The Last Defender Of Camelot

by Roger Zelazny

  He slowed. He braked and stopped. Then he saw them. He sat there and watched them as they passed, about a half-mile ahead.

  A monstrous herd of bison crossed before him. It took the better part of an hour before they had passed. Huge, heavy, dark, heads down, hooves scoring the soil, they ran without slowing until the thunder was great and then rolled off toward the north, diminishing, softening, dying, gone. The screen of their dust still hung before him, and he plunged into it, turning on his lights.

  He considered taking a pill, decided against it. Greg might be waking soon, he -wanted to be able to get some sleep after they'd switched over.

  He came up beside a highway, and its surface looked pretty good, so he crossed onto it and sped ahead. After a time, he passed a faded, sagging sign that said "TOPEKA—110 MILES."

  Greg yawned and stretched. He rubbed his eyes withhis knuckles and then rubbed his forehead, the right side of which was swollen and dark.

  "What time is it?" he asked.

  Tanner gestured toward the clock in the dashboard.

  "Morning or is it afternoon?"

  "Afternoon."

  "My God! I must have slept around fifteen hours!"

  That's about right."

  "You been driving all that time?"

  "That's right."

  "You must be done in. You look like hell. Let me just hit the head. I'll take over in a few minutes."

  "Good idea."

  Greg crawled toward the rear of the vehicle.

  After about five minutes. Tanner came upon the outskirts of a dead town. He drove up the main street, and there were rusted-out hulks of cars all along it. Most of the buildings had fallen in upon themselves, and some of the opened cellars that he saw were filled with scummy water. Skeletons lay about the town square. There were no trees standing above the weeds that grew there. Three telephone poles still stood, one of them leaning forward and trailing wires like a handful of black spaghetti. Several benches were visible within the weeds beside the cracked sidewalks, and a skeleton lay stretched out upon the second one Tanner passed. He found his way barred by a fallen telephone pole, and he detoured around the block. The next street was somewhat better preserved, but all its store-front windows were broken, and a nude mannikin posed fetchingly with her left arm missing from the elbow down. The traffic light at the corner stared blindly as Tanner passed through its intersection.

  Tanner heard Greg coming forward as he turned at the next comer.

  "I'll take over now," he said.

  "I want to get out of this place first," and they both watched in silence for the next fifteen minutes until the dead town was gone from around them.

  Tanner pulled to a halt then and said, "We're a couple hours away from a place that used to be called Topeka. Wake me if you run into anything hairy."

  "How did it go while I was alseep? Did you have any trouble?""No," said Tanner, and he closed his eyes and began to snore.

  Greg drove away from the sunset, and he ate three ham sandwiches and drank a quart of milk before Topeka.

  IX

  Tanner was awakened by the firing of the rockets. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and stared dumbly ahead for almost half a minute.

  Like gigantic dried leaves, great clouds fell about them. Bats, bats, bats. The air was filled with bats. Tanner could hear a cluttering, squeaking, scratching sound, and the car was buffeted by their dark bodies.

  "Where are we?" he asked.

  "Kansas City. The place seems full of them," and Greg released another rocket, which cut a fiery path through the swooping, spinning horde.

  "Save the rockets. Use the fire," said Tanner, switching the nearest gun to manual and bringing cross-hairs into focus upon the screen. "Blast 'em in all directions—for five, six seconds—then I'll come in."

  The flame shot forth, orange and cream blossoms of combustion. When they folded,. Tanner sighted in the screen and squeezed the trigger. He swung the gun, and they fell. Their charred bodies lay all about him, and he added new ones to the smouldering heaps.

  "Roll it!" he cried, and the car moved forward, swaying, bat bodies crunching beneath its tiresTanner laced the heavens with gunfire, and when they swooped again he strafed them and fired a flare.

  In the sudden magnesium glow from overhead, it seemed that millions of vampire-faced forms were circling, spiraling down toward them.

  He switched from gun to gun, and they fell about him like fruit. Then he called out, "Brake, and hit the topside flamel" and Greg did this thing.

  "Now the sidesi Front and rear next!"

  Bodies were burning all about them, heaped as high as the hood, and Greg put the car into low gear when Tanner cried "Forward!" And they pushed their way through the wall of charred flesh.

  Tanner fired another flare.

  The bats were still there, but circling higher now. Tan-ner primed the guns and waited, but they did not attack again in any great number. A few swept about them, and he took pot-shots at them as they passed.

  Ten minutes later he said, "That's the Missouri River to our left. If we just follow alongside it now, we'll bit Saint Louis."

  "I know. Do you think itil be full of bats, too?"

  "Probably. But if we take our time and arrive with daylight, they shouldn't bother us. Then we can figure a way to get across the Missus Hip."

  Then their eyes fell upon the rearview screen, where the dark skyline of Kansas City with bats was silhouetted by pale stars and touched by the light of the bloody moon.

