Last Gasp

we die--help us.'

Chase grimaced from the stab of pain in his side as he stood up. He made no attempt to conceal the gun, nor to use it. These pathetic creatures were no longer a threat. It was fear that had driven them, fear of what was happening to their body, fear of what they were turning into.

He went to Ruth and held her. She was shaking, her skin clammy, her mouth red where she had rubbed it.

'Can we do anything for them?'

'No, it's too late.' She sucked in a shuddery breath, clutching his arm. 'It's hopeless. There's nothing anyone can do.'

Daybreak on Interstate 80, twenty miles from Reno.

Chase was determined to reach Goose Lake before nightfall. Keeping to the side roads and the backwoods hadn't been such a great idea after all; whatever Reno had to offer couldn't be much worse. He kept his foot pressed down hard on the accelerator, willing the jeep to take off and fly. When daylight came he thought it would somehow diminish the memory of those figures seen by flashlight, bring back a measure of everyday sanity, but the reverse had been true. Seeing for himself the terminal effects of pollution sickness had intensified his feeling of dread and filled him with a desperate panic that Cheryl might be suffering the same fate.

The hard shoulder and inside lane of the highway were strewn with wrecks. People were living in some of them. Small fires burned in front of doors hanging off their hinges, cooking utensils and belongings were scattered around, and ragged sooty-faced children played among the dented metal and rusting engines.

Fleeing from the south they'd got this far and run out of money, gasoline, goods to barter, and luck. Now they were stranded in no-man's-land with nowhere to go. Large recently erected signs every quarter mile warned: absolutely no admission to immigrants within city limits! So here they were and here they stayed.

If conditions were this bad here, what must they be like back east in the densely populated industrial areas of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati? Chase visualized it as a vast stinking Dick-ensian slum where the skies were perpetually black and the rivers choked with putrescent sludge, inhabited by gray ghosts who trudged to work and carried out their tasks like automatons. According to the newscasts goods were still being produced and sold, the service industries still functioned, life went on 'normally' . . . but for how much longer?

'What's happening, can you see?' Ruth asked, craning to look over the windshield.

Chase slowed down as the stream of traffic built up into a solid jam. It was a perimeter checkpoint manned by state militia and city police. Each vehicle and its occupants were being closely scrutinized. The guards were wearing respirators, Chase saw, their visored white helmets gleaming like skulls in the murk that had thickened the nearer they got to the city. He recalled with a small prayer of thanks that Drew had packed respirators and goggles, which at the time had struck him as both morbid and unnecessary.

'They'll want to see our IDs,' Chase said, fumbling for his own. He noticed that many of the vehicles, the majority in fact, were being directed onto a slip road. These were the rejected, turned back to swell the tide of flotsam along Interstate 80.

The line crept forward with infuriating sluggishness. The vehicle in front was a clapped-out microbus with taped-over cracks in its tinted windows and a bent TV aerial on the roof. It contained a family, with two or three kids and an old woman who stared morosely through the rear window, chin propped in her hand.

A semicircle of militia, weapons drawn, covered all angles. Chase watched a barrel-chested sergeant who topped six feet examining the family's ID cards and papers. His voice sounded hollow and distorted inside the faceplate.

'State your business in Reno.'

'Just passing through.'

Chase couldn't see the driver's face, but he could imagine it from the tone of voice. Timid, hopeful, anxious, sweating.

'Destination?' demanded the burly sergeant.

There was a fractional pause. 'San Francisco.' The driver rushed on with a hurried explanation. 'We got relatives there, officer, my wife's parents. They wrote and promised us a place--'

'San Francisco is off limits. Has been for six months.' The sergeant pointed with a gloved hand. 'Pull over to the right. Access denied.'

'But we have to get through,' the man whined. 'You see, it's my son, the youngest, he's sick. He needs medical attention. My wife's parents have fixed it for him to be--'

'In that case you've crapped out twice,' the sergeant said indifferently. 'Nobody with an illness or disease of any description is allowed inside city limits. Now move this fucking heap of rust before I have it impounded. That's if you don't want to forfeit everything except the clothes you stand up in.'

The microbus shuddered off to the right and Chase took its place. He handed the documents over. 'We're both doctors. We have a patient who urgently requires--'

'Did I ask you a question?' The sergeant glanced at the ID cards and held them over his shoulder without looking. 'Check these on Memorex.'

Chase blinked. His eyes were starting to sting. He noticed that Ruth's eyes were red-rimmed too. Photochemical smog activated by the sun's rays. Welcome to California.

'State your business in Reno.'

'Passing through.'

'Destination?'

'Goose Lake, Oregon.' Chase could see the trooper inside the glass-walled booth feeding data into a keyboard terminal. What did they expect to find? That he and Ruth were a couple of homicidal maniacs on the run from a mental institution? He gripped the wheel with both hands, fingers flexing, trying to curb his impatience. They couldn't turn them back now. There was no earthly reason why. They couldn't.

'Are the two of you healthy? Pollution sickness?' To judge from the flat gaze behind the faceplate he might have been inspecting a side of beef to see whether it ought to be condemned.

'Yes, we're both healthy.'

'Are you carrying drugs?'

Chase was about to say no when Ruth said, 'Medical supplies. No hard drugs or hallucinogens.'

'Show me.'

She opened the aluminum case and the sergeant looked at the plastic bottles, capsules, and vials in their padded compartments, the syringes in their pouches. Everything was clearly labeled, though whether the sergeant knew the difference between digitoxin and ethyloestrenol was open to doubt, in Chase's view.

The trooper returned with the ID cards. He handed them to the sergeant without a word, who folded the papers he was holding and gave them to Chase. The sergeant recited:

'You are allowed to remain twelve hours within the Reno city boundary. One minute longer will be considered a violation of the special emergency law, as will the sale or purchase of drugs by trade, barter, or any other form of exchange, punishable by imprisonment and confiscation of all possessions and personal effects. Unauthorized purchase of oxygen is also forbidden, subject to the same penalties.'

He stepped back and waved them on, his attention already on the next vehicle in line.

A mile farther on visibility was so bad that they had to don the goggles and respirators. Their skin felt prickly, as though a static charge were playing over it.

'Twelve hours,' Chase laughed shortly. 'Who in his right mind would want to stay any longer?' He squinted up through the murk. The sun was a diffuse orange blur and it was noticeably warmer, by several degrees. A thermal inversion layer, trapping the heat and fumes in a thick vaporous blanket that hugged the ground. It was like driving through a hot burning mist of sulfuric acid.

Buildings loomed and they realized they were in the city itself. Beyond knowing that he wanted to head roughly northwest Chase hadn't a clue where he was going or which direction to take. Headlights came toward them like dim yellow eyes. Several times he had to stamp on the brakes as a glowing red taillight warned him of stalled traffic.

'Like being back in New York,' Ruth said with mordant humor.

Chase peered hopelessly ahead. 'Can you see any signs? Can you see anything?' Nightmares were like this, wandering about lost in an eerie blank timelessness. He began to believe that it was a dream and would last forever, driving through acid mist for all eternity. It was