Chapter 6
Brian looked at Carl’s clean-shaven, well-rested face. He appeared to be in good shape, looking as if he’d been sleeping at night and eating regularly in the daytime. Moreover, he appeared to know it. His head was tilted slightly, with something of the look of superiority with which the son of a wealthy man might look at the sweaty child of a ditchdigger.
Beside Cardan, someone said, “Chief, there’s quite a roadblock up ahead. The cars are too close to get by, and they’re clear across the mall in the center. This gang here must have set it up so that no-one could rush them and get away.”
“Clear it out,” said Cardan. “Keep your eyes open, and use the chains. It may be like that setup we ran into the first time we stopped for fuel.”
“We’ll be careful.”
Cardan glanced at Brian. “It’s good to have you back.” He smiled suddenly. “Here’s someone else who feels the same way.”
Anne, her blond hair brushed and shining in the light of the gasoline lanterns, started to run to Brian, and caught herself at the last moment, a mixture of emotions struggling on her face.
“Oh, Brian,” she said at last, smiling happily, “I’m so glad you’re here!” She frowned. “But why did you—?”
Carl’s voice cut in. “We’ve found your father, Anne.”
Anne turned, to cry out, like a child, “Daddy!”
She ran to the elder Cermak, who, unnecessarily steadied by one of Cardan’s men, was coming toward them, his Springfield rifle gripped firmly in his right hand. Cermak smiled as he saw Anne, but his eyes narrowed intently when he looked at Carl.
Carl stood about six feet from Brian, a look of satisfaction on his face. A little louder than was necessary, Carl said, “Decide you couldn’t make it on your own, Brian?”
Through a layer of gathering weakness from the hundreds of miles covered on the bicycle, lack of sleep and food, and the two narrow escapes of the day, Brian became aware of an ugly sensation, deep down inside himself. He remembered Carl’s footsteps behind him, the blow on the back of the head. Out of the corner of his eye, Brian could see several of the men watching him and Carl.
Cermak had returned his daughter’s kiss, and now spoke briefly to her. She shook her head. Cermak spoke more forcibly, and then thrust her aside. He jerked open the bolt of his rifle; an empty cartridge flashed in the light as it flew out, then in one blur of motion Cermak stuffed a fresh clip into the magazine and slammed home the bolt. He watched Brian and Carl without expression.
Carl was looking down at Brian. “Afraid to speak?”
Brian was aware of a steady dull ache in his left arm, where he had landed when the bike overturned, a slow throb at the back of his neck, and a multitude of aches and stiffnesses, all felt through a haze of weariness. Something told Brian that his chance of beating Carl now was nonexistent. The only thing to do was to put off the fight till he had some rest. But how?
Carl’s eyes glinted. “You don’t look very good, Brian. You’d have done better to come with us in the first place.”
No one else said anything. But it became obvious to Brian, despite his weariness, that Carl was speaking for the benefit of the others.
Carl said, “I don’t like a guy that runs out. You’re here now, and I suppose we’ll have to take care of you, but I think you need a lesson.”
From several of the men came an approving murmur.
Carl stepped forward. There was a flash, a deafening roar, and the pungent smell of burned nitrocellulose. Something lightly ruffled Carl’s hair.
There was a dead silence for an instant after the shot, and then Carl very slowly turned his head.
Cermak handed his gun to his daughter, and grinned at Carl.
“Fight me, why don’t you?”
Carl blinked.
“Daddy!” cried Anne.
“No, no,” said Cermak, holding her back with one hand. “He’s tough. He and Brian go off together and only Carl comes back. Carl tells his story, and Brian isn’t there, so of course only one side gets told. Carl’s side. Then Carl rides along protected by everyone else, while Brian has to fight his way for hundreds of miles, on his own muscle. After he’s worn out, Big Carl shows up riding in a truck and he’s going to teach Brian a lesson for being so cowardly as to fight his way across hundreds of miles of territory, by himself, with an old man to lug on his back. This Carl is a big fellow. If someone else does something brave, that makes Carl a hero.”
There was a motionless stillness in which the hiss and roar of the gas lanterns sounded loud and clear, and all the men in sight were frowning at Carl and glancing in puzzlement from Carl to Brian to Anne’s father.
