Chapter 4
Brian came to to find Anne’s father bathing his face with a cold wet towel. As the older man’s tough, workworn face showed concern, Brian sat up dizzily and felt the large tender bump at the back of his head. He had a violent headache, but it seemed to be something he could get over. Then he thought of the time and glanced at his watch. The crystal and face of the watch were smashed.
Steve Cermak noticed Brian’s gesture and turned to the kitchen clock on the shelf near the stove. “Twenty-five after two,” he said. “What happened?”
Brian told him. Cermak shook his head sorrowfully. “I was out for groceries. I thought of going into town after Anne, but on foot it’s a long walk, and I was afraid I’d go in one way while she came out another way. Then she’d be worried and go looking for me. I went upstairs and stretched out for a nap; I woke up a few moments ago, certain I had heard a moan. That’s when I came down and found you.”
“Yeah, thanks to good old Carl.” Brian was reminded that because of his colleague’s double-cross, he was now pressed for time. “Listen, I’ll have to go ahead on the bicycle and get them to send a truck for you.” Brian got to his feet, wincing at the furious headache, and went out to get the bicycle he’d left leaned against the porch steps. Anne’s father followed, picking up an oil lantern from the kitchen table.
The bicycle wasn’t by the porch steps.
They descended the steps, the lantern casting long swinging shadows on the frost that whitened the lawn and crunched stiffly underfoot. They looked briefly under the porch and behind a nearby hedge, then Cermak said, “While we look, time passes.”
“Yes,” said Brian, “we’ll have to make it on foot.”
Cermak went inside and came out carrying two jackets. He tossed one to Brian. “We’re about the same size.”
“Thanks.”
Cermak blew out the lantern and shut the door. They slid down a low bank in front of the house and walked along the road.
Brian said, “We’ve got a long walk ahead of us—and not too much time to do it in. I’m afraid we’ll have to run—”
“Young man, don’t you worry about me. If you think we need to run, let’s run.”
They alternated running and walking down the road, their frosty breath drifting slowly up in the cold air that chilled their faces and made Brian’s throat feel raw. Every step he took made his head throb, and the muscles of his thighs, because of the race with Carl, rebelled against further activity. It occurred to Brian that the idea of the race might not have been a spontaneous one. Perhaps Carl had already been planning to leave Brian behind, to be swallowed up in the collapse of civilization, while he, Carl, got away to make a fresh start with Anne. Brian remembered Carl saying, “I always get what I want. By hook or by crook, I win.”
They rounded a bend in the road. The smell of smoke was suddenly strong in Brian’s nostrils. There was the pressure of a hand at his arm.
“Wait,” said Anne’s father. “What’s this?”
Ahead of them was a downhill slope, at the bottom of which were two burning houses, facing each other across the road. A little knot of people was struggling in the road, and to the right, a lone woman was sobbing by a pile of furniture near the curb, where an old car was parked.
It seemed clear to Brian that here was the miserable end of somebody’s hopes, but all he felt was exasperation at the thought that their way might be blocked.
“Maybe we can run past them when we get close.”
“Okay.”
They walked downhill, and when they came near the little knot of struggling people, Brian and Cermak started to race past, well to one side.
As they came abreast, a girl’s voice cried, “Help! Oh, help!”
Brian had a brief glimpse of a girl’s face in the glare of the fire, her eyes wide with terror. Then she was slammed back against the car, and the only sound was the roar and crackle of the flames. One of the men rocked the girl’s head to one side with an open-handed slap. The other grabbed the cloth of her jacket.
Cermak and Brian whirled at the same time. Cermak shot his right arm around the neck of the nearer of the two men, yanked him back, getting his left arm around the man’s waist. There was a brief pinwheeling motion against the glare of the fire, and the second man’s hand shot forward, a glint of steel sparkling momentarily.
Brian slammed the knife-hand aside, pivoted on his heel, and smashed his antagonist on the point of the chin. There was a grunt as the man’s head snapped back and he slammed against the fender of the car, off balance, near Cermak. Cermak promptly sank a terrific left-handed blow in the knife-man’s midsection and the fight was all over.
The dark-haired girl, still wide-eyed, trembled with relief. Brian said, “Do you live here?”
“No, I was just passing through.”
“Which way are you going?”
She pointed down the road toward the city.
“Then you’d better stick with us, if you can.” Brian picked up the knife and handed it to her. “Keep this. You may need it. You close it like this, and press this stud to open it.”
“I don’t know how to thank—”
“Don’t. Let’s get out of here. We’re in a hurry.” Brian spoke more sharply than he’d intended. He wanted to help the girl, but the momentary delay could already have made them late at the rendezvous. A few minutes’ polite talk could cost them a two-thousand-mile hike.
A few moments later Brian and the older man were going down the road, alternately running and walking, the girl coming along behind them, when abruptly Cermak stopped.
“Oh-oh,” he murmured. “Wait.”
Brian stopped. Ahead of them, from a peculiarly dark place where a row of tall hemlocks cast their shadows across the moonlit road, came a grunting, struggling noise, and Brian could make out the dim outlines of a group of men, some moving around among the trees, others standing around watching two of them fight.
Cermak murmured, “Better go around this,” and they made their way off to the side, guiding the girl by the arm, around to the rear of the houses. Then they were back on the road again, but now a cloud covered the moon, making their progress slower. Here the girl thanked them profusely and disappeared up an intersecting road.
