It was strange to stand there looking out at Ben Cortman; a Ben completely alien to him now. Once he had spoken to that man, ridden to work with him, talked about cars and baseball and politics with him, later on about the disease, about how Virginia and Kathy were getting along, about how Freda Cortman was about.
Neville shook his head. There was no point going into that. The past was as dead as Cortman.
Again he shook his head. The world’s gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it.
The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough! Neville stood there, sipping his whisky and wondering who it was that Ben reminded him of. He’d felt for some time that Cortman reminded him of somebody, but for the life of him he couldn’t think who.
He shrugged. What was the difference?
He put down the glass on the window sill and went into the kitchen. He turned on the water there and went back in. When he reached the peephole, he saw another man and a woman on the lawn. None of the three was speaking to either of the others. They never did. They walked and walked about on restless feet, circling each other like wolves, never looking at each other once, having hungry eyes only for the house and their prey inside the house.
Then Cortman saw the water running through the trough and went over to look at it. After a moment he lifted his white face and Neville saw him grinning.
Neville stiffened.
Cortman was jumping over the trough, then back again. Neville felt his throat tightening. The bastard knew!
With rigid legs he pistoned himself into the bedroom and, with shaking hands, pulled one of his pistols out of the bureau drawer.
Cortman was just about finishing stamping in the sides of the trough when the bullet struck him in the left shoulder.
He staggered back with a grunt and flopped onto the sidewalk with a kicking of legs. Neville fired again and the bullet whined up off the cement, inches from Cortman’s twisting body.
Cortman started up with a snarl and the third bullet struck him full in the chest.
Neville stood there watching, smelling the acrid fumes of the pistol smoke. Then the woman blocked his view of Cortman and started jerking up her dress.
Neville pulled back and slammed the tiny door over the peephole. He wasn’t going to let himself look at that. In the first second of it, he had felt that terrible heat dredging up from his loins like something ravenous.
Later he looked out again and saw Ben Cortman pacing around, calling for him to come out.
And, in the moonlight, he suddenly realized who Cortman reminded him of. The idea made his chest shudder with repressed laughter and he turned away as the shaking reached his shoulders.
My God-Oliver Hardy! Those old two-reelers he’d looked at with his projector. Cortman was almost a dead ringer for the roly-poly comedian. A little less plump, that was all. Even the mustache was there now.
Oliver Hardy flopping on his back under the driving impact of bullets. Oliver Hardy always coming back for more, no matter what happened. Ripped by bullets, punctured by knives, flattened by cars, smashed under collapsing chimneys and boats, submerged in water, flung through pipes. And always returning, patient and bruised.
That was who Ben Cortman was-a hideously malignant Oliver Hardy buffeted and long suffering.
My God, it was hilarious!
He couldn’t stop laughing because it was more than laughter; it was release. Tears flooded down his cheeks. The glass in his hand shook so badly, the liquor spilled all over him and made him laugh harder. Then the glass fell thumping on the rug as his body jerked with spasms of uncontrollable amusement and the room was filled with his gasping, nerve-shattered laughter.
Later, he cried.
He drove it into the stomach, into the shoulder. Into the neck with a single mallet blow. Into the legs and the arms, and always the same result: the blood pulsing out, slick and crimson, over the white flesh.
He thought he’d found the answer. It was a matter of losing the blood they lived by; it was hemorrhage.
But then he found the woman in the small green and white house, and when he drove in the stake, the dissolution was so sudden it made him lurch away and lose his breakfast.
When he had recovered enough to look again, he saw on the bedspread what looked like a row of salt and pepper mixed; just about as long as the woman had been. It was the first time he’d ever seen such a thing.
Shaken by the sight, he went out of the house on trembling legs and sat in the car for an hour, drinking the flask empty. But even liquor couldn’t drive away the vision.
It had been so quick. With the sound of the mallet blow still in his ears, she had virtually dissolved before his eyes.
He recalled talking once to a Negro at the plant. The man had studied mortuary science and had told Robert Neville about the mausoleums where people were stored in vacuum drawers and never changed their appearance.
“But you just let some air in,” the Negro had said, “and whoom!-they’ll look like a row of salt and pepper. Jus’ like that!” And he snapped his fingers.
The woman had been long dead, then. Maybe, the thought occurred, she was one of the vampires who had originally started the plague. God only knew how many years she’d been cheating death.
He was too unnerved to do any more that day or for days to come. He stayed home and drank to forget and let the bodies pile up on the lawn and let the outside of the house fall into disrepair.
For days he sat in the chair with his liquor and thought about the woman. And, no matter how hard he tried not to, no matter how much he drank, he kept thinking about Virginia. He kept seeing himself entering the crypt, lifting the coffin lid.
He thought he was coming down with something, so palsied and nerveless was his shivering, so cold and ill did he feel.
Is that what she looked like?
Chapter Nine
MORNING. A SUN BRIGHT hush broken only by the chorus of birds in the trees. No breeze to stir the vivid blossoms around the houses, the bushes, the dark-leaved hedges. A cloud of silent heat was suspended over everything on Cimarron Street.
