A Woman’s
Strident Voice Sounded Somewhere Above Him. .
He got up and crouched on the marble stoop to peer over the edge of the grave. Once again, baby pink; the long arm of the law had arrived. Yet another woman clad in the familiar pink garment stood a short distance away with her back to him, scolding the zombie crew clustered about the working grave.
Owen knew her problem^ She had heard him talking, she had overheard him trying to strike up a conversation with the crew while she was lollygagging in the timber, or whatever she was doing in there, and had come out to learn the reason. Talking wasn’t permitted among the males.
Owen waited until she ran out of breath. He stood up straight on the marble stoop with his head and shoulders aboveground.
“Hi, there, cupcake! I’m grave-robbing.”
The woman spun around in startled disbelief.
Owen looked at her ashen face and then her crumpling body as it tumbled into the weedy grass.
“Now, ain’t that just like a woman?” he asked the zombies. “Give them a straight answer and they faint dead away.”
RESURRECTION
DAYS
WILSON TUCKER
A TIMESCAPE BOOK
PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS NEW YORK
This novel is a work of fiction. Name, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Another Original publication of TIMESCAPE BOOKS
A Timescape Book published by
POCKET BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster division of GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020
Copyright © 1981 by Wilson Tucker
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Timescape Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020
ISBN: 0-671-83242-5
First Timescape Books printing November, 1981
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
POCKET and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster.
Use of the TIMESCAPE trademark under exclusive license from trademark owner.
Printed in the U.SA.
For Ralph and Phyllis,
who waited with patience.
W. T.
One
’Tis the voice of the sluggard;
I heard him complain;
“You have waked me too soon,
I must slumber again.”
—Isaac Watts
Owen Hall’s first day of his new life began with uncertainty, misdoubt. It was a second life, his second time around, and that contributed to the confusion. His very first look at this new world convinced him it was not the promised land, not the Eden-like garden he had been led to expect. Someone had robbed him of that.
He had been thwacked on his bottom and shoved, rudely. They weren’t supposed to do that in Utopia.
Owen Hall was a reborn but troubled man.
In that first moment of total awareness, of knowing he was alive again, Owen found himself standing outside a door and facing a road that moved. The road flowed slowly eastward toward a rising sun, a road wholly without bumps, potholes, mile markers, or the familiar yellow line down the middle to guide irresolute travelers. Owen stared at the moving road and thought the new world a very odd place. It was definitely not what the pastor had promised him.
He craned his head around to look at the door behind him. It was painted a sickly green and bore a number that meant nothing—it wasn’t his house number.
That door had been slammed shut behind him after he was so rudely pushed through it, although there was no distinct recollection of his passage through the doorway or who had done the shoving. It was reasonable to assume that the same person was responsible for both acts. He’d felt a powerful thrust across the small of his back, an equally powerful thwack across his bottom, and he had been propelled from a darkened interior out into the brilliant light of a new day. The same heavy hand had then slammed the door behind him, and here he was: Owen Hall, alive in a new world. Awareness of self and awareness of his surroundings began with that discourteous ejection.
Owen Hall thought it a damned poor way to send a guest down the road.
The new sun hurt his eyes because he’d been used to a long darkness. It was rising with the quick heat of summer, rising into a cloudless sky that surely promised hot and discomforting hours to come. He thought it was a July or an August sun, but it shouldn’t be summertime; A July or an August sun was out of place, as strange as that flowing roadway. This should be late winter. There should be ice and snow on the land. He found a fleeting memory of snow everywhere, of ice on a highway, of a blizzard around him and stinging his face. He should be in the middle of winter, not in the early morning of a hot summer day. Not only had the pastor misled him, somebody had turned the seasons around when he wasn’t looking.
“I’ve been had,” he muttered aloud.
There was a healthy stand of summer grass on either side of the walk where he stood, and an enormous prairie of grass just over there beyond the rolling road. That prairie seemed to fill all of the new world from one horizon to the other, occupying all of the visible world across the roadway. The lush turf was everywhere, as the pastures and the croplands had once been everywhere before the subdivisions came. This was clean, green country unspoiled by highways, billboards, and hamburger houses, much the same as it had been in his youth—open country where a boy or a man could roam to his heart’s content. That one part of the world could be the promised land.
In the far distance—off there to the east—a stand of timber grew against the horizon, fine trees standing tall before the sun. Now that was good. The day was already so bright that he had to squint to see the timber. Owen thought he just might go over there and see that timber— it would be cool there when the day grew unbearably hot, and he could sit a batch and try to puzzle out this business. A headful of blackness where his memory should have been really irritated him.
