by Kate Wilhelm
Once more he went out into the water, and this time he maneuvered close enough to one of the larger slabs of ice to get his rope around it and tow it back to shore. He wove a shallow basket of pine branches, put the clams on the bottom, then the oysters, and on top of them the fish. He put the basket on the flat ice, hacked off pieces of the ice with his knife, and put them over everything. Then he relaxed. He had used up almost the whole day in gathering the food, making sure it would not spoil before he could eat it. But he didn’t care. Later when he ate roasted fish and wild asparagus, he knew he had never eaten any food half as good.
From where he camped, the Delaware was a black hole in the dark forest. Now and then the blackness was broken by a pale shadow that moved without a sound, as if floating in air. Ice. The river was very high; on the banks some trees were standing in water; there might be others invisible until too late, or rocks, or other perils. Mark considered the hazards of that black river and felt only contentment, and the next morning he entered it and headed for Philadelphia.
It was the cities that depressed him, he thought, staring at the gray ruins on either side of the Schuylkill River. As far as he could see in any direction there was the same vista of gray ruins. The city had burned, but not to the ground as Baltimore had. Some buildings seemed almost intact here, but everywhere the same grayness persisted, the same ugliness of destruction. Trees had started to grow here, but even they were ugly, stunted, sickly-looking.
Mark felt here the same fear that others spoke of feeling in the forest. There was a presence here, and it was malign. He found himself looking back over his shoulder again and again, and determinedly paddled ahead. Soon he would stop and make some sketches of the buildings he could see from the river. Probably he should make some token explorations on foot, he thought reluctantly. He paddled more slowly and examined a grove of trees. They were so badly formed it was hard to determine what kind of trees they were. Aspens, he decided. He tried to imagine their roots searching in the concrete and metal beneath the streets for sustenance, finding only more concrete and metal.
But there had been trees in Washington, he thought, paddling harder to avoid a large, ragged chunk of ice. Those trees had been normal-looking, but these . . . They were less than half full size, misshapen, their branches few and grotesquely twisted. Abruptly Mark pulled up. Radiation, he thought with a chill. This is what radiation poisoning did. Before his mind’s eye appeared descriptions and photographs of various kinds of animal and vegetable life deformed by radioactivity.
He turned the canoe and raced back downriver to the juncture with the Delaware. He still had several hours before darkness forced him to stop. For a moment he hesitated, then turned northward once more, this time keeping a wary eye open for deformed plant growth, as well as for chunks of ice, which had become more numerous.
He passed one more place with badly deformed plant life. He kept to the far side of the river and continued to paddle.
Philadelphia went on and on, the ruins more or less uniform. Occasionally there were blocks of buildings that seemed virtually untouched, but now he suspected that was because those areas had been blocked off when they became radioactive. He didn’t investigate any of them. Most of the immense buildings were skeletons, but there were still many standing, enough to make a full-scale expedition worthwhile, if the buildings were not contaminated. He knew that problem would have to be solved by Barry or his younger brothers. He continued on. The forests were taking over again, and the trees were well developed here, thick, luxuriant; in some places where the river narrowed, the canopies met overhead, and it was like passing through a tunnel where only his paddle in the water made a sound and the rest of the world held its breath in the twilight stillness.
There was another puzzle here, he thought, studying the banks of the river. The flow was very swift, but the water was low and the banks in places rose several feet to the land above. The river could have been partially dammed; he knew he would have to find out before he returned to Washington.
Daily the weather had become colder, and that night there was frost. The next day he went through Trenton, and as in Philadelphia, the ruins were ubiquitous, the growth stunted and malformed.
Although it took him several miles out of his way, he went through the city in his canoe, and didn’t leave it until the woods looked normal again. Then he carried the boat to high ground and secured it and headed north on foot. The Delaware turned west here, and he was bound for New York. That afternoon the rains started. Mark blazed a trail now; he didn’t want to have to make a search for the canoe when he returned. He traveled steadily through the heavy rain, protected by his great poncho, which covered him from crown to feet.
He could find no dry wood for a fire that night, and he chewed his cold beef and wished he had another of the succulent fish instead.
The rain was undiminished the next day, and now he knew that to continue was foolish, that he might lose his direction completely in a world whose boundaries had been erased, with no sky, no sun to plot his course. He searched for a spruce grove and crept under the largest of the trees and huddled in his poncho, dozing, waking, dozing again throughout the day and night. The sighing of the trees wakened him and he knew the rain was over; the trees were shaking off the water, murmuring together about the terrible weather, wondering about the boy who slept among them. He had to find a sunny place, dry out his pack, the poncho, his clothes, dry and oil his moccasins . . . He crawled out from under the spruce, whispered a thank you, and began to search for a good place to dry out everything, make a fire, have a good meal.
When he came upon the deformed underbrush late that afternoon, he backed up a hundred feet, squatted, and studied the woods before him.
