III
Denver's skies had seen little of smog for more than a century, since the orbiting power stations had written finish to the age of fossil fuels. Now, though, standing on the roof garden, David Sebastion could smell foulness, the stench of putrefaction. Even at fifteen stories and with a fair breeze, he thought with dismay. Leaning against the polished, pseudo-granite balustrade, he looked out and down. The city stretched in every direction—groves and lines and arcs of leafy trees and square miles of grass—a pattern of "villages," tall buildings arranged in separated circles and ovals. David was a floral arranger, sensitive and alert to patterns, colors, and contrasts, but now his eyes saw without seeing.
For a week he'd holed up, waiting to die. The first morning of the fires and the dying had been spiced with the thrill of fear, and they'd been swamped with orders at the flower shop. But they'd kept the tridee on, tuned to a news channel. Then Rodney had thrown up, and a minute later had gone berserk, running around with the sharp knife he used to cut stems with, crashing into things while people screamed and scurried and bled. A uniformed security woman had stunned him as he'd run into the lobby; no doubt he'd died within minutes. Then excitement had hardened to dread, and Marylee had gone home, leaving him to handle the shop alone.
After work that day, he'd gone straight upstairs, to find Helena in a daze, almost catatonic, and little Trissy shut in the bathroom, dead. It had been up to him to call the police and have the body removed. They'd taken more than an hour to get there, and then they hadn't been policemen, but two men in the coveralls of the Sanitation Department, looking drawn and haggard. The Sanitation Department! It had seemed to him terribly insensitive.
The next morning he'd taken Vincy down to daycare; Helena had been too distraught to look after him. David had been the only employee at the flower shop that day, but he hadn't had many orders to take care of. When he'd stopped at daycare afterward to get Vincy, a policeman was guarding the door, and the place reeked with smoke. Some of the children had been taken away by the police, some by ambulances, and others by parents.
Upstairs he'd called the police station, but no one there knew anything about a Vincent Sebastion. The officer who'd answered said thousands of children had been hauled from schools and daycare centers to sports arenas, and there'd been no chance to take names. He might check with Kiowa Arena; that seemed likeliest for a child from Cherry Village.
He'd called Kiowa then. The woman who'd answered sounded weirdly calm. They had several hundred children there, she told him, but she had no idea what their names were. Some were in shock, she said, some were hysterical, and some were dead. After 1430, any who'd been brought in had been sent elsewhere, to neighborhoods less hard hit. If he'd care to come down, they'd be happy to have his help; several of their adults had died, and she'd had a twinge of headache herself a minute earlier.
David hadn't gone. Instead he'd poured himself a drink, and when he'd finished that one, poured another. And some more after that.
Sometime that night, Helena had gone into the bathroom and cut her throat.
Cut her throat! He remembered finding her there. With her usual tidiness, she'd done it in the shower with the water on. Just a glimpse had been too much for him; he'd fled howling. Building services, shorthanded from deaths of its own and overwhelmed by requests, had not responded; Mr. Contreras across the hall had carried her corpse away for him. Tears flowing, David weakly kicked the massive planter, and as if in response, the automatic sprinklers came on, bathing the plants with mist. She might have lived, like me! We might still be together!
He felt pretty sure now that he was immune to the plague, unless the cold he'd had these last few days was a weak expression of it. If he'd been going to die, it would have happened already. Two days earlier, from the air-conditioned shelter of the apartment, he'd tried phoning everyone he knew, then started through the directory beginning with Aaberg. After about fifty calls—down to Abbot, Norman—he'd given up; there'd been no answer from other than servos. Even the tridee had been blank for three days—no, four. The same day when, from there on the roof, he'd heard the last siren, and seen a police van crash into the athletic field.
He looked down at the oval below, sights registering again, seeing benches and swings quiet in the greenness where bodies lay rotting. He wanted to go out and hunt for people—there had to be someone alive besides himself—but he couldn't bring himself to go out there with the bodies.
His eyes pinched shut, but no tears squeezed between his lids; he'd cried himself out days ago. He leaned against the balustrade, utterly forlorn and hopeless. If she just hadn't killed herself! Am I the only one? Am I all that's left?
Almost as if in answer, he heard the voice, and opening his eyes, leaned over the balustrade to look downward, down at the grassy oval fifteen stories below. Down at the small figure walking slowly across the mall. Without the laughter and shouting of playing children, the soft but neverending sound of traffic overhead, he could hear her calling. He shouted once—he'd never shouted before in all his adult life—then turned and ran to the elevators. In less than three minutes they were looking embarrassedly at one another across twenty meters of lawn and pavement, and he was glad he hadn't stopped shaving. She burst into tears and ran to him, this woman he'd never seen before, embracing him so strongly, he thought she'd spring his ribs.
