You go right ahead.'
Adelaide was watching, tense and fearful, from a few feet away, holding the door of the Gran Torino. Dr. Petrie looked at her, and couldn't see her eyes, only the dark brunette curls of her hair. The guard was shuffling away from them, step by step, holding his hands out in front of him.
As if in a dream, Dr. Petrie fired the revolver twice. The guard yelped like a small dog, and started running away across the car park. Dr. Petrie lifted the revolver in both hands, held it steadily, and fired again. He missed. He fired once again, and the bullet sang mournfully off the fender of a parked car.
Dr. Petrie lowered the gun, and peered into the darkness.
'He got away,' he said, as the smoke drifted away across the car-park.
'You might have killed him,' Adelaide gasped. 'You meant to.' She sounded very frightened.
Dr. Petrie put the revolver in his pocket.
'Yes,' he said. 'I meant to. But I didn't.'
They drove out of the car park in silence, and out into the plague-ridden streets of Miami.
They switched on the car radio. It was now just past midnight, into the early hours of Wednesday morning. What they heard on the news and what they saw as they drove through the dark broken streets of the city were so different as to be totally bizarre.
The calm, rich voice of the mayor, John Becker, was reassuring citizens throughout Florida and the United States that the breakdown in communication between Miami and the outside world was 'purely temporary and technical, and in the best interests of all concerned.'
Dr. Petrie glanced across at Adelaide, and shook his head. She smiled him a tight little smile.
Mayor Becker went on, 'This epidemic, which is still awaiting medical analysis, is proving a little more difficult to control than we had originally hoped, and for the protection of residents and folks on vacation, we've had to restrict some of the highway traffic through the city. But we can assure you that there's nothing to worry about, provided you follow a simple safety code and remain at home whenever possible.'
It was while he was saying this that, without warning, the city lights of Miami began to go out. Most of the downtown office buildings and stores were already in darkness, but now the street lights flickered out, and everything electrical dimmed and died. Like stars obscured by the passing of a murky cloud, the bright subtropical city with its glittering strip of hotels and its garish downtown streets was gradually overtaken by a shadowy gloom, as dark and threatening as a primitive jungle.
'I expect it's the power station,' Dr. Petrie said. 'They've got the plague.'
He switched on the car's headlights. The streets seemed wrecked and deserted. Store windows were smashed, and there was garbage and junk strewn all over. Despite the threat of summary shooting, the looters had obviously been out in force. As they turned north on to 95, they saw a small group of blacks running furtively through the shadows with television sets, stereo equipment and records.
Abandoned cars — some with their dead drivers still sitting in them — cluttered the highway. From the height of the expressway, Dr. Petrie and Adelaide could see small fires burning all over Miami in the tropical darkness, and a few buildings uncertainly lit by emergency generators. The whole city echoed with the endless warbling of police and fire sirens, and the crack of spasmodic shooting.
In just over four days, from the first signs of plague in Hialeah, Miami had collapsed into pandemonium. It was like an old painting of hell with lurid flames and demonic shadows; and above everything was the terrible wail of sirens, the smashing of glass and the ceaseless blast of car horns, pressed down by the weight of their dead owners.
Dr. Petrie opened the car window and slowed down for a while, listening and looking in cold disbelief.
'It's like the end of the world,' whispered Adelaide. 'My God, Leonard, it's like the end of the world.'
The stench of burning and the inhuman sounds of a dying city filled the car, and Dr. Petrie wound up the window again. He felt exhausted beyond anything he had ever known before. He had to open his eyes wide to clear them and focus them, and even then he found it difficult to drive through the debris and jetsam that strewed the highway.
They were almost level with Gratigny Drive when he had to pull the Torino up short. The road was entirely blocked by two burning cars. One of them, a Riviera, was already blackened and smoldering, but the other, a Cadillac, still had its tires ablaze, like a fiery chariot from Heaven.
Dr. Petrie opened his car door and got out. The heat was oily and fierce. Shielding his eyes, he went as close to the wrecks as he could, and to his horror, he saw a woman still sitting in the Cadillac — her face was roasted raw, but she was lifting her smoking arm up and down, trying to call out. A lurch of nausea made his empty stomach turn over, and he had to look away.
Adelaide called out, 'What is it? Can we get past?'
Dr. Petrie shouted back, 'Stay there! Just stay there!'
He took the security guard's revolver out of his pocket, held it tight in both hands, and hoped to God that he wouldn't miss. He inched as close to the blazing car as he could, and then fired. The woman jerked sharply back into her ruined seat as if he had kicked her. She disappeared in a torrent of rubbery smoke.
Dr. Petrie climbed back into the Gran Torino.
'Was there someone in there?' Adelaide asked quietly.
He nodded, and laid the gun on the parcel shelf. For some reason, the killing seemed to have purged something within him; to have quelled his broken nerves. Maybe it was because, for the first time since Mr. Kelly had woken him up on Monday morning, he had been able to act, to do something positive.
'Honey — I'm going to have to ram my way through there.' he said. He twisted around in his seat, and backed the car up thirty or forty yards. He stopped. 'All you have to do is hold tight.'
He licked his lips. Then he shifted the car into 2, and stamped on the gas. The back tires screeched and slithered as they fought for traction on the concrete, and then the Torino bellowed forward — straight towards the two smoking wrecks.
There was a heavy smash, and for a moment Petrie thought the car was going to roll over. But he forced his foot harder on the gas, and their car gradually shoved the black carcass of the Riviera, its buckled hubs scraping and shuddering on the road, right to the edge of the expressway. Then Dr. Petrie backed up a foot or two, turned the wheel, and drove the Gran Torino over broken glass and oil and litter until they were clear. The car gave one last snaking skid, and they were driving north again.
'Are you all right?' asked Dr. Petrie.
Adelaide brushed back her hair. 'I bruised my knee when we collided, but that's all. I'm okay.'
Dr. Petrie checked his watch. 'Another two or three minutes, and we'll be there. Then we can try and get out of this godforsaken place.'
They drove without talking for a moment or two, and then Adelaide said, 'Was it a man or a woman?'
Dr. Petrie frowned. 'Was what a man or a woman?'
'In that burning car. I just wondered.'
He rubbed at his left eye. The road was dark and confusing, and he had to swerve to avoid an abandoned police car.
'It was a woman,' he said baldly. 'Does it make any difference?'
'I don't know. I got the feeling you needed to kill someone.'
He glanced across at her. 'What made you think that?'
'It was the way you fired at that security man. He wasn't doing anything. He was just doing his job. Somehow, you looked as though you really needed to kill him.'
She was right, but Dr. Petrie could no more analyze his reactions than she could. It was connected with his present sense of helplessness as a doctor, with the need to protest, however ridiculously, against the outrage that was sweeping through his city. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I guess I'm just tired and frustrated.'
They didn't say anything more until they had driven through the dark suburbs of North Miami Beach up to Dr. Petrie's former house. He pulled the Gran Torino up to the kerbside, and climbed out. With Adelaide he walked across the grass to the house next door. It was a pink Spanish-style ranchette, called El Hensch, and owned by the Henschels. There was a bright gas-light burning in the living-room, so Dr. Petrie assumed his erstwhile neighbors were at home. He rang the doorbell, and it played The Yellow Rose of Texas.
The frosted-glass door opened half-an-inch. Dr. Petrie saw one bespectacled eye and the muzzle of a.38 revolver.
