Ressurection Days

by Wilson Tucker

  Somebody had finked on him—somebody had overheard him talking with Kehli and called in the dogs of the law. A party pooper. That was the trouble with neighbors having thin walls—they always begrudged the people next door throwing a party; they always betrayed themselves as soreheads when they weren’t invited to join an orgy. (Not that he would want Hoon at an orgy. Owen didn’t even want to think about the steamy night spent with Hoon after she resurrected him. There are some things man was not meant to know.)

  Owen reached out to find and feel the pipe that had thrown him and wondered briefly why it was there. The _ pipe wasn’t connected to anything and it ran at crosspurposes to all the others, but it was there and it was probable that others like it were ahead of him.

  He scanned the sky, seeking Jupiter, and found it near the zenith; a surprising amount of time had passed while he was in the kitchen romancing Kehli. As yet there was no moon, but if one should rise later he’d stand out like a rogue zombie. Owen got to his feet and hastily changed his clothes, keeping a wary eye on the distant torches. They’d be howling after him soon like Indians after a tenderfoot and the pink coveralls were an easy target; the dun-colored garment was the better one for flight. He bundled up Paoli’s pinks and tucked them inside his waist, not wanting to leave them behind to mark his trail.

  Owen started off through the tangled weeds but then changed his mind and climbed atop the larger pipe for the inward journey. It was easier than walking a Pennsy rail, a balancing act he’d often done in his childhood. Indiana was chock full of rails for walking or for practicing broad jumps, and every once in a blue moon a boy could, if he was very lucky, find an unused fusee along the tracks. Fusees were glorious treasures to save for Fourth of July night or for New Year’s Eve.

  He’d give a shiny buffalo nickel to know what happened to Indiana—if he had a buffalo nickel.

  What happened to Hartford City and Kokomo and Indianapolis, to the Pennsylvania and the New York Central tracks, to the old highway that crossed the Pennsy tracks and robbed him of his twenty-ninth birthday, and to all the farms along that highway? What happened to his boardinghouse and to the lumberyard where he traded? To his Ford truck? What happened to Dusty’s Bar in Galveston, to Juanita’s Grocery in Hartford City, to Texas Tommy’s Steak House on the north side of Indianapolis, and to the windmill on Brickyard Road that had been wired to generate electricity? What happened to President Roosevelt and to his old buddy Churchill over there in England?

  Gone. All dead and gone. Hartford City and all those places were gone with Babylon and Jericho. Owen Hall and Pastor Coulson and the workmen were the only ones left alive from the old days, but you couldn’t say much for the pastor and the zombies.

  Somebody had done an awful lot of tearing down and rebuilding in the last several hundred years—or maybe it was a thousand, considering those stars overhead in their strange positions. Somebody had really wrecked the country. Maybe the United States had lost the war, or maybe it had been bombed out like those cities and towns in England, or maybe the NorAmerFed had made a clean sweep. This town wasn’t a new Hartford City built on the ruins of the old one—not this crazy round town with the rolling road. The cemetery was a useful landmark, a stable mark, but it was in the wrong direction from the town. Hartford City used to be off there somewhere, to the west.

  The powerhouse was an enigma.

  The pipe from Kehli’s house had carried Owen near the center of the circle before it merged with an adjoining twin. Smaller pipes had joined with larger pipes and the larger pipes later merged with huge pipes as he approached the center, and in the end Owen was forced to abandon his pipe walking and descend to the ground. He worked a slow and tortuous path through the maze. The pipes had evolved into a plumber’s nightmare, and every one of them ended at the powerhouse; they were welded into the walls of the giant structure—the wackiest Rube Goldberg invention Owen had ever encountered—but nowhere could he find a point of entry for man or woman. The powerhouse sprouted a wilderness of pipes and resembled a metallic octopus, but it lacked a door, a window, a rat hole. The building was sealed.

  Owen clambered over pipes and slid under pipes, fighting weeds every foot of the way, circling the structure twice searching for a way in before admitting defeat.

