The Long Loud Silence

by Wilson Tucker

  Gary nodded. “Couple of hundred miles south of Chicago when it happened.” He thought of another question. “What happens now — with the lieutenant dead, I mean? Yeah — he's dead all right.” The soldier had twisted around to study the other truck, seeking his companions. “All of them, except you and your buddy here — and he's in no condition to drive. What are you going to do now? You, I mean; what do the orders read?”

  The soldier didn't answer at once. He stared at the side of the truck some inches before his face and then looked down at the man lying at his feet. He seemed to take faint hope from the question.

  “Damned if I know for sure,” he answered presently. “The lieutenant was shooting off his mouth all the time — I got a hazy idea what to do. And he's carrying papers; he's got the captain's stuff, too. I guess the only thing to do is beat it for the bridge and tell them you — tell them what happened.”

  “Can you make it by yourself?” Gary insisted. “Can you get across without the officers? Know the password or the signal?”

  “There ain't none that I heard of; we just stop in the middle of the bridge and wait for them to come out to us. I told you they've been waiting for us.”

  Gary pursed his lips, relishing the simplicity of it. “Are there any more coming? More trucks behind you?”

  The soldier shook his head. “Not yet, not until we get there okay. If we… I mean, if I make it, there'll be more on the way.”

  “Is that a fact? This road will be crawling with them in no time at all.” He thoughtfully rubbed the stubble on his face, realizing he had better shave again. “Why the devil didn't they send a column to protect you? They should have known what to expect on this side of the river.”

  He was answered by a bitter laugh. “Corporal, there ain't no column to send. Most of our men got caught above ground and died in the plague — or deserted. We've been living down in the hole ever since… and I'll bet there ain't a hundred left. Hell, mister, we've got more trucks then we got men to drive them.” He lapsed into silence.

  Gary backed away to glance about the grove, alert for sound or movement. Two trucks, loaded with gold ingots for a pinched government west of the Mississippi — and if these arrived safely, more to come. But two in the grove were worth a hundred others still at Knox, especially if this man should reach the river with his story. He came to a quick decision.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that the lieutenant should go along; it might look better to show up with his body, just in case we are questioned. You'll find him over there in the trees.”

  The soldier peered around at him warily.

  Gary jerked the automatic. “Go get him!” He stepped clear of the vehicle to cover the man. The trooper crossed the clearing to thrash among the underbrush and presently located the officer's body. Grunting, he carried it back to dump it in the rear of the truck, across the wooden boxes.

  “Ready to roll? How about gas?”

  The other nodded. “Gassed up when we stopped. We carry our own.” And then he added, “Pretty slick trick with that tire.”

  Gary's dry grin was lost in the darkness. “You haven't seen anything yet. What about grub and ammo? Got plenty in both trucks?”

  “Yeah. In case we got separated.”

  “If I helped myself to one of the trucks, could you get along all right in the other one?”

  “Sure. Say, are you thinking of…?”

  “Never mind what I'm thinking. And you'd better be telling the truth because your life may depend on it. I'm pulling out of here with this one. How's that for slickness?”

  “You'll never get across…” He stopped, and then began again. “What for? The lieutenant's in there.”

  “The lieutenant will take me across. And listen to some good advice, bud — the old voice of experience himself. I've lived two years in this damned country, and if you hope to live that long you'll have to keep your eyes and ears open, and shoot first. Don't pull any more damned fool tricks like you did tonight — and if I was you, I'd head south this fall. Got all that?”

  “You can't get away with it! I'll follow you to the river and tell them—”

  Gary rammed his face close and laughed. “You can follow me all you please, but you won't tell them nothing! You don't seem to get the idea, bud. You're an enemy agent, now.” And he clipped him with a short, hard right.

