by C. L. Moore
When we topped the next rise Corby was much nearer. The whole town was brilliantly alight, and I thought I could hear the sharp crack of gunfire, though the noise around me was too heavy now to be sure. The town couldn't be more than five minutes away, I thought.
But maybe we didn't have five minutes to spare. The voice of the Prowler rose again in that terrifying, high, undulating scream that sounded bright red like the creature that voiced it. In the mirror I watched it swing contemptuously around two sets of headlights and come roaring after us down the road, swelling, crimson, glaring with light and color.
Pod's foot was on the floor boards and the truck heaved and rocked, booming in protest. The lights of Corby rushed toward us and the tree rushed backward along the road in continuous hissing streams. The stars winked above Corby, quiet and cool.
The Prowler cut in on a car two places behind us, herding it in toward the roadside with an ear-destroying wail of the siren. Again the tableau of Prowler and captive leaped backward and dwindled in the dark.
But this time something else happened. One of the enormous Comus trucks behind the Prowler swung wide around the halted tableau and came thundering after us, closing the distance with appalling speed. I saw the wheel fighting Pod Henken's grip like something alive, terrified and struggling to escape. He swerved toward the edge of the road, cutting across the humming power lanes, trying to lose us among the line of rushing trucks and cars.
He couldn't do it. The pursuers were coming too fast behind us, and it was us they were after. A quarter of a mile behind us the huge Comus van swung into a lane paralleling ours and came roaring down on us like a cyclone, blinking its lights on and off furiously. Pod stamped the accelerator hard on the floor boards and the whole vehicle shuddered under us, but still the big pursuer gained and gained.
Now it was drawing level with us in the next lane. It didn't try to pull ahead, but went thundering along neck and neck in a high-speed tableau, hunter and hunted alike roaring down the road together. I saw Pod give it one quick glance and then stare straight ahead, his jaw set, fighting the wheel to keep us on our course. Very briefly I realized how little I had known of the old man until tonight. He had come a long way from the red-faced nonentity I'd met back there in the redwoods. Or maybe I'd come a long way. Maybe it was I who'd changed.
The enormous truck towered over us on juggernaut wheels like a moving factory that thundered along the road. Now it was moving in as the Prowler had done to other cars, crowding us toward the edge of the pavement. The relief driver on our side was leaning out of the window, yelling and waving.
"Pod!" I shouted. "Your gun! If we could hit their tires——"
Pod rolled sideways in the seat. "My pocket!" he yelled, not taking his eyes off the road. I groped in his coat pocket with my left hand. And then, with the gun in my grip and halfway lifted to take aim, I paused suddenly, straining my ears. Had I heard what I thought I heard?
"Hey, Charlie!" a thin voice was yelling in the whistling dark between us. "Hey, Charlie—can you hear me?"
A flash of bright excitement glinted in my mind. I leaned back across Pod's bent shoulders and waved furiously.
"Charlie?" I yelled in answer. "What's the word?"
The wind whipped his answer to rags in the space between us. All I could hear was a thin sound that seemed to say, "—block ahead—"
"What?" I shouted. And this time it came clearer through the roaring of the wind.
"Roadblock ahead! Take it easy—we'll crash through! Let us get—ahead ..."
Time seemed to stretch out like elastic. Time stopped entirely. We would go on at this racking speed forever with the huge bulk of the truck pulling ahead of us, lengthening the distance between our lights and the great, rumbling, shaking galaxy of lights that outlined its rear.
Now I could see the barricade set up across the whole highway just outside the lights of the Comus check station at the edge of Corby. But trucks were parked nose to tail in a solid wall across the road, and an enormous Prowler sat waiting at the narrow gap through which traffic was being passed. I thought, watching the traffic slip through the barrier:
They know about us. Somehow they know. The trap's set up for us and nobody else. And it had to be true that the word was out about us, or how had our friends in the truck ahead known we needed help? Someone had talked. It was the only answer. I wondered painfully if the someone had been Elaine. And I wondered if I'd ever know the truth about that one.