  Food and water came out of the powerhouse to serve the row houses but people didn’t enter it to tend or tinker with the machinery. He had to admit that it was the nearest thing to perpetual motion he’d yet seen. Maybe it was a weird spaceship from Mars or Venus or one of those alien planets, come to earth to feed the natives; maybe the pink women had found it and taken advantage of it by hooking up their pipes for a lifetime of free handouts. But then again, maybe not. Owen eyed the looming bulk with speculation. Food also went into the thing—he could speak from experience about that. v

  Owen said, “Oh, fudge!” and rapped the metal wall in sudden recognition. It wasn’t a spaceship from Mars.

  He climbed up and through the maze and sat down astraddle the topmost pipe. The town was spread out around him in a near perfect circle, and he was looking down on the roof of the building just beyond his feet. No spaceship. Despite the dim light, he could now see all of the structure clearly, and he recognized it as the very big brother of the think-and-do machines in the factory, a giant-sized replica of the machine he had worked on. The design was the same, but the multitude of pipes had misled him, prevented him from knowing the machine at first sight. He had made bacon on one such machine during the morning, and his machine fed the bacon to this machine, where it would be dispatched to the row houses come morning. Kehli had ordered his overdone monkey wrench from here. The powerhouse was a transshipment center and it was no wonder he couldn’t find a door into the thing; the pink ladies would be both surprised and displeased to find pieces of Owen mixed in with their eggs and bacon at breakfast. He would likely spoil their appetites.

  Owen craned his neck to look behind him and found the dark line of buildings that he called downtown—the zone containing City Hall and the factories. He squinted in the darkness, struggling to separate roofline from skyline. The pipe he sat on appeared to lead into one of those buildings. He stood up carefully, found his balance, and advanced a dozen paces along the pipe before a flicker of firelight caught his eye.

  Owen stopped and turned to look.

  The posse was coming through the jungle; they had . at last realized his escape route and now the pack of them were spread out in a surprisingly wide search pattern, beating the bushes and working along the pipes in pursuit. Their sweep was slow but thorough, and already they had reached that quarter-mile point where he’d tripped and fallen.

  Owen measured the pipe before him and the roofline in the distance. He thought he could make it to the nearest building if he ran. He could climb to the rooftops and find refuge there before the posse arrived at the center. But then, he hadn’t been behind the door when the brains were passed out. He wasn’t about to run along a pipe twenty feet above the ground in darkness—not even to escape an avenging horde. Owen turned about and retraced the dozen paces to the powerhouse and jumped down onto its roof. The footing was firm but gently sloping.

  He flopped on his belly in the middle of the roof and turned his head to watch the approach.

  There were thirty-six torches by count. The torches were so widely separated that the torch bearers would have missed him if he had been concealed between any two of them, so there had to be other women without light working the darker spaces between. Owen guessed that somebody had called out the marines. The posse had to number between the thirty-six and maybe fifty, sixty, or seventy women. He couldn’t con or sweet-talk that many. If that mob discovered him, he would be reconstituted pork before you could say Jack Armstrong.

  Owen hugged the roof and waited.

  The huntresses came on with grim purpose and soon the faces and the pink uniforms of those in between without fire could be seen in the torchlight. The weeds were trampled, the few bushes that might hav
e offered concealment were beaten down, and the undersides of every large pipe was searched. A chipmunk would not have escaped discovery.

  The maze slowed their march. It was more difficult to climb through a tangle of pipes and peer beneath each and every one as well, and the really large pipes near the center offered better hiding places. Owen was thankful he hadn’t remained on the ground; they would have found him by now unless he had circled the powerhouse and run for the distant row houses on the opposite side.