  Gary rolled his body aside, and then strode back to the second truck. Lifting the hood, he ripped out the distributor cap and pocketed it and then to satisfy his mounting excitement he tore loose the wiring to the plugs and smashed the glass gasoline cup. He tried to take off the fan belt but it resisted his fingers. Dropping the hood, he reached under the truck and hauled out the dead man lying there. This one, of the party of six, was nearest his height and build. He stripped the body of its uniform and as an afterthought, removed the chain and dog tags from the man's neck.

  Gary shoved aside the body of the lieutenant to examine the contents of the truck he had chosen. There were three radiation suits, the machine gun, several dozen boxes of C-rations, red gasoline cans and the personal effects of the troopers. Satisfied, he seated himself behind the wheel.

  Without lights, the truck left the roadside park and rolled onto the highway, nose to the west.

  Somewhere in Illinois, Gary stopped the vehicle on a deserted highway and climbed out, cradling the machine gun. Walking a distance from the truck, he turned and spewed it with slugs, leaving it nicked and scarred as though it had undergone a running battle. Taking off his clothes, he threw away his own identification tags and slipped the stolen chain over his head. His new name, he learned, was Forrest Moskowitz. He read the serial number over several times, striving to memorize the initial four or five digits. Satisfied, he put on the uniform. The papers carried by the late captain and lieutenant were already familiar to him — as the sole survivor, he would be expected to have read them from curiosity if nothing else. Gary was confident he could carry his new identity smoothly. There remained only the odd chance that someone at or near the bridge was familiar with Fort Knox.

  He clothed the lieutenant's body in a radiation suit, donned another himself, and drove on.

  The truck neared the Chain of Rocks bridge.

  Two years — nearly two years since the day of his thirtieth birthday, the day of a glorious drunk and personal disaster. Two years since awakening in that broken-down hotel to find dust on the bed and death everywhere in the city. Two years since he had moved among living people with no great fear of the present or the future. Two years of dodging, hiding, stealing, killing to eat and stay alive, two years of hunting or be hunted. How many dead men lay behind him, he wondered then? How many lives had he taken to protect his own, or to gain what he wanted?

  He couldn't remember their number.

  But to hell with all that, to hell with the memories and the hunger and the freezing cold. Ahead lay the bridge.

  He approached it slowly and cautiously, turned onto the span and commenced the long climb to the middle of the river, the truck creeping along at less than twenty miles per hour. A knot of excited panic gripped his stomach and for a brief moment he debated turning back, abandoning the truck and the sighted goal to turn and flee for the comparative safety of a known ground. Gary fought it away and drove on. Just over the arbitrary dividing line, just past that invisible point where the Illinois boundary touched Missouri, two tanks waited for him in the roadway, blocking passage with their bulk.

  He pulled up short, staring into their gun muzzles. They excited him, frightened him not a little and at the same time they appealed to an almost forgotten emotion within him. Now he was standing under their snouts with impunity, in safety, and they again imparted the peculiar sense of friendly guns facing a common enemy. His guns now — almost. He climbed from the truck to lift an arm in greeting but they did not reply. Gary leaned against the vehicle to await their move. He wanted desperately to smoke but the suit prevented it.

  After a while he heard a ca
r come racing up the other side of the bridge. It came to a skidding halt just beyond the tanks and several clothed figures emerged, clumsily grasping hand weapons. They moved around the tanks and advanced upon him. Gary held his position, nervously alert but striving to hide any fear of them. When they were but ten feet distant the group stopped and a leader motioned with his arm. Gary obeyed by moving away from the truck, to lean on the bridge railing and watch.

  The suited troopers closed in on the truck, yanking open the rear door to examine the interior and kneeling to peer underneath. They found the body of the lieutenant — with obvious surprise, the precious cargo, Gary's hijacked supplies and nothing more. Again the anonymous leader motioned and two of the troopers climbed into the truck to roll it forward across the state line. Heavy motors broke into sudden, noisy life as one of the tanks moved sluggishly aside. The truck shot past it, and the tank resumed its former position.