The Prowler at the barricade began to howl high and shrill as the huge truck hurtled toward it, not slowing down at all. The truck added its own hornblast to the commotion, raucous and defiant. For one long last moment it thundered straight for the barricade with all its lights glittering and its horn screaming until the echoes rolled back from the hills around us. The noise was exhilarating and contagious. I leached over to slam my wrist down on our own horn, hearing the hoarse bellow of it leap into life. The world was full of tremendous motion and the stunning sound of horns filling the road and the air and the sky.
The next moment the leviathan before us hit the barricade.
The sound was enormous—high, hollow, booming. All the horns stopped on the same note and the world was full of that tremendous booming and nothing else at all. We saw the trucks that made up the barricade hurtle left and right as the huge battering-ram thundered forward, plowing its path through their ranks and leaving a broad space open across the road. Then slowly, solemnly, it began to heave over toward one side. There was something awesome and deliberate about its overturning. It leaned, leaned past the balance point, leaned solemnly and crashed ...
We hadn't time to pause or look back. The Prowler was already gunning into life as we hurtled through the opening the nameless rebels had made for us and shot straight toward the center of town at close to a hundred miles an hour, Corby streaming back on both sides of us like a town made of water.
Pod threw on the brakes. The soundtruck skidded and shrieked, tires smoking on the pavement until we rocked at last to a standstill and the houses around us turned solid again and we had stopped in the center of Corby.
I looked at the street before us and blinked and looked again. All I could see was the color of Comus—bright red. Two of the three helicopters we had seen laboring over us above the road sat now in the middle of the main street of Corby, glinting crimson in the light. Drawn up before the helicopters were the men who had come down in them, red-coated men with guns in their hands, waiting for us. Comus knew. And Comus had got here first.
For a moment it seemed to me that after we stopped the world went right on streaming backward on both sides, and the ground still seemed to be heaving under us. Walking across the heaving ground came a familiar figure in a familiar checkered shirt.
Guthrie's face was as red as the coats of the men behind him. Anger made the veins beat in his temples.
He called up at me in a tight voice, "All right, Rohan, come out with your hands up. I made a mistake with you, but it's not too late to catch it. Where's the Anti-Com fuse?"
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CHAPTER XXVIII
BEHIND ME I heard a sudden brisk motion inside the sound truck. I didn't turn my head. I was looking at the town of Corby and wondering where its people were. I was sure I'd heard gunfire from back there on the road. I was doubly sure there had been fighting here to slow down the house-to-house searchers. It came to me only now, in a sudden blaze of realization, that we'd made it into Corby and the Anti-Com hadn't yet blown up. I thought, Then they can't have found it yet. There's still time——
But was there? Time for what? Time to be arrested and searched, outnumbered by the Comus men before us. I wondered if Guthrie would shoot if we tried to run him down. Gunfire might rouse the local rebels, call them to the rescue. Alone, we'd shot our bolt. We couldn't do much from here on in without help that I saw no way to get. Guthrie said, "You heard me, Rohan. Come on down." For a moment I was acutely aware of my own weakness, the pain in my arm, the dizziness i
n my head. I drew a breath and started to mutter to Pod Henken. All I could think of was to start the truck again and force their gunfire. It was all I could think of. But behind us in the truck better wits were at work.
I heard from the roof of our cab a sudden, hollow, metallic coughing sound, loud and carrying. Then a voice amplified all out of recognition, a woman's voice that sounded a little flat with age, shouted to the silent town.
"Hey, Charlie!" the amplifiers on the roof of the sound truck roared. HEY, CHARLIE! The enormous scream went rolling into the dark. HEY, CHARLIE! The flat-faced houses around us picked up the words, flung them from echo to echo until they diminished down the streets of Corby in overlapping patterns of sound. HEY, CHARLIE! the housefronts seemed to be shouting. HEY, CHARLIE—CHARLIE—CHARLIE!
The whole town heard it. The sound soared up and made a dome above the rooftops, and even the stars must have been listening.
