatic weapon loosely in both hands. The old police sergeant fidgeted restlessly. “Nothing, sir,” the rookie said, climbing out. The lieutenant nodded, and the rookie returned smartly to the prowlcar. “Sounds okay, sir,” the sergeant said, shifting his weight with doughy impatience from one sore foot to another. He looked tired, and there was a network of blue veins on the side of his graying head. The lieutenant considered, then nodded reluctantly. “Uh-huh,” he said, slowly, then speeded up, became brisker, turned a tight parody of a smile on Robinson. “Sure. All right, mister, I guess you can go.”

Another pair of headlights bobbed over the close horizon behind.

The lieutenant’s smile dissolved. “Okay, mister,” he said, “you stay put. Don’t you do anything. Sarge, keep an eye on him.” He turned, strode toward the prowlcar. The headlights grew larger, bobbing. Robinson heard the lieutenant mutter something and the spotlight flicked on to full intensity again. This time it was aimed away from him, and he saw the beam stab out through the night, a solid column of light, and catch something, pinning it like a captured moth.

It was a big Volkswagen Microbus. Under the spotlight’s eye it looked grainy and unreal, a photograph with too much contrast.

The Microbus slowed, pulled to a stop near the shoulder across the road from Robinson. He could see two people in the front seat, squinting and holding up their hands against the glare. The lieutenant strolled over, investigated them from a few feet away, and then waved his hand. The spotlight clanged down to quarter intensity.

In the diffused orange glow, Robinson could just make out the bus’s passengers: a tall, thin man in a black turtleneck and a Nordic young woman with shoulder-length blond hair, wearing an orange shift. The lieutenant circled to the driver’s side and tapped on his window. Robinson could see the lieutenant’s mouth move, hardly opening, neat and precise. The thin man handed his papers over stolidly. The lieutenant began to examine them, flipping slowly through the pages.

Robinson shifted impatiently. He could feel the sweat slowly drying on his body, sticky and trickling under his arms, in the hollows of his knees, his crotch. His clothes stuck to his flesh.

The lieutenant gestured for the rookie to come over, paced backward until he was standing near the hood. The rookie trotted across the road, walked toward the rear of the vehicle and started to open the sliding side door. Robinson caught the quick nervous flicker of the thin man’s tongue against his teeth. The woman was looking calmly straight ahead. The thin man said something in a low joking tone to the lieutenant. The rookie slid the side door open, started to climb inside—

Something moved in the space between the back seat and the closed tailgate, throwing off a thick army blanket, rolling to its knees, scrambling up. Robinson caught a glimpse of dark skin, eyes startlingly white by contrast, nostrils flared in terror. The rookie staggered backward, mouth gaping, revolver swinging aimlessly. The thin man grimaced—a rictus, neck cording, lips riding back from teeth. He tried to slam the bus into gear.

A lance of fire split the darkness, the submachine gun yammering, bucking in the lieutenant’s hands. He swept the weapon steadily back and forth, expressionless. The bus’s windshield exploded. The man and woman jerked, bounced, bodies dancing grotesquely. The lieutenant continued to fire. The thin man arched backward, bending, bending, bending impossibly, face locked in rictus, and then slumped forward over the steering wheel. The woman was flung sideways against the car door. It gave and she toppled out backward, long hair floating in a tangled cloud, one hand flung out over her head, fingers wide, reaching, stretching out for something. She hit the pavement and lay half in, half out of the bus. Her long fingers twitched, closed, opened.

The dark figure at the back of the bus tore frantically at the tailgate, threw it open, scrambled out, tried to jump for the shoulder. From the embankment, the big .50 caliber opened up, blew the back of the bus’s roof off. Metal screamed and smoked. The black man was caught as he balanced on the tailgate, one foot lifted. The .50 pounded harshly, blew him almost in half, kicked his limp body six or seven feet down the road. The .50 continued to fire, kicking up geysers of asphalt. The rookie, screaming in inhuman excitement, was firing his revolver at the fallen figure.

The lieutenant waved his arm and everything stopped.

There was no noise or motion.

Echoes rolled slowly away.

Smoke dribbled from the muzzle of the lieutenant’s submachine gun.

In the unbelievable silence, you could hear somebody sobbing.

Robinson realized it was himself, ground his teeth together and tensed his stomach muscles to fight the vomit sloshing in his throat. His fingers ached and bled where he had locked them around the steering wheel; he could not get them loose. The wind streamed against his wet flesh.

The lieutenant walked around to the driver’s side of the Microbus, opened the door. He grabbed the man by the hair, yanked his head up. The gaunt face was relaxed, unlined, almost ascetically peaceful. The lieutenant let go, and the bloody head dropped.

Slowly the lieutenant walked back around the hood, paused, looked down at the woman for a second. She was sprawled half out of the bus, face up, one arm behind her. Her eyes were still open and staring. Her face was untouched; her body was a slowly spreading red horror from throat to crotch. The lieutenant watched her, gently stroking the machinegun barrel, face like polished marble. The bitter wind flapped her dress, bunched it around her waist. The lieutenant shrugged, moved to the rear of the vehicle. He nudged the black man sprawled across the center line, then turned away and walked briskly to the prowlcar. Above, the corporal grinned and began to reload his smoking .50. The jeep driver went back to sleep.

The rookie remained standing by the side of the bus, excitement gone, face ashen and sick, looking at the blue smoke that curled from his revolver, staring at his spit-polished boots, red clotting over ebony. The flashing crashlight turned the dead white faces red, flooding them with a mimic flush of life, draining it away, pulse-flick, flick-pulse.

The old sergeant turned toward Robinson, grimly clutching the shotgun, face drawn and strained, pale dough with hollow-socketed, yellowing eyes, looking suddenly twenty years older. “You’d better get out of here now, son,” he said gently. He shifted the shotgun, looked toward the smoldering bus, looked quickly away, looked back. The network of blue veins throbbed. He shook his head slowly, limped away hunch-shouldered, started the prowlcar and backed it off the road.

The lieutenant came up as Robinson was fumbling for the ignition switch. “Get the lead out of your ass,” the lieutenant said, and snapped a fresh clip into his submachine gun.

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