  After a time, Tanner slept once more. He dreamt he was riding his bike, slowly, down the center of a wide street, and people lined the sidewalks and began to cheer as he passed. They threw confetti, but by the time it reached him it was garbage, wet and stinking. He stepped on the gas then, but his bike slowed even more and now they were screaming at him. They shouted obscenities. They cried out his name, over and over, and again. The Harley began to wobble, but his feet seemed to be glued in place. In a moment, he knew, he would fall. The bike came to a halt then, and he began to topple over toward the right side. They rushed toward him as he fell, and he knew it was just about all over... .

  He awoke with a jolt and saw the morning spread out before him: a bright coin in the middle of a dark blue tablecloth and a row of glasses along the edge. "That's it," said Greg. "The Missus Hip." Tanner was suddenly very hungry.

  After they had refreshed themselves, they sought the bridge.

  "I didn't see any of your naked people with spears," said Greg- "Of course, we might have passed their way after dark—if there are any of them still around."

  "Good thing, too," said Tanner. "Saved us some ammo."

  The bridge came into view, sagging and dark save for the places where the sun gilded its cables, and it stretched unbroken across the bright expanse of waters. They moved slowly toward it, threading their way through streets gorged with rubble, detouring when it became com-pletely blocked by the rows of broken machines, fallen walls, sewer-deep abysses in the burst pavement.

  It took them two hours to travel half a mile, and it was noon before they reached the foot of the bridge, and, "It looks as if Brady might have crossed here,'* said Greg, eyeing what appeared to be a cleared passageway amidst the wrecks that filled the span. "How do you think he did it?"

  "Maybe he had something with him to hoist them and swing them out over the edge. There are some wrecks below, down where the water is shallow."

  "Were they there last time you passed by?"

  "I don't know. I wasn't right down here by the bridge. I topped that hill back there," and he gestured at the rearview screen.

  "Well, from here it looks like we might be able to make it. Let's roll."

  They moved upward and forward onto the bridge and began their slow passage across the mightly Missus Hip. There were times when the bridge creaked beneath them, sighed, groaned, and they felt it move.

  The sun began to climb, and still they moved forward, scraping their fenders against the edges of
the wrecks, using their wings like plows. They were on the bridge for three hours before its end came into sight through a rift in the junkstacks.

  When their wheels finally touched the opposite shore, Greg sat there breathing heavily and then lit a cigarette.

  "You want to drive awhile. Hell?"

  "Yeah. Let's switch over."

  He did, and, "God! I'm bushed!" he said as he sprawled out.

  Tanner drove forward through the ruins of East Saint Louis, hurrying to clear the town before nightfall. The radiation level began to mount as he advanced, and the streets were cluttered and broken. He checked the inside of the cab for radioactivity, but it was still clean.

  It took him hours, and as the sun fell at his back he saw the blue aurora begin once more in the north. But the sky stayed clear, filled with its stars, and there were no black lines that he could see. After a long while, a rosecolored moon appeared and hung before him. He turned on the music, softly, and glanced at Greg. It didn't seem to bother him, so he let it continue.The instrument panel caught his eye. The radiation level was still climbing. Then, in the forward screen, be saw the crater and he stopped.

  It must have been over half a mile across, and he couldn't tell its depth.

  He fired a flare, and in its light he used the telescopic lenses to examine it to the right and to the left.

  The way seemed smoother to the right, and he turned in that direction and began to negotiate it.

  The place was hot! So very, very hot! He hurried. And he wondered as he sped, the gauge rising before him: What had it been like on that day. Whenever? That day when a tiny sun had lain upon this spot and fought with, and for a time beaten, the brightness of the other in the sky, before it sank slowly into its sudden burrow? He tried to imagine it, succeeded, then tried to put it out of his mind and couldn't. How do you put out the fires that burn forever? He wished that he knew. There'd been so many places to go then, and he liked to move around.

  What had it been like in the old days, when a man could just jump on his bike and cut out for a new town whenever he wanted? And nobody emptying buckets of crap on you from out of the sky? He felt cheated, which was not a new feeling for him, but it made him curse even longer than usual.

  He lit a cigarette when he'd finally rounded the crater, and he smiled for the first time in months as the radiation gauge began to fall once more. Before many miles, be saw tall grasses swaying about him, and not too long after that he began to see trees.

  Trees short and twisted, at first, but the further he fled from the place of carnage, the taller and straighter they became. They were trees such as he had never seen before —fifty, sixty feet in height—and graceful, and gathering stars, there on the plains of Illinois.

  He was moving along a clean, hard, wide road, and just then he wanted to travel it forever—to Floridee, of the swamps and Spanish moss and citrus groves and fine beaches and the Gulf; and up to the cold, rocky Cape, where everything is gray and brown and the waves break below the lighthouses and the salt burns in your nose and there are graveyards where bones have lain for centuries and you can still read the names they bore, chiseled there into the stones above them; down through the nationwhere they say the grass is blue; then follow the mighty Missus Hip to the place where she spreads and comes and there's the Gulf again, full of little islands where the old boosters stashed their loot; and through the shagtopped mountains he'd heard about: the Smokies, Ozarks, Poconos, Catskills; drive through the forest of Shenandoah; park, and take a boat out over Chesapeake Bay; see the big lakes and the place where the water falls, Niagara. To drive forever along the big road, to see everything, to eat the world. Yes. Maybe it wasn't all Damnation Alley. Some of the legendary places must still be clean, like the countryside about him now. He wanted it with a hunger, with a fire like that which always burned in his loins. He laughed then, just one short, sharp bark, because now it seemed like maybe he could have it.