Brian and Cermak were now in a more settled part of town. Encounters with people became more frequent; the roads were more often blocked with cars, and once Brian took a bad fall from a child’s roller skate lying on the sidewalk in the dark. When they finally reached the corner of Fourteenth Street and Railroad Avenue, the trucks were gone.
By then, the sky over the city was lit with a red glow. Off to the east, it was just starting to get light.
Anne’s father, studying a layer of thin mud at the corner where a large puddle had partly dried up, said, “They’ve been here, Brian. Even in this light, you can see the marks of big truck tires.”
Brian looked around, thinking that Cardan might have left some sign for anyone who reached the spot late. Then he saw the paper tacked to the telephone pole. In the poor light, it took Brian at moment to read it:
Supplies
At R. E.
Anne’s father said, “Could we catch up to them at another place in town?”
“I’m afraid not. We’ll have to get some supplies, and hope they’re held up on the road.”
They started out through the city, detouring large groups of people and narrow places, but having to scare off occasional individuals and small groups which made menacing gestures, took a closer look, and generally moved on quickly. By now, their clothes had been torn and dirtied in a number of scuffles. Anne’s father had picked up a short length of black-painted pipe after one of those fights, and he carried it jutting forward so that in the poor light it looked like the end of a sawed-off shotgun. Brian, after falling over the child’s roller skate, had gotten up only to have a bat turn under his foot. This was small, but solid, and Brian had taken it along with him. Brian didn’t know how he looked himself, but the dirtied face of Anne’s father, lit by the red glow and with eyes in shadow, was not one to encourage troublemakers.
They were crossing the bridge over the river when Brian suddenly thought how calmly Cermak was taking it all. “I thought all this would be a terrible blow to you.”
“So did I. Why, did Anne say something to you?”
“She said you foresaw it.”
Cermak was quiet a moment, studying a car stalled just ahead. He shifted his length of pipe to cover it, and Brian dropped back a little, as if to give a clear field of fire.
Nothing moved in the car as they went past, but afterwards Brian thought he heard a very faint creak of the springs. They both stiffened and turned. After a time they moved in closer. The car was deserted.
Cermak grunted. “What a stupid business this is. You get to suspect your own shadow.” He clucked disapprovingly. “And people going around robbing others. For what? What does money mean now?” He glanced ahead, where all was clear to the bridge.
“Yes,” he said, going back to the question Brian had asked him. “I did foresee it. But it’s no credit to me. I just had a dream. I saw the lights go out, and the cars stop, and people rush out shouting, ‘What’s happened to the power?’ I could see the whole thing, and when I woke up, I was near to being crazy. All my life I’ve worked underground, envying people who worked in the sunlight. Someone with more brains or better luck could have got out of the spot I was in. Until I was almost thirty, I never woke up to the fact that, first off, I was in the wrong part of the country, trying to get work where too many were out of a job. Then I had sense enough to get out of there. Twenty-nine years it took for this to dawn on me.
“All my life, I’ve been that way. Thrifty and hard-working, but stupid. The trouble is, it’s not how hard you work that they pay you for, it’s what you accomplish. A man could chip rock all his life with a sledge hammer, ten hours a day, and get less done in his whole life than another man could do in half an hour with a few sticks of dynamite. Which man deserves the more money? Another ten years it took me to see that. I was stupid, because I thought I could get ahead on hard work and always putting my money away, but finally it came to me a man has got to think, too. By then, I was in the rut it took me all those years to dig while I was being smart, working hard for pennies and putting the pennies in the savings bank. Finally it dawned on me that hard work was good, but you had to have hard thought, too. By this time it was a little late for me, but I could still help Anne. And it worked out. She had a good job, with good people. She could hold her head up. But a man still needs to work.”
They crossed the street. No one bothered them.
Anne’s father said, “It’s hard to waste most of your life, finally see what’s wrong, help your daughter to do things right, have things finally start to go right, and just then have everything smashed. I was almost ready to do away with myself this morning, but it dawned on me that that was wrong. Why do that when maybe my heart will finish me anyway? Besides, this awful thing at least has made people equal again. No one is going to be asking me how many grades I went in school. All those paper requirements don’t mean a thing any more. I’m not happy about this mess, but somehow I feel useful again.”
They went on in silence till they reached the Research East building. They climbed the stairs wearily to the fourth floor, found food, clothing, blankets, canteens, several .30-06 Springfield rifles, a box containing bandoliers of ammunition, and a map showing the route Cardan intended to follow. Brian copied the map, he and Cermak fell into exhausted sleep, and then, somewhat rested, they each took a canteen, rifle, a hundred and twenty rounds of ammunition, and as many supplies as they could pack on their backs, and went cautiously down to the street.
“Where now?” said Cermak. “Two thousand miles is a long trip on foot.”
“Down the street and several blocks to the left, there’s a bicycle shop. If Cardan gets held up getting fuel, or runs into a jam of cars and trucks, we may catch up yet.”
They made their way to the shop, saw no bicycles in sight, but found several cartons containing partly assembled bikes. Half an hour later they had assembled two of them and were out of the city and on the highway. No one stopped them. Apparently, after the nightmarish day and night that had gone before, the city had fallen into a stupor of exhaustion. Brian was grateful that they wouldn’t be there when it woke up.
Then he thought of Carl, riding comfortably down the road ahead.
A murderous anger gripped Brian, and he settled down to a steady, mile-eating pace.