* * *
Marie moved in with him. Her husband had set fire to their apartment, and it was smelly and dirty. At first they stayed inside, where they didn't have to see things, and the air-conditioning lessened the stench. They'd sleep late, and after showering and dressing, ate sparingly in order to postpone the inevitable trip to the dispensall on the ground floor. They read a lot, things that he and Helena had had around. David started to grow a Vandyke, explaining that the patriarch of the new human race should be bearded. He said it to be funny, then realized that he really felt that way.
They'd intended to mark off each day on the calendar so they wouldn't lose track of the date, but got confused. He'd marked off a day, and was pretty sure she'd marked off the next date that same day. They'd had their first bad argument over that. On their ninth day together, or maybe their seventh or eighth, hunger forced them down to the dispensall.
The first part wasn't as bad as he'd feared. Mr. Contreras still lay in the hallway, his face nearly black, but he'd deflated a lot, and the smell wasn't as bad as when they'd seen him last. Mold was spreading on his clothes. David wished there was someone to drag Mr. Contreras away.
Riding down in the elevator capsule, it occurred to him that he'd always intended to read Les Miserables. On paper. So they decided to walk across the mall to the library before getting groceries. His first few steps outside were hesitant, then he straightened and walked almost briskly. He hadn't realized how good it would feel to get outdoors again. Unlike Mr. Contreras, the bodies outside had collapsed inside their light summer clothes. They seemed to be mostly bones now, bones and skin and hair, with very little smell. He decided the flies must have made the difference. Inside the building, the insect repellent field had protected what had been Mr. Contreras.
It was a clear, pleasant morning, but the flowerbeds disturbed him. Not the lawn. Lawns were of grass varieties that didn't need mowing. But in some of the flowerbeds the plants had gone to seed and needed replacing, and weeds were growing up through them, and tree seedlings. Hybrid elms, he decided; they produced such quantities of seed each spring.
The library was the size of a small shop, and it was empty. There wasn't even a body inside. He spoke carefully into one of the order phones, the way he'd heard the librarian do it: "Hard copy, Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo." He pronounced the French noun like the English adjective. Marie had taken a paper magazine from a rack, and they sat down to wait. After five or six minutes a bell rang, and it occurred to him that there was no one to wait on him. Self-consciously he put his ID away, walked behind the counter to the receiver door, and got his book. The right one; book center servos were not fastidious about pronunciation.
Crossing the mall again, they'd stopped by a splashing fountain to watch the goldfish. He'd been afraid they might have starved, but they seemed all right. He was sitting with Marie, quietly watching, when he heard the distant voice. A heavyset man was walking across the mall in their general direction, and even at a hundred meters there was something frightening about him. Without saying a word, they lowered themselves behind the fountain.
At that, the man passed so near that David wondered they weren't seen. Passed them like a poorly-adjusted automaton, his unshaven face working, and from his mouth curses flowed: loud obscenities and ugliness, and horrible threats delivered toward God. He brandished what David assumed to be a tool, a wrench of some sort—David wasn't familiar with tools—slapping it against the palm of his left hand. When he'd passed on out of sight, they'd hurried into their building and upstairs without stopping at the dispensall. Timidly, David went out again later, for groceries.
They spent the summer and autumn following a series of routines. For a while after they'd seen "that man," they'd stayed in and drank a lot, going down to the lounge on the ground floor every two or three days to replenish their supply. Then there was a period when they took daily walks. That was after it occurred to David to snoop the office of building security, where he found and appropriated two stunners. They stayed near their own village though, fearing to get lost from it.
Also they painted; like most people, they'd had considerable instruction in the arts. Marie painted faces mostly, with painstaking care, and sometimes cried, but David preferred to paint scenery and flowers. He'd set the easels up in front of the ClearWall and when they wanted to paint, pressed the transparence switch to let the daylight in.
They had an unusually long Indian summer, but in mid-November the weather turned cloudy and wet. For two days, mist and drizzle blew against the ClearWall, punctuated now and then with spatters of rain. David was at his easel, trying to capture the variations of gray in the sky, when Marie spoke.
"I'm hungry," she said.
Since she's been pregnant, she's always hungry, David thought, and she's getting fat. He squinted critically at his board. "Get something to eat then."
"I want milk and fried eggs and bacon. And buttered toast. Real, not processed!"
He thinned his lips. The dispensall hadn't had "real" milk or eggs or bread for months, and it was unlikely there'd be bacon. There was a seemingly endless supply of processed foods of numerous kinds, but . . ." There isn't anything real," he said. "Not any more. You'll have to try something else."
"But I don't want something else! Real food's better when you're growing a baby!"