Virginia Neville’s heart had stopped.
He sat beside her on the bed, looking down at her white face. He held her fingers in his hand, his fingertips stroking and stroking. His body was immobile, one rigid, insensible block of flesh and bone. His eyes did not blink, his mouth was a static line, and the movement of his breathing was so slight that it seemed to have stopped altogether.
Something had happened to his brain.
In the second he had felt no heartbeat beneath his trembling fingers, the core of his brain seemed to have petrified, sending out jagged lines of calcification until his head felt like stone. Slowly, on palsied legs, he had sunk down on the bed. And now, vaguely, deep in the struggling tissues of thought, he did not understand how he could sit there, did not understand why despair did not crush him to the earth. But prostration would not come. Time was caught on hooks and could not progress. Everything stood fixed. With Virginia, life and the world had shuddered to a halt.
Thirty minutes passed; forty.
Then, slowly, as though he were discovering some objective phenomenon, he found his body trembling. Not with a localized tremble, a nerve here, a muscle there. This was complete. His body shuddered without end, one mass, entire of nerves without control, bereft of will. And what operative mind was left knew that this was his reaction.
For more than an hour he sat in this palsied state, his eyes fastened dumbly to her face.
Then, abruptly, it ended, and with a choked muttering in his throat he lurched up from the bed and left the room.
Half the whisky splashed on the sink top as he poured. The liquor that managed to reach the glass he bolted down in a swallow. The thin current flared its way down to his stomach, feeling twice as intense in the polar numbness of his flesh. He stood, sagged against the sink. Hands shaking, he filled the glass again to its top and
gulped the burning whisky down with great convulsive swallows.
It’s a dream, he argued vainly. It was as if a voice spoke the words aloud in his head.
“Virginia…”
He kept turning from one side to another, his eyes searching around the room as if there were something to be found, as if he had mislaid the exit from this house of horror. Tiny sounds of disbelief pulsed in his throat. He pressed his hands together, forcing the shaking palms against each other, the twitching fingers intertwining confusedly.
His hands began to shake so he couldn’t make out their forms. With a gagging intake of breath he jerked them apart and pressed them against his legs.
“Virginia.”
He took a step and cried aloud as the room flung itself off balance. Pain exploded in his right knee, sending hot barbs up his leg. He whined as he pushed himself up and stumbled to the living room. He stood there like a statue in an earthquake, his marble eyes frozen on the bedroom door.
In his mind he saw a scene enacted once again.
The great fire crackling, roaring yellow, sending its dense and grease-thick clouds into the sky. Kathy’s tiny body in his arms. The man coming up and snatching her away as if he were taking a bundle of rags. The man lunging into the dark mist carrying his baby. Him standing there while pile driver blows of horror drove him down with their impact.
Then suddenly he had darted forward with a berserk scream.
“Kathy!”
The arms caught him, the men in canvas and masks drawing him back. His shoes gouged frenziedly at the earth, digging two ragged trenches in the earth as they dragged him away. His brain exploded, the terrified screams flooding from him.
Then the sudden bolt of numbing pain in his jaw, the daylight swept over with clouds of night. The hot trickle of liquor down his throat, the coughing, a gasping, and then he had been sitting silent and rigid in Ben Cortman’s car, staring as they drove away at the gigantic pail of smoke that rose above the earth like a black wraith of all earth’s despair.
Remembering, he closed his eyes suddenly and his teeth pressed together until they ached.
“No."
He wouldn’t put Virginia there. Not if they killed him for it.
With a slow, stiff motion he walked to the front door and went out on the porch. Stepping off onto the yellowing lawn, he started down the block for Ben Cortman’s house. The glare of the sun made his pupils shrink to points of jet. His hands swung useless and numbed at his sides.
The chimes still played “How Dry I Am.” The absurdity of it made him want to break something in his hands. He remembered when Ben had put them in, thinking how funny it would be.
He stood rigidly before the door, his mind still pulsing. I don’t care if it’s the law, I don’t care if refusal means death, I won’t put her there!
His fist thudded on the door.
“Ben!”
Silence in the house of Ben Cortman. White curtains hung motionless in the front windows. He could see the red couch, the floor lamp with the fringed shade, the upright Freda used to toy with on Sunday afternoons.
He blinked. What day was it? He had forgotten, he had lost track of the days.
He twisted his shoulders as impatient fury hosed acids through his veins.
“Ben!”
Again the side of his hard fist pummeled the door, and the flesh along his whitening jaw line twitched. Damn him, where was he? Neville jammed in the button with a brittle finger and the chimes started the tippler’s song over and over and over. “How dry I am, how dry I am, how dry I am, how dry I…”
With a frenzied gasp he lurched against the door and it flew open against the inside wall. It had been unlocked.
He walked into the silent living room.
“Ben,” he said loudly. “Ben, I need your car.”
They were in the bedroom, silent and still in their daytime comas, lying apart on the twin beds, Ben in pajamas, Freda in silk nightgown; lying on the sheets, their thick chests faltering with labored breaths
He stood there for a moment looking down at them. There were some wounds on Freda’s white neck that had crusted over with dried blood. His eyes moved to Ben. There was no wound on Ben’s throat and he heard a voice in his mind that said: If only I’d wake up.
