Lost, wandering hunters—mavericks of one kind or another—men like Joe Custis, but without his resources. Half- bandit, but unorganized and forever unorganizable. Rogue males, more lost than anything else that roamed the plains, for the bandits at least had their organization, and the independent towns had safety along with their inbreeding.
But the men on the plains would die, and their children would be few, and dying. And the bandits couldn’t go on forever. There was no weapon of their own manufacture that could stand up to a farmer’s shotgun. And the independent farmer would die, buried in the weakling seed he spawned, afraid to reach out across the miles of empty grass toward where other independent farmers would give him short welcome, scratching the ground with deteriorating tools, trying to raise food here on the prairie where there were no smelters—not even any hardwood trees—to give him implements.
And the cities—. It was different, elsewhere. So the Berendtsen legend said of the tightly packed East where an army could march from one city to another and establish one Law. And so also said the persistent legends of some kind of good living down in the agricultural southern plains.
But in the East the cities could reach out and control the farmlands—could send their citizens out to grow food, or could trade machinery to the farmer and so, gradually, make one society.
Out here, it couldn’t be done. Or it hadn’t been done, either Berendtsen’s way or in whatever way the middle South was doing it. The first wave of refugees out of Chicago after the plague had set the pattern, and nothing had broken it. Without readily available fuel, or replacement parts for their machinery, and without harvesting and planting crews, the surviving farmers had soon learned to shoot on sight. It was either that or be robbed and then starve, for farming was back to the point where one man and his family could grow as much food as would feed one man and his family.
Some city refugees had organized into bandit groups and managed to get along, killing and robbing— kidnapping women; no man wants to die without leaving sons.
Most city refugees—those who lived—went back into the cities. There was ten times as much room as they needed. But even with all the warehouses in a city, there was not ten times as much food.
The cities scraped along. Momentary governments subjugated bits of farmland here and there. Measures of one kind and another enforced various kinds of rationing and decreed various sources of protein; there were rat farms in Chicago, and other things.
One way or the other, Chicago scraped along. But it dreamed of legends.
Custis stared at the mountains. He wondered if he would ever be coming back this way again. And how many men before him, he wondered, had set out on the road toward Berendtsen?
Seven republics in Chicago. Bandits in the mountains, raiding across the plains, forcing the surviving farmers into a permanent state of siege.
Night was falling. In some parts of the world, the sun rode high in the sky, or the first ripples of morning lapped the fabric of the stars. But here, now, night was falling, and Joe Custis searched the edges of his world.
CHAPTER ONE
I
Matthew Garvin was a young, heavy-boned man who had not yet filled out to his mature frame. His grip on his automatic shotgun was not too sure. But he had been picking his way through the New York City streets for two days, skirting the litter and other obstructions left by the plague, and the shotgun made him feel a great deal more comfortable—for all that he still half-expected a New York City policeman to step out from behind vie of the slewed, abandoned cars, or from one of the barricaded doorways, and arrest him for violating the Sullivan Act.
His picture of the world’s condition was fragmentary. Most of it was gleaned from remembered snatches of the increasingly sporadic news over the TV. And he had heard those only while lying in delirium, on a cot beside the room where his dying father kept death watch over the other members of his family. He had not truly come back to alertness until well after his father was dead and the TV was inoperative, though it was still switched on.
All he could remember his father telling him, in all those days. was “If you live, don’t forget to go armed.” He was certain, now, that his father, probably delerious himself, had repeated it over and over, clutching his arm urgently and slurring the words, the way a man will when his rationality tries to force a message out through an almost complete loss of control.
And when he had finally wakened, and known he was going to live, Matthew Garvin had found the Browning lying on the floor beside his cot, together with a box of shells still redolent of woodsmoke and old cleaning solvent. His father’s old hunting knapsack had been there, too, stocked with canned food, waterproof matches, a flashlight, a compass, and a hunting knife, almost as if Matthew and he had been going to leave for the North Woods together. They had been doing that every deer season for the past four years. But this time it was his father’s gear that Matthew would be carrying; and it was the big Browning, instead of the rifle.
He had not questioned his father’s judgment. He had strapped the knapsack on, and taken the shotgun, and then he had left the apartment—he could not have stayed, though he did his best to leave his family in some semblance of decent repose.
At first, he had not quite known what he was going to do. Looking out the window, he could see nothing moving on the streets. A pall of gray mist hung over Manhattan—part fog, part smoke, from where something was burning and had not been put out. He had gone and taken the heavy binoculars from his father’s closet and studied the two rivers. They were almost clear of floating debris of various kinds, and so he assumed the great wave of dying was over—those who still lived, would live. He had probably been one of the last to be sick.
The streets and the waterfronts were a jumble of abandoned and wrecked equipment—cars, trucks, boats, barges—much as he had last seen them, on the night when he had realized he, too, was at last growing feverish and dry-mouthed. That had been after the government had abandoned the continual effort to keep the streets clear and people in their homes.
Here and there, some of the main avenues had been opened, with cars and buses towed out of the way, lying as they had been dropped on the sidewalks. He could see one crane—a Metropolitan Transit Authority company emergency truck—where it had stopped, with a bright blue sports car still dangling from the tow hook. So there had not been time after he fell ill for anything to litter up the opened streets again.
He tried the radio—he had read enough novels of universal disaster to know nothing would come of it, and for a while he had been undecided, but his human nature had won out—and there had been nothing. He listened for the hum he associated with the phrase “carrier wave,” and did not hear that, either. He looked down at the baseboard, and saw that someone—probably his father—had ripped the line cord out of the wall so savagely that the bared ends of the wire dangled on the floor while the gutted plug remained in the socket.
But he had not repaired it. The dead TV was good enough—in the end, he remembered, the final government announcement had been quite explicit—the President’s twanging, measured voice had labored from phrase to phrase, explaining calmly that some would surely survive—that no disease, however impossible to check, could prove fatal to all human beings everywhere—but that the survivors should not expect human civilization to have endured with them. “To those of you who will live to re-make this world,” the President had said, “my only promise is this: That with courage, with ingenuity, with determination—above all, with adherence to the moral principles that distinguish Man from the animals—the future is one of hope. The way will be hard. The effort will be great. But the future waits to be realized, and with God’s help it shall be realized—it must be realized!”
But that had not been much to go on. He had put the binoculars back—if someone had asked him, he would have replied that certainly he planned to come back to the apartment; he would not have stopped to think about it until he had actually heard his positive words—and he had left, climbing down flight after flight of stairs.
He was on his way to Larry Ruark’s apartment, he had realized at some point on his journey. Larry lived
