The car rolled up to the traffic jam in the westbound lane and stopped.
Nancy turned off the ignition. In the silence one could hear the faint rustling of that strange windrow that moved along the road, a small whisper of sound punctuated now and then by the cracking and the popping of the branches as the uprooted trees toppled in their unseemly tumbling.
I got out of the car and walked around it and started down the road, working my way through the tangle of the cars. As I came clear of them the road stretched out before me and up the road the people still were running — well, not running exactly, not the way they had been. They would run a ways and then stand in little groups and look behind them, at the writhing windrow, then would run a ways and stop to look again. Some of them didn't run at all, but just kept plodding up the road at a steady walk.
It was not only people. There was something else, a strange fluttering in the air, a darting of dark bodies, a cloud of insects and of birds, retreating before this inexorable force that moved like a wraith across the surface of the land.
The land was bare behind the barrier. There was nothing on it except two leafless trees. And they, I thought — they would be left behind. For they were lifeless things and for them the barrier had no meaning, for it was only life that the barrier rejected. Although, if Len Streeter had been right, then it was not all life, but a certain kind, or a certain size, or a certain condition of life.
But aside from the two dead trees, the ground lay bare.
There was no grass upon it, not a single weed, not a bush or tree. All that was green was gone.
I stepped off the roadbed onto the shoulder and knelt down and ran my fingers along the barren ground. It was not only bare; it was ploughed and harrowed, as if some giant agricultural rig had gone over it and made it ready for new seed. The soil, I realized, had been loosened by the uprooting of its mat of vegetation. In all that ground, I knew, no single root existed, no fragment of a root, down to the finest rootlet. The land had been swept clean of everything that grew and all that once had grown here was now a part of that fantastic windrow that was being swept along before the barrier.
Above me a dull rumble of thunder rippled in the sky and rolled along the air. I glanced backward over my shoulder, and saw that the thunderstorm which had been threatening all morning now was close upon us, but it was a ragged storm, with wind-twisted clouds, broken and fragmented, fleeing through the upper emptiness.
"Nancy," I said, but she did not answer.
I got quickly to my feet and swung around. She had been right behind me when I'd started through the traffic tangle, but now there was no sign of her.
I started back down the road to find her and as I did a blue sedan that was over on the opposite shoulder rolled off down the shoulder and swung out on the pavement — and there, behind the wheel, was Nancy. I knew then how I'd lost her. She had looked among the cars until she had found one that was not blocked by other cars and with the key still in the lock.
The car came up beside me, moving slowly, and I trotted along to match its speed. Through the half-open window came the sound of an excited commentator on the radio. I got the door open and jumped in and slammed the door behind me.
"…called out the national guard and had officially informed Washington. The first units will move out in another — no, here is word just now that they have already moved out…"
"That," said Nancy, "is us he's talking about." I reached out and twisted the dial."… just came in. The barrier is moving! I repeat, the barrier is moving. There is no information how fast it's moving or how much distance it has covered. But it is moving outward from the village. The crowd that had gathered outside of it is fleeing wildly from it. And here is more — the barrier is moving no faster than a man may walk. It already has swept almost a mile…" And that was wrong, I thought, for it was now less than half a mile from its starting point.
"… question, of course, is will it stop? How far will it move? Is there some way of stopping it? Can it keep on indefinitely; is there any end to it?"
"Brad," Nancy said, "do you think it will push everyone off the earth?
Everyone but the people here in Millville?"
"I don't know," I said, rather stupidly.
"And if it does, where will it push them"? Where is there to go?"
"… London and Berlin," blared the radio speaker. "Apparently the Russian people have not as yet been told what is happening. There have been no official statements. Not from anywhere. Undoubtedly this is something about which the various governments may have some difficulty deciding if there should be a statement. It would seem, at first thought, that here is a situation which came about through no act of any man or any government. But there is some speculation that this may be a testing of some new kind of defence. Although it is difficult to imagine why, if it should be such, it be tested in a place like Millvile. Ordinarily such tests would take place in a military area and be conducted in the greatest secrecy." The car had been moving slowly down the road all the time we'd been listening to the radio and now we were no more than a hundred feet or so behind the barrier. Ahead of us, on either side of the pavement, the great windrow of vegetation inched itself forward, while further up the road the people still retreated.
I twisted around in the seat and glanced through the rear window, back toward the traffic snarl. A crowd of people stood among the cars and out on the pavement just beyond the cars. The people from the village had finally arrived to watch the moving barrier.
"…sweeping everything before it," screamed the radio.
I glanced around and we were almost at the barrier.
"Careful there," I warned. "Don't run into it."
"I'll be careful," said Nancy, just a bit too meekly.