He was at least another day’s distance from New York, he suspected, twenty miles, maybe even more. The woods here were too thick to be able to see if the deformities were localized. He retreated half a mile, made camp, and thought about the days ahead. He would not enter any place that he thought had been irradiated. How many days was he willing to detour? He didn’t know. Time had stopped for him, and he couldn’t be certain now how long he had been in the woods, how long since the paddle wheel had entered Washington. He wondered if the others were all right, if they had found the warehouses, had brought out the stuff they were to collect. He thought how they might blindly stumble through the poisoned areas in Philadelphia, through the poison here. He shuddered.
He followed the edge of the poisoned area for three days, sometimes going north, then west, then north again. He got no nearer the city. A ring of death surrounded it.
He came to a vast swamp where dead trees lay rotting and nothing grew; he could go no farther. The swampy land extended westward as far as he could see; it smelled of salt and decay, like mud flats when the tide went out. He touched the water to his tongue and then turned back. Sea water. That night the temperature plummeted, and the next day the trees and bushes stood blackened. Now he ate his corn and beef hungrily, and wondered if he would find any wild food again. His supply was running low, his raisins were gone, his dried apples nearly gone. He knew he wouldn’t starve, but it would be pleasant to have fresh vegetables and fruit, more of the hot flaky fish, or oysters, or a clam broth thick with chewy bits of white meat . . . Resolutely he turned his thoughts away from food and walked a little faster.
He traveled quickly, his own trail easily followed, the blaze marks on the trees like roadmarks — turn here, this way, straight ahead. When he got back to his canoe he went west on the Delaware to satisfy his curiosity about the diminished flow and the ice, which was thicker than before. The rain must have broken more of it loose, he thought. It was difficult going against the swift current, and the floating chunks of ice made the river more hazardous. The land here was flat. When the change came, he knew it instantly. The river became faster, and now there was the white water of rapids, and there was a definite rise in the land on either side of the river. It had cut a channel here, another deeper o
ne farther on. When the rapids became too dangerous for the small boat to navigate, he took the canoe from the water and stored it safely, then continued on foot.
A hill rose before him, barely covered with scrub growth and loose rocks. Carefully he picked his way up it. It was very cold. The trees here looked as they would in early March, or even late February. There were bud swellings, but no leaves, no green, only the black-green of the spruces, still in their winter needles. At the top of the hill he drew in his breath sharply. Before him was a vast sheet of snow and ice, blinding in the sunlight.
In some places the snowfield came to the banks of the river, in others it started a good distance back, and up there, about a mile away, the river was almost jammed with ice. It was a narrow black ribbon winding its way through the glare.
Southward the trees blocked his view, but he could see for miles to the north and west, and there was only snow and ice. White mountains climbed to the clear blue sky, and the valleys had been rounded at the bottoms as the snow accumulated there. The wind shifted and blew into Mark’s face, and the cold was numbing, bringing tears to his eyes. The sun seemed to have no warmth here. He was sweating under his leather shirt, but the sight of all that snow, and the chill of the wind when it swept across it, created the illusion that the sun had failed. The illusion made him shiver violently. He turned and hurried down the steep hillside, sliding the last twenty feet or more, aware even as he started the slide that it was dangerous, that he would cause rocks to follow him, that he might be hit by them, injured too badly to move out of the way. He rolled at the bottom and jumped to his feet and ran. He ran a long time, and could hear the rocks crashing behind him.
In his mind the sound was that of the glacier advancing, rolling toward him inexorably, grinding everything to powder.
Chapter 25
Mark was flying. It was glorious to swoop and dive high over the trees and rivers. He soared higher and higher until his body tingled with excitement. He swerved to avoid flying through a billowing white cloud. When he straightened out, there was another white cloud before him; again he swerved, and then again and again. The clouds were everywhere, and now they had joined to form a wall, and the great white wall was advancing on him from every direction. There was no place he could go to avoid being overtaken. He dived, and the dive became a fall, faster and faster. There was nothing he could do to stop it. He fell through the whiteness . . .
Mark came wide awake, shivering hard, his body covered with sweat. His fire was a feeble glow in the blackness. He fed it carefully, blew on his chilled hands while he waited for the scrapings of punk to burn, and then added twigs, and finally branches. Although it would be dawn soon and he would have to extinguish the fire, he fed it until it blazed hot and bright. Then he sat huddled before it. He had stopped shivering, but the nightmare vision persisted and he wanted light and warmth. And he wanted not to be alone.
He traveled very swiftly the next four days, and on the afternoon of the fifth he approached the landing area in Washington where the paddle wheel had docked and the brothers and sisters had set out for the warehouses.
The Peter brothers ran to meet him, helped with the canoe, took his pack, talking all the while.
“Gary said you should go to the warehouse the minute you got in,” one of them said.
“We had six accidents so far,” another one said excitedly. “Broken arms, legs, stuff like that. Nothing like the other groups had in the past. We’re making it!”
“Gary said we’ll start for Baltimore or Philadelphia by the end of this week.”
“We have a map to show you which warehouse they’re doing now.”
“We have at least four boatloads of stuff already . . .”
“We’ve been taking turns. Four days down here getting stuff ready for the boat, cooking, all that, then four days in the warehouses finding stuff . . .”
