He drew a black speck out of the orange juice in the glass.
“How the hell they get in the refrigerator I’ll never know,” he said.
“None for me, Bob,” she said.
“No orange juice?”
“No.”
“Good for you.”
“No, thank you, sweetheart,” she said, trying to smile.
He put back the bottle and sat down across from her with his glass of juice.
“You don’t feel any pain?" he said. "No headache, nothing?”
She shook her head slowly.
“I wish I did know what was wrong,” she said.
“You call up Dr. Busch today.”
“I will,” she said, starting to get up. He put his hand over hers.
“No, no, sweetheart, stay there,” he said.
“But there’s no reason why I should be like this.” She sounded angry. That was the way she’d been as long as he’d known her. If she became ill, it irritated her. She was annoyed by sickness. She seemed to regard it as a personal affront.
“Come on,” he said, starting to get up. “I’ll help you back to bed.”
“No, just let me sit here with you,” she said. “I’ll go back to bed after Kathy goes to school.”
“All right. Don’t you want something, though?”
“No.”
“How about coffee?”
She shook her head.
“You’re really going to get sick if you don’t eat,” he said.
“I’m just not hungry.”
He finished his juice and got up to fry a couple of eggs. He cracked them on the side of the iron skillet and dropped the contents into the melted bacon fat. He got the bread from the drawer and went over to the table with it.
“Here, I’ll put it in the toaster,” Virginia said. “You watch your… Oh, God.”
“What is it?”
She waved one hand weakly in front of her face.
“A mosquito,” she said with a grimace.
He moved over and, after a moment, crushed it between his two palms.
“Mosquitoes,” she said. “Flies, sand fleas.”
“We are entering the age of the insect,” he said.
“It’s not good,” she said. “They carry diseases. We ought to put a net around Kathy’s bed too.”
“I know, I know,” he said, returning to the stove and tipping the skillet so the hot fat ran over the white egg surfaces. “I keep meaning to.”
“I don’t think that spray works, either,” Virginia said.
“It doesn’t?”
“No.”
“My God, and it’s supposed to be one of the best ones on the market.”
He slid the eggs onto a dish.
“Sure you don’t want some coffee?’ he asked her.
“No, thank you.”
He sat down and she handed him the buttered toast.
“I hope to hell we’re not breeding a race of superbugs,” he said. “You remember that strain of giant grasshoppers they found in Colorado?’
“Yes.”
“Maybe the insects are… What’s the word? Mutating.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, it means they’re… changing. Suddenly. Jumping over dozens of small evolutionary steps, maybe developing along lines they might not have followed at all if it weren’t for…”
Silence.
“The bombings?” she said.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Well, they’re causing the dust storms. They’re probably causing a lot of things.”
She sighed wearily and shook her head.
“And they say we won the war,” she said.
“Nobody won it”
“The mosquitoes won it.”
He smiled a little.
“I guess they did,” he said.
They sat there for a few moments without talking and the only sound in the kitchen was the clink of his fork on the plate and the cup on the saucer.
“You looked at Kathy last night?” she asked.
“I just looked at her now. She looks fine.”
“Good.”
She looked at him studiedly.
“I’ve been thinking, Bob,” she said. “Maybe we should send her east to your mother’s until I get better. It may be contagious.”
“We could,” he said dubiously, “but if it’s contagious, my mother’s place wouldn’t be any safer than here.”
“You don’t think so?” she asked. She looked worried.
He shrugged.
“I don’t know, hon. I think probably she’s just as safe here. If it starts to get bad on the block, we’ll keep her out of school.”
She started to say something, then stopped.
“All right,” she said.
He looked at his watch.
“I’d better finish up,” he said.
She nodded and he ate the rest of his breakfast quickly. While he was draining the coffee cup she asked him if he had bought a paper the night before.
“It’s in the living room,” he told her.
"Anything new in it?”
“No. Same old stuff. It’s all over the country, a little here, a little there. They haven’t been able to find the germ yet.”
She bit her lower lip.
“Nobody knows what it is?”
“I doubt it. If anybody did they’d have surely said so by now.
“But they must have some idea.”
“Everybody’s got an idea. But they aren’t worth anything.”
‘What do they say?”
He shrugged.
“Everything from germ warfare on down.”
“Do you think it is?”
“Germ warfare?”
“Yes,” she said.
“The war’s over,” he said.
“Bob,” she said suddenly, “do you think you should go to work?”
He smiled helplessly.
“What else can I do?” he asked. “We have to eat.”
“I know, but..”
He reached across the table and felt how cold her hand was.
“Honey, it’ll be all right,” he said.
“And you think I should send Kathy to school?”
“I think so,” he said. “Unless the health authorities say schools have to shut down, I don’t see why we should keep her home. She’s not sick.”
“But all the kids at school.”
“I think we’d better, though,” he said.
She made a tiny sound in her throat. Then she said, “All right. If you think so.”
“Is there anything you want before I go?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Now you stay in the house today,” he told her, “and in bed.”
“I will,” she said. “As soon as I send Kathy off.” He patted her hand. Outside, the car horn sounded. He finished the coffee and went to the bathroom to rinse out his mouth. Then he got his jacket from the hall closet and pulled it on.
“Good-by, honey,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “Take it easy, now.”