"… like a wind," the announcer said, "blowing a long line of grass and trees and bushes steadily before it. Like a wind…" And there was a wind, first a preliminary gust that raised spinning dust devils in the stripped and denuded soil behind the barrier, then a solid wall of wind that slewed the car around and howled against the metal and glass.
It was the thunderstorm, I thought, that had stalked the land since early morning. But there was no lightning and no thunder and when I craned my neck to look out the windshield at the sky, there still were no more than ragged clouds, the broken, fleeing tatters of a worn-out storm.
The wind had swung the car around and now it was skidding down the road, pushed by the roaring wind, and threatening to tip over. Nancy was fighting the wheel, trying to bring the car around, to point it into the direction of the wind.
"Brad!" she shouted.
But even as she shouted, the storm hit us with the hard, peppering sound of raindrops splashing on the car.
The car began to topple and this time I knew that it was going over, that there was nothing in the world that could keep it from going over. But suddenly it slammed into something and swung upright once again and in one corner of my mind I knew that it had been shoved against the barrier by the wind and that it was being held there.
With one corner of my mind, for the greater part of it was filled with astonishment at the strangest raindrops I had ever seen.
They weren't raindrops, although they fell like raindrops, in drumming sheets that filled the inside of the car with the rolling sound of thunder.
"Hail," Nancy shouted at me.
But it wasn't hail.
Little round, brown pellets hopped and pounded on the car's hood and danced like crazy buckshot across the hard flatness of the pavement.
"Seeds!" I shouted back. "Those things out there are seeds!" It was no regular storm. It was not the thunderstorm, for there was no thunder and the storm had lost its punch many miles away. It was a storm of seeds driven by a mighty wind that blew without regard to any earthly weather; There was, I told myself, in a flash of logic that was not, on the face of it, very logical, no further need for the barrier to move. For it had ploughed the ground, had ploughed and harrowed it and pre
pared it for the seed, and then there'd been the sowing, and everything was over.
The wind stopped and the last seed fell and we sat in a numbing silence, with all the sound and fury gone out of the world. In the place of sound and fury there was a chilling strangeness, as if someone or something had changed all natural law around, so that seed fell from the sky like rain and a wind blew out of nowhere.
"Brad," said Nancy, "I think I'm beginning to get scared." She reached out a hand and put it on my arm. Her fingers tightened, hanging onto me.
"It makes me mad," she said, "I've never been scared, never my life. Never scared like this."
"It's all over now," I said. "The storm is ended and the barrier has stopped moving. Everything's all right."
"It's not like that at all," she told me. "It's only just beginning." A man was running up the road toward us, but he was the only one in sight. All the other people who had been around the parked cars were no longer there. They had run for cover, back to the village, probably, when the blast of wind had come and the seeds had fallen.
The running man, I saw, was Ed Adler, and he was shouting something at us as he run.
We got out of the car and walked around in front of it and stood there, waiting for him.
He came up to us, panting with his running.
"Brad," he gasped, "maybe you don't know this, but Hiram and Tom Preston are stirring up the people. They think you have something to do with what's happening. Some talk about a phone or something."
"Why, that's crazy!" Nancy cried.
"Sure it is," said Ed, "but the village is on edge. It wouldn't take too much to get them thinking it. They're ready to think almost anything. They need an explanation; they'll grab at anything. They won't stop to think if it's right or wrong."
I asked him: "What do you have in mind?"
"You better hide out, Brad, until it all blows over. In another day or two…"
I shook my head. "I have too many things to do."
"But, Brad…"
"I didn't do it, Ed. I don't know what happened, but I didn't have a thing to do with it."
"That don't make no difference."
"Yes, it does," I said.
"Hiram and Tom are saying they found these funny phones…" Nancy started to say something, but I jumped in ahead of her and cut her off, so she didn't have a chance to say it.»
"I know about those phones," I said. "Hiram told me all about them. Ed, take my word for it. The phones are out of it. They are something else entirely." Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nancy staring at me.
"Forget about the phones," I said.
I hoped she'd understand and apparently she did, for she didn't say a thing about the phones. I wasn't actually sure that she'd intended to, for I had no idea if she knew about the phone in her father's study. But I couldn't take a chance.
"Brad," warned Ed, "you're walking into it."
"I can't run away," I told him. "I can't run somewhere and hide. Not from anyone, especially not from a pair like Tom and Hiram." He looked me up and down.
"No, I guess you can't," he said. "Is there anything I can do?"
"Maybe," I said. "You can see that Nancy gets home safely. I've got a thing or two to do." I looked at Nancy. She nodded at me.
"It's all right, Brad, but the car's just down the road. I could drive you home."
"I'd better take a short cut. If Ed is right, there's less chance of being seen."
"I'll stay with her," said Ed, "until she's inside the house." Already, in two hour's time, I thought, it had come to this — to a state of mind where one questioned the safety of a girl alone upon the street.