Brian kept his face from showing the grin he felt at Cermak’s sarcasm. The only flaw in the argument was that Carl, from what Brian had seen, was no coward. He would lie and misrepresent whenever it suited his advantage, but Brian had seen no sign of cowardice. The men who were with Carl must have had time to find this out by now.
“Oh,” said Carl, a look of relief crossing his face as he saw a way out. “I forgot he’s had time to fill you full of lies.”
He turned to face Brian, a look of genuine anger on his face. It was anger at the spot he found himself in. “You’d stoop to anything, wouldn’t you?” He glanced at Anne. “Take care of your father, Anne. He’s tired, and this rat has been pumping him full of lies. And keep that gun away from him. We can’t have anyone around who shoots at his friends.”
He glanced at Brian. “Don’t have much to say for yourself, do you?” He glanced to one side, saw that several men were holding the smiling Cermak, and immediately took one long step forward, reaching out a big hand and knocked loose the gun Brian had been absently holding since the trucks had shown up.
Brian still stood unmoving, the accumulated fatigue combining with the unfairness of the attack to create a feeling of unreality, as if he were watching someone else rather than experiencing it himself.
“This,” said Carl, “is for running out on me.” His open hand struck Brian jarringly across the side of the head. His other hand slapped Brian’s face in a stinging explosion from the other side. “And that’s for telling my girl’s father lies.”
Carl landed a lightning blow to the stomach that left Brian gasping, and then Carl had him by the cloth at the throat, holding him up as he said, “I don’t like to do it, Brian, but you’ve got to learn if you’re going with us. You don’t leave your friends to do all the work. And you don’t lie about it afterwards. You hear me?”
From somewhere to the side, Cermak’s voice reached them.
“You tell him, Carl hero. You’ve had the sleep.”
There was a murmur that might have meant anything, but Brian, out on his feet before Carl had ever touched him, felt Carl’s hand tighten and lift brutally.
For one blinding instant, Brian saw himself held like a rag doll while Carl taunted him, hoping for Brian to struggle a little, giving Carl further excuse to slap him around.
Brian was suddenly wide-awake. He let go a crushing blow to Carl’s jaw, and saw him stagger back. He caught up with him in three swift steps, yanked him upright, and struck him a blow that came up from the ground. An instant later, Brian’s open left hand lashed out twice, repaying the slaps in the face, then his right buried itself deep in Carl’s midsection, doubling Carl up as if he’d been hit with a telephone pole.
Carl was on the ground, his eyes glazed, and Brian was standing over him, his mind running back through the things Carl had said and done, aching for the justification to land one more blow, but vaguely aware that the accounts had been evened up and anything more would place the discredit on his side.
Then the anger was gone, and he was breathing hard, aware of a dizziness and a tiredness, of the pain in his left arm, and of aches, stiffnesses, sore muscles, and a throbbing head.
Men were crowded around and someone was shouting for water. Someone gripped Brian’s shoulder, and he turned to see Steve Cermak, grinning broadly.
“That punk has been filling Anne with lies.” He glanced at the prostrate Carl; a bucket of water was being emptied in his face. “I never saw anything so pretty in my life. Come on.”
They started toward the trucks, then Brian remembered the gun Carl had knocked from his hands, found it, carried the gun toward the truck that someone pointed out as a place where he and Cermak could sleep, and then he remembered the bicycles. With someone else carrying a gas lantern, they found the bikes, one smashed out of shape and the other perfectly usable, and put them in the truck. With these safely on board, they crawled into the roomy interior, and found places to settle down in the soft hay.
***
After a long, dreamless sleep, Brian stirred to the rumble of the truck. Daylight was seeping in around the door at the far end. But it was warm nestled in the soft hay, and Brian drifted off to sleep again. He woke the next time with someone gently shaking his shoulder. Light was streaming in at the open back of the truck, and Brian woke, stretched, winced at his swollen knuckles, and scrambled to his feet.
Smitty, clean-shaven, grinned at Brian.
“I let you sleep through breakfast, but I figured you’d want lunch. There’s a stream back in the trees to the right of the road if you want to wash up. The cook-truck has hot water, soap, and some mirrors for shaving. You can take your time. We’re broken down again.”
“What’s wrong?”