Guthrie's gun arm swung up and I saw his lips move, but I couldn't hear anything he said in the amplified screaming that filled the whole air. I did hear his gun bark, and then the twang of the bullet on metal, and one of the two amplifiers above us coughed and went silent.
For one last moment I heard Eileen Henken's defiant voice screaming the rally call in vast, metallic tones. Then the gun barked again and the sound amplifier gave a hoarse squawk and was silent. My ears roared with the stillness when it stopped.
From the row of flat-faced houses to our left and right I thought I sensed motion behind windowpanes. I wasn't sure, because a Comus sergeant in a brilliant red coat had jumped out before the line of unmoving men as Eileen's alarm began to sound, and I was watching him, ready to duck. His mouth opened and closed with some order nobody could hear while the amplifier horns still screamed. I wasn't even paying attention to Guthrie just now. I thought this man was our nearest real danger—now.
When the roar of the amplifier died the sergeant's voice bawled out with unexpected volume. He got some of the command out. "FI——" he yelled.
A rifle cracked sharply, with a sound of brisk authority. The yelling sergeant never finished his command. Guthrie whirled toward the noise, and in the same instant I realized that all alone the street gun muzzles were poking out from upper windows with a sharp crackle of breaking glass. Their fusillade swept the scarlet ranks, whined from the helicopter sides, sang on the pavement. The Comus men reeled in a moment's wild disorder before they broke for cover, firing as they ran. The focus of the fight had changed with amazing swiftness.
So the rebels had known we were on our way. They had held their fire until now.
But it was still up to us to take the next step.
I felt the shape of Pod Henken's gun solid and unexpected in my hand. I had forgotten I held it. Clumsily in my left hand I hefted the thing.
Then from behind us the wild, rising wail of the Prowler we had so briefly escaped came swelling toward us along the street. A burst of futile rifle fire rattled from windows above as it passed. I heard a dull boom and saw a flash of sullen reddish light reflected on the building fronts around us. The Prowler had fired a small bomb into one of the centers of rebel resistance as it passed. And it must be a building Comus had already searched, I told myself. They still wanted the Anti-Com and wanted it intact, or all of Corby would by now be rocking with explosions. I glanced apprehensively at the quiet stars. There might be bombs or bombers on the way already, poised to strike if all else failed.
Over the wild shrieking of the Prowler and the rattle of gunfire a voice was shouting in my ear from the back window of the cab. Roy's voice, pitched to carry. He was almost at my ear but he sounded as if he were shouting over windy miles, the noise around us was so heavy.
"Where—we headed?" he called. "Where's—Anti-Com?"
It brought me back to life. The tremendous noise and the numbing effect of all I had been through had dulled me briefly to the need for more action, and fast, while the rebel firing still gave us time to move. It occurred to me with a kind of impersonal interest that I was losing blood and had been for the past half hour—or was it less? Time had little meaning now. The loss of the blood had little meaning. It was somebody else's blood reddening the bandage on my arm.
I leaned to look through the windshield at the skyline of Corby. Elaine had said you could see the church tower from anywhere in town. And after an instant I saw it, high and gray, underlighted from below by what might be the glow of an unseen fire somewhere near it. The belfry shone pink-lit and pale against the sky, and I could see one star shining through the arches.
A hand came through the window of the cab at my side groping for the inside handle. An arm with a checkered shirt sleeve. I looked down at Guthrie's red, determined face, dark with anger. My gun was in my left hand and I swung it up and looked straight down the barrel at him, the gun sight centered between his eyes and the rest of his face so near my own hand blotted it out. He looked up at me, his eyes on mine, waiting because it was too late for him to do anything at all but await the explosion.
I couldn't pull the trigger.
I tried. I couldn't do it. From a distance, yes, maybe. From an impersonal distance when it was his life or mine. But not now, not this close, not with his eyes calmly gazing into mine. I knew him too well. He was a tough old man doing a job he didn't much like, but doing it because he knew he had to. According to his lights, I was a fool.
