“But there can't be people over there, our people. They're all dead.”
Gary stared at him. “Why should I lie about it?”
“Well— I dunno.”
“All right. The burgs are full, believe me. Farmers in the field — a lot of the horses are dead, I guess, because I saw men pulling plows.” He hid a grin, watching the corpsman write down what he had said. The corpsman would do more than that — he would spread it around the camp. He went on with his story, bringing it up to the point where the ambush had wiped out everyone but him and the lieutenant — and the lieutenant had died a few hours later. And say — did the lieutenant get a military funeral?
“Hell, no,” the corpsman answered. “They weighted his body and dumped it in the river — ain't taking no chances.”
That night, the second in the chamber, Gary escaped.
He first considered asking the sentry for milk, knowing that milk would take longer to procure, but then quickly abandoned the idea with the knowledge that the sentry might well refuse — also being aware of the difficulty. Or if he did consent to go after it he might lock the door before leaving, or he might not be gone more than five minutes at the most. Five minutes were not enough. He needed hours to be free of the area.
Instead, Gary made the usual request for water and held the door opened the slightest crack, peering into the night. He could hear no one else near-by, could smell no tobacco smoke in the air. The sentry returned with the water and stooped to place it on the doorsill — stiffening with surprise when his eyes noticed the tiny crack in the opening. Gary caught him on the back of the neck, cracking the side of his hand on the man's spinal cord. The sentry slumped. Gary thrust his head outside warily but there was no outcry. Quickly then he dragged the inert body into the chamber and stretched it out along the far wall where he had slept the night before. Within seconds he had slipped outside and locked the door behind him, to vanish instantly into the surrounding darkness, away from the river.
He counted on three to four hours. At least three hours before the guard was scheduled to be relieved.
* * *
He was wearing civilian clothes, a pair of dirty coveralls and a nondescript sweater he had taken from a. farmer. A couple of dollars in change, also belonging to the throttled farmer, rattled around in his pocket The farmer's unconscious body lay many miles behind in a ditch but his ancient Ford truck sped along a highway to the south. Sunrise found Gary and the stolen truck nearly fifty miles south of St. Louis and well away from the river, well outside the ten-mile military zone.
This was freedom, this was what he had waited two years to see again.
He bowled along the highway at top speed, watching the unhurried activity about the farms, the sleepy beginnings of a new day in each small town he passed. There were no suspicious faces turned his way, no armed men to meet him at the village limits, no skulking figure to waylay the noisy truck as it sped along the road. This was free country, living country. Far behind him, unknown to him, not everything was so alive. A sentry lay dead in a decontamination chamber and a medical corpsman lay dying on a hospital bed, his body turning blue. Early alarm had turned to furore when the corpsman was discovered, and a hasty quarantine had been thrown around the camp guarding the bridge. Of a sudden two paramount problems had arisen for the responsible brass: finding the escaped carrier, and disposing of a few hundred men suddenly turned “enemy agents.”
Finding Gary would be the easier of the two: he would mark his own trail.
Early that afternoon he entered a theater and sat through a double feature, suddenly discovering as he passed the theater that capering images had been one of the things he hungered for. The double feature consisted first of a very sexy woman flinging her body around in a bathing suit, to the dismay… and delight… of every other male and female in the picture; and next of the true-blue western hero throwing the deep-dyed villain for a loss to save the ranch. Each held him enthralled and he stayed for a second showing of the bathing suit, to emerge finally with another thought in mind. The idea wasn't so readily fulfilled, but he managed it by nightfall. His money was short, not nearly enough to eat and drink with, much less satisfy his desires. The first robbery netted him only pocket change, the second brought him a wallet. He left the town behind him and sought another. -
He bought other clothes, not new ones for fear they would mark him, but secondhand garments in a shop. The farm truck was abandoned on a side street and he caught a bus, to find himself in Little Rock late that night. Little Rock held much of what he sought. Little Rock also held radios that blared forth the news, or part of the news of what had happened. An enemy agent was loose west of the river. He sat in a bar and listened to the bulletins repeated every fifteen minutes.
There was an interest in the bulletins, faces turned and ears listened, but after each one the faces went back to its preoccupations. There was talk, speculation, idle threats as to what they would do to the sonofabitch if he came here, but their most immediate interest lay in the liquor at hand and the companion at the table.
“Hell,” Gary told the bartender, “he'll never get this far. The soldiers will catch him.”
The bartender agreed. “They always do. Them soldiers are all right joes — I'm for ’em. They certainly changed things around here. You know what this state was before the change.”
Gary didn't, but nodded as if he did. He guessed that the bartender might be referring to the subject nearest his heart — the liquor trade — but he didn't dare reveal his ignorance by asking. He couldn't recall having been in Arkansas before, nor did he remember anything said about the place. Furthermore he didn't give a damn.
