The Long Loud Silence

by Wilson Tucker

  Biological warfare can be a weapon as deadly and as devastating as an atomic bomb, in addition to having the advantage of being an inexpensive and efficient method of waging an undeclared war. A nation could be quickly and seriously disabled by subjecting its population to…

  He flipped shut the volume and let the cigarette drop to the floor. Absently stepping on it, he slumped down in the chair and stared moodily through the window, unmoving and unconscious of the passage of time until the sun covered his face and struck his eyes.

  So that was what was thrown at them.

  Who threw it?

  Someone to the east of them, the north and east; at least the bombardment appeared to have come from that direction. The northeastern third of the nation was wrecked, pulverized and depopulated by bombs and flying missiles dropping out of the sky. Atomic bombs for the larger cities, pneumonic plague for the smaller, the toxin of botulism spread everywhere. Water supplies, the grain fields, wherever people gathered, ate and drank in sufficient number, someone to the northeast had knocked out the industrial potential and the greatest mass of the population. Quite apparently the bombing had not been carried into the West or even far into the Middle West for the Mississippi River marked the dividing line between the contaminated and the clean. The government had explained its present position coldly and clearly in the pink leaflets: the eastern third would be sealed off to protect the remainder. How much was left of the government, he wondered?

  First Army, on Governors Island, New York, was charged with the over-all defense of the country. The fact that a western headquarters was now defending it bespoke the fate of Governors Island. Even Washington admitted what might befall it when it built secret bomb shelters under the Pentagon building, super-secret military and government chambers beneath the green rolling hills of Maryland and Virginia. Those chambers still might contain living people, but they too were quarantined on the wrong side of the river. He recalled that in the earlier war, the one which had swallowed him up ten years before, Hitler's underground retreat had not proved successful in the end.

  Who threw it?

  Someone to the northeast, someone whose missiles and bombs were concentrated on the eastern third of the nation for tactical and economic reasons. They could have easily originated in some spot as near as Greenland, an island almost as large as a continent and nine-tenths uninhabited. A source such as Greenland would not find it too difficult to shower death on those portions of Canada and the United States nearest it, with the West and the South escaping immediate devastation only to fall victim to pestilence shortly thereafter. The plague would spread as fast as frightened people ran. By now, he realized, it must have reached the southernmost tip of Florida and would quickly have gone to the Rockies if it were not for the river and the pink leaflets.

  The sun reached his eyes and he left the chair.

  He was immune. The past week had proved that. Therefore he could see no reason why he shouldn't cross the river and get back into uniform. If nothing else, the army offered him security, a precious security now that death in many forms stalked the countryside and food was becoming scarce. This food was contaminated and…

  But he had already eaten it, and drunk the water.

  Gary sat down again to puzzle it out, to think back to that morning when he woke up in the run-down hotel. What he had eaten had come from cans, liquids from sealed bottles. He had passed by the meats and vegetables, the bread in the stores because of mold and the decaying odors; he had not been able to brew coffee because water was not running from the taps. So he had opened cans and drunk from bottles. But what about shaving? That water was stale, clean but stale. It had lain untouched in the flush boxes since at least the day before the bombardment. And since then he had drunk only from bottles or fresh water country wells, forced to by the dry taps or the nearness of a well. The narrow margin between life and death, his life and death staggered him. Had water still been flowing from taps…

  The only food that could still be regarded as safe, then, was stored on grocery shelves. And despite the immense loss of life, there still remained some thousands of people roaming the countryside between the river and the Atlantic. The grocery shelves would not supply them forever and in the very near future an acute situation would arise. When the food began to disappear, a different kind of plague would grip the survivors.

  A man would either be quick, or dead.

  Gary intended to be quick even before the necessity of making such a choice confronted him. He quit the library abruptly, conscious of the several days he had wasted, and descended the stairway at a fast trot with the two volumes under his arm. Absently closing the smashed door behind him, he dumped the books onto the automobile seat and gunned the motor, straining to recall the location of the street which carried the highway through town. He stopped only once more in the silent city to pick up tobacco from the shelves of an outlying store, and then nosed the car south along the highway which would eventually lead him to the Kentucky border.

  Briefly as he drove he thought about the girl, the nineteen-year-old Irma something… what did she say her name was? He wondered what had become of her in the week since he had last seen her, wondered what she had done since deserting him at the bombed bridge. Or since he had deserted her. Where was she now?

  Night found him still rolling southward.

  He cautiously refrained from using the road lights for fear their brilliant beams might attract shooting. The white concrete strip was not hard to see as it unrolled before him; he drove with only the dim parking lights aglow, to give warning to anyone who might be in his path. Far over on the horizon an unseen structure illuminated the night with its fiery, burning glow. Another farmhouse, he supposed.

  Sometime during the early morning hours he stopped for a few minutes to get out of the car, to stretch his legs and stand stiffly on the pavement examining the dawn stars. Waiting there, standing only half awake in the very dead stillness of the waning nights he picked up the sound of another car coming toward him, heard the fast approaching whine of a motor in labor and the peculiar sound of hot tires taking punishment on the cement roadway. Turning quickly, he discovered distant headlights probing the earth and sky.