He shook his head. No, there was no waking up from this.
He found the car keys on the bureau and picked them up. He turned away and left the silent house behind. It was the last time he ever saw either of them alive.
The motor coughed into life and he let it idle a few minutes, choke out, while he sat staring out through the dusty windshield. A fly buzzed its bloated form around his head in the hot, airless interior of the car. He watched the dull green glitter of it and felt the car pulsing under him.
After a moment he pushed in the choke and drove the car up the street. He parked it in the driveway before his garage and turned off the motor.
The house was cool and silent. His shoes scuffed quietly over the rug, then clicked on the floor boards in the hall.
He stood motionless in the doorway looking at her. She still lay on her back, arms at her sides, the white fingers slightly curled in. She looked as if she were sleeping.
He turned away and went back into the living room. What was be going to do? Choices seemed pointless now. What did it matter what he did? Life would be equally purposeless no matter what his decision was.
He stood before the window looking out at the quiet, sun-drenched street, his eyes lifeless.
Why did I get the car, then? he wondered. His throat moved as he swallowed. I can’t burn her, he thought. I won't. But what else was there? Funeral parlors were closed. What few morticians were healthy enough to practice were prevented from doing so by law. Everyone without exception had to be transported to the fires immediately upon death. It was the only way they knew now to prevent communication. Only flames could destroy the bacteria that caused the plague.
He knew that. He knew it was the law. But how many people followed it? He wondered that too. How many husbands took the women who had shared their life and love and dropped them into flames? How many parents incinerated the children they adored, how many children tossed their beloved parents on a bonfire a hundred yards square, a hundred feet deep?
No, if there was anything left in the world, it was his vow that she would not be burned in the fire.
An hour passed before he finally reached a decision. Then he went and got her needle and thread. He kept sewing until only her face showed. Then, fingers trembling, a tight knot in his stomach, he sewed the blanket together over her mouth. Over her nose. Her eyes.
Finished, he went in the kitchen and drank another glass of whisky. It didn't seem to affect him at all.
At last he went back to the bedroom on faltering legs. For a long minute he stood there breathing hoarsely. Then he bent over and worked his arms under her inert form.
“Come on, baby,” he whispered.
The words seemed to loosen everything. He felt himself shaking, felt the tears running slowly down his cheeks as he carried her through the living room and outside.
He put her in the back seat and got in the car. He took a deep breath and reached for the starter button.
He drew back. Getting out of the car again, he went into the garage and got the shovel.
He twitched as he came out, seeing the man across the street approaching slowly. He put the shovel in the back and got in the car.
“Wait!”
The man’s shout was hoarse. The man tried to run, but he wasn’t strong enough.
Robert Neville sat there silently as the man came shuffling up.
“Could you… let me bring my… my mother too?’ the man said stiffly.
“I…I…I…”
Neville’s brain wouldn’t function. He thought he was going to cry again, but he caught himself and stiffened his back.
“I’m not going to the… there,” he said.
The man looked at him blankly.
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“But your…”
“I’m no t going to the fire, I said!” Neville blurted out, and jabbed in the starter button.
“But your wife,” said the man. “You have your…”
Robert Neville jerked the gear shift into reverse.
“Please,” begged the man.
“I’m not going there!” Neville shouted without looking at the man.
“But it’s the law!” the man shouted back, suddenly furious.
The car raced back quickly into the street and Neville jerked it around to face Compton Boulevard. As he sped away he saw the man standing at the curb watching him leave. Fool! his mind grated. Do you think I’m going to throw my wife into a fire?
The streets were deserted. He turned left at Compton and started west. As he drove he looked at the huge lot on the right side of the car. He couldn’t use any of the cemeteries. They were locked and watched. Men had been shot trying to bury their loved ones.
He turned right at the next block and drove up one block, turned right again into a quiet street that ended in the lot. Halfway up the block he cut the motor. He rolled the rest of the way so no one would hear the car.
No one saw him carry her from the car or carry her deep into the high-weeded lot. No one saw him put her down on an open patch of ground and then disappear from view as he knelt.
Slowly he dug, pushing the shovel into the soft earth, the bright sun pouring heat into the little clearing like molten air into a dish. Sweat ran in many lines down his cheeks and forehead as he dug, and the earth swam dizzily before his eyes. Newly thrown dirt filled his nostrils with its hot, pungent smell.
At last the hole was finished. He put down the shovel and sagged down on his knees. His body shuddered and sweat trickled over his face. This was the part he dreaded.
But he knew he couldn’t wait. If he was seen they would come out and get him. Being shot was nothing. But she would be burned then. His lips tightened. No.
Gently, carefully as he could, he lowered her into the shallow grave, making sure that her head did not bump.
He straightened up and looked down at her still body sewn up in the blanket. For the last time, he thought. No more talking, no more loving. Eleven wonderful years ending in a filled-in trench. He began to tremble. No, he ordered himself, there’s no time for that
I Am Legend and Other Stories Page 6
