“Yes,” he said, going back to the question Brian had asked him. “I did foresee it. But it’s no credit to me. I just had a dream. I saw the lights go out, and the cars stop, and people rush out shouting, ‘What’s happened to the power?’ I could see the whole thing, and when I woke up, I was near to being crazy. All my life I’ve worked underground, envying people who worked in the sunlight. Someone with more brains or better luck could have got out of the spot I was in. Until I was almost thirty, I never woke up to the fact that, first off, I was in the wrong part of the country, trying to get work where too many were out of a job. Then I had sense enough to get out of there. Twenty-nine years it took for this to dawn on me.
“All my life, I’ve been that way. Thrifty and hard-working, but stupid. The trouble is, it’s not how hard you work that they pay you for, it’s what you accomplish. A man could chip rock all his life with a sledge hammer, ten hours a day, and get less done in his whole life than another man could do in half an hour with a few sticks of dynamite. Which man deserves the more money? Another ten years it took me to see that. I was stupid, because I thought I could get ahead on hard work and always putting my money awg.y, but finally it came to me a man has got to think, too. By then, I was in the rut it took me all those years to dig while I was being smart, working hard for pennies and putting the pennies in the savings bank. Finally it dawned on me that hard work was good, but you had to have hard thought, too. By this time it was a little late for me, but I could still help Anne. And it worked out. She had a good job, with good people. She could hold her head up. But a man still needs to work.”
They crossed the street. No one bothered them.
Anne’s father said, “It’s hard to waste most of your life, finally see what’s wrong, help your daughter to do things right, have things finally start to go right, and just then have everything smashed. I was almost ready to do away with myself this morning, but it dawned on me that that was wrong. Why do that when maybe my heart will finish me anyway? Besides, this awful thing at least has made people equal again. No one is going to be asking me how many grades I went in school. All those paper requirements don’t mean a thing any more. I’m not happy about this mess, but somehow I feel useful again.
They went on in silence till they reached the Research East building. They climbed the stairs wearily to the fourth floor, found food, clothing, blankets, canteens, several .30-06 Springfield rifles, a box containing bandoliers of ammunition, and a map showing the route Cardan intended to follow. Brian copied the map, he and Cermak fell into exhausted sleep, and then, somewhat rested, they each took a canteen, rifle, a hundred and twenty rounds of ammunition, and as many supplies as they could pack on their backs, and went cautiously down to the street.
“Where now?” said Cermak. “Two thousand miles is a long trip on foot.”
“Down the street and several blocks to the left, there’s a bicycle shop. If Cardan gets held up getting fuel, or runs into a jam of cars and trucks, we may catch up yet.”
They made their way to the shop, saw no bicycles in sight, but found several cartons containing partly assembled bikes. Half an hour later they had assembled two of them and were out of the city and on the highway. No one stopped them. Apparently, after the nightmarish day and night that had gone before, the city had fallen into a stupor of exhaustion. Brian was grateful that they wouldn’t be there when it woke up.
Then he thought of Carl, riding comfortably down the road ahead.
A murderous anger gripped Brian, and he settled down to a steady, mile-eating pace.
Chapter 6
The highway stretched ahead of them, a long unending track reaching to the horizon, dotted with an endless succession of cars. Pedaling steadily, they went past dazed people torn loose from civilization and not yet drawn into any other pattern, drifting along uncertainly. Here and there they passed cars and trucks that had been pushed to one side, and occasionally they saw fresh signs of big truck tires to the side of the road, or on the grassy mall in the center. On the level or going downhill, they made good time. But going uphill was another matter. Brian estimated that they averaged about two miles an hour uphill, pushing the bicycles. This quickly became a serious matter.
The first day or two Brian and Steve Cermak traveled by day and slept at night, making use of the cars that were always nearby on the road. But as day followed day, the situation changed. Though the superhighway was designed to avoid passing directly through heavily populated cities, it often came close to them, leading Brian and Anne’s father into clouds of smoke from burning cities, where the fire trucks couldn’t run, the water pressure was down, and the firemen had to struggle like everyone else to save their own lives.
As the highway passed supermarkets and shopping center they saw rioting mobs, heard the crash of the big plate-glass windows, and the screams of trampled people. But out of this chaos, a new pattern began to emerge. Now they began to hear the sound of gunfire, saw men sprint from car to car, working their way along curbs and gutters and ditches, and race in small groups toward the sides and rear of chosen buildings. Now the battles were beginning to rage for control of the stocks of food and manufactured goods. More and more often, the people they passed were armed, and the whine of bullets missing them narrowly warned them that they could easily join the bodies ever more thickly strewn along the road, lying motionless face-down, or on their backs, terrible eyes staring at the sky.
They crouched one day near a pine tree by the side of the road, hearing the bang and rattle of gunfire ahead, with the gloom of late afternoon deepened by heavy clouds of smoke, and lit by a towering pillar of flame rising from a large service station down the highway.
Cermak said, “We can’t go on like this. Through these places, and when we’re walking the bikes, it’s too dangerous.”
“We’d better keep out of sight by day, and travel at night,” Brian said. He glanced at the road. “And right there is something else we’d better look out for.”