He left the establishment and wandered along the street, watching the neon lights and the blinking electric signs. Those too he had missed, longed for without stopping to think about it, and their brilliant flickerings fell across his eyes like memories. There weren't many automobiles, due to the gas rationing, but the sounds of those passing was sweet on his ears, and even though the odor of burnt gasoline stung his nostrils as he stepped from behind a bus, he liked it. This was living in the way he wanted to live. This was living again.
It wasn't hard to find a girl willing to share the contents of the wallet with him. She cooked breakfast for him the following morning and he was so delighted with the process and the deep sense of contentment, with the feeling of being at home with her — despite the shabby apartment and her lack of taste in dress and speech — that he asked to stay a few days. She was more than willing. She made a transparent kind of love to him that satisfied his long starvation diet — love that did not wait on an hour or a place; he tried to read her newspapers but she would interrupt, he fingered a few of her worn books but she plucked them from his hands and threw them across the room. She did not fool him — he knew it would stop when the wallet was empty, but meanwhile the wallet was not empty and she was a pleasing torrent after a two-year drought. He rumpled the false blonde hair and let her have her way.
He did not think to switch on the radio because now that he was here, what people said on the air here did not arouse curiosity or desire within him; and because her continual chatter was all that he desired in human speech at the moment. Hers was a friendly voice and a loving one; it satisfied him. So he did not hear the later bulletins and did not know the new tone the broadcasts had taken.
Gary spent a lazy, spendthrift afternoon walking about the city and buying things he both did and didn't need. For once the advertisements didn't annoy him and he purchased a new razor because a colorful sign told him he could be a smoother rooster; he found no Mother Mahaffey Candy Kitchen, but bought a box of chocolates for the girl waiting at the apartment. Stopping at a half dozen stores, loading his arms with groceries only for the pleasure of buying things, Gary wandered back to the apartment just before sunset. He twisted the knob with his fingers and shoved open the door with one knee, his voice raised to shout for the woman. Gary stopped short in the doorway to stare at t
he twisted, writhing body on the floor. She was clad only in a slip, her reddish-purple body ugly with approaching asphyxiation. She raised an accusing finger at him, trying to gasp out a few words. Behind her the radio was talking. He dropped the bundles from his arms and turned to run, forgetting even to close the door in his hasty flight.
Another bus, still southward because it was the first one out of the city.
He thought he had been in Shreveport before but he couldn't be sure — that other life had been so long ago that the memories of it sometimes played tricks on him. He might have been there a decade before with the Louisiana war games, or it may have been only a troop train passing through. But the memory of that tortured girl on the floor was no vague trick. It would not leave him, despite his efforts to wipe it away. It remained with him during the tedious bus ride south, haunted him as he stalked the brilliantly lit streets of Shreveport, a memory which burned bright and bitter. She lay on the floor, twisted, struggling for breath, accusing him with a barbed finger.
He couldn't stay anywhere now, couldn't stay longer than a day. Just one day! Wherever he paused, small town or bustling city, overnight at some farmhouse, he could stay but one day or his past would overtake him. That farm family — the Hoffmans — had not been affected by his presence for the same reasons they had lived through the initial exposure. They were immune, he was immune. These people living west of the river were not, and he was killing them. Carrying death to the people in the bus, the stores, those he jostled on the streets, the bartender, the girl in the shabby apartment.
Shreveport had lost the magic it once had known.
He drank by himself, off in a corner as though a few empty tables would erect a wall between him and the others, ate at a small and nearly deserted restaurant that served him cheap unsatisfactory food. At the opposite end of the counter a taxi driver nursed a cup of coffee, dawdling over a newspaper. Gary turned his eyes away from the paper — there was no picture of him, they didn't have that, but he knew after one glance the headlines concerned him. With that paper, there were many more men than soldiers after him now. Everyone was watching for him. Some of them would see him, but not know him until it was too late. Damn that schoolteacher! He had called the turn with an accurate deadliness.
This then was the brightly glowing life he had wanted west of the river, life filled with women, food and drink that could not be had in the contaminated area. This was what he had risked his life to gain — and he could stay here one day.
“They'll get the bastard all right!”
Gary jerked around, brought his attention on the cabby. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” He put down money on the counter and walked out.
So he was a bastard to be hunted down and shot, simply because he wanted to live with them instead of in that empty wasteland to the east. They wanted to kill him because he should have died long ago and didn't — wanted to kill him if they could find him. The laugh was on them. He actually held them in the hollow of his hand; he had only to cough in the cab driver's face, to touch or kiss the waitress, to throw his arm about the shoulders of a drunken barfly and he could slay them while they were hunting him. But he could stay only one day. Tomorrow they would discover he had been there.
Had been there. The taxi stood at the curb, motor running.
Gary turned his head to look back through the restaurant window, to see the cabby still buried in his paper. The girl was bringing him a second coffee. Gary stepped off the curb and walked around the vehicle to slide under the wheel. He released the brake and put the car into low gear, moving off slowly and quietly to avoid attention of the driver. When he was a block away he changed gears and pushed the throttle to the floor, scooting along the nearly deserted street. A cross-town thoroughfare claimed his attention and he turned west, thinking to flee still further from the river. By this time those trailing him would believe him going steadily south.