  Which is what the manhunters did, but not on the run. They split into two groups when they reached the powerhouse, searched about its base in the same methodical manner, and regrouped on the far side. The operation was stalled for several minutes when someone called a war council. One woman wanted the posse split into three groups so that they could fan out into the three remaining directions simultaneously, but she was voted down. Another, a woman with a soft but confident tone of voice, argued that the culprit would flee in a straight line to the opposite side of the circle in search of unlocked doors, that the wisest course of action would be to follow him there and then split into two groups, with each group, working back along the wall line until they met again at the starting point. She was of the opinion that when Owen found all the doors locked against him, he could be herded ahead of them and trapped when the two groups again came together. If, by chance, he managed to elude them in the darkness, he would surely be found when another hundred women joined the manhunt at sunrise. The plan was seconded and carried.

  Owen turned his head on the rooftop to watch them go, but then counted the torches a second time to make certain they hadn’t left one behind to snare him when he came out of hiding. There would be no way of knowing —until he moved—whether or not the sneaky devils had left behind a shadow without a torch.

  Owen stayed put until the posse was half a mile gone and then crept away on big cat feet. He lifted himself cautiously from the rooftop and scanned the pipe maze below in search of a shadow, a flash of pink, an upturned face. Walking softly and without sound, he crossed the roof to the edge of the maze of ducts and mounted the pipe he’d left only a short while before. There should be a factory at the other end of it and a means of reaching the road.

  Again he stopped to scan the darkness below and then to stare after the receding torches. He stood poised, watching and listening, but there was no outcry. Jupiter had moved another hour across the sky.

  Owen marched off along the pipe with high confidence, mindful of his height off the ground and maintaining his balance by holding his arms outstretched and keeping his gaze firmly fixed on the narrow path ahead of him. Even in the night it was easier than walking a thin Pennsy rail by daylight. Old Indiana railbirds never lost their touch.

  Behind him on the ground, unseen and unheard, two tall shadows emerged from concealment to follow the pipe walker. The shadows were careful to keep their distance and not crowd their quarry, careful not to betray their presence; they were content to tag along at an easy pace, following the silhouette balanced against the sky.

  A factory wall met his outstretched fingers.

  Owen flattened himself against the wall and reached overhead to grope for the roofline. The building had no eaves and the roof edge was just above his head; he thought he could pull himself up and climb onto the roof easily enough, but first he wanted to investigate the ground below the pipes. The darkness underneath was complete, but there should be doors somewhere in the factory wall—doors opening out into the jungle. Owen clambered down the pipes and ran his fingers along the back wall in search of a latch, strap, or doorknob. An ill-fitting door was soon discovered, but it was locked against him. He braced one foot against the wall for leverage and pulled, but the door remained firm. He lacked a screwdriver in his pockets.

  “Fudge!”

  Owen worked his way through yet another tangle of pipes and continued the search of the back walls, finding two more doors that were locked. A man would think that the townspeople had panicked and locked everything against an army of rapacious burglars—or else the doors had been sealed for a century since the day the pipes were connected and the factories opened. The fire marshall should have something to say about that.

  Owen gave up the search in disgust and climbed the nearest set of pipes to the rooftop, pulling himself over the edge and grunting at the exertion. He dropped on his belly to catch his breath, squirmed because of a lump pressing against the belly, and finally raised his head to look for the distant torches. The posse had reached the far side of town, and as he watched, the torchbearers split into two groups to follow opposing walls around the inside circle. The group on his side would be below him after a while. It was time to move on.

  He rolled away from the edge and found that the roof had a very slight pitch from front to back; it was no more than two or three degrees, but it insured the runoff of rainwater. The roof was also alarmingly spongy under his weight, another indication of poor carpentry work—the joists were too far apart and the roofing material was as thin as a politician’s pledge.

  Owen got to his feet, gingerly tested the surface under him, and walked to the front roofline to peer into the blackness below. He thought he could see the ground, and if he really was seeing it, the grass and the rolling road were more than twenty feet below—much too far away to risk hanging by his hands and dropping. A pioneer setting off to explore a new world with a couple of broken legs had little chance of capturing a horse or bringing down’ a buffalo. He backed away from the edge and decided to circle the town by rooftop, turning first to the southwest, where the houses of Kehli and Paoli were.