Cermak followed his gaze, to look at the crouching figures bending over the prostrate bodies, briefly and expertly robbing them, then gliding on.
Cermak involuntarily raised his gun, then slowly lowered it.
Brian watched them warily. “Worse yet, there are traps and ambushes being set. That dose call we had today was just a sample.”
Brian and Cermak had been going downhill on the right side of the highway when Brian noticed the odd fact that, on both sides of the road, the lanes were blocked, the cars lined up almost abreast. Then he noticed another thing. In the right-hand lane, straight ahead, the front wheels of the car toward the side of the road were turned sharply to the left. If the car had been driving with the wheels in that position, it would have swung in front of the car to its left and been wrecked. Obviously, the car had been moved, steered downhill and parked in line with the other car. Brian glanced around. It was too late for him to brake. He leaned to his left, and the bike shot across the grass. Simultaneously, the door of a car to his right opened up and there was the loud report of a gun going off.
Brian glanced back, worried about Anne’s father. There was no time for Brian to help him, but one quick glance was enough. Steve Cermak was forty feet behind, gripping the handle bars with his right hand, the big Springfield resting across his right forearm, his left hand gripping the small of the stock, and his left forefinger on the trigger. As Cermak passed the open door, he squeezed the trigger; there was a second,much louder, report, and that was the end of the trouble.
“Yes,” said Cermak, looking down the road at the shopping plaza, where guns flashed in the twilight, and where the tall shadows of dark light poles wavered across the face of the buildings, lit by flames of fires burning out of control. “Yes, now honest people have the least chance, so we’ll meet only human wolves, rats, and vultures.” He looked at the shadowy figures flitting down the road from body to body, glanced around and gripped his gun tighter. Brian, too, unconsciously checked his gun, his thumb feeling to be
sure the gun was cocked and the magazine cutoff turned up.
Brian and Cermak had suddenly become conscious that even if they escaped the other dangers, their food would soon run out. They were sparing it, and they still hoped to catch Cardan before they needed more. But their packs were lightening steadily.
In time they were away from the worst of the heavily populated districts, traveling through country that was almost wild in places, and very hilly. They still saw signs of the trucks that had gone before, and twice they had run into massive traffic jams that must have delayed Cardan and his men, but they hadn’t caught up. Then, in a stretch of desolate country, they ran out of food, and there followed a day when their only refreshment was a drink from the canteens they filled at the numerous streams they passed.
The next day, while searching for food, they came to the third traffic jam. Here the pile-up of cars reached through a complicated cloverleaf at the base of a hill where a wide blacktopped road, also jammed with cars, passed under the superhighway. Farther down the superhighway, a line of toll gates stretched across the road. Huge signs told of a service station to the right, and food and lodging to the left. Down below, they could see people moving along past the cars, and disappearing under the overpass. Ahead, the cars were thick on the road, but on the other side, across the grass, where the cars had been leaving the toll gate, they were more spread out.
“Well?” said Cermak.
Brian shrugged. “We’ve got to have food.”
“What about Cardan and your friend Carl?”
Brian drew a slow deep breath and checked their map. “That’s it,” he said. “They went down this ramp, and came up that one.”
Off in the distance, to the left, there was a brief burst of gunfire. Cermak nodded. “There’s food there—and trouble.”
“Okay. Let’s go, fast. If we want food, we can’t avoid trouble.”
They bent over the bikes, and, one behind the other, swooped down the hill, through the tollgates, and walked their bikes up a moderately steep hill.
They hid the bicycles in a kind of small oblong concrete room under the grassy center strip at the middle of a long culvert, the handle bars hooked through a set of bent pipes that made a ladder from a manhole overhead. They looked back in from outside, saw the bicycles were not conspicuous, and went on, taking only their empty packs, their guns, and a bandolier apiece of ammunition.
They climbed the bank by the road, pushed through the low trees, and found themselves in a soggy place where the water stood in thin puddles on gray muck, with the bare brush as thick as a hedge around them, and trees rising here and there, many of them dead, and reaching out before them into the distance.
It took several hours to get around this place, and by then the sun had climbed high overhead. But spread out below them, at the foot of a long gentle slope, was a shopping plaza.
Cermak grinned and nodded, then lost the grin as he studied the plaza.
The sound of gunfire was now loud and clear, and almost continuous. From amongst the cars jammed in the front of a parking lot, they could see an occasional dull flash, and many wisps of blowing smoke. Across the front and on both sides of the long block of buildings there seemed to be one continuous fight. Only to the rear was there no sign of fighting. There, sawhorses blocked off the parking lot Where some repair work was being done on a drainage system. Just beyond the line of sawhorses, there was a long ditch, and nearby, several, bodies stretched out awkwardly, where they had tried to make It around the side to the rear, and failed.
Cermak said, “They’re coming from both directions along that road. See there?”
From along the road to the right, Brian could see a slow trickling of armed men, hidden from the buildings by the lines of cars.
Brian watched intently. “They work in close to the front of the buildings, by the cars in that lot. If they leave the cars, they’ve got a hundred feet of dirt and asphalt to cross, and a ditch, before they get around in back.”
