white. No industry. Lots of bars, black and white; never the twain shall meet. Music in the bars was soul or country. That was it. So, Pavarotti, do not waste your time coming to the Delta, unless you first appear on “Barbed-Wire Hoedown,” yodeling; or on “Boogie Funky Wagon,” beating on a drum and shaking your tushie.
It was gracious Southern living at its best and worst. Half-million-dollar homes and two-hundred-dollar shacks. Cadillacs and food stamps. Cotton, rice, soybeans, and wheat.
And football.
Ben cut his eyes to the ditch by the side of the road and his thoughts were abruptly returned to the present. He jammed on the brakes, sliding to a halt.
That was a body in the ditch.
He got out of his truck and, stepping over the water (when had it rained?), walked to the ditch and knelt by the man. The man had been dead at least a week; his corpse was blackened and stinking.
He walked back to his truck and flipped on the CB radio. “Give me a Montgomery Parish Deputy or a state trooper.”
Nothing.
He repeated his call and received the same scratchy emptiness from the speaker.
His CB was a good one and he had had it on… a couple of days before the wasps hit him.
“Break-one-nine for a radio check,” he said.
Nothing.
He monitored all channels and received the same on all of them. Nothing.
He sat in his truck for a moment, reviewing what he could remember of the past week, before he was stung. He had been shopping, was it Wednesday or Thursday? Had he listened to a radio or TV since? No, not since the night he had gotten drunk listening to the TV newspeople flap their gums about nuclear war.
Ben looked around him, at the clear day, sunny and bright. Obviously, no nuclear war had occurred. He suddenly felt uneasy. Or, had it? When had he heard those horns honking so frantically? He shook his head. Kids, probably, cutting up.
He glanced at the body in the ditch and then at his watch. Almost noon. “Well, this is silly!” he said. “There is something wrong with my radio, that’s all.”
Then he thought about the radio in his truck. He turned it on, tuning in to the local station first. Nothing.
He punched all the preset buttons. Nothing. He spun the dial left to right, then went slowly back.
Nothing.
A finger of something very close to fear touched him. He shook it off. But something deep within him, some… sense of warning prompted him to punch open the glove compartment and take out the .38 special he always carried. Ben had blatantly ignored the government order to turn in all handguns, as, he suspected, had several million others. Ben despised Sen. Hilton Logan and everything he stood for. Logan was a dove—Ben was a hawk. Logan was a liberal—Ben was a conservative. A conservative in most of his thinking.
He checked the cylinder of the .38. All full. He shoved the pistol behind his belt and put the truck in gear. He had not recognized the dead man.
A mile further and he turned onto the road that was just inside the city limits. A half-mile further, on the edge of town, in an open field, Ben slowed to watch several large birds, vultures, rise from the ground at the sound of his truck. They flapped ponderously away. Full and heavy. Ben had only to glance quickly to see what they had been feeding upon: bodies.
This time it was fear that touched him—open, naked fear. “Did the balloon go up?” he asked aloud. “If so, why was I spared?”
He could not answer his question.
He drove on until he could drive no further. Two cars were blocking the street. Ben did not have to get out of his truck to see that the occupants’ bodies were blackened and decomposing in death.
He backed up, turned around, and drove down a side street until he came to a residential area. He saw no signs of human life, but neither did he see any bodies. He wound his way to the service station and pulled into the drive. There, Ben sat in numb silence, staring at the windows of the Exxon station. The windows were smashed, broken; glass littered the drive. The body of his friend lay sprawled half in, half out of the door.
Ben got out of his truck slowly, not really believing all this was happening—had happened. He corrected his thinking. He knelt down beside the man. Mr. Harnack was stiff and black and stinking. Dogs had gnawed on him.
Ben stepped over the body and walked to the phone. He punched out the numbers of the police department, letting the phone ring twenty times. No answer. He called the sheriff’s department. Same results.
Ben felt the butt of the .38, and the touch of the wood was reassuring.
He stood in the doorway and listened intently. He could not hear one human sound coming from the town.
He walked to the desk and turned on the small TV. He got the same results from every channel. And this was cable, coming from Chicago and Atlanta. Nothing from Chicago. Blank screen. The others had the civil defense emblem on the screen, but nothing to explain why.
Bold Strike. The words returned to him. Hunt a hole, partner. “I’m dreaming,” Ben said, his voice sounding strange amid the silence and the death. “What the hell happened? It has to be a dream.”
But he knew he was not dreaming.
He thought, this is nationwide—worldwide. Those thoughts chilled him, bringing beads of sweat to his forehead. “Jesus, am I the last man on earth?”
Then the words of that grizzled sergeant drifted back to Ben as he stood in the doorway, looking out at the mute gas pumps. “Survive is the name of this game, men. Fuck a bunch of candy-assed civilians. When the balloon goes up—and it will go up, believe that—most civilians won’t make it, ‘cause they don’t know their ass from peanut butter about stayin’ alive. And what is so sickenin’ is, they don’t wanna know. They’re content. They’ve got their pretty little houses, two cars in the garage, membership in the country club, and they think being tough means playing football. As far as they’re concerned, everything is aces up. But they don’t know the meaning of tough. They’ll be the victims in any holocaust. But I’m gonna teach you men what tough is—mentally and physically. And when I’m through with you, you’ll survive. If you men make it through the first wave, if you don’t take one nose-on, most of you will survive.”
Ben nodded his head and instinctively moved from the door into the darkness of the station’s work area. He squatted down, all his training returning to him.
The sergeant had said, “Maybe most of you won’t make the military your life’s work; sure, most of you will pull your hitch and get out. But that’s no matter, ‘cause what you learn here in this school, and the other schools you go to; well,”—he smiled—“it’ll stay with you. You made it this far, and that proves to me you want to learn the meaning of survival. So even if you get out, you’ll push all this training way in the back of your minds—some of you will even try to forget it, ‘cause it’s nasty and dirty and dehumanizing. But you won’t forget it, and if you ever need it, it’ll be right there. Now, get on your goddamned feet and get ready to find out what you’re really made of.”
Ben squatted in the shade of the garage area until his legs began to protest from the strain. When he rose, walking a bit to relieve the kinks in his leg muscles, he had reviewed what he had been taught… years back.
And he knew one thing for certain: he was going to survive.
FOUR
He pulled his truck up to the pumps and filled his tanks, topping off his reserve tank. He found four five-gallon gas cans and filled them, placing them in the bed of his truck. He looked back at Mr. Harnack, nodded his head, and drove off, heading for the police station, only a few blocks away.
The dispatcher was dead, not a mark on him. On the note pad on the table was scribbled: “I’m the last one alive. Getting weak. No help. Atomic bombs hit some cities. Some type of germ stuff got the rest of us. God have —”
He never got to finish the sentence.