  Gary hesitated but a few indecisive seconds, and then leaped behind the wheel of his automobile to roll it forward across the road. He cut diagonally across the pavement to let the front wheels come to rest in a shallow ditch paralleling the highway, snapped off the motor and the lights and leaped out again, leaving one door hanging open as though the car had been abandoned. Recrossing the road, he sped back a hundred feet along the highway and dropped into the opposite ditch, to watch the approach of the strange car with his eyes barely above the rim of the depression.

  It roared toward him through the night, making no attempt at caution or secrecy, the noise and the headlights magnified many times in the vacant stillness. When it was but half a mile distant he dropped forward into the bottom of the ditch, hiding his face to prevent its contrasting whiteness from betraying him. He followed the rapid progress of the car with his ears, judging its nearness by the overtaxed revolutions of the motor. It must be doing eighty or ninety miles an hour. He thought he could hear someone shouting or screaming above the noise of it.

  It came rushing on, the reflected fan-glare of the headlights briefly illuminating the bottom of the ditch so that he saw his own outstretched hands before him. It was abreast of him, above him for a fraction of a second, and then it was gone, passing him and his ditched automobile as though both objects were nonexistent. Carefully he raised his eyes to the rim of the shoulder, staring after the receding red splotches as they dwindled with distance. He stayed where he was, watching them until they were gone from sight, until the faraway beams of the headlamps had been lost in the night, until even the sounds of the motor and the tires had dwindled into nothing And then he climbed back onto the road.

  Now why, he asked himself, had he done that? Was it caution born of long-ago battle tra
ining, or was it nothing more than fear of another moving car in the darkness? They had not been interested in his automobile, hadn't so much as slackened speed to look at it. Why, then, had he acted as he did?

  He crossed over to his car and stood staring at it, still thinking of that other one He could find no ready answer — but he realized he wanted to play the cautious role. Staring down at the rear of his car, he remembered the bright red taillights of that other, and without stopping to analyze the reasons for doing so, raised his foot to smash both red glasses and the small bulbs beneath them. Stepping forward to the dash, he pulled on the parking lights and again returned to the back bumper. There was no revealing gleam.

  Gary jockeyed the car onto the pavement and once again drove south, toward Kentucky. He moved along slowly with the windows open so that he might hear the coming of another motor, drove with constant attention to the far road ahead and the rear-vision mirror, that he might see approaching lights while still some distance away. Only after sunrise did he leave the highway and pull up a dusty country road to catch a brief sleep.

  * * *

  The bridge spanning the Mississippi was intact, one of the very few the army had left that way. Two other bridges had been found and passed by as useless before he arrived at this whole one. And the opposite end of the intact structure was heavily guarded as always; this one was blocked by a big troop carrier parked sideways just beyond the middle, two soldiers manning a heavy machine gun in the rear of the truck. Behind them, Gary saw an armed patrol waiting for something to happen. He intended to be the something.

  He stopped his car near the bridge, got out of it and walked onto the span, warily watching the two men behind the machine gun. When one of them moved, he came to a sudden halt. Unbuttoning his shirt, he lifted out the chain hanging around his neck and held the dogtags high in the air, knowing that he was making his point when the morning sun glistened on their metallic surfaces. One of the machine gunners called to someone else behind him and presently a third soldier joined the pair stationed on the truck. The newcomer studied Gary briefly with field glasses and then climbed down again dafter a word to the gunner. Gary waited, knowing army procedure, knowing what that word was. After long minutes the third man reappeared, this time accompanied by an officer who wore a small white stripe painted on the fore of his helmet. Both men stood in the truck and put glasses to their eyes to observe him.

  Gary righted one of his tags so that it might be read and held it between thumb and forefinger, hope. fully watching the patrol. It was very doubtful that the field glasses were sufficiently powerful to pick out the small lettering at that distance, but still it was worth trying. Holding the tag aloft, he began a slow walk toward the center of the span. Very quickly he saw the gesture was in vain and the movement an error. The officer half turned to one of the watching riflemen, and Gary slammed his body to the bridge as that soldier lifted his carbine. Even as he fell he saw that it was no more than a warning — the carbine pointed at the sky and the single slug screamed through the summer air overhead. Gary scrambled backward five yards before regaining his feet. When he stood up, he clenched his fist around the dogtags and shook that fist at the watching officer.

  The officer made no reply.

  Gary retreated to the automobile and sat down facing the bridge. Shortly thereafter the officer and the other man left the truck and the two machine gunners returned to their perpetual watch of the bridge. Gary looked at them, felt a sudden resentment rising within him and cupped his hands to shout a single, descriptive word. The word had its beginning root in muttonhead.

  “That goes for me too,” a quiet voice cut in.

  Gary whirled, startled and alert. A tousled, unshaven soldier leaned against a bridge girder not far away. The man's uniform was in rags.

  “Where the hell did you come from?” Gary demanded.

  “The field over yonder" — he pointed with a lazy thumb. “Was sleeping — until that shot woke me. Warm welcome, huh?”

  “I'm going to get across this damned bridge if I have to break every one of their damned heads!”