“You see those little holes knocked in the side, high up in that blank wall back of the show window?” Cermak asked.
“Yes,” Brian said, his eyes pinpointing on the occasional flashes appearing at these holes. “Yes, I see. They can shoot across the lot and straight into the ditch from there.”
“It’s a deathtrap,” Cermak said. “But from down there, you wouldn’t know it till it was too late.”
“I wonder if anyone’s watching the back.”
The two men studied the apparently bare dirt at the back of the plaza. On closer examination, it looked like blacktop tracked over with dirt from the excavation. There was a drainage ditch around the lot, and beyond that, empty fields. To one side, the ditch ran back straight across the foot of the slope where Brian and Cermak looked out from behind a screen of thick brush. From where they sat in relation to this ditch, there was scattered cover. From the ditch to the rear of the stores there wasn’t enough cover to hide a mouse.
They studied the buildings carefully. Cermak cleared his throat. “They should have someone covering the rear. But there’s a lot of shooting down there.”
“They could be hard pressed.”
There was a moment’s silence as they looked over the bare fields to either side. No one down there was trying to get across those bare fields to the rear. Everyone was coming along the road, where the jammed cars offered cover.
Again they studied the empty parking lot at the rear, the ditches leading to it, and the empty space that had to be crossed to get to the back door.
Finally Cermak said, “Well, I’ve seen bear traps I’d rather walk into than this thing. But if we don’t go down there, what do we eat?”
Carefully, stealthily, they eased down the slope toward the ditch.
It seemed to take them forever as they worked their way along the slippery, steep-banked ditch with the sucking-mud bottom under slow-flowing icy water, then they were peering out through the dead grass at the stretch of dusty, empty parking lot at the rear of the stores. They lay still there for long minutes, studying the doors, ventilators, trash cans, and the cement-block wall of the building.
Not moving, Cermak murmured, “See anything?”
“Not a thing.” Brian very carefully tilted his head side-wise to study the roof, then slowly and carefully glanced around to either side.
“Funny nobody at all tries to get around this way.”
“They’ve got wide-open fields on either side. There’s no cover. But it stands to reason they ought to have a guard inside, watching this way, just in case.”
“I don’t see any.”
“I don’t either.”
Brian was looking at the vacant parking lot. He’d seen empty spaces in his life, but nothing that compared with this. From his low ground-level viewpoint, it appeared to stretch out, flat and bare, for a hundred yards in front of them.
Cermak laughed suddenly. “Looks like a damned airfield, doesn’t it? Well, if We wait, someone else may get the same idea. Ready?”
Brian braced himself. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
Cermak’s voice was low and hoarse. “We’ll head for the red door of that supermarket. When I count three. One— two—”
Brian cautiously eased himself a little farther up the Bank.
“Three,” said Cermak.
They scrambled up the bank and sprinted across the parking lot.
Brian was pumping his legs as fast as they could go, but he had the feeling of Crossing a mile-wide mud flat at a leisurely crawl.
Then abruptly the cement-block wall at the rear of the building was right in front of him, and slowing down was just as hard as running had been. He whirled at the last minute to lightly bang the wall with his upper arms and back, and looked quickly around, the gun raised. But no guard was in sight on the roof of the building. He took hold of the red-painted door and, a moment later, he and Cermak were in a bare whitewashed room with a few empty crates on the floor. They went through an open door to one side, and foun
d themselves in a room about twenty feet wide, apparently running the full depth of the store, with boxes and cardboard cartons stacked from one end to the other.
At the far end of the room, high up, was a small irregular patch of light, where someone looked out and fired. No one else was in sight, but the firing from the front of the store was rising to a crescendo.
Using their pocketknives, they tore open nearby cartons, finding baby food, big jars of pickles, mustard, relish, bottles of ketchup—all the things they didn’t care to find themselves living on for the next week. Warily, they eased up the aisle, in clear view of the man at the hole, if he merely turned around. They reached a pair of swinging doors with small diamond-shaped windows and Brian cautiously glanced out. A barricade of food cartons, bales of garden mulch, and overturned shopping carts blocked the aisles where the row of checkout counters faced the long, smashed front window of the store. Behind the barricade, men crouched and fired in a haze of smoke, while outside in the parking lot, a row of cars rolled forward slowly, the front wheels climbing over the outstretched bodies that lay here in the smashed glass.
Behind the cars, there had to be people pushing, and when the cars reached the front of the building, then it would be possible for them to gather in numbers, right next to the building, for one final rush.
Cermak quickly loaded Brian’s pack. The cars were coming steadily on, almost to the curb, and now one of the men in the store glanced back nervously over his shoulder.
Brian loaded Cermak’s pack, his fingers feeling thick and clumsy, and fastened down the flap. They went quickly down the aisle, then something whanged over Brian’s head as he turned, and a stinging shower of bits of cement hit him on the side of the face. Then they were at the back door. On the other side was that stretch of parking lot, and Brian could see its empty flat bareness from the doorway. Behind them, the firing rose to a new height, and now there were yells, curses, and the pound of feet.
The Day the Machines Stopped Page 6