  The remaining troops herded Gary forward.

  They marched around the tanks and at an unspoken command, Gary climbed into the waiting automobile with the others pushing in behind him. The car turned about, jockeying back and forth on the bridge to return to the Missouri shore. The nearer faces in the seat peered at him curiously. The car shot forward. Gary slumped against the back of the seat, exhausted with tension. He was in! After two years of bitter struggle and constant dreaming, he had crossed the river.

  11

  AN ORNATE brick building flashed past his window, a building which had housed the toll-collector's offices back before a part of the world had ended; now it contained a command post with a pair of sentries before the door. They stared at the passing car, watched after it when it pulled up before a smaller and newer building a short distance down the road.

  At a pressure on his arm, Gary left the automobile and followed the troopers toward the small building. Someone opened the steel door, pushed him in and then crowded in after him. The door was slammed and bolted from the inside. The leader made some sort of a signal and an instant later the whole ceiling seemed to open, showering down on them a thick gray fog. Gary jerked back nervously, fighting the swirling mist with ineffective fists. The man nearest him seized his arms, held him still, and then thumped his back encouragingly. At that moment he realized what it was, where he was — this was the decontamination chamber, erected to cleanse the troops returning from patrols. Or returning from the task of throwing bodies over the bridge rails.

  The fog closed around him, hiding the others.

  After an interval he detected a new note in the chamber and the mist began to dissipate as blowers sucked the gas away. The other men began peeling off their suits. He lifted a slow hand to open his, and was stopped.

  “Hold it, buddy. Not yet. You've gotta be processed, so keep it on until we get out of here.”

  Now what the devil did he mean by that? Gary watched them, the nervous knot again forming in his stomach. They slid out of their suits and left the building, slamming the door behind them to leave him standing there alone. Again he raised a hand and commenced undressing, noticing for the first time that his uniform didn't quite fit him, that he had a stubble of beard. Abruptly the steel door opened and a medical corpsman appeared there.

  He stared at Gary professionally. “I oughtta get a medal for this,” the man announced briskly. “Maybe you got the plague.”

  “And maybe I haven't!” Gary retorted. “Come on, get it over with. I want to get outside — this place gives me the willies.”

  “You don't go outside, brother — not until your tests come out. Gimme your arm.”

  “The hell I don't! What for?”

  “The hell you don't.” The soldier reached for his arm. “Blood tests, see? You might be carrying something. We gotta be damned careful.” He plunged the needle into Gary's arm and drew forth a sample. “What type blood?”

  “How do I know?” Gary said with angry impatience.

  “By looking at your tag, stupid.” He reached out a swift hand to lift the chain hanging from Gary's neck, to read the inscription on the metal tag. “AB. Kinda rare, ain't you?”

  “What do you mean by that crack?”

  “AB ain't common around here chum, like in the Egyptians or the Chinese maybe.” He glanced at the tag again. “You're Moskowitz, huh? Well, I've seen funnier — maybe you're an Egyptian Moskowitz.”

  “Get the hell out of here!” Gary was fast losing his temper, aided by a growing fear. “And bring me something to eat — I'm damned tired of C-rations.”

  “Okay, okay.” The corpsman completed his work and left.

  Gary sat down on the floor to wait and to brood. He waited a full half hour, worrying about the dog tag on his neck. The stolen Moskowitz tag — and the Moskowitz blood type. He hadn't thought about that. It occurred to him suddenly that he hadn't thought about many things, little things really that seemed unimportant until they reached out to push him before a firing squad. What were they doing with the lieutenant's body? He had strangled the man and later encased the body in a radiation suit, but there were no bullet holes in the suit. What did that do to his carefully prepared story of ambush, with himself the only survivor?

