daybreak of the morning after the final holocaust, and he was the lone survivor, the last man on earth, coming home...
He could see all of that vividly, but it was all in his mind, and in his mind, too, were the sounds, nightmare sounds of screaming and wailing sirens and driving rain and hurtling machines, and above it all were Larry Drexel’s brittle, dying, whispered words: “Helgerman . . . dead . . . long-time dead.”
He had been sitting there at the dinette for—how long? two hours? three?—sitting there and staring into the cold coffee, trying to keep from losing his grip on reality, from blowing his mind finally and irrevocably, feeling the awful pressure slowly but inexorably begin to lessen until, now, he knew a kind of unstable calm. He could look at the mental images, and hear the mental sounds, and there was no panic. He could be objective now, he could examine what had happened and determine its effect, he could be rational.
Helgerman is dead, he thought, it isn’t Helgerman; Drexel said it isn’t Helgerman and he was dying when he said it and there can be no disputation of the words of a dying man. So it isn’t Helgerman, Helgerman is dead, it isn’t Helgerman of the injured neck, Helgerman the wronged, Helgerman who had been struck down in the parking lot, Helgerman the only man it
Who?
And why?
But even more urgently important, what am I going to do now? Do I somehow seek out and somehow kill this now-nameless, now-faceless, non-existent but all-so-terribly-real madman—as Drexel would have done? Do I avenge the deaths of the others, and in so doing save my own life? Or do I go to the police, as I should have done in the very beginning? Or do I curl up in a tiny ball like a naked hedgehog and wait defenseless for whoever it is to come for me? Or do I run out of the state, out of the country, always looking over my shoulder, always trembling, always running?
What do I do?
The only thing I can do.
I’m not a killer, I never will be a killer, I could never find the man alone, and I would be as mad as he must be to believe I can. And I don’t want to die any more than any man wants to die; and the only place I could run—my eventual destination next week or next month or next year—would be off the deep end, right off the deep end. I have one alternative left, then. I go to the police. I go to Inspector Commac and Inspector Flagg and I tell them all about it, I tell them the whole story and I ask them to protect me and they will protect me and they will find the madman, whoever he is; I simply go to the police, and it’s over for me, it’s finished, no more fear, no more terror, it’s over.
But can I do it?
Can I go in there and pick up that telephone and dial that number and say the words that have to be said? Did what I saw and heard and smelled and was a part of last night—the horror of last night—somehow give me enough guts to do what I wasn’t able to do yesterday? Have I regained something of myself, a part of my manhood, that which enables a man to do what he must do?
Or is cowardice, once ingrained, not so easily dispelled?
Like a terminal malignancy, does it only spread until it consumes and destroys the being? And like that same malignancy, does it bring brief moments like these now—moments of painless calm, of commanding will, of hope— only to banish them, and return even more relentlessly destructive than before?
Kilduff got to his feet, pushing his chair back, and walked very slowly toward the hallway telephone. To find out if he was still a man.
It was just eight o’clock when Inspector Neal Commac stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice. He walked along the quiet hallway and through a doorway marked with the sign: GENERAL WORKS DETAIL. It was a huge room with pale plaster walls and a reception desk on his immediate right and several glass-fronted interrogation cubicles beyond an open archway. The detective bull pen contained several metal desks in no particular order, with typewriters on metal roll stands beside them.
Commac nodded a perfunctory good morning to the receptionist, turned to the right and then to the left to a doorway beyond, entering the bull pen. At the desk facing his, in the center of the room, Inspector Pat Flagg was just hanging up his telephone. Steam spiraled upward from a container of coffee at his elbow. He looked up as Commac took off his hat and sat down.
“Morning, Neal.”
“Pat.”
Flagg indicated a covered container identical to the one on his desk, resting on Commac’s blotter. “Brought you some coffee.”
“Thanks,” Commac said gratefully. “I could use some. It’s a bear out this morning.”
“We’re in for a hell of a winter.”
“Yeah.” Commac slipped the plastic cover off the container and tasted the coffee. He made a wry face and looked at Flagg over the rim of the container. “What’s on tap?”
“So far, just a talk with Mr. Brokaw on that attempted extortion in Sea Cliff.”
“Any special time?”
“After eleven.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, and the DMV report came back on that ’59 Personnel Roster we got from the Bellevue Air Force Station.”
“Anything?”
Flagg picked up a printed form from his blotter. “Six with registered automobiles in California,” he said. “Conradin and Kilduff; Thomas Baird, North Hollywood; Lawrence Drexel, Los Gatos; Dale Emmerick, Redding; Victor Jobelli, Yreka.”
“You run those last four through R&I?”
“What I was doing when you came in.”
Commac nodded. “I wonder if we’ll turn anything there.”
“Is that a question, or are you thinking out loud?”
“A little of both, I guess.”
Flagg said, “Probably draw the same blank we did on Kilduff and Conradin.”
“Is that a considered opinion, or are you just being cynical?”
Flagg grinned. “A little of both, I guess.”
The phone on Commac’s desk buzzed; it was an interdepartmental call. He depressed the button and lifted the receiver. He listened for a moment, said “Yes, sir,” and replaced the instrument. To Flagg he said, “Boccalou wants to see us, Pat.”
“What on?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Well,” Flagg said, getting to his feet, “here we go.”
They went across the bull pen and Commac knocked on a door marked: CHIEF OF DETECTIVES. A voice said to come in. They stepped inside and stood respectfully before the desk of Chief Nello Boccalou. Boccalou had inscrutable green eyes, a firm chin with a Kirk Douglas cleft, and longish silver hair that gave him a leonine and properly authoritative appearance. He smoked imported English tobacco in a long-grain briar pipe, and the office was filled with gray-blue clouds of aromatic smoke. He said, “Commac, Flagg.”
“Morning, Chief,” Commac said.
“Turn anything new on this Kilduff you questioned yesterday?”
“Not yet, sir,” Flagg told him.
Boccalou took the pipe out of his mouth and scowled at it and put it in an ashtray. “Well, I may have something for you. Squeal from the Los Gatos police.”
“Oh?”
