by Earl
For two hours more he and the praying Finny breathed over the air in their tiny prison. At last it became so stagnant that Walwin’s head began to ache tormentingly. He pressed his face against the upper part of the port window, which was half out of water, and peered out over the surface. The mist had changed from its original deep crimson to a light, rosy tint. Was that the shore he saw there, dim and fogged?
Walwin reached for the hatch bolt, almost too weak to stand.
“Say your last prayer, Finny,” he mumbled. “Pm going to open up. We can’t breathe this air any more. Not a damned oxygen molecule left in it and——”
He jerked open the hatch savagely, defiantly. If it was to be death——
“—amen!” wailed Finny, as a stream of cool, but acid-tainted air rushed over them.
It tickled their throats and set them to coughing. “Oh, Lord!” moaned Finny, and began to take up a new prayer.
“Shut up, you fool!” cried Walwin joyfully. “This air is all right. A little pungent”—he strangled a cough that threatened to strangle him—“but no worse than my old chem lab at college. The red mist has had its fangs pulled. Come on, out we go!”
Fifteen minutes later, breathing deeply on the raft, they knew they had been saved. Their throats felt as though they had swallowed broken glass, and their lungs were sore, but a growing strength suffused their muscles. The twenty-hour ordeal in the bathysphere had been torture, mental as well as physical, but it was over. Finny thanked his Maker profusely. Walwin felt as though he had been dead and buried, and then resurrected. His spirits soared exuberantly.
“Start up the motor, Finny boy. We’ll have something to eat at the house first. Then we’ll fix those flats, drive to town and find out what this is all about. Maybe somebody just hung his socks in the wind.”
Finny’s simple face was a mask of gravity. “I don’t like this business at all, sir,” he murmured gloomily. “My witches’ bones told me this was a big thing—bigger than we think.”
“Nonsense!” scoffed Walwin. But within himself was an uneasy feeling he could not define. Just how widespread had been the red mist’s activity? Miles, perhaps? Or perhaps——
He checked himself as his thoughts sprang to unreasoning conjecture. It could not be more than a local event, something for the rest of the world to read about avidly. Anyway, the red mist was fast vanishing away. It lingered now only as a glow of light vermilion. And maybe that was mainly a reflection from the setting Sun, which was often red.
After eating, Walwin found himself too tired to go to town, so it was not till next morning that he and Finny, after repairing the two flat tires, embarked for the near-by village in their little-used car. The distance was some thirty miles along the coast, an hour’s drive.
IN THAT HOUR a feeling of dread came over Walwin. The light vermilion mists lay everywhere, in all directions. As they went along, they noticed little things that added up to a mad answer. No cars met them on the way. Not one human being was sighted; it was autumn and there should be workers in the fields of this farming community. There was not a single chicken or dog or scurrying rabbit. And when Walwin once stopped the car and turned off the engine, they were greeted by an aching silence—no drone of bee, no chirp of insect or bird!
An unnatural, oppressive silence lay over the land like a cloak. What could it mean? The young artist’s brain seethed with ominous thoughts that he tried to quell.
Soon direct signs of catastrophe came to them. A car was overturned in a ditch. Walwin stopped. But he did not have to get out to see the two men’s bodies beside the wreck. Their twisted faces plainly told of the horrible, strangling death that had overtaken them.
Farther on they stopped at a farmhouse. They left with a shocking scene burned into their minds: a whole family of seven lying lifeless in the neat home. They had been eating dinner, grouped about the large, round dining table. The red-death gas had belched upon this happy family circle, striking them lifeless. The mother had despairingly grasped two of the children, had tried to keep the deadly fumes from their little noses with her apron. The older children had stumbled toward the back window for pure air, only to be met there with the red fury. The father, a robust man, had valiantly tried to close all the windows—his dead fingers still clutched the drop of a half-open window. His body had crumpled over the sill——
Sudden death!