He stood frustrated, helpless. As if a fetus could distinguish between, say, riboflavine or lysine in fresh milk and that in a powdered drink. Marie read his expression and changed her approach. "Let's try another village," she said. "Maybe they'll have real food."
He didn't think so. He suspected that all the villages were serviced by the same master servo, though he wasn't certain. He d never worried about things like that. "It's raining," he pointed out.
"Lots of people like to walk in the rain. They do it for pleasure. And we haven't walked for days now."
He didn't feel like correcting her tenses, and a walk might do them good. "I'll get slickers," he said nodding. He got Helena's for her, put on his own, and they left. There was no "real food" in Apple Village either though, and he told her what he suspected about a master servo.
He agreed to try one more; that's how they found the asthmatic. He was in front of the pharmacy section, kneeling on the floor with his head and arms resting on the arm of a partly burned-out sofa. They stood staring at him, and at first they thought he didn't know they were there, even though they'd been talking when they came in. David's hand slipped into a pocket and came back out with his stunner, just in case.
They could hear the man's labored breathing, a gasping inhalation followed by a short gusty exhalation, almost a grunt. Then slowly, laboriously, leaning his hands on the sofa arm, he pushed himself upright while they stared at the thin unfolding body. He turned to them.
"Asthma," he whispered. "And my prescription's . . . run out . . . I can't . . . get any more . . . pills. Not here . . . not anywhere." The words jerked out slowly a couple at a time, separated by short painful breaths. "I put . . . my prescription . . . card . . . in the slot . . . but . . . nothing comes out."
Marie stepped hesitantly to the man, almost touching him with her hand. "Can we do anything?"
For the first time, David felt real love for her.
The man shook his head slowly, twice, as if that was all he had the strength for. Then, surprisingly, he chuckled slightly. "Make . . . the sun . . . come out."
The attempt at humor touched David as much as the evident suffering. He'd seldom seen a truly sick person before, not even during the Death. People hadn't really gotten sick then. They'd just sort of frenzied and died. "Why don't you come with us to our place," he heard himself saying. "At least you'll be with people, and we can take care of you."
They left together. Wet white flakes were coming down with the rain now. The asthmatic shuffled slowly, coughing occasionally in short weak spasms that sometimes ended with retching. He stopped often to lean on dripping trees, and it took a long time to get to their apartment. There David learned that the asthmatic couldn't lie down—not and breathe. He sat slumped while they talked. Now and then he said something, just enough to show he was listening, and that he appreciated being with them. David didn't turn on the ClearWall, but before it got dark he peered between the curtains on the balcony door. The air swirled with snowflakes. They went to bed early, closing their bedroom door so they wouldn't hear their guest's effortful breathing.
When they got up the next morning, he was gone. They checked the bathroom and hall, and after they'd gotten dressed they rode a capsule down to the lobby, where they found him face down in his own blood. It seemed to David he must have had a knife, or taken one from their kitchen, and he wondered that the man had had the physical strength to kill himself.
"Why did he do it?" Marie asked.
David looked at her, surprised. "You heard what he sounded like."
"I didn't mean why did he kill himself. I meant, why did he come down here to the lobby to do it? It must have been hard, getting down here without help."
David stared at the crumpled body. "I guess—I guess he didn't want to be any trouble to us."
* * *
The rest of the day they drank. They were in reasonable practice, so they actually got to bed instead of passing out on the floor. It was cold when David woke. When he sat up, pain hit him in the forehead, deep and high. For a heart-stopping moment he was afraid the plague was claiming him after all, but then he recognized his hangover for what it was.
Slowly and carefully he swung his legs out of bed, hoping he wouldn't throw up. The room was chilly, too. Marie must have turned the thermostat down, he thought irritably. And the night light was out; the room was lit only by moonlight filtering through the bedroom blinds. He stood, frowning back the pain. Moonlight. The storm must be over, he told himself, and shuffled to the bathroom.
The bathroom light switch didn't work, and for a moment he stood perplexed. Then anxiety struck. He tried the bedroom light; it didn't work either. Hurriedly, forgetting his hangover, he strode through the apartment to the balcony doors and opened them.
The -20° cold would have been shocking, except that his mind was wholly held by what he saw. The night was beautiful, and it laid icy hands on his heart. There was not a light anywhere except in the sky, the cold sky swept clear of clouds. As if Edison and Tesla had never been born. David had never seen virgin sky before. There'd always been window lights, and city glow, and the lights of traffic overhead. Now there was only the moon and stars, and the glow of moonlit snow.
And waiting death, come to gather the leavings of his Plague. David was aware of Marie looking past his shoulder. "What is it?" she whispered.
"The power's gone," he said simply, "and the lights and the heat. And the dispensall—the food. And I don't know what we're going to do."