There was something frightening about these acres of empty silence; he had never been this alone before, without others somewhere close by. He walked slowly now, pressed against the sun-warmed bricks of the building, pausing and peering out cautiously when he came to the corner. Ahead was a wide, wreckage-strewn avenue of emptiness. Just as he started across there was a movement far down the street and he fell back to the wall as a gray-uniformed guard passed slowly across. When he was gone, Billy hurried in the opposite direction, taking shelter in the shadows of the rusted steel beams of a floating dry dock.
From wreckage to ruin he went on, looking for some shelter he could crawl into, to hide and sleep. There were other guards about but they were easy to spot; they stayed on the wider avenues and never came near the buildings. If he could find a way inside one of the locked structures he would be safe enough from discovery. One of them looked promising, a long, low building with a collapsed roof and glassless windows. It was sided with slabs of asbestos sheeting and many of the panels were cracked and one of them had been almost completely torn away. He came close and looked in and could see only darkness. The fallen roof was only a few feet above the floor, making a dark and silent cavern. This was just what he needed. He yawned and crawled through the opening. The big chunk of iron caught him in the side and he screamed in agony.
The darkness filled with red tongues of pain as he scrambled backward out of the opening, hurling himself to one side. Something heavy rushed through the air next to his head and crashed into the wall, cracking and splintering it. Billy stumbled to his feet, away from the entrance, but no one tried to follow him. There was only silence within the dark opening as he hobbled away as fast as he could, favoring his side, glancing back fearfully at the building. When he turned a corner and it was out of sight he stopped and pulled up his shirt, looking at the scratched rawness just below his ribs that was already starting to turn black-and-blue. It didn’t seem to be more than a bad bruise, but how it hurt.
Something to fight with, that’s what he needed. Not that he was going back to that building — never! — he was just going to need a weapon of some kind in this place. There were shattered chunks of concrete around and he picked up one that fitted into his hand, and even had a broken stub of rusty reinforcing rod sticking out of it. Lots of other people must have had the idea to hide in here, he should have known that when he saw the guy who came out under the fence. They stayed out of sight of the guards, that seemed easy enough to do. Then they found a place and took it over, keeping anyone else out, that’s how it would be. There might be a way into every one of these buildings, and there might be someone hiding in each one. He shivered as he thought of this and pressed his hand to his sore side and moved away from the shelter of the building. Maybe he should get out of here while he was still in one piece? But this was too good a spot to leave. If he did find a place to hole up it would be perfect, just what he needed. He should look around some more before he got out. And find something better than this lump of concrete to fight with. He searched as he walked and realized that, in spite of the ruined and crumbled landscape, there was nothing lying about that was small and handy enough to use for a weapon. It was as if many others had been through here before him, bent on the same mission. Clutching the concrete tighter, he limped on.
A little later, he wanted to escape this collapsing and rusted jungle, but he had lost his way and could not get out. The sun was hot on the top of his head, bouncing up from the cracked pavement around him. He walked along the brink of a vast and silent dry dock, empty and forgotten, a canyon of scrap-littered silence, feeling like an insect crawling along the edge of the world. Beyond was the oily rush of the East River cutting him off from the distant towers of Manhattan; his side hurt when he breathed and loneliness was a weight pressing down on his shoulders.
A dismantled ship rested on blocks at the edge of the water from which it had been reluctantly pulled, its skin peeled off by the wreckers and its rusting ribs standing like the skeleton of a dead sea monster. The work had never been finished; the after part of the ship was almost intact, while some of the deckhouse and the stern were still untouched. There were no openings at ground level, the ship had been a tanker and the transverse bulkhead was still in place, but high above were portholes and a doorway. It wouldn’t be hard to climb the framework and Billy wondered if anyone had been there before him. They might, they might not, there was no way to tell. He had to rest and the ship made him think of home. He had to try some place. Carrying the chunk of concrete made climbing difficult, but he still took it with him.
In front of the deckhouse door there remained only a jagged-edged piece of deck, just a few feet wide. Billy pulled himself up onto this and faced the doorless opening to the cabin, holding the concrete ready.
“Is anyone there?” he called softly. The circular openings that had once contained portholes threw beams of light into the interior, bright spots on the deck that made the surrounding darkness more intense. “Hello,” Billy called again, but there was only silence.
Reluctantly he advanced through the doorway and into the blackness of the room. No one struck at him this time. Nothing moved and he blinked his eyes, dimmed by the bright sunlight outside, at a dark shape, but it was only a pile of rubbish. There was another pile in the far corner, and he had to look at it twice before he realized that it was a man, squatting against the wall with his legs pulled up before him, looking intently at Billy.
“Put that thing down, the thing in your hand,” the man said in a hushed voice, almost a whisper. He reached out a long arm and clanged a twisted length of pipe against the decking. Billy stared at it wide-eyed, and his side ached. He dropped the concrete.
“That’s very wise,” the man said, “very wise.” He stood up jerkily, unfolding like a carpenter’s rule, a tall man with spiderlike arms, thin to the point of emaciation. When he walked into a beam of sunlight Billy saw that the skin was stretched tight across his cheekbones and almost hairless skull, while his lips were drawn back to reveal long yellow teeth. His eyes were round as a child’s and of such a watery blue that they seemed almost transparent. Not empty, but more like windows to look through — with nothing to be seen on the other side. And he kept staring at Billy, swinging the pipe slowly, saying nothing, his lips pulled away from his teeth in an expression that might have been a grin, but also might be something else, very different.
When Billy took a slow step back toward the doorway the end of the pipe twitched out and stopped him. “What do you want here?” the whisper asked.
“I don’t want anything, I’m going—”
“What do you want?”
“I was just looking for a place to lie down, I’m tired, I don’t want any trouble.”
“What is your name?” the voice whispered, the eyes never blinked or moved.
“Billy…” Why had he answered so fast! He bit his lip: why had he given his right name?
“Do you have anything to eat, Billy?”
He started to lie, then thought better of it. He reached inside his shirt. “Here, I got some weedcrackers. You want some? They’re a little broken.”
The pipe dropped to the deck and rolled away while the man stepped forward with both hands cupped before him, towering over Billy. “ ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.’ Do you know where that comes from?” he asked.
“No — no, I don’t,” Billy said uneasily, dropping the crackers into the outstretched hands.
“I didn’t think you would,” the man complained, then sat down with his back to the wall at the same spot as before. He began to eat with a steady, automatic motion. “You’re a heathen, I imagine, a yellow heathen, though that doesn’t matter. It will to you as to the rest of His creatures. You wish to sleep, sleep. This place is large enough for two.”
“I can get out, you were here first.”
“You are afraid of me, aren’t you?” Billy turned away from the unchanging stare, and the man nodded. “You should not be, because we are coming very near the end of fear. Do you know what that means? Do you know the significance of this year, do you?”
Billy sat silent. He did not know what to answer. The man finished the last of the crumbs, wiped his hands on his filthy pants and sighed heavily. “You could not know. Go to sleep, there is nothing to worry about here. No one will come near to bother you, we have strict rules of property in our community. Usually it is only strangers, like you, who trespass, though the others will do it if they think it worthwhile. But they won’t come here, they know I have nothing for them to covet. You may sleep undisturbed.”
It seemed impossible to even consider sleeping, no matter how tired he felt, not with this strange man watching him. Billy lay against the wall in the far corner, eyes open and alert, wondering what he should do next. The man mumbled to himself and scratched at his ribs inside his thin shirt. A high-pitched hum whined in Billy’s ear and he slapped at the mosquito. Another bit him on the leg and he scratched the spot. There seemed to be an