  A pioneer had urgent need of the supplies in those two rucksacks that had been left behind.

  Owen put his hand and arm upright before his face and advanced slowly. He hadn’t seen a radio anywhere in the town, but that wasn’t proof they didn’t exist somewhere, here or there, and radio antennas were always stretched across rooftops at the exact height of a man’s neck. That seemed to be a perverse rule of thumb. The building he was walking on was higher than the nearby dwellings, so the roofline had to drop off somewhere. He proceeded with caution.

  The beginning was easy.

  The roof of the adjoining building was the same height as the one he stood on, but the structure next beyond was a few inches lower, while the bacon factory or gin mill after that one was again lower by an inch or so. Owen kept going with a singleness of purpose but at a slow and frustrating pace. Here a roofline jutted higher against the night sky, forcing a climb, but there the structure was lower and he descended once more in pursuit of his goal; sometimes only a small ridge separated two roofs, but at other times there was no line of demarcation at all and it was useless to attempt a count of the number, of buildings traversed. Owen said to hell with it, he wasn’t taking a census, and trudged on. When his left foot suddenly lost the spongy surface and dangled in empty space, he backed off and lay down on his stomach to reconnoiter. He rested on a lump.

  He reached over the side of the building and waved a hand to and fro in the night air. Nothing below him obstructed the free passage of his hand. The roofing material was black and no solid surface met his questing gaze, but he thought he had come to the end of the zone and reached the first of the dwellings where the good citizens should be sleeping—if they all weren’t running, around carrying torches and hunting a fugitive.

  “So now what, Horace Greeley?”

  Owen rested and puzzled the blackness below. When he realized that the lump against his stomach was the pilfered pink coveralls he pulled them out with a sound of self-derision and shook them out to their full length. The coveralls were held by the neck and dangled over the edge to the very limit of his reach. The bottoms of the trouser legs created a soft swooshing sound on the rooftop below as he dragged the garment to and fro.

  “Jackpot, Mr. Greeley.”

  Owen tied the coveralls about his waist, Towered himself carefully over the roof edge, and dropped. The new rooftop cracked
under his falling weight with a sound that resembled a small-bore cannon fired into a stilly night.

  “Geez, do they ever need a carpenter around this town. If I wanted to hang around, I’d apply for the job.”

  Owen pulled his feet out of the hole in the roof.

  He still had a respectable distance to travel and no guideposts to lead him to the correct house. The timber and the cemetery first glimpsed in the early morning were now hopelessly lost in the darkness, and looking out across the pipe jungle to the moving torches was of no help; those eager manhunters could be anywhere along the inside rim of the circle. The only reliable indication of his goal would be at or near the point where the two parties came together again, and he would have to seek out the specific house from there, sneaking inside one after another, if need be, in search of those precious rucksacks.

  Owen put the protective arm before his face and struck off into the southwest at a quickened pace. He was quickly thankful for the absence of chimneys and vents. The roofs beneath him sagged at his every footfall, while the creaks and groans of the timbers were enough to wake the sleepers in the bedrooms below. He glanced over his shoulder once at the torchbearers, found them surprisingly near, and edged closer to the front rooflines to put more distance between him and the manhunters. A bright moon would have betrayed him at once.

  It was a patch-poor way for a law-abiding Indiana boy to spend the night. If he had his ’druthers, he’d ’druther be in a warm snug bed with Paoli or Kehli, doing what he had been resurrected to do. Kehli was his first choice.

  Twin detonations crackled quickly behind him—two sharp crashes that resembled the sounds of small-bore cannons fired at his back. Owen whirled around but could not see his pursuers against the dark factory wall; they would need only a moment to pull their feet free of their holes and take after him. In the greater distance a torch flared above the zone rooftops, and as he watched another joined it—the troops were climbing the pipes and carrying the chase to higher elevations. There’d be precious little sleep tonight for the innocent citizens below.