“Mother of Moses — you're just a kid!”
“I'm not,” she snapped. “I'm nineteen.”
“You're a liar. You're just a kid, fifteen or sixteen maybe.”
“I'm nineteen,” she insisted. “I can prove it.”
“How?” he asked skeptically, dousing the flash.
“I'm in college — a junior.”
“That doesn't mean a thing to me.” He stared along the street, alert for any movement in the night. Turning over her answer, he admitted grudgingly: “Well, maybe seventeen.”
“Nineteen,” she still insisted.
“Skip it.” He got to his knees. “Are you going to behave? What's your name?”
“Irma. Irma Sloane. What's yours?”
“Call me Gary. Are you going to behave now?”
“Gary what?”
“Russell Gary. Answer me.”
“All right, don't get mad.” She sat up, felt around on the pavement for the scattered jewelry. “Look what you made me do!” Abruptly she was on her knees and frantically searching the street. “Help me find them. I want them, I want them all. Help me!”
He held the light for her, contemptuously watching and sweeping it around in ever widening circles as she scrabbled over the street gathering up the spilled loot. When she had recovered all that could be found in the light's dim beam, she brought the double handful of gems over to dump them in his trouser pockets.
“We'll have to come back here tomorrow. I know I've missed some.”
“To hell with that,” he told her. “There's other stores around here.”
“Yes!” She paused in pleased surprise. “That's right. There are many of them; I know where they all are. We'll find them tomorrow, you and I.”
He contradicted her. “We'll get the devil out of here tomorrow, and fast. Don't you know what this city will be like this time tomorrow night?”
“But Russell, my jewelry — What will it be like?”
“What do you think, with those bodies under two or three days of baking sun?”
“Oh…” She was silent, and took the flashlight from his hand to direct the beam up into his face. He squinted against the sudden light and heard her indrawn breath.
“What's the matter?”
“Nothing, Russell. But you need a shave.”
He took the light from her hand and shut it off. “Let's get away from here.”
“Where are we going?”
He hesitated. Where were they going?
They stood like silent sentinels in the middle of a dead, deserted city, an odorous city lying lifeless under a black night sky — the victim of some enemy's bombs. They alone, for all he knew, among uncounted dead. They and a stray dog. Where to go? Certainly not back to that place where he had spent the previous nights. Were it not for the girl he knew what he would have preferred, what he would have done. A pair of blankets from the first shop offering such merchandise, and a bunk in the fields outside of town, out of reach of the smell and reminder of death. Or a vacant farmhouse whose occupants had left before disaster struck.
She put a small hand in his, anxiously waiting.
“Do you live here?” he asked. “Do you know the town?”
“I've lived here all my life. I know it all.”
“Find us a hotel,” he directed then, “a big one.”
She hesitated only a moment and he could guess what she might be thinking. “Where are we now?” she asked him.
They picked their way to the nearest intersection and he turned the light on the street sign.
“Oh, yes,” she said then. “This way.”
The lobby seemed empty. He searched it carefully in the beam of the flashlight before advancing across it. The desk clerk was slumped on the floor behind his desk.
“This bombing,” Gary said, “did it come at night?”
“The bom — oh, yes. In the early evening. The radio said some planes had been shot down, and something about long-range rockets. It wasn't very clear.”
He went behind the clerk's desk and scanned the key rack, finally taking several of them from their slots. “How did you escape? Where were you?”
“Oh, I wasn't here. I was with my class in Havana. Do you know where that is?”
“No.”
“A small town south of here; my class was on an archeological field trip. There are Indian mounds at Havana.”
“Still sticking to your story?”
“I
“I won't argue about it; I don't give a damn how old you are. Come on.” He walked to the stairs. “What happened to the rest of the class?”
“I don't know. When we heard the news on the radio, I came home. Home was… home was…”
“Bombed out?” He led her up the stairway.
“No. It hadn't been touched. But inside, Mother was… dead. Her body had turned color, sort of purple.”
“Purple?”
“Bluish-purple. I can't describe it. It was ugly.”
“I can't figure that one out. Some disease? It worked fast, damned fast. Say — when did this happen, this bombing? Wednesday night?”
“I think so. Yes, Wednesday evening.”
“And this is Friday.” He shook his head.
They continued to climb the carpeted stairs. At the second floor landing he paused only long enough to send the light flashing down the corridor, to assure himself that it was empty, and started upward again, pulling the girl along. He believed the third or the fourth floor would be the safest, away from the street. The silent city might contain other prowlers besides themselves.
“What have you been doing since Wednesday night?”
“I don't know. Honestly I don't.” She shuddered. “I came home and found — It was unpleasant. I cried a lot, and I was sick. Every time I attempted to eat I was sick. I guess I've lived on canned juices, and soup. There was no electricity, no running water.”
“Power station must be out,” he explained. “Either a bomb struck it or something went wrong and the machinery shut itself off. Automatic cutouts, things like that. Nobody was around to start it again. That explains the water, too. The pumping stations are run by electricity. I'm surprised the whole damned town isn't burning down.” He thought about her remarks on food. “Soup?” he asked.
“The gas stove worked, after a fashion. The flame was very low.”
“Pressure giving out. It'll be gone in a day or so.”
“What will we do then?”
“We won't be here,” he assured her. “We're getting out of this town tomorrow.”
“There's no place to go.”
When they reached the fourth floor he paused to examine the keys he carried in his hand, and then flicked the light along the door numbers. The keys directed them away from the stairway toward the rear of the building. The first room he unlocked and kicked open proved to be a narrow one, holding but a single bed; the following two were replicas of the first. On the next try a large room having a double bed stood revealed in the gleam, and adjoining that a similarly large room with twin beds. He pulled her inside, locked the hall door, unlocked the connecting door between the rooms and locked the remaining outside doorway of the other bedroom.
“This is where we bunk,” he told her.
She watched him, saying nothing.
