revolt or die. In any case, they would die. So (after suitable bureaucratic fictions and a few bribes had had the building condemned), Orville had provisioned his fortress in the basement of the First American National Bank and retired from his life of public service.
There had even been a romance, and it had progressed (unlike his marriage) exactly as a romance should progress: a strongly contested courtship, extravagant declarations, fevers, jealousies, triumphs—oh unceasing triumphs, and always the aphrodisiac of mortal danger that suffused the alleys and looted stores of the dying city.
Three years he had been with Jackie Whythe, and it seemed no more than a holiday weekend.
If it were true for him, would it not be true for the other survivors as well? Did they not all feel this clandestine gladness in their hearts, like adulterers together secretly in a strange town? It must be so, he thought. It must be so.
Past the Brighton Beach Tourist Camp, the Plants grew denser and the urban sprawl thinned. The fortuitously met little group had come to the wilderness, where they might be safe. As they moved northeast on Route 61, the dim light of the burning city faded behind them, and the dimmer light of the stars was blotted out by foliage. They advanced into perfect darkness.
They moved rapidly, however, for though the Plants had broken through the road wherever they wished, they had not obliterated it. It was not as though the hurrying band had to fight its way through one of the old scrub woods that had once grown around here: no branches tore at one’s face; no brambles snagged one’s feet. There were not e.ven mosquitoes, for the Plants had drained all the marshes roundabout. The only obstructions were occasional potholes, and sometimes, where the Plants had broken the asphalt sufficiently to give headway to erosion, a gulley.
Orville and the others followed the highway until morning glowed grayly through the eastern mass of forest, then turned toward the light, toward the lake, which had once been visible to the cars driving along this road. It seemed dangerous to follow Route 61 any farther, as though it were an extension of the city and subject to the city’s fate. Then, too, they were thirsty. If luck was with them, they might even get fish from the lake.
The route had been forced on them by circumstances. It would have been wiser, with the winter in view, to move south, but that would have meant circling the burning city, a chance in no way worth taking. There was no water to the west, and to the east there was too much. Lake Superior, though diminished, was still an effective barrier. Perhaps one of the lakeshore villages would have maintained serviceable boats, in which case they might turn pirate, as that fleet of tugboats had done three years before when Duluth Harbor ran dry. But the best probable direction was to continue northeast along the shore of the lake, looting the farms and villages. Worry about winter when winter came.
Lake Superior teemed with sunfish. Cooked over a driftwood fire, they were good even without salt. Afterward the group discussed, with some attempt at optimism, their plight and prospects. There was not much to decide: the situation dictated its own terms. The gathering was in fact less a discussion than a contest among the sixteen men to see who would assume leadership. Their band had been formed at hazard. Except for the couples, they did not know each other. (There had been little social life those last years; the only community that had survived in the cities had been the pack, and if any of these men had been in a pack before, he wasn’t talking about it now.) None of the contenders for leadership seemed willing to discuss the details of his own survival. Such reticence was natural and becoming: at least they had not become so brutalized as to exult in their depravity and brag of their guilt. They had done what they had to, but they were not necessarily proud of it.
Alice Nemerov rescued them from this awkwardness by narrating her own story, which was singularly free of unpleasantnesses, considering. From the very first days of the famine she had stayed at the main hospital, living in the isolation ward. The hospital personnel had traded on its skills and medical supplies and gotten through even the worst times—except, apparently, for that last worst time of all. The survivors were mostly nurses and interns; the doctors had retired to their country houses when, after the failure of the Government, anarchy and famine had governed the city. In the last years, Alice Nemerov had gone about the city, armored in innocence and the certain knowledge that her skills would be a passport among even the meanest survivors, secure also in the knowledge that she had passed quite beyond the point where she need worry about rape. Thus, she had come to know many of her fellow refugees, and she effected their introductions with aplomb and tact. She told too of other survivors and the curious expedients by which they bad saved themselves from starvation.
“Rats?” Jackie asked, trying not to seem overdelicate in her disgust.
“Oh yes, my dear, lots of us tried that. I’ll admit it was highly unpleasant.” Several of her listeners shook their heads in agreement.
“And there were cannibals, too, but they were poor guilty souls, not at all what you’d think a cannibal would be like. They were always pathetically eager to talk, for all of them lived quite alone. Fortunately, I never came across one when be was hungry, or my feeling might be different.”
As the sun mounted to noonday, weariness and sheer contiguity made the others drop their guards and speak of their own pasts. Orville realized for the first time that he was not quite the monster of iniquity that he had sometimes thought himself. Even when he revealed that he had been a foreman on the Government labor crews, his hearers did not seem outraged or hostile, though several of them had been impressed for labor in their time. The invasion had turned everyone into relativists: as tolerant of each others’ ways, and means, as if they were delegates at a convention of cultural anthropologists.
It was hot, and they needed sleep. The breaking down of the barriers of solitude had tired their spirits almost as much as the march had tired their bodies.
The band did post sentinels, but one of them must have slept. The opportunity for resistance was already past before it was realized.
The farmers—their bones as ill-clothed with flesh as that flesh with tattered denim—outnumbered them three to one, and the farmers had been able, while the wolves slept (lambs, might not one better say?) to confiscate most of the weapons and prevent the use of the rest.
With one exception: Christie, whom Orville had thought he might grow to like, had managed to shoot one farmer, an old man, in the head. Christie was garroted.
Everything happened very quickly, but not too quickly for Jackie to give Orville a last kiss. When she was pulled away from him, roughly, by a younger farmer who seemed better fleshed-out than the majority, she was smiling the special, bittersweet smile which was reserved for just such occasions as this.
FIVE
Blood Relations
Lady tucked Blossom into bed that night just as though she were still her little girl. She was only thirteen after all. Outside the men were still going at it. It was a terrible thing. If only she could shut her ears to it.
“I wish they didn’t have to do that, Mother,” Blossom whispered.
“It’s necessary, darling—a necessary evil. Those people wouldn’t have hesitated to kill us. Are you warm under that thin blanket?”
“But why don’t we just bury them?”
“Your father knows best, Blossom. I’m sure it distresses him to have to do this. I remember that your brother Buddy—” Lady always referred to her stepson as Blossom’s and Neil’s brother, but she could never forget that this was a half-truth at best and she stumbled over the word. “—that he once felt the same as you.”
“
“To guard against the other marauders who may come.” The steady rasping noise outside penetrated the light weave of the summer walls and hung in the air. Lady brushed back a strand of gray hair and composed her features to something like sternness. “I have work to do now, darling.”
“Would you leave the light?”
Blossom knew better than to bum oil to no purpose— even this oil, which had been extracted from the Plant. She was only seeing how far she could go. “Yes,” Lady conceded (for it was not just any night), “but keep it very low.”