I turned the gun barrel sidewise and struck him in the face with the back of my hand, heavily, knocking him backward into the street.
"Pod," I said, keeping my voice as quiet as I could, "get going. Turn left into that street there. We're heading for the gray stone church."
The motor heaved into life before I fished speaking, and the truck rumbled into motion in a slow arc across the street. And not an instant too soon, either. The wail of the Prowler was all around us, bathing us in sound that made the viscera tighten. To our right just as we began to move an enormous crimson shape went hurtling by, so close its curved side shrieked against the side of the sound truck. They had meant to ram us. They had only barely missed. Next time they wouldn't miss at all.
Pod knew it as well as I did. He didn't try to straighten out of his arc and enter the street I'd pointed to. Instead he swung the truck broadside across its mouth, blocking the whole way.
"Outside!" he yelled. "We can't outrun 'em! Maybe on foot we can make it. Hurry!"
He was down in the street before he finished the last words. I scrambled across the seat after him and dropped through his open door, hearing the thud of hurrying feet in the truck behind me as the rest of the troupe scrambled too. Pod caught me as I hit the street and staggered. The next instant the whole truck boomed and leaped as the Prowler, accelerating backward with enormous speed and accuracy, crashed hard into the side I had just vacated.
It crashed and rebounded. The street was fully blocked—for a minute or two. For whatever that was worth to us. For under the continuous wailing of the Prowler I felt rather than heard a heavier beating throb, and knew that the helicopters were heaving their crimson weight into the air.
Cressy was on one side of me, Eileen Henken on the other. "You all right?" Roy asked anxiously, peering at me. I looked past him at Polly, her face strangely not haggard at all any more, but bright with a flamboyant freshness of excitement. Between them she and Roy were carrying the square box by its handles.
"I'm fine!" I yelled at them through the uproar. "Come on. Run!"
Somewhere down a side street another of the dull explosions boomed and another fan of crimson light sprang briefly up. Smoke blew toward us, veiling the buildings. People were running in the smoke, turning to fire back the way they had come. From the hidden side street the wail of another Prowler shrieked to a terrible crescendo and swooped down again with a shrill falling sound. Behind us the stalled sound truck reverberated again as the Prowler crashed once more into its side. A fusillade of useless rifle fire burst from a row of windows above us, bullets spattering against the high c
rimson curve of the Prowler futilely. We could see its gleaming red brow above the top of the sound truck drawing back for another blow.
We ran, under a slanting curtain of the rifle fire down the street toward the church tower in the distance.
It was like running through chaos. My head felt light and my feet seemed a long way off, hardly touching the pavement. The smoke that blew past us seemed to swirl through my mind. I remember a bright red 'hopper rocking toward us down a street where men and women were running and falling, and I remember one man drawing back his arm to throw something bottle-shaped that gleamed in the 'hopper's single headlight and then crashed against its side. Oily lid splashed as it broke, flashed into fire, and spread a film of unsteady flame over the whole side of the 'hopper. A homemade bomb, I thought. They're fighting back with all they've got.
But it wasn't going to be enough.
'Hoppers you can knock out. But not Prowlers. Not helicopters. The machines were closing in on us all and rifles are no good against the kinds of machines Comus was mustering against us.
Only the Anti-Com could knock these monsters out.
A heavy buzzing overhead made my very bones vibrate, and somebody's hand on my arm dragged me under the overhang of a porch roof just before the search beam from the sky came splashing down, outlining startled runners in the street. They turned up frightened faces bleached white in the strong light. Bullets rattled down along the high beam and an irregular zigzag line of people doubled up and dropped onto the dazzling pavement.
Comus was out of control. Ted Nye was out of control. The safety fuse we carried with us was a safety fuse for Nye as well as the powerful thing we carried it to. I remember thinking desperately, They won't take much more of this. They can't. They shouldn't. They'll turn on the Anti-Com, safety fuse or not, and stop Comus in its tracks or blow up California trying. I heard Pod Henken's voice wheezing in my ear.
