“Don’t go to sleep, toots. You can’t sleep here.”
She answered quietly, “I am not sleeping, Owen Hall.”
He led her from the stall and looked around for a towel. There was one, for the two of them.
Owen said,v “Come along. We’ll dry outside.” He picked up the towel and took her hand. They left two trails of water across the floor from the shower to the front door. Owen thought the hot sun felt extraordinarily fine on his bare skin after the cascade of cold water.
The traveling zombies ignored them.
Owen positioned Paoli in the center of the small lawn with her body facing the western sun and asked her to bend toward him. When she did he began toweling her hair. Owen rubbed briskly, looking over her head at the men on the road. It occurred to him that this was the acid test: if just one of them turned to stare, or even peeked through slitted fingers, at the two naked bodies on the grass, that man was more alive than dead. None of them exhibited the spark of life, either above or below.
When the woman’s hair was dry to his satisfaction, he stood her straight and rubbed down the tall, lithe body. The sun had already done most of the work for him, but he considered it his duty to towel the entire body nonetheless. She might catch mildew if moisture remained anywhere on the long frame. Owen enjoyed his work. He threw himself into the job with enthusiasm, toweling down and up and around and down again, even remembering to lift each foot and dry the bottom of it. When he patted her knees in signal, she spread her feet apart without the necessity of words. All in all, Owen spent ten or fifteen minutes at the happy task, and when he stopped because his arms were getting tired, he flipped the towel over his shoulder and stepped back to inspect Paoli.
Two pink-clad monitors were standing on the grass at the edge of the road, inspecting them. Their mouths hung open with astonishment.
There had been no warning of their arrival.
“Good afternoon, ladies.” Owen thought it best to placate them—he didn’t want to lose his prize now. “You’re looking tired and careworn. Are you in the mood for a bath and a brisk rub? I have the expert’s touch.” He demonstrated the expert’s touch by playing the tips of his fingers up and down Paoli’s spine. She shivered, but not from a chill.
The monitors could only gape at him, now amazed by a talking male. One of them began the automatic motion of reaching out, reaching for his breast pocket to check his identification, but her hand quickly dropped away when she remembered that the talking male was unclothed. Her gaze went down his body and lingered on his thighs.
Owen took the blonde’s hand and led her inside. He paused in the doorway to glance back at the staring monitors and found that they had not yet recovered their wits. One stared at his backside.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” Owen said, and disappeared into the dim recesses of the house.
Paoli lay on her bed looking up at Owen. She was unblinking, unmoving, and content to merely watch him.
“Want to dance now, baby doll?”
She asked, “Will we dance all night?”
Owen began a grin but changed it to a soft smile and sat down beside her on the bed. His weight caused her to roll toward him. He studied her face for a moment and then, despite himself, let his gaze drift down the long silken body. Paoli was pink.
“We’ll dance until you holler quit,” he promised.
“Did the ancients do this at the wakes?”
“They did, unless the guest of honor objected. He usually didn’t say much.”
Paoli waited, looking up at him.
Owen patted her knees in the now familiar signal and Paoli responded.
Eight
A woman Is a foreign land,
Of which, though there he settle young,
A man will ne’er quite understand
The customs, politics and tongue.
—Coventry Patmore
Owen Hall opened his eyes and saw the ceiling. It wasn’t a readily familiar ceiling—it was nothing he remembered from any old room in Indiana—and he stared at it for a long moment of disorientation. The ceiling was washed in fading daylight, and the room was hot. Owen rolled his head on the bed to look across the room, but an opaque divider blocked his view. That was familiar. The daylight was coming from some point on ,the other side of the divider, but the source eluded him. He listened carefully for people sounds, traffic sounds, but there were none—and then, suddenly, he remembered where he was and why the sunlight was spilling across the ceiling.
“Oh, my.” His mouth was as dry as popcorn.
.Owen turned his’ head the other way on the bed and discovered he was only inches away from the sleeping woman. She was on her side facing away from him, with one leg flung carelessly toward his side of the bed. He glanced down at the leg and then followed it upward to the body.
“Oh, my!” he said again.
He couldn’t guess how long he’d been sleeping, but the setting sun offered a clue. All the rest of it was crystal clear—he remembered the shower and the rub down in the sun, the gawking women outside, and then going to bed with Paoli; he remembered what they had done and the length of time they’d taken while doing it; he remembered her amazement at learning a new thing and his amazement at discovering that she wasn’t a virgin, but he couldn’t guess or judge how long he’d slept afterward. And now he was hungry. Dry in the mouth and hungry. Dancing certainly took a lot out of a man.
Owen slipped out of bed and padded around the room divider to look through the gaping doorway.
The August sun was low in the west and casting long shadows of men on the road. He approached the doorway, but caution prompted him to stop just inside the battered frame, just out of sight of those on the roadway. The hounds of the law were still searching for him.
“Confound it, they just won’t give up.”
The road was teeming with hundreds of homebound workmen, all of them stolidly facing the east and riding that long circle around the city to their destinations. The road was also populated with an unusual number of female monitors inspecting the zombies—testing them, thumping them, attempting to provoke them into a response, picking at their identification bars. The continued search meant that they had not yet turned up the gravedigger who was now wearing Owen’s number. He suspected that the town police force had called out the reserves; their number was double and perhaps triple the number he’d seen on the road early in the morning.