They went on, two live beings in a land of universal death. They sped by another wrecked car, resolutely turning their eyes away. Out of the corner of his eye Walwin had a glimpse of a white figure—a young girl huddled in an attitude of prayer——
Finny groaned aloud. “Wally, sir,” he quavered, “there can’t every one be dead, can there?”
“Of course not!” said Walwin, but with no conviction. “That red mist, whatever it was, did a horribly complete job around here, but there must be a limit to it. There are 20,000 people in the town ahead. Lord! They can’t all be——”
Dead! 20,000 corpses inhabited the town they drove into! Walwin drove grimly for two hours through the streets, before he was convinced of it. At places their path was blocked by fallen buildings, tom down by the brief but violent wind that had come in the wake of the red mist of death. Bodies lay everywhere, faces contorted, hands clutched to throats.
Walwin stopped the car, sick to the very core of his being. He closed his eyes, but the tragic scenes wheeled nightmarishly across his reeling mind. 36 hours before, this had been a busy, bustling city of humans. Now it was a great tomb—utterly and completely lifeless. There were not even scavenger flies humming around the corpses. The red mist had accomplished a total annihilation of animate life.
GRASS, trees and most other plant life had survived the strangling death. But in the months to come, they, too, might be blighted for lack of a constant supply of carbon dioxide. Thus Death would at last ride supreme over the corpse of Earth.
Walwin stirred out of a deep brooding that was matched by the supernal silence around them. A wave of panic swept over him. He clutched Finny’s arm spasmodically. “Talk to me, Finny! For Heaven’s sake, say something, so I don’t hear this damned silence! I——”
“Mr. Wally!” gulped Finny. “Don’t go on like that!”
Walwin released his grip, took a long breath. “Have to watch ourselves, Finny,” he said, “so it doesn’t get us! It almost did me there for a second—Lord! the thought of——”
He broke off, began again; “Listen, Finny, we’ll have to accept this just the way it is, and not think too much about it. Otherwise we’ll be a couple of psychopathic cases in short order. We’ll have to plan a course of action, just as if things were normal. First of all, we’ll eat. Then we’ll head north toward Washington. This red mist must have ended somewhere, and we’ll run out of its area of activity by going in one direction. Come on, let’s find a grocery store. At least”—he grinned ruefully—“we can have our choice of foods at no cost.”
Before they found a grocery store, they came upon a building that announced itself as a newspaper office. On sudden impulse, Walwin stopped the car and went in. He shuddered at the dozen bodies within the door, but saw what he wanted—a newspaper.
The carefully worded account of a giant red cloud hanging in space inflamed his curiosity. A search in the files of back numbers revealed the entire story. The story of approaching doom he had been so blissfully unaware of in his idyllic retirement.
It left him stunned, white-faced. He had thought it ghastly to find a town of 20,000 lifeless. His worst pessimistic thought had been that perhaps a few dozen other towns and cities had been likewise visited by the red mist.
But here was the stark revelation that the whole world had suffered the same fate!
VII.
BEFORE they stepped out of the cabin, in which they had been besieged by the now-impotent red gas for almost 24 hours, Appleton and Masters had come to the tacit understanding that they would not talk of the red doom, would not endlessly remind each other tha
t life on Earth was no more. They would simply take up a new course of life and concern themselves with little things.
With his methodical habits as a scientist, Masters took care that the outer atmosphere was fit for consumption before venturing far from the cabin and its store of life-giving oxygen. In science, he informed his companion, theories were only made to be tested. The great chemical reaction which he believed to have taken place overnight—the interaction of oxygen released by plants and the red gas, both in macro-cosmic proportions—might and might not have occurred.
“I’m going out,” he announced, “for a half hour. You must close the door behind me. I’ll stand in front of the window so you can watch me. I’ll breathe deeply. If I should feel myself weakened and could not make it back to the door.