“The usual. Apparently when the binding of the electrons to the metal atoms was increased it wasn’t only the conduction of the electricity that suffered. Brightness and heat conductivity are off, too. The metal of the pistons and cylinders in the engines doesn’t get cooled as well as it should; it overheats, and just what goes on in there is hard to say, but we’ve had cracked blocks, pitting, spalling off of bits of metal, pistons stuck tight in the cylinders. I don’t know what it is this time, but we were due for it. We get a breakdown every few hundred miles. At least it didn’t happen at night.”
Brian followed Smitty past a number of bed rolls he hadn’t noticed the night before, and dropped out of the truck.
“Hard to work on at night?”
“Unless you’ve already cleaned out the place, you don’t know who’s going to take a pot shot at you. Moreover, if a truck stops all of a sudden, there’s a chance of two trucks slamming into each other. In the daytime, we run further apart.”
“At night, it’s dangerous to get separated?”
Smitty nodded. “The highway is bad enough, but when you go off it to get fuel, food, or anything else, all hell breaks loose. Either some bunch of thugs has already grabbed what you want, or else there’s a vigilance committee, citizens’ protective association, or something just as good, right there to see the thugs don’t grab the place. Either way, you’re an outsider, and they don’t want you. Then there’re setups like what you ran into last night. If you hadn’t set them off first, they’d have hit us later when we stopped to get the roadblock out of the way. They wait for somebody to rob a place like that shopping center, then they, in turn, ambush the robbers.”
“Nice,” said Brian ironically.
“Isn’t it? The trouble is, everybody has to eat.”
They were walking along past the trucks, and Smitty said, “Here’s the cook-truck. ’Morning, Barbara, Anne.”
Anne Cermak and Barbara Bowen smiled at Smitty and then at Brian. Brian was suddenly conscious of his dirty clothes and unshaven face. But he was also hungry. There was a large kettle of stew cooking slowly on a bottled-gas stove inside the truck, and a pile of bowls of unbreakable plastic, and a tray of stainless-steel spoons.
Brian took a bowl of stew off to one side, ate hungrily, then went off to the stream to wash up. He came back shaved, and by now the small, cursing crowd at the front of one of the trucks had subsided, the hood was down again, the women and children on the grass at the center of the road were going back to the trucks, and the men were coming out of the woods and back from up and down the road where they’d been serving as guards and lookouts.
Brian hunted up Cardan, who put him on one of the trucks as a guard. Anne’s father volunteered as the driver, but Anne herself was in another truck with Barbara Bowen.
The days passed pleasantly enough—by comparison with what it had been like when Brian and Cermak were traveling by bicycle—but Brian couldn’t help noticing that every day the going got tougher.
The cars were getting thicker along the roads, which meant many more obstacles to go around, or to get out of the way. The trucks were already carrying a number of cans of extra fuel, which they stopped to refill at every opportunity. But they were low on food, and as Cardan was determined to get more before they ran out, the result was a carefully planned raid on a shopping center. This took an entire day, and was immediately followed by an ambush worse than any they’d run into before.
Brian had looked forward to being with Anne, but they were in separate trucks while traveling, and when they were stopped there was a desperate need for guards and lookouts.
At every stop Cardan now had some of the men bolting tight more big oblongs of the galvanized iron roofing he’d loaded up with after the last raid on a shopping center, and which now, in several layers of thickness, served to armor the trucks against the fire of most light hand-weapons. The extra protection was needed, since they were now being fired on by people who apparently shot for fun as well as plunder. They were getting into a section like a suburb of hell. Cars and trucks were burnt out, the roads were strewn with broken bottles, barbed wire, and spike-studded boards; the ditches were dug into trench systems, and an explosion had knocked out a wide section of overpass. From all sides there was continuous firing, with leaping flames devouring the buildings in the background, and a pall of smoke blotting out what lay beyond. Cardan pulled back out of it, sent the steam car on a brief reconnaissance to the south, learned that it was no better that way, tried a wider detour, and ran into another mess. Before they were through, they’d gone a hundred miles out of their way, suffered painful wounds, and repaired half a dozen tires. It took the better part of a week to get back on the highway.
“Well,” said Smitty, studying a map, “I think that was Cleveland. One of these days, if we last long enough, we’ll hit Chicago. I’m not looking forward to it.”