Owen stayed out of sight, knowing it prudent to not retrieve his clothing just then. The dry coveralls were stretched out on the grass where he’d left them and it was his good fortune that none of the monitors saw them or bothered to come inspect them and then peer into the empty doorway.
The doggers were eager to find him, but they were plainly amateurs at this manhunting business; they lacked the technique. If he were the mayor or the marshall of the town, he could teach them a thing or two. That’s what this town needed—organization all the way down the line.
The monitors weren’t skilled huntresses, they didn’t have the good old American know-how of the Indiana cops, or else they would have organized a door-to-door search long before now. The missing door to this house should have alerted them, should have tipped them that something unusual was happening inside, if nothing more than a burglary, but instead of investigating the doorless place they wasted their time by poking men on the road. Owen shook his head at the inept search.
They actually expected him to play dumb; they really thought he was so dumb that he’d be out there skylarking on the road all the while they were searching for him. It didn’t speak for efficient police work, but it did say that his kind was very rare—so rare that the monitors lacked a businesslike system of finding him. It was silly that the pair of gaping women who had discovered him naked on the grass earlier in the afternoon never realized he was the culprit they sought. Silly and dumb. An Indiana cop would have nailed his tail to the wall in seconds, and the explanations would have come later.
Kehl
i and Paoli had been literally truthful when they had said that a man like him had never happened in the city before. Variants were made now and then for the amusement and edification of some woman, and perhaps once in a while a bad rebuilding job rolled out of the oven, but he seemed to be the one and only bungled variant in the town’s history. One hundred and sixty-nine years of female history, unless these people had short memories.
Owen backed away from the door and returned to the workbench in search of the cigars and a drink. His mouth was still dry and he wished mightily for a long cold beer, but the bourbon would have to do. It was still mellow but warm. The pile of old coins spilled on the bench took his attention and he pushed them about with a finger, arranging the dates in a rough consecutive order.
The hole in history bothered him.
These people—the women and the zombies—had lived in the city for 169 years (they said), but before them there was something else called the NorAmerFed, and before that there was the good old U.S. of A. Well, maybe, just maybe. History things didn’t always follow along in a neat, orderly manner. Old nations didn’t just stop at sundown one day and let a new nation spring up at sunrise the next morning—it wasn’t as easy as all that, as one of his Indiana schoolteachers had pounded into his head. There was usually something in between the end of one government and the beginning of the next, and that something in between was likely to be a bloody mess, a disaster, even a revolution. There was likely to be a nothing space of months or years to pass the time while people got things organized and running smoothly again.
Take the dates on these coins, for instance.
Here was a half-dollar dated 1984, so the United States was still chugging along in 1984, no matter who won the war and no matter if the picture of that jackass was stamped on the coin. Owen examined it closely. There were no foreign words on the coin—nothing printed in German, Italian, or Japanese—which certainly suggested that the Americans had won the war after all. Comforting notion. But how long did the United States last after 1984? No clue. And when the country finally stopped being the United States and fell down, how long was the something in between until people got this NorAmerFed business organized and running well? No clue.
The new Feds minted ten shul pieces in 2081 and 2097, and that was … that was only ninety-seven to a 113 years after 1984. Not very long—not long at all. And yet there was still Paoli’s history to be accounted for —another 169 years to be added to all the other figures. He counted on his fingers, made an obvious error, and went back to count again. All of it—everything and the kitchen sink—made this year out to be 2266. August 2266 A.D. Imagine it: that long! And 2266 take away 1943, when life had stopped for him the first time, was … was at least 323 years! All that without even counting the blank spaces in between governments—the nothing spaces before each new country was organized and working. Why, if he made proper allowances for the blanks between nations, if he allowed for a blank between the United States and the NorAmerFed, and yet another blank between the NorAmerFed and the Queen Bee’s cities, it was possible that five hundred or a thousand years had passed since that wintry night in 1943 when he died at a railroad crossing. A thousand years.
It boggled the mind.
Owen found it difficult to believe that he’d been below ground for five hundred or a thousand years waiting for Kehli to dig him up only yesterday. Why, that was fantastic. What’s more, he’d rot.
He had a drink on it, contemplating rotting.
Well, no—maybe not. Maybe his bones wouldn’t rot after all. He was every bit as good as a king or a slave, and the scientists were always digging up kings and slaves and other people who had lived two or three thousand years ago over there in Palestine and Turkey and Egypt and foreign places like that. They were finding kings all the time; buried kings were knocking around all over Egypt.* The scientists dug up the bones and the mummies and put them in museums, and then the Tribune reporters wrote articles about them. Owen had read all about the latest scientific discoveries in the Chicago Tribune; he prided himself on his scholarship and often wondered if he’d missed his calling.
The Sunday magazine sections were vast storehouses of wisdom and knowledge.