“It’s not bad here, not like we thought it would be. I don’t know why the others had so much trouble.”
Mark followed them wearily. “I’m hungry,” he said. “There’s soup cooking now for dinner,” one of them said. “But Gary said . . .”
Mark moved past them to the building they were using for their quarters. Now he could smell the soup. He helped himself, and before he finished eating he began to feel too sleepy to keep his eyes open. The boys kept talking about their successes. “Where are the beds?” Mark asked, interrupting one of them again.
“Aren’t you going to the warehouse like Gary said?”
“No. Where are the beds?”
“We’ll start for Philadelphia in the morning,” Gary said with satisfaction. “You did a good job, Mark. How long will it take us to get to Philadelphia?”
Mark shrugged. “I didn’t walk, so I don’t know. I’ve shown you where it’s all marshy, maybe impassable by foot. If you can get through, probably eight to ten days. But you need something to measure the radioactivity.”
“You were wrong about that, Mark. There can’t be any radioactivity. We weren’t at war, you know. No bombs were used here. Our elders would have warned us.”
Again Mark shrugged.
“We trust you to get us through,” Gary said, smiling now. He was twenty-one.
“I’m not going,” Mark said.
Gary and his brothers exchanged glances. Gary said, “What do you mean? That’s your job.”
Mark shook his head. “My job was to find out if the cities are there, if anything’s left in them. I know I reached them by water. I don’t know if they can be reached on foot. I know there’s been radioactivity, and I’m going back to the valley to report that.”
Gary stood up and began to roll the map they had been using to mark the swamps, the changed coastline, the marsh that had been the intercoastal waterway. Not looking directly at Mark, he said, “Everyone in this expedition is under my command, you know. Everyone.”
Mark didn’t move.
“I order you to go with us,” Gary said, and now he looked at Mark.
Mark shook his head. “You won’t make it there and back before the weather changes,” he said. “You and your brothers don’t know anything about the forests. You’ll have the same trouble the early expeditions had in coming to Washington. And the boys can’t do anything without someone to tell them what to do. What if all the stuff in Philadelphia is radioactive? If you bring it back, you’ll kill everyone with it. I’m going back to the valley.”
“You’re going to take orders just like everyone else!” Gary shouted. “Keep him here!” He motioned to two of his brothers, and they hurried from the room. The other three remained with Mark, who was still sitting cross-legged on the floor where he had been from the beginning of the meeting.
In a few minutes Gary returned; he carried several long strips of birch bark. Now Mark stood up and reached for the bark. It was from his canoe.
Gary thrust the scraps at him. “Now you understand, I hope. We leave in the morning. You’d better get some rest.”
Wordlessly Mark left them. He went to the river and examined the ruined boat. Afterward he built a small fire, and when it was burning brightly he put one end of the boat in the flames, and as it burned he pushed it forward until it was totally consumed.
The next morning when the boys assembled to start the trek to Philadelphia, Mark was not among them. His pack was gone, he could not be found. Gary and his brothers consulted angrily and decided to start without him. They had good maps that Mark himself had corrected. The boys were all well trained. There was no reason to feel dependent on a fourteen-year-old. They started off, but there was a pall over them now.
Mark watched from a distance, and throughout the day he kept them in sight. When they camped that night, their first night in the open forest, he was in a tree nearby.
The boys were all right, he thought with satisfaction. As long as their groups were not separated, they would be all right. But the Gary brothers were clearly nervous. They started at noises.
He waited until the c
amp was still, and then, high in a tree where he could look down on them without being seen, he began to moan. At first no one paid any attention to the noises he made, but presently Gary and his brothers began to peer anxiously at the woods, at one another. Mark moaned louder. The boys were stirring now. Most of them had been asleep when he started. Now there was a restless movement among them.
“Woji!” Mark moaned, louder and louder. “Woji! Woji!” He doubted anyone was still asleep. “Woji says go back! Woji says go back!” He kept his voice hollow, muffled by his hand over his mouth. He repeated the words many times, and ended each message with a thin, rising moan. After a time he added one more word. “Danger. Danger. Danger.”
He stopped abruptly in the middle of the fourth “Danger.” Even he was aware of the listening forest now. The Gary brothers took torches into the forest around the camp, looking for something, anything. They stayed close to one another as they made the search. Most of the boys were sitting up, as close to the fires as they could get. It was a long time before they all lay down to try to sleep again. Mark dozed in the tree, and when he jerked awake, he repeated the warning, again stopping in the middle of a word, though he wasn’t certain why that was so much worse than just stopping. Again the futile search was made, the fires were replenished, the boys sat upright in fear. Toward dawn when the forest was its blackest Mark began to laugh a shrill, inhuman laugh that seemed to echo from everywhere at once.
The next day was cold and drizzly with thick fog that lifted only slightly as the day wore on. Mark circled the straggling group, now whispering from behind them, now from the left, the right, from in front of them, sometimes from over their heads. By midafternoon they were barely moving and the boys were talking openly of disobeying Gary and returning to Washington. Mark noted with satisfaction that two of the Gary brothers were siding with the rebellious boys now.