Appleton nodded in understanding. The scientist stepped out and carried through his crude, but effective, plan for detecting possible poisons in the atmosphere that had so lately held death in every breath. A half hour later he joined Appleton, smiling wanly.
“Breathable, all right,” he stated. He closed the door. “However, there’s still a sharp tang of bromine, as I suspected from the vermilion color that is still left. Not much of it, but we’ll stay in the cabin to-night. The odor of cyanogen is also quite noticeable out there, and there must also be some carbon monoxide, though it is odorless. But the latter two gases kill only at certain concentrations. They are not accumulative in action, like lead poisoning. They kill on the spot, and quickly. Since I survived without collapse for a half hour, it means that their concentration in the total atmosphere is below that point where they are potent. All the lesser gaseous poisons which came with the red cloud have been reduced to harmless proportions. So the atmosphere is once again breathable to organic life.”
Appleton looked at Masters as his voice faded, and saw that he had fallen into a state of brooding thought. Appleton, too, felt a gloom descend over him. Earth was once again a habitable globe—but uninhabited! He turned this strange irony over in his mind, and found it mentally unpalatable. Why had this come about? Why?
Masters looked up as though he had heard that unvoiced query. Then he shook his head as though to say: no sense to ask why. That is a question unanswerable to mortal minds.
That was as close as the two men got to making a topic of the one thing they dreaded to speak of. Appleton stirred himself.
“Let’s have something to eat,” he suggested.
The next morning they stepped out of the cabin in a dawn of fiery red that faded gradually to a rosiness which remained, grim reminder of the deadly red fog of the day before. Then they left the cabin, ventured in Masters’ car out into a new world.
VIII.
WALWIN AND FINNY pursued their way northward, changing from car to car whenever the gas tanks emptied. The next two days were like a feverish nightmare to the two lone humans. Hopefully, they approached Washington, with its many white buildings and the great Capitol dome—symbol of a mighty nation. Had the red mist struck here, too? Had it in one brief day wiped away the core of a government which had marked a new and grander phase in human history? Could Congress, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, the President—names for a power as seemingly durable as rock—could that all have been whiffed to eternity in a few short hours!
It was almost an inconceivable thought to Walwin, yet he knew the answer. He knew he could not expect this city of tradition and history to have survived any more than the dozens of other towns and cities they had found lifeless. And as he drove the car slowly through the cadaver-strewn streets, its motor purring almost silently, an overwhelming realization of this supercatastrophe swept over him. As though impelled by other wills than his own, he stopped the car before the Capitol and strode up the broad, white steps in a vast, tomblike silence.
He seemed to feel a crushing weight descend over him. The blind, all powerful forces of an immutable universe seemed to stand over him, laughing in mockery. A nameless all-pervading voice seemed to say, “Look at your so-called civilization! Look at mankind that dared to think it was master of the Earth and of the universe! Little man, who was an ant in the path of the Juggernaut of marching time, which levels all!”
Walwin could not think clearly in smaller terms. As he gazed out over the building tops, his eyes seemed to penetrate to every portion of this great land. And everywhere his inner vision saw death triumphant, saw unnumbered hundreds of tombs that had been cities, millions of corpses that had been a bustling nation.
His vision extended itself, reached across the ocean, to picture four great continents speckled with the dead. Ancient glories, vivid histories, timeless traditions—all canceled. The strivings, warrings, goals of centuries and millenniums totaling zero.
Walwin seemed to hear ghostly voices arising—the disembodied cries of Earth’s murdered billions. Like a distant echo they filled the air, sobbing, wailing. From every direction, from every corner of Earth, the spirit chorus wafted, sad and moaning. It was as though Earth were haunted by souls that hovered around it!
A fine sweat had beaded Walwin’s forehead. His face had become strained and haggard.
As from a distance, he heard Finny’s voice, anxious and questioning. “I’m all right, Finny,” he heard himself saying. But he could not shake the heavy mood from his sensitive mind. He continued to brood on the soul-shaking thought of world death.