He found the western route closed. A roadblock had been thrown across the highway and two or three cars were lined up there, undergoing an inspection by uniformed police. Without changing speed he turned off on a side road and drove north, striving to give the impression such had been his route.
He continued north until he came to an intersecting road, and pivoted toward the city once more. Back in Shreveport he directed the cab south, having described a complete circle from his earlier start, only to find a similar roadblock on the highway to Alexandria and Baton Rouge. He stopped well back from the barrier where police were inspecting the passengers of a cross-country bus, and turned around.
The routes to the west and south were closed to him — the plague scare had snowballed that quickly to those dimensions. Escape to the north might be open, on the theory that he would not return that way, but again he would find barriers thrown up on the southern outskirts of Little Rock. The girl lay on the apartment floor in Little Rock — the last apparent clue to him. There would be more in Shreveport tomorrow or the next day. A waitress, another bartender, more.
Escape only to the east?
Driving cautiously, Gary sent the cab across the Red River into Bossier City. No one stopped him. He continued on, seeking out and finding the federal route to Monroe and the Mississippi. There were no roadblocks that way. Not yet.
Not yet… but there would be soon. As soon as that cabdriver reported his stolen vehicle, as soon as the police manning the roadblocks reported the cab had not gone west or south. Suddenly the cab stuck out like a yellow thumb on a bare highway. He had to get rid of it.
The opportunity came shortly after dawn next morning.
She was a middle-aged woman driving an old Model A Ford, driving it slowly and carefully along her lane. Gary slowed the stolen cab and fell in behind her, watching the manner of her driving, noting that her speed never exceeded a steady, careful thirty miles an hour. A cautious, lonely woman driving along in a lonely dawn, intent on some distant destination. She had pulled over on the far right side of the road to permit him to pass, and was taking quick peeks at the cab in her mirror.
Gary shoved down on the accelerator and shot around her, to swing directly in front of the Ford and apply the brakes. She obediently slowed, nervously gauging her distance by watching his bumper and taillights. He slackened speed again, dropping well below her accustomed thirty and was satisfied to see the uncertainty on her face. She tried to fall well behind him but he kept his foot on the brake and stayed just ahead of her. Finally, when the two vehicles were doing less than ten miles an hour, he jerked to a complete stop. Her reflexes were not quick enough and the Ford piled into the rear of the cab.
Gary slid out from under the wheel, leaving the motor running and the door open, to walk back and inspect the damage. She was beside him in an instant, berating him for his poor driving and decrying the damage to her own car. Without a word he seized her arm and pulled her forward, to place her on the front seat of the cab. She stared at him, speechless then with surprise and growing anger. He left her there, ran back to the Ford and jumped in. Before she could recover her wits and step down to the pavement he had backed the Ford away from the tangle of bumpers and shot forward, curving out and around the stalled cab with a rich burst of speed. The woman screamed at him as he sped by. The old car would do no more than fifty, wide open, but he slammed his foot to the boards and held it there until the yellow taxi and wildly gesticulating woman had fallen from sight behind.
Gary slowed to a leisurely thirty, secure in the belief that the cautious woman would not attempt to close the gap between them. Plus the necessary amount of time she would need before continuing in the cab — she would undoubtedly waste many minutes, debating the honesty of driving off in the strange vehicle.
* * *
The high-pitched sound of a diving plane caught his ear. Gary twisted the wheel and savagely nosed the car over into the nearer ditch, to leap clear and run for the fields as soon as the Ford had come to rest. At the fence he stopped. The plane was several miles behind him, back along the hi
ghway he had just traversed and it was not coming his way. He wandered back to the road, staring into the distance.
The aircraft's motors were screaming again and he found it just as it was pulling out of a dive. As he watched, the plane climbed into the sky, snapped around in another circling approach, and dived at the highway once more. Quite clearly he could hear the rattle of machine guns. The ship plummeted below the horizon and was hidden for only a moment, before tilting its nose for the climb. It made one last pass at the target while Gary stood there watching, and then stayed in the sky to aimlessly circle the object, waiting.
The cabdriver would be annoyed at the loss of his vehicle.
Gary backed the Ford onto the road and hurried eastward toward the river, toward the only place of safety that he knew. He hoped the occupants of the plane would not notice his car. There was no shred of doubt now that his presence had been detected in Shreveport.
* * *
The river lay wide and dark ahead of him, moving along listlessly with a whispering nothing that wasn't quite sound and yet was not silence. The real silence lay on the other side, a silence so complete it was a tangible thing that could be held in the hand. A loud, hurtful silence. Gary lay motionless, frozen in the marshy grasses, his eyes searching for the black silhouette of a sentry against the night sky. They knew he was here somewhere now, knew that he had entered the forbidden ten-mile zone, knew with certainty that he was hiding in some secret place between the wrecked taxi and the river. They even knew where he was going, and would have denied him the right to go back to the silence.
Gary lay still, hating the silence and the river.
The Long Loud Silence Page 15