The road again claimed his attention. It moved.
The flowing roadway was actually a street, now that he examined it closely—a wide and smoothly surfaced street that flowed toward the rising sun at a speed equal to a fast walk. It rolled in from the southwest in a gentle arc, coming from someplace beyond his sight, and curved gently around an endless row of low buildings as it approached him. The road served the row houses from southwest to northeast, following the building line.
All of the buildings were identical to the one he’d been thrown out of, with one small exception. They had plain fronts, were one-story high, and were without windows; the houses abutted one another as if to prop each other up, and each had a small plot of grass in front with a narrow walk leading to the roadway. The door to each house was painted a different color, the only distinguishing mark other than the numbers.
Owen Hall inspected the street and the town with a growing sense of wonder. He guessed that it was a round town, a self-contained ring, and that the moving street completely encircled it in an endless loop. A small pinprick of memory helped him make that guess; there had been something about the concept in one of the science wonder magazines, some prophecy of the amazing things to come in a technological future. The roads must roll to replace the automobile.
There was no telling what science would do next.
In the next moment that mysterious green door behind him was yanked open and a woman shouted belligerently —shouted at him.
“Hey, you, dummy!”
Owen turned around to examine this newest wonder. He was quickly astonished a
t sight of her.
The woman popped through the door and nearly lost her balance, but managed to shake a balled fist at him.
“What are you doing there, dummy?”
Owen took a prudent step backward.
The woman was an ogre. She was about forty years old and distinctly chunky through the middle parts; her arms and legs were uncommonly thick—solid—and her huge hands were obviously capable of hurling him through any number of doorways. He realized at once those hands had thrown him through that doorway.
“Good morning, ma’am.”
The woman came on, following him down the walk. Her hair was black, her eyes were angry, and her height was impressive—she towered at least six inches above him, looming over him like a tall tree in a strong wind.
The ogre was clad from neck to sandals in tight, formfitting pink clothing. Baby pink. The single garment resembled a mechanic’s overalls, and it might have been flattering if it were not for that unsightly bulge around the middle, if it were not for her elephantine weight. She staggered as she approached him.
“I asked you, dummy, what’re you doing here? What?” Her voice was a hoarse bellow and the wind that blew from her mouth was freighted with an old familiar smell. Owen recognized the odor of sour mash whiskey.
She belched in his face. “Told you to go to work! Now, go” Again the rank breath washed down over him, falling on him from her greater height. “Go on, dummy!” Owen was impressed. “Honey, you’re loaded.”
Ignoring the accusation or perhaps not understanding it, the belligerent woman stumbled closer and bent to peer into his eyes. He was splashed with the eighty-six proof gale winds and made ready to jump aside if she came fumbling down on him. His new life would be a very short one if she pinned him to the ground.
“Easy, now—go easy.”
“What’s wrong with you, dummy? What went wrong? How’s your equilibrium? Huh?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my equilibrium,” Owen retorted. “Why did you shove me through that door? Why did you hit me behind? What’s the big idea in all that?”
She peered down at him. “Can you walk without falling down? Now, huh?”
“I might ask you the same thing.”
Owen discovered that he possessed a baritone voice and was quickly pleased. It had been a very long time since he’d listened to the sound of his own voice.
Another bellow. “There’s something wrong with you!”
“Pot calling the kettle black,” Owen retorted.
“Something went wrong in the mix, dummy.”
“It smells that way,” he agreed. “You didn’t let it age long enough.”
“I could do you over again.”
Owen studied her bulk. “You can’t run that fast.”
A balled fist was held before his face. “The others don’t talk back, dummy!”
“I do. I talk when I please. I’m a New Deal Democrat, and President Roosevelt gave us the Four Freedoms. Freedom of speech is one of them, and I talk to anybody.” He studied her looming bulk. “Even you.”
She jabbed him with a heavy index finger and it felt like an awl digging into his shoulder blade.
“Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!”
“Honey, your needle is stuck.”
Owen backed away from the jabbing finger and the alcoholic wash. The . ogre teetered precariously and was near falling. He realized the pushy, loud-mouthed woman wasn’t his wife and was pleased again. The realization was a relief. Now that he thought about it, he knew he didn’t have a wife—not here, not back there, nor anywhere. He had never married. A large and all-enveloping blackness still lived in his skull, displacing the memory that should have been there, but these stray remembrances that came through from time to time were most welcome. They were mere threads of his memory, but he clutched at them, saved them. The harridan wasn’t his wife.