But suddenly his perspective wheeled around. Some alien will seemed to tug at his mind and drag it out into space. Suspended in the void, he took account of the vast cosmos with its uncountable suns, its limitless extent, its eternal duration. After all, Earth was but an insignificant mote in the immensity of the universe. And the life on Earth was but an evanescent phenomenon, one of many in the halls of eternity. A superentity, taking census of the cosmos, might even have skipped this tiny green speck and failed to count it in with the other myriads of worlds.
The thought of all-Earthly life having been destroyed might be a terrific holocaust in his, Walwin’s, conception. But what, if anything, could it mean in the great scheme of the macrocosm?
“Wh-what are you thinking about, sir?” came Finny’s frightened voice. He did not like the brooding stare that he saw in the young artist’s unseeing eyes.
Walwin started as though from a trance, sighed deeply. “O.K., Finny, that’s over. I was just—just”—he groped for a simple explanation—“looking at this in a different way. You see, Finny, it’s likely that you and I are the only two humans left on Earth. It doesn’t much matter what happens to us either, does it? If we think that way, we’ll stay—healthy.”
Finny looked at his master with a peculiar lack of the abysmal panic that had been in his eyes before. “I’m thinking, sir,” he said quietly, “that we aren’t the last two of God’s children. I rolled my witches’ bones while you were thinking, and they tell me we’re going to find others alive!”
Walwin started. Others alive! He had not dared to give himself this crumb of hope. For two days they had toured the countryside slowly, hoping for other survivors, but there had been none. Not even a dog or a bird. The red mist had apparently done a thorough job. But why couldn’t there be other survivors? Why couldn’t the kind fate that had shielded them from the death mist also have saved others, in accidental ways?
“Damn you, Finny,” cried Walwin, “you and your witches’ bones may be right at that! We’re going to make a thorough search for probable survivors. We’ll tour around every day and all day. There isn’t much else to do anyway.”
Imbued with a purpose that would give them some reason for wanting to live on, they embarked in a shiny new car and left the city. Strangely, at first they had felt guilty when taking over a new car, or when entering a food shop to eat. The habit of conscious wrongdoing clung to them, despite the apparent absurdity of it. But this had rapidly worn off, and at times now they felt a momentary thrill of undisputed proprietorship over an entire world of things.
ON AND ON they went, watching in every directio
n for the slightest sign of movement. They had by now become inured to the picture of widespread havoc and death. Even the sight of a man’s body tossed into a tree by the collision of two trucks, and hanging by one foot from a crotch directly over the road, failed to elicit more than a glance.
Their minds no longer involuntarily counted the dead, nor their eyes looked at them horrified. They were concentrating on the one absorbing pursuit of finding some one—or something—alive.
Walwin almost lost control of the car when Finny’s shout, and his own eyes, informed him of movement in the road ahead. Heart pounding, Walwin drove up dose, jammed on the brakes, and ran out with a cry of pure joy.
He picked up the cat just before Finny grabbed. He hugged the animal close to him, petting it fiercely and murmuring half brokenly. Then, as though bestowing a priceless treasure, he handed it to Finny, who buried his face in its soft fur with tears in his eyes.
“We should feel like fools,” said Walwin, “making such a fuss over just a cat. But considering it’s the first live thing we’ve seen in almost four days it——”
They promptly named it Adam and took it to the car with them. Black and sleek, it snuggled purringly into Finny’s lap, obviously glad for human companionship after four days of perhaps puzzled loneliness. It looked well fed, and for a moment Walwin had hopes that it had a human master thereabouts. But then he realized that food was no problem in this world where there were no irate “scats!”
Walwin’s hand strayed to pet the animal now and then, as he drove along. It was not just a cat. It was a symbol of hope. Some inexplicable thing had saved this cat. The red mist had not been omnipotent. Somewhere, sometime, they would find another human who——
