The Long Loud Silence

made by the three truckloads of gold, and what happened to them. Gary hid his relief and spun an acceptable story. He included a vivid description of the country through which he had supposedly passed, and for spite threw in mention of the thousands of people they had seen, people hospitable and otherwise.

The questioner's head jerked up in disbelief. “Huh?”

“Huh, what?” It seemed that Gary had him hooked.

“Thousands of enemy agents?”

“I don't know if they were enemy agents or not,” Gary said casually, “but there were thousands of them all right. I don't mean in the cities — all the cities are dead and bombed out, we avoided those, but the little towns are full of people. Every time we passed through a whistle stop the whole damned population rushed out to greet us — just like those towns in France I went through.”

“But there can't be people over there, our people. They're all dead.”

Gary stared at him. “Why should I lie about it?”

“Well— I dunno.”

“All right. The burgs are full, believe me. Farmers in the field — a lot of the horses are dead, I guess, because I saw men pulling plows.” He hid a grin, watching the corpsman write down what he had said. The corpsman would do more than that — he would spread it around the camp. He went on with his story, bringing it up to the point where the ambush had wiped out everyone but him and the lieutenant — and the lieutenant had died a few hours later. And say — did the lieutenant get a military funeral?

“Hell, no,” the corpsman answered. “They weighted his body and dumped it in the river — ain't taking no chances.”

That night, the second in the chamber, Gary escaped.

He first considered asking the sentry for milk, knowing that milk would take longer to procure, but then quickly abandoned the idea with the knowledge that the sentry might well refuse — also being aware of the difficulty. Or if he did consent to go after it he might lock the door before leaving, or he might not be gone more than five minutes at the most. Five minutes were not enough. He needed hours to be free of the area.

Instead, Gary made the usual request for water and held the door opened the slightest crack, peering into the night. He could hear no one else near-by, could smell no tobacco smoke in the air. The sentry returned with the water and stooped to place it on the doorsill — stiffening with surprise when his eyes noticed the tiny crack in the opening. Gary caught him on the back of the neck, cracking the side of his hand on the man's spinal cord. The sentry slumped. Gary thrust his head outside warily but there was no outcry. Quickly then he dragged the inert body into the chamber and stretched it out along the far wall where he had slept the night before. Within seconds he had slipped outside and locked the door behind him, to vanish instantly into the surrounding darkness, away from the river.

He counted on three to four hours. At least three hours before the guard was scheduled to be relieved.

* * *

He was wearing civilian clothes, a pair of dirty coveralls and a nondescript sweater he had taken from a. farmer. A couple of dollars in change, also belonging to the throttled farmer, rattled around in his pocket The farmer's unconscious body lay many miles behind in a ditch but his ancient Ford truck sped along a highway to the south. Sunrise found Gary and the stolen truck nearly fifty miles south of St. Louis and well away from the river, well outside the ten-mile military zone.

This was freedom, this was what he had waited two years to see again.

He bowled along the highway at top speed, watching the unhurried activity about the farms, the sleepy beginnings of a new day in each small town he passed. There were no suspicious faces turned his way, no armed men to meet him at the village limits, no skulking figure to waylay the noisy truck as it sped along the road. This was free country, living country. Far behind him, unknown to him, not everything was so alive. A sentry lay dead in a decontamination chamber and a medical corpsman lay dying on a hospital bed, his body turning blue. Early alarm had turned to furore when the corpsman was discovered, and a hasty quarantine had been thrown around the camp guarding the bridge. Of a sudden two paramount problems had arisen for the responsible brass: finding the escaped carrier, and disposing of a few hundred men suddenly turned “enemy agents.”

Finding Gary would be the easier of the two: he would mark his own trail.

Early that afternoon he entered a theater and sat through a double feature, suddenly discovering as he passed the theater that capering images had been one of the things he hungered for. The double feature consisted first of a very sexy woman flinging her body around in a bathing suit, to the dismay… and delight… of every other male and female in the picture; and next of the true-blue western hero throwing the deep-dyed villain for a loss to save the ranch. Each held him enthralled and he stayed for a second showing of the bathing suit, to emerge finally with another thought in mind. The idea wasn't so readily fulfilled, but he managed it by nightfall. His money was short, not nearly enough to eat and drink with, much less satisfy his desires. The first robbery netted him only pocket change, the second brought him a wallet. He left the town behind him and sought another. -

He bought other clothes, not new ones for fear they would mark him, but secondhand garments in a shop. The farm truck was abandoned on a side street and he caught a bus, to find himself in Little Rock late that night. Little Rock held much of what he sought. Little Rock also held radios that blared forth the news, or part of the news of what had happened. An enemy agent was loose west of the river. He sat in a bar and listened to the bulletins repeated every fifteen minutes.

There was an interest in the bulletins, faces turned and ears listened, but after each one the faces went back to its preoccupations. There was talk, speculation, idle threats as to what they would do to the sonofabitch if he came here, but their most immediate interest lay in the liquor at hand and the companion at the table.

“Hell,” Gary told the bartender, “he'll never get this far. The soldiers will catch him.”

The bartender agreed. “They always do. Them soldiers are all right joes — I'm for ’em. They certainly changed things around here. You know what this state was before the change.”

Gary didn't, but nodded as if he did. He guessed that the bartender might be referring to the subject nearest his heart — the liquor trade — but he didn't dare reveal his ignorance by asking. He couldn't recall having been in Arkansas before, nor did he remember anything said about the place. Furthermore he didn't give a damn.

He left the establishment and wandered along the street, watching the neon lights and the blinking electric signs. Those too he had missed, longed for without stopping to think about it, and their brilliant flickerings fell across his eyes like memories. There weren't many automobiles, due to the gas rationing, but the sounds of those passing was sweet on his ears, and even though the odor of burnt gasoline stung his nostrils as he stepped from behind a bus, he liked it. This was living in the way he wanted to live. This was living again.

It wasn't hard to find a girl willing to share the contents of the wallet with him. She cooked breakfast for him the following morning and he was so delighted with the process and the deep sense of contentment, with the feeling of being at home with her — despite the shabby apartment and her lack of taste in dress and speech — that he asked to stay a few days. She was more than willing. She made a transparent kind of love to him that satisfied his long starvation diet — love that did not wait on an hour or a place; he tried to read her newspapers but she would interrupt, he fingered a few of her worn books but she plucked them from his hands and threw them across the room. She did not fool him — he knew it would stop when the wallet was empty, but meanwhile the wallet was not empty and she was a pleasing torrent after a two-year drought. He rumpled the false blonde hair and let her have her way.

He did not think to switch on the radio because now that he was here, what people said on the air here did not arouse curiosity or desire within him; and because her continual chatter was all that he desired in human speech at the moment. Hers was a friendly voice and a loving one; it satisfied him. So he did not hear the later bulletins and did not know the new tone the broadcasts had taken.

Gary spent a lazy, spendthrift afternoon walking about the city and buying things he both did and didn't need. For once the advertisements didn't annoy him and he purchased a new razor because a colorful sign told him he could be a smoother rooster; he found no Mother Mahaffey Candy Kitchen, but bought a box of chocolates for the girl waiting at the apartment. Stopping at a half dozen stores, loading his arms with groceries only for the pleasure of buying things, Gary wandered back to the apartment just before sunset. He twisted the knob with his fingers and shoved open the door with one knee, his voice raised to shout for the woman. Gary stopped short in the doorway to stare at the twisted, writhing body on the floor. She was clad only in a slip, her reddish-purple body ugly with