Shark waved his heavy black police .38. ‘You see? Fully loaded, too!’
Tammy looked at Shark and she saw in his eyes the cold concealed threat that even Edgar hadn’t detected yet. ‘I see,’ she said quietly. ‘In that case, I suppose I’d better get the children ready.’
Edgar could see she was upset. He reached for her hand again as she turned to go upstairs. ‘Tammy,’ he said, ‘you have to see that this is the only way.’
Tammy didn’t turn around. ‘If you say so, Edgar.’
She went upstairs, and Edgar watched her go, biting his lip.
Shark, tucking his revolver back in his pants, said, ‘Hey, man, I hope I haven’t caused you any domestic whatitsname. You know? I may rip off a few stores now and then, but I aint no homebreaker.’
Edgar shook his head. ‘I don’t think you could break us up if you tried. Shark. Tammy and me – well, people say we’re inseparable.’
Shark grinned. ‘That’s cute, man. I love a story with a happy ending.’
It didn’t take Tammy long to get everything packed. She loaded the Mercury wagon with canned food, blankets, medical supplies, water, soft drinks and spare clothes. Shark McManus kept a lookout for police cars, but the streets of Edgar Paston’s tidy suburb were silent under the early-morning stars, and the only sign of life was a neighbor’s curtain, twitching suspiciously as they prepared to leave.
At three-fifteen, they locked up the house. Chrissie and Marvin, yawning, climbed into the back of the car with Tammy, while Edgar drove and Shark McManus sat next to him. Shark kept his revolver resting on his lap. He was behaving amiably, but he was also making it clear that any interference or argument would not particularly v amuse him. They kept the radio playing in case there was any news of National Guard blockades or possible escape routes from Jersey.
Every half-hour, there was a plague bulletin, and a repeated message telling people what to do if they thought they had plague. The message was sober, but it was also absurdly optimistic, and if you didn’t know how terrifyingly quickly the plague had spread across the Eastern seaboard, you could have been forgiven for thinking that your pallor, your pains and your chronic diarrhoea were nothing worse than a severe tummy bug.
The Pastons and Shark McManus drove through the pallid night into the early dawn. They were flagged down once by a motorcycle cop just outside Jersey City, but he seemed more interested in checking Edgar’s driver’s license than questioning their destination. He looked around the station wagon a couple of times, and then waved them on. He was obviously tired out after a night’s duty.
The radio said, ‘Now, it’s important not to let your anxiety about this epidemic prompt you into ill-considered action. The federal authorities in charge of this situation say that the best thing you can do – safer for your family and safer for your neighbors – is to stay home. If you do not have sufficient foodstuffs to last you – well, simply wave a makeshift flag or banner from your windows, and your local police department will bring you supplies. Stay at home, folks – it’s the sensible way, and it’s the safest way.’
Tammy said, ‘They’re bound to stop us and send us back home. Edgar, why don’t we just turn back? Please!’
Shark McManus turned in his seat. ‘Of course they’ll stop us. But if we use our noodles, they won’t turn us back. Now relax, will ya? I have some brainwork to do.’
Tammy said, ‘Edgar – tell him we’re turning back!’
But Edgar said nothing, and kept on driving through the outskirts of dreary Jersey City – through the silent, deserted suburbs – with the emasculated obedience of a man who knows he will never have the courage to argue against a gun.
Shark McManus, chewing gum noisily and repetitively, directed Edgar through the streets of Jersey with laconic expertise. It was a dead city of parked cars and wind-blown garbage, and the gradually-brightening sky only made its shabbiness look worse.
Tammy sat there, pale-faced, with dark rings under her eyes, and the two children silently dozed, with heads lolling against the seat. Tammy was coming along because Edgar was her husband and she was Edgar’s wife, but – with a strange kind of internal tension that she had never felt before – she was beginning to suspect that Edgar was not the man she had once thought him to be.
She even wondered if he had shot that Boy Scout out of something more than the righteous defense of property and the American way – out of violence, even, and calculated hatred. A bond of some sort – an understanding – seemed to have grown up between Edgar and this hoodlum Shark McManus. She looked at the back of her husband’s neck as he drove and it looked like the back of a stranger, someone she didn’t love very much at all.
At five-thirty in the morning they stopped. She opened her eyes and realized she’d been sleeping. They were third or fourth in a line of cars that was being checked by police and National Guardsmen by the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel.
‘Edgar,’ she said. ‘What’s happening?’
Edgar didn’t turn around. ‘Lincoln Tunnel,’ he said flatly. ‘We got as far as here, and we didn’t get stopped by the cops once. We can thank Shark for that.’
‘That’s right, ma’am,’ grinned Shark McManus. ‘Right through them back-streets like rabbits through a warren. Any time you want to get yourself out of a jam, just call on Shark McManus, and you’re saved. Service with a smile.’
Tammy said, ‘They won’t let us through here, whatever happens.’
Shark pointed across the gray ruffled waters of the Hudson, to the gray spectral spires of Manhattan. This morning, the city looked like a ghostly mirage of itself – an oasis of purity in a desert of disease.
‘You see that?’ he said, smiling lopsidedly. ‘That’s where we’re headed, ma’am, and aint nobody going to stand
