The river lay wide and dark ahead of him, moving along listlessly with a whispering nothing that wasn't quite sound and yet was not silence. The real silence lay on the other side, a silence so complete it was a tangible thing that could be held in the hand. A loud, hurtful silence. Gary lay motionless, frozen in the marshy grasses, his eyes searching for the black silhouette of a sentry against the night sky. They knew he was here somewhere now, knew that he had entered the forbidden ten-mile zone, knew with certainty that he was hiding in some secret place between the wrecked taxi and the river. They even knew where he was going, and would have denied him the right to go back to the silence.
Gary lay still, hating the silence and the river.
There was no other choice for him if he wanted to go on living beyond this moment and this hour, and that knowledge angered him. He felt a burning hatred of the choice, of the narrowness of it and of the hard necessity for making it. He could spring to his feet now and shout his defiance of the west — to die in the next second, or he could go back across the line of quarantine — and what? The river was a tormenting barrier that divided the nation in halves, unequal halves in which unequal lives were played out on a stage of poverty or plenty. For many — food, drink, chocolates, radio, sensation, gasoline, money, neon, flesh, sleep, peace. For some — be quick or be dead, starve slowly or die quickly by violence. And so common a thing as a river was the line of bitter division.
The black and almost shapeless mass of a prowling sentry moved against the stars.
Gary stopped breathing, watching the dim figure stalk past him, watching him out of sight. He counted a hundred while waiting for any others that might be following the sentry and then rose up on hands and knees to edge toward the water. A rock turned under his knee and he froze to the sand, watching and listening. Slowly then, feeling his way with his senses as much as his fingers, he wormed toward the river's edge, on the alert for trip wires. One outstretched hand came down in water, causing a minute splash. After a taut, silent moment of listening he lowered his naked body into the river and moved sluggishly away from the Louisiana shore.
He swam for one of the tiny spits of land he had seen in midstream while reconnoitering in the early evening, swam and floated for any of the islands that would give him a brief rest before pushing on to the silence beyond. The hatred still churned within him, hatred now for his own bitter futility and silly hopes that he could live like a man again. Hatred for the injustice that had been done him after two years of watchful waiting and crafty planning; he had succeeded in crossing the forbidden river only to have his triumph hurled in his face, and now he was literally crawling back again with nothing left to him but his life, a naked and defenseless body returning to the dead silence.
He pushed on, increasing the bite of his strokes.
For a flashing instant he wished he could have spread the disease beyond stopping, could have run free through hundreds of towns and villages spewing a choking death as he ran. He wished he could have pulled the smug and stupid western states down to his own level by carrying the plague to the mountains, could have shown them what really lay on the eastern side of the river.
Gary paddled on in the darkness until he felt a mixture of mud and sand beneath his feet. Pulling himself out of the water, he got to his feet and turned to shake an angry fist at the Louisiana shore.
“You sonsabitches!”
The farm woman in the riddled taxi would have appreciated that; the anonymous man whose body had been hurled into the frozen creek might even have grinned with the humor of it. Clumsy Harry, in his ignorant haste to crawl the cable, would have laughed out loud.
12
THE LONG sparse sliver of land jutted out into the blue-green waters of the Gulf, tiny swells running up to foam on the baking sandy beach. That alone had not changed. The Florida sun was hot and uncomfortable in midsummer.
Gary pawed through the charred remains of the old fisherman's cabin, seeking some slight clue to the fate of its occupants, something to indicate how long ago they had departed — and in what manner. He wanted desperately to know how long ago the familiar shack had burned to the ground.
He walked along the glaring white shoreline and stared out to sea, remembering how he and Oliver had fished there, how Sally had watched a sail which was quite invisible to them beating across the Gulf. Their old mail truck was gone, vanished completely with no remaining sign of how it had left. The ruins of the cabin still held the cooking stove, a mass of wrecked and useless metal now that was rapidly rusting away; that and some miscellaneous scrap which had not survived the fire in any recognizable form. A part of the wooden causeway to the mainland had been broken up and carried away, or burned on the spot. Other parts of it sagged with rotten, collapsing timbers. The wind, the rain and the water had destroyed all traces of human passage other than his own fresh footprints.
Oliver was gone, Sally gone — the baby gone. Where?
He kicked angrily at the charred wood and realized that the initial advantage of wintering here was no longer an advantage — it had now become a definite, deadly liability. Too many of the survivors were moving down from the North to escape the punishing winters, too many of them had discovered the warm sands and the seas filled with food. He knew that those who still survived
The fifth year? Five years since the bombs fell? In which of those years, then, had strangers found the tiny cabin, sacked it, burned it?
His bare foot came down on an artificial something which dug into his skin and he bent over to examine it, pry it from the sands which half buried it. The wooden link chain he had carved and given to Sally… for Christmas, one of those years ago.
Abruptly, Gary quit the island, conscious of his exposed position.
13
HE HAD to find something to eat.
Three days without food were racking his stomach with pain, causing his guts to rumble and ache. The air of the cave was foul and dead from his refuse, blurring his wits and creating a dangerous drowsiness. A bucket for drinking water in the rear of the cave contained a scant half inch of liquid — he could make that stretch another day if need be, but he had to have something to eat soon. The last of the few edible roots he had ripped from the frozen ground were gone and if he delayed longer, he would be too weak and dulled to fight.
Gary picked up his .22 rifle and crawled to the mouth of the cave to search the snow-covered plain.
In earlier years he had favored the shotgun or the heavier rifle, along with many men who wanted or needed the greater distance and more powerful shell. But other men who clung stubbornly to those heavier rifles were no longer alive. The crack of a heavy carries a long distance — too long a distance across the silent, watchful land. The crack of a gun meant
The plain before him was clear, white and bright with fresh-fallen snow. Nothing moved across his vision.
He carefully parted the brush and wriggled through the mouth of the cave, pausing every few inches to look and listen and sniff the air. The hillside was barren of life or movement as he emerged into the open, and he rose to his knees the better to search the field below and the rising slope of the hill behind him. A man had very nearly killed him there, three or four years before. The man had lain for days above the cave mouth waiting for him to