10
Now, finally, I had to do a thing I had intended to do ever since this morning — a thing I probably should have done last night — get in touch with Alf. It was more important now than ever that I get in touch with him, for in the back of my mind was a growing conviction that there must be some connection between what was happening here in Millville and that strange research project down in Mississippi.
I reached a dead-end street and started walking down it. There was not a soul in sight. Everyone who could either walk or ride would be down in the business section.
I got to worrying that maybe I'd not be able to locate Alf, that he might have checked out of the motel when I failed to get there, or that he might be out gawping at the barrier with a lot of other people.
But there was no need to worry, for when I reached my house the phone was ringing and Alf was on the line.
"I've been trying for an hour to get you," he said. "I wondered how you were."
"You know what happened, Alf?"
He told me that he did. "Some of it," he said.
"Minutes earlier," I said, "and I would have been with you instead of penned up in the village. I must have hit the barrier when it first appeared." I went ahead and told him what had happened after I had hit the barrier. Then I told him about the phones.
"They told me they had a lot of readers. People who read books to them…"
"A way of getting information."
"I gathered that was it."
"Brad," he said, "I've got a terrible hunch."
"So have I," I said.
"Do you think this Greenbriar project…?"
"That's what I was thinking, too." I heard him drawing a deep breath, the air whistling in his teeth."
"It's not just Millville, then."
"Maybe a whole lot more than Millville."
"What are you going to do now, Brad?"
"Go down into my garden and have a hard look at some flowers."
"Flowers?"
"Alf," I told him, "it's a long, long story. I'll tell you later. Are you staying on?"
"Of course I am," said Alf "The greatest show on earth and me with a ringside seat."
"I'll call you back in an hour or so."
"I'll stay close," he promised. "I'll be waiting for your call." I put down the phone and stood there, trying to make some head or tail of it. The flowers, somehow, were important, and so was Tupper Tyler, but they were all mixed up together and there was no place one could start.
I went out of the house and down into the garden by the greenhouse. The trail that Tupper had left was still plain and I was considerably relieved, for I had been afraid that the wind that brought the seeds might have blown it away, that the flowers might have been so beaten and so twisted that the trail could well be lost.
I stood at the edge of the garden and looked around, as if I were seeing the place for the first time in my life. It wasn't really a garden.
At one time it had been land on which we'd grown the stuff we sold, but when I quit the greenhouse business I'd simply let it go wild and the flowers had taken over. To one side stood the greenhouse, with its door hanging on the broken hinges and most of the panes gone from the windows. And at one corner of it stood the elm tree that had grown from seed — the one I'd been about to pull up when my father stopped me.
Tupper had talked wildly about flowers growing by the acre. All of them, he said, had been purple flowers and he had been most emphatic that my father should be told of them. The mystery voice, or one of the mystery voices on the phone had been well informed about my father's greenhouse and had asked if I still ran it. And there had been, less than an hour ago, a perfect storm of seeds.
All the little purple flower-heads with their monkey faces seemed to be nodding at me as if at a secret joke and I jerked my gaze away from them to stare up at the sky. Broken clouds still streamed across it, shutting out the sun. Although, once the clouds were gone, the day would be a scorcher.
One could smell the heat in the very air.
I moved out into the garden, following Tupper's trail. At the end of the trail I stopped and told myself that it had been a witless thing — this belief of mine that I would find something in this flower patch that would make some sense.
Tupper Tyler had disappeared ten years ago and he'd disappeared today and how he'd
managed it no man might ever know.
And yet the idea still went on banging in my skull that Tupper was the key to all this screwy business.
Yet I couldn't, for the life of me, explain the logic of my thinking.
For Tupper wasn't the only one involved — if he was, in fact, involved.
There was Stiffy Grant as well. And I realized, with a start, that I had not asked anyone how Stiffy might be doing.
Doc Fabian's house was on the hill just above the greenhouse and I could go up there and ask. Doc might not be home, of course, but I could wait around a while and eventually he'd show up. At the moment there was nothing else to do. And with Hiram and Tom Preston shooting off their mouths, it might be a good idea not to be found at home.
I had been standing at the end of Tupper's trail and now I took a step beyond it, setting out for Doc's. But I never got to Doc's. I took that single step and the sun came out and the houses went away. Doc's house and all the other houses, and the trees as well, and the bushes and the grass.
Everything disappeared and there was nothing left but the purple flowers, which covered everything, and a sun that was blazing out of a cloudless sky.
11
I had taken that one step and everything had happened. So now I took another one to bring my feet together and I stood there, stiff and scared, afraid to turn around afraid, perhaps, of what I'd see behind me. Although I think I knew what I would see behind me. Just more purple flowers.
For this, I knew, in one dim corner of my curdled mind, was the place that Tupper had been telling me about.
Tupper had come out of this place and he'd gone back to this place and now I'd followed him.
All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories Page 10