  “Sure. I said that, two-three days ago.”

  Gary stared at him. “Yeah?” He came to a decision. “Sit down and take a load off your feet.”

  “Was waiting for the invitation,” the soldier grinned. “Some folks are touchy about company any more.” He crossed the roadway and sat down beside Gary. “Anything to smoke?”

  Gary passed him a package of cigarettes. “Won't they let us come over?”

  “Nope, not us, not even a general if he's on this side of the creek. Afraid we're carrying the plague. The lieutenant said as how he was sorry, but there it was.”

  “The lieutenant said… He talked to you?”

  “By flag. I'm in Signals — tore up some cloth and made myself some flags the other day. Had quite a conversation. The lieutenant's name is MacSneary, unless I missed a letter. Decent sort but inclined to be stuffy about orders. Mine is Jay Oliver.”

  “I'm Gary,” Gary told him moodily, watching the two machine gunners. “I was a corporal until a week ago. No way of getting over to the other side?”

  “Not alive. MacSneary was quite positive about that. Pointed out to him that I was still alive and healthy — as well as hungry — but he answered that I could be carrying the plague even though I hadn't contracted it. Yet. Good sense, of course. Said that all of us still alive on this side of the creek were common carriers. He read that last in some army explanation and doesn't fully understand the implications, but it sounded weighty and he used it on me.”

  Gary contemplated the machine gun. “There's some books in the car that explains it.”

  “Am familiar with it,” Oliver told him. “Was a science teacher until I was drafted.” He smiled at Gary. “And that label is a catchall if there ever was one. Taught science in a small township high school in Indiana; biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, was supposed to be familiar with them all. How to construct a wet cell battery, where Orion is located, on Tuesday dissect a frog, show the girls how to make their own cold creams on Wednesday, and since 1945 every succeeding class tinkered around with the theory of nuclear fission.” He smiled at some memory. “Never did produce a bomb.”

  “Ah, this is a hell of a note! Here we are supposed to be defending the country and they won't let us. What if we're invaded?”

  “That, friend, is one worry we on this side of the creek will never have to face.” Oliver took another cigarette from the package. “Our friends across the bridge may have a fight on their hands in the near future, but we're out of it. The enemy has made this section of the country so thoroughly untenable that even he can't land here, all of which leads me to believe no invasion was intended.” He paused to light the cigarette. “Our lieutenant yonder is rather vague as to what happened — communications must be in a sad state when the army doesn't fully know what is going on. But the gist of it is that you-know-who unloaded on us. Long-range bombers, flying missiles, and apparently some fifth columnists who polluted the water supplies. They ran in a flock of bombers — the lieutenant doesn't know how many; but between the bombers and the rockets they pretty well blanketed every major city east of the creek here: atomic bombs and at least two types of disease. There may be more that haven't come to light yet — I should think they'd use anthrax on the cattle.” He waved his hand toward the land behind them. “Shrewd tactical move — half the country done for and they lost only their bomber pilots.”

  “I'd rather be on the other side,” Gary declared.

  Oliver nodded. “Likewise. Prefer to fight the enemy to fighting what's behind us — and will be behind us, shortly.”

  “I had a supply,” Gary told him, following the thought. “Guns, food, a good car. A kid ran away with it all.”

  “Little buggers learn fast.”

  “This one was a girl.”

  “Oh.”

  “She claimed she was nineteen,” Gary continued. “Looked about sixteen, acted a
bout sixteen the way she ran around picking up stuff. She acted nineteen… once.”

  Oliver pulled slowly on the cigarette, watching the smoke. “Would suggest we team up — if you don't mind company. Find us a truck and put away all we can. Stores'll be empty in another week, the idea of this is catching on fast.”

  Gary stared at the patrol across the bridge. “You don't think… ?”

  Oliver shook his head. “No. Been here three days. MacSneary said no three days ago and he told you no today. I've resigned myself to the idea of waiting out the quarantine — might be several weeks and then again it could be months. Would suggest you do the same.”

  “A hell of a note!”

  “Food is of the utmost importance. And guns. When these people begin starving they'll begin shooting.”

  “Yeah.” Gary stood up and stretched, rubbed a hand across the rubble on his cheeks. “Well, let's get moving. I'm hungry now.” He cast a last look at the men behind the machine guns, and again shook his fist at them, repeating the single descriptive word he had used earlier.

  Oliver said, “Likewise.”

  They climbed into the near-by car and Gary turned it around, heading back along the blacktopped highway that slowly pulled away from the river and wound through flat, sticky bottomland on its route to the nearer hills. The heat was intense and the air not moving. His eyes kept returning to the rear-vision mirror, watching the bridge fading behind.

  “The muttonheads!”

  * * *

  The machine gunners blankly watched the car out of sight. A rifleman thought to replace the round he had fired. Silence settled over the bridge.

  5

  EX-CORPORAL GARY carefully stamped out the remains of the small cooking fire and with his shoe scraped a bit of loose dirt over the embers. The skillet he cleaned by scrubbing it with a handful of grass, and then turned it upside down to thump it on the ground. Finally he ran his tongue over teeth and gums to lick away any remaining taste of the egg.