About ten years ago—no, come to think on it, it happened in 1930—thirteen years ago another scientist named Tombaugh had been puttering around in his observatory and found a brand-new planet named Pluto, away out to hell and gone beyond Saturn. It was a tiny planet—an icy thing. The magazine section of the Tribune had printed a lengthy piece on the discovery together with pictures of Mr. Tombaugh, his telescope, his blinker machine, and drawings of what the surface of Pluto looked like: it was all frozen seas, with huge rocks and mountaintops sticking up through the ice. Owen remembered comparing the pictures of Pluto to the mountains and ice fields of the South Pole.
On another Sunday about four years ago, just before the war started in Europe, there had been a fine article on a scientist named Munnfred and a three-thousand-year-old tomb he’d uncovered in Mesopotamia, which was in one of those foreign places like Iran or Iraq.
The newspaper had printed photographs and sketches of the tomb. Dr. Munnfred said the bones in a royal chamber were fully three thousand years old, and the artifacts in the chamber identified the remains as that of a woman, one of the concubines of King Gilgamesh. The newspaper artist offered a picture of Gilgamesh, based on ancient but authentic records. The king wore his hair down to his waist and looked like a red radical bolshevik.
Owen realized the significance of that discovery now* It made him authentic.
If the concubine’s bones could endure for three thousand years and then be found and identified by Dr. Munnfred, it was likely that his bones could last for five hundred or a thousand years and be found by Kehli and her crew. The only difference being that Kehli was a grave robber, not a trained scientist, but Owen decided he could forgive her that. It was pretty nice being alive again a thousand years in the future, even if the town was a rum place to be alive in.
Owen played with the coins, turning the matter over in his mind. Imagine it! Perhaps he was a thousand years old—a bungled variant who was the oldest man on earth. Paster Coulson would be mighty surprised when the grave robbers turned him up.
He needed clean clothing.
Owen prowled about the blonde’s bedroom inspecting the merchandise available to him. The blonde was sprawled on the rumpled bed, sleeping like an exhausted rug cutter, but he knew better than to wake her. Moving quietly,* Owen picked among the underclothing.
There were several pairs of short white socks that felt like cotton. He tried on a pair and found that they fitted him to just above the ankles. Underpants were another matter. The blonde owned several pair of white cottony underpants, but Owen wasn’t at all sure he wanted to be caught dead in them. The underpants were a trifle longer than the boxer shorts he was used to, but not quite as long as the bloomers his grandmother had worn in her heyday. Strange that he hadn’t noticed the cut and style of those underpants when he pulled a pair off the blonde in the shower. Perhaps his mind had been on other things —perhaps he’d been distracted by one thing or another. Owen decided he didn’t want to wear the underpants.
The pink coveralls were a sloppy fit, of course, but they were better than the drab ones he’d been wearing. He climbed into the coveralls and rolled up the sleeves and legs to accommodate his shorter frame. All in all, not too bad for hand-me-down clothing. Even the blonde’s shoes were a decent fit.
The back door claimed his attention. He hadn’t yet inspected the outback, but it might provide a handy escape route. Road travel was becoming risky to him.
The house—or the apartment—narrowed at the back, with the rear wall of the trapezoid being only wide enough to accommodate the door and the back wall of the small bedroom where zombies were expected to sleep on a cot. The back door was fastened with a simple sliding bolt and Owen found time to wonder why. There seemed to be no such thing as crime in the city, so why bother
to bolt a door? He opened it and another kind of jungle met his eye.
The outback was an overgrown confusion of weeds and pipes in contrasting array. The weeds were a tangled jungle, having never known a scythe or a lawn mower, while the pipes had been put down in neat patterns resembling the spokes of a wheel. There were no fences or walks, no gardens or garden paths, not even a scrawny tree—nothing but weeds and conduits. Owen counted pipes of three sizes: small three-inch pipes that likely carried water to each dwelling, larger six-inch pipes that carried he knew not what, and even larger twenty-inch ducts that resembled heating ducts above coal furnaces —but these surely couldn’t be heating pipes for the winter months for the heat losses would be enormous. The pipes were all aboveground, and a set of three served each house.
Owen dropped to the ground and put an ear to the smallest pipe. As expected, he heard water running. The next largest size gave him no hint of what it carried or contained; it was warm with the heat of the day but betrayed no sound to his ear. If this was good old Indiana, he’d guess it for a gas pipe of enormous size. The largest duct was as much a mystery as the supposed gas pipe. It too was warm from the sun, but there was no clue to its purpose. Paoli’s house had neither heating nor air conditioning, as far as he could determine, and he’d cased it carefully. The lack of a heating system and the presence of water pipes aboveground told him the town enjoyed mild winters; he guessed they’d never seen snow and ice around here.
Owen tested the largest duct for strength and then climbed atop it to peer inward, toward the center of the circle city. A large building he thought of as the powerhouse was there, in the geographical center, and all the pipes radiated from it. Each house was served by three pipes, and each set of three ran toward the powerhouse; the sets of three converged before they reached the powerhouse to larger, fewer pipes and then vanished into the building. The plan was an enormous wheel with the powerhouse serving as the hub and hundreds—perhaps even a thousand—spokes stretching out to serve each dwelling.
Ressurection Days Page 11