  The music played softly, too sweetly perhaps, and it filled him.

  By morning he was into the place called Indiana and still following the road. He passed farmhouses which seemed in good repair. There could even be people living in them. He longed to investigate, but he didn't dare to stop. Then after an hour, it was all countryside again, and degenerating.

  The grasses grew shorter, shriveled, were gone. An occasional twisted tree clung to the bare earth. The radiation level began to rise once more. The signs told him he was nearing Indianapolis, which he guessed was a big city that had received a bomb and was now gone away.

  Nor was he mistaken.

  He had to detour far to the south to get around it, backtracking to a place called Martinsville in order to cross over the White River. Then as he headed east once more, his radio crackled and came to life. There was a faint voice, repeating, "Unidentified vehicle, halt!" and he switched all the scanners to telescopic range. Far ahead, on a hilltop, he saw a standing man with binoculars and a walkie-talkie. He did not acknowledge receipt of the transmission, but kept driving.

  He was hitting forty miles an hour along a halfway decent section of roadway, and he gradually increased his speed to fifty-five, though the protesting of his tires uponthe cracked pavement was sufficient to awaken Greg.

  Tanner stared ahead, ready for an ^attack, and the radio kept repeating the order, louder now as he neared the hill, and called upon him to acknowledge the message.

  He touched the brake as he rounded a long curve, and he did not reply to Greg's "What's the matter?"

  When he saw it there, blocking the way, ready to fire, he acted instantly.

  The tank filled the road, and its big gun was pointed directly at him, As his eye sought for and found passage around it, his right hand slapped the switches that sent three armorpiercing rockets screaming ahead and his left spun the wheel counter-clockwise and his foot fell heavy on the accelerator.

  He was half off the road then, bouncing along the ditch at its side, when the tank discharged one fiery belch which missed him and then caved in upon itself and blossomed.

  There came the sound of rifle fire as he pulled back onto the road on the other side of the tank and sped ahead. Greg launched a single grenade to the right and the left and then hit the fifty calibers. They tore on ahead, and after about a quarter of a mile Tanner picked up bis microphone and said, "Sorry about that My brakes don't work," and hung it up again. There was no response.

  As soon as they reached a level plain, commanding a good view in all directions. Tanner halted the vehicle and Greg moved into the driver's seat.

  "Where do you think they got hold of that armor?"

  "Who knows?"

  "And why stop us?"

  "They didn't know what we were carrying—and maybe they just wanted the car."

  "Blasting, it's a helluva way to get it."

  "If they can't have it, why should they let us keep it?"

  "You know just how they think, don't you?"

  "Yes."

  "Have a cigarette."

  Tanner nodded, accepted.

  "It's been pretty bad, you know?"

  "I can't argue with that."

  "... And we've still got a long way to go.""Yeah, so let's get rolling."

  "You said before that you didn't think we'd make it"

  "I've revised nay opinion. Now I think we will."

  "After all we've been through?"

  "After all we've been through."

  "What more do we have to fight with?"

  "I don't know all that yet."

  "But on the other hand. we know everything there is behind us. We know how to avoid a lot of it now."

  Tanner nodded.

  "You tried to cut out once. Now I don't blame you."

  "You getting scared, Greg?"

  "I'm no good to my family if I'm dead."

  "Then why'd you agree to come along?"

  "I didn't know it would be like this. You had better sense, because you had an idea what it would be like."

  "I had an
idea." "Nobody can blame us if we fail. After all, we've tried."

  "What about all those people in Boston you made me a speech about?"

  "They're probably dead by now. The plague isn't a thing that takes its time, you know?"

  "What about that guy Brady? He died to get us the news."

  "He tried, and God knows I respect the attempt. But we've already lost four guys. Now should we make it six, just to show that everybody tried?"

  "Greg, we're a lot closer to Boston than we are to L.A. now. The tanks should have enough fuel in them to get us where we're going, but not to take us back from here."

  "We can refuel in Salt Lake."

  "I'm not even sure we could make it back to Salt Lake."

  "Well, it'll only take a minute to figure it out. For that matter, though, we could take the bikes for the last hundred or so. They use & lot less gas,"

  "And you're the guy who was calling me names. You're the citizen was wondering how people like me happen. You asked me what they ever did to me, I told you, too: Nothing. Now maybe I want to do something for them, just because I feel like it. I've been doing a lot of thinking.**"You ain't supporting any family. Hell. I've got other people to worry about beside myself.