And again he wondered what he was doing in the new world, doing in that house, on this walk, arguing with a drunken behemoth. Why was he in her company at all? Most definitely, this was not the happy kingdom promised by the preachers—although it could be a version of the fiery pit they threatened for backsliders. That gauzy golden land in the sky wasn’t likely to have drab row houses, moving roads predicted by technical magazines, and overweight females loaded to the eyeballs on homemade sour mash whiskey. This was something else altogether, but he didn’t think the lurching lady was apt to explain it to him. Her mood was foul.
“Show me you can walk, dummy.”
Owen obediently marched back and forth along the walk between the green door and the edge of the street.
His legs were strangely weak and for a brief moment he felt like an infant learning its first steps, but the uneasy feeling passed, and soon he was ambling along in his old rangy stride. Another stray remembrance, a wisp of his missing memory—his old rangy stride. He knew he was doing it right, knew he was walking in an old and familiar pattern, but he couldn’t pin down just how he knew it was right. Perhaps his memory was returning, perhaps he would soon regain all his old skills. He had skills, of course—the skills he had learned back there in first life. “How does it feel?” the woman demanded.
“Nothing to it. I walk all the time.”
“You talk all the time, too.”
“I have a natural wit.”
“You ready to go to work?”
“Work?” Owen stopped pacing to ponder that and stared up into her face. “Well, now, I hadn’t considered working. I thought I might mosey over to the timber, there, or maybe knock around the town to see what is going on here.” He inched away from the secondhand whiskey. “What is going on here?”
“You go to work!” was the answering blast. “That’s what you’re for ” And she seemed ready to topple again.
“Females always take that attitude,” Owen said. “Why don’t you go to work and let me go fishing?”
“Shut up, dummy. Work!” The very heavy fist was pushed up to his nose and waggled suggestively. The other hand was reaching for his shoulder but having trouble in finding it. “I can do you over again.”
Owen jumped away, thoroughly alarmed. One of those heavy hands had smacked him across the rump and helped him through a doorway only a short while ago, and he didn’t welcome another demonstration of strength now—nor did he care to go back indoors with the harridan.
“Work it is, honey. Yessiree, ma’am! I don’t really mind if I do. It’s the patriotic thing to do—did you know that? President Roosevelt said that honest work will help the country through these trying times—work will turn the lights on again in Europe. We’ve got to win the war.” He watched the hands with a wary eye. “What work? Where? I can saw wood.”
“The road, you dummy, get on the road.” Sour mash fumes enveloped him. “That’s what it’s for. Follow those other dummies, go where they go. Work!” She waved both large arms with disgust. “Mother, are you wrong .”
“I wouldn’t want to be your mother. I don’t even want to be your father. I’d go shoot myself.”
“Get out there on the road with those other dummies and go to work. Stop talking!”
Owen craned around to look again at the rolling road and discovered it thinly populated. He revealed surprise. The road had been empty when he was demonstrating how to walk—at least, he hadn’t seen anyone on it—but now men were beginning to appear. They were coming from the southwest, from those far distances down the road, riding toward him and past him to some unseen destination in the northeast. Going to work, wherever that was.
The men behaved like sleepwalkers, or dummies; they displayed all the energy and vitality of anemic zombies. They traveled singly, or in pairs, but there was no fraternization between them, no gossiping or retelling old ball scores—no one talked of Rogers Hornsby finally making the Hall of Fame after more than twenty-two hundred games and a batting average of .358; no one of them spoke to his fellow even though the fellow was alongside, elbow to elbow, cheek by jowl; no one cracked jokes about Be
tty or the other Bette. The workmen were models of inert bodies.
They didn’t look up at Owen as they passed him, nor glance at his besotted companion; instead, they contented themselves with studying their shoes or the smooth roadway beneath their shoes, each carefully keeping his own quiet company. Now and again there was a rare individual who had forgotten to bend his neck and who spent his travel time absently contemplating the nape of the neck of the man standing next in front, but such men were few. A man emerged from a yellow door in the adjoining house and swung onto the roadway.
“What’s wrong with all those guys?” Owen demanded. “They look like zombies, walking zombies.”
There was no answer.
Owen turned around to question the woman, but she had left him. He watched her stagger up the walk toward the door. She collided with the “doorframe, bounced off it, bellowed some unknown word in hurt or in frustration, and straightened for another attempt. The body gathered speed. Owen held his breath. The woman lumbered through the doorway and shouted again, hurling a command back to him. The command sounded like “Go, dum!”
The door was slammed shut.
Owen went.
Two
It’s well to be off with the Old Woman before you’re on with the New.
Ressurection Days Page 1