  The personnel from Knox were not supposed to remove their suits on the journey, but they had done so, believing themselves safe from contamination so long as they did not fraternize with “enemy agents.” If then he admitted that the lieutenant had removed his suit en route and had been strangled by an enemy, it followed that Gary must have replaced the suit after the officer was dead. It also followed that both the officer and Gary had exposed themselves to the plague. That would be the certain end of him. On the other hand it was difficult to believe that the lieutenant could be strangled while wearing his suit — and there was the manufactured evidence of a bullet-scarred truck to show that the ambushers had used guns, not fingers to kill.

  Bitterly, he realized he should have left the rotting officer behind. Rotting… the thought took form, shaped itself into a faint hope. It might be that they would not remove the suit from the lieutenant's body.

  There were other things — he didn't know the names of people of Knox, he didn't know the history or background of Moskowitz… didn't so much as know the man's enlistment date. The serial numbers on the dog tag would give some clue to that, but he couldn't guess the accurate answer from the numbers. His only chance of escaping detection there lay in the fact that serial records may have been destroyed in a ravaged Washington.

  The door opened and the corpsmen entered, carrying a tray.

  “Another medal — you phony Egyptian!”

  “I ain't no Egyptian,” Gary flared, half frightened.

  “I'll say you ain't. AB hell! You ain't no more AB than I am. In case anybody asks, you're a big fat round O. Better remember that — you might need it sometime.”

  “But the tag says—”

  “The tag lies like a rug, chum, but don't let it throw you. You're an early bird, ain't you?” He put down the tray. “It happened all the time, back at the beginning; they rushed them through fast and made some mistakes. I'll bet one guy out of every twenty is walking around with the wrong type on his tag — or pushing up flowers. Sloppy work, but you can't help it. Only trouble is, if you ever need a transfusion in a hurry and they pump the wrong kind into you — bingo.”

  “Maybe it changed,” Gary suggested. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Nope.” The soldier shook his head and grinned at Gary's ignorance. “It never changes, no more than fingerprints. You was born with O and you'll die with O. Now eat up. I'll bring in water and a can pretty soon; you're stuck here until the tests prove out. Two or three days maybe.”

  “What for?” he asked again. “Why the tests?”

  “To see if you picked up anything, stupid. If you're carrying any plague germs around, we'll soon know it.” He backed away. “And I'll earn that damned medal.”

  “That's a hell of a note. Listen — do me a favor. Put in for a pass for me. I've been out of circulat
ion too long.”

  “A pass he wants yet!”

  * * *

  Gary didn't get the pass — he never waited for it, never waited out the three days. He knew with certainty what those tests would reveal, knew beyond doubt that the test tubes or whatever things they used would point to his two years of wandering around the quarantined land, would shout what must be in his blood. Freedom was too near to wait three days.

  He did nothing the first night, other than lie in the decontamination chamber and wait quietly. He called for and received repeated trays of food, a great quantity of water, the needed things a half-starved man would demand. And he noted with each opening and closing of the door that it was not locked from without. A single sentry stood outside, seldom at attention. They did not consider him a dangerous risk. Twice during the first night he sent out for water and once asked for more cigarettes. The sentry brought them, laid them in the doorway and retreated a few paces. Gary opened the door and hauled the things inside.

  On the second day the medical corpsman brought paper and pencil and commenced questioning; he began in the routine way with Gary — or Moskowitz's immediate and current history, but quickly moved on to the journey made by the three truckloads of gold, and what happened to them. Gary hid his relief and spun an acceptable story. He included a vivid description of the country through which he had supposedly passed, and for spite threw in mention of the thousands of people they had seen, people hospitable and otherwise.

  The questioner's head jerked up in disbelief. “Huh?”

  “Huh, what?” It seemed that Gary had him hooked.

  “Thousands of enemy agents?”

  “I don't know if they were enemy agents or not,” Gary said casually, “but there were thousands of them all right. I don't mean in the cities — all the cities are dead and bombed out, we avoided those, but the little towns are full of people. Every time we passed through a whistle stop the whole damned population rushed out to greet us — just like those towns in France I went through.”