Once again they were making good time. They were well stocked with provisions, and at every stop the men were strengthening the protection of the trucks. Now more of the rear tires were shielded, and metal disks were fitted to the front wheels. Small-caliber bullets striking from the side would do little damage unless very well aimed. “But,” as Cardan pointed out, “a few gasoline bombs heaved at us out of a ditch could end the whole thing.” He decided on a wide detour to avoid Chicago, at the same time staying well north of Indianapolis. By now, no city looked attractive to them.
Several days later, they seemed to be in the clear again, traveling along a wide, deserted road, weaving occasionally to pass the inevitable cars, when Brian, traveling this time in the steam car that raced in front of the trucks to see what was up ahead, saw a cloud of dust far ahead as they swooped over a low rise.
“Now,” said Brian, pointing out the dust cloud, “what do you suppose makes that?”
“Either a lot of animals,” said Cermak, frowning, “or a lot of people.”
Smitty, driving, said, “Whichever it is, that’s a sizable migration.”
He slowed the steam car. They studied the dust cloud for a moment, then they raced ahead for a closer look.
Cermak cleared his throat. “If that’s a migration, it’s got a leader. If he’s got any sense, he’ll have flank guards watching this road.”
Smitty slowed to a stop. Ahead and to either side was a gentle rise covered on the left with small trees now starting to leaf out. Most of the rest of the land they’d passed was open farm country, the fields already plowed and ready to be planted by the tractors that no longer ran.
Smitty swung the car around and they reported back to Cardan, who nodded thoughtfully. “We’ll keep going, but stop short of that place. From what you say, they’re headed south, and we’re going west. We’ll wait till the column, whatever it is, goes past.”
A little while later they were there, the head of the dust cloud now perceptibly further to the south. But the tail of the cloud was still out of sight to the north.
“If,” Smitty suggested, “we could get through those woods beside the road, we could look down on whatever it is that’s going past on the other side.”
“Go ahead,” said Cardan. “But be careful. This is a bad setup, and there’s no telling what you may run into.”
Smitty, Brian and Steve Cermak walked up into the woods. It was a cool day, but the ground was soft underfoot, and the small leaves just coming out gave the forest a misty, delicate appearance. The sky overhead was a clear blue, with only a few high clouds. There was a light breeze, and it carried the sound of voices.
Then Brian was near the edge of a low steep bank, looking down through the trees, seeing, on a wide dirt road below, a column of men.
Brian glanced back over his shoulders to where Smitty and Cermak, further back in amongst the trees, covered him from either side.
As he turned to look back, he saw, about forty feet away, three men standing in the shadow of a tall evergreen. They were watching him, their guns not quite aimed at him, but requiring only a slight shift to be centered on him. One of them called out in a low voice, “What you doing, man?”
“Looking,” said Brian, all his senses alert.
“You alone?”
“My friends are covering me.”
“We don’t see them.”
“They’d be careless if you did.”
“What you planning?”
“We wanted to go past. But we can wait.”
“Which way you headed?”
“West.”
“And you’re sure your friends have got us covered?” the man asked slyly.
“Make a false move, and you’ll find out,” Brian said amiably.
“How many of them?” the man wanted to know.
“Only a dozen,” said Brian, “but all good shots.”
The man hesitated, his gun hand itching to swing his weapon around. For a moment there was a deathly silence as uncertainty plagued the man. Abruptly he relaxed, grinned from ear to ear, let out a bellow of a laugh, and commented, “I believe you.”
Almost nonchalantly, he motioned to his companions and they took off to join their column. Brian heaved a deep sigh of relief and walked back to where Smitty and Cermak were waiting.
“What was all that about?” asked Cermak.
“I tried a bluff,” Brian said. “And it worked. But for a moment there it was touch and go.” He wiped the perspiration off his forehead.
Their release from extreme tension made them feel almost hilarious, and Smitty and Cermak congratulated Brian on his handling of the situation.
“Well,” said Brian, “I couldn’t have pulled it off if you two weren’t there to back me up. How were they to know whether there were two of you or a dozen?”
Sudden gunfire erupted in the direction where they had left the trucks. Obviously, they weren’t in the clear yet.
As one, they moved through the woods toward the firing.
Long before they got back, the gunfire had ended.