“Good-by,” she said. “Be careful.”
He moved across the lawn, gritting his teeth at the residue of dust in the air. He could smell it as he walked, a dry tickling sensation in his nasal passages.
“Morning,” he said, getting in the car and pulling the door shut behind him.
“Good morning,” said Ben Cortman.
Chapter Seven
“DISTILLED FROM ALLIUM SATIVUM, a genus of Liliaceae comprising garlic, leek, onion, shallot, and chive. Is of pale color and penetrating odor, containing several allyl sulphides. Composition: water, 64.6%; protein, 6.8%; fat, 0.1%; carbohydrates, 26.3%; fiber, 0.8%; ash, l.4.%.”
There it was. He jiggled one of the pink, leathery cloves in his right palm. For seven months now he’d strung them together into aromatic necklaces and hung them outside his house without the remotest idea of why they chased the vampires away. It was time he learned why.
He mashed the clove to a pulp and smelled the acrid fluid on the thick cleaver blade.
All right, what now? The past revealed nothing to help him; only talk of insect carriers and virus, and they weren’t the causes. He was sure of it.
The past had brought something else, though; pain at remembering. Every recalled word had been like, a knife blade twisting in him. Old wounds had been reopened with every thought of her. He’d finally had to stop, eyes closed, fists clenched, trying desperately to accept the present on its own terms and not yearn with his very flesh for the past. But only enough drinks to stultify all introspection had managed to drive away the enervating sorrow that remembering brought.
He focused his eyes. All right, damn it, he told himself, do something!
He looked at the text again, water-was it that? he asked himself. No, that was ridiculous; all things had water in them. Protein? No. Fat? No. Carbohydrates? No. Fiber? No. Ash? No. What then?
“The characteristic odor and flavor of garlic are due to an essential oil amounting to about 0.2% of the weight, which consists mainly of allyl sulphide and allyl isothicyanate.”
Maybe the answer was there.
Again the book: “Allyl sulphide may be prepared by heating mustard oil and potassium sulphide at 100 degrees.”
His body thudded down into the living-room chair and a disgusted breath shuddered his long frame. And where the hell do I get mustard oil and potassium sulphide? And the equipment to prepare them in?
That’s great, he railed at himself. The first step, and already you’ve fallen flat on your face.
He pushed himself up disgustedly and headed for the bar. But halfway through pouring a drink he slammed down the bottle. No, by God, he had no intention of going on like a blind man, plodding down a path of brainless, fruitless existence until old age or accident took him. Either he found the answer or he ditched the whole mess, life included.
He checked his watch. Ten-twenty A.M.; still time. He moved to the hallway resolutely and checked through the telephone directories. There was a place in Inglewood.
Four hours later he straightened up from the workbench with a crick in his neck and the allysulphide inside a hypodermic syringe, and in himself the first sense of real accomplishment since his forced isolation began.
A little excited, he ran to his car and drove out past the area he’d cleared out and marked with chalked rods. He knew it was more than possible that some vampires might have wandered into the cleared area and were hiding there again. But he had no time for searching.
Parking his car, he went into a house and walked to the bedroom. A young woman lay there, a coating of blood on her mouth.
Flipping her over, Neville pulled up her skirt and injected the allyl sulphide into her soft, fleshy buttock, then turned her over again and stepped back. For a half hour he stood there watching her.
Nothing happened.
This doesn’t make sense, his mind argued. I hang garlic around the house and the vampires stay away. And the characteristic of garlic is the oil I’ve injected in her. But nothing’s happened.
Goddamn it, nothing’s happened!
He flung down the syringe and, trembling with rage and frustration, went home again. Before darkness, he built a small wooden structure on the front lawn and hung strings of onions on it. He spent a listless night, only the knowledge that there was still much left to do keeping him from the liquor.
In the morning he went out and looked at the matchwood on his lawn.
The cross. He held one in his hand, gold and shiny in the morning sun. This, too, drove the vampires away. Why? Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism? There was only one way to find out.
He took the woman from her bed, pretending not to notice the question posed in his mind: Why do you always experiment on women? He didn’t care to admit that the inference had any validity. She just happened to be the first one he’d come across, that was all. What about the man in the living mom, though? For God’s sake! he flared back. I’m not going to rape the woman!
Crossing your fingers, Neville? Knocking on wood?
He ignored that, beginning to suspect his mind of harboring an alien. Once he might have termed it conscience. Now it was only an annoyance. Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic.
Makes a good excuse, doesn’t it, Neville? Oh, shut up.
But he wouldn’t let himself pass the afternoon near her. After binding her to a chair, he secluded himself in the garage and puttered around with the car. She was wearing a torn black dress and too much was visible as she breathed. Out of sight, out of mind… It was a lie, he knew, but he wouldn’t admit it.
At last, mercifully, night came. He locked the garage door, went back to the house, and locked the front door, putting the heavy bar across it. Then he made a drink and sat down on the couch across from the woman.
From the ceiling, right before her face, hung the cross. At six-thirty her eyes opened. Suddenly, like the eyes of a sleeper who has a definite job to do upon awakening; who does not move into consciousness with a vague entry, but with a single, clear-cut motion, knowing just what is to be done.
Then she saw the cross and she jerked her eyes from it with a sudden raffling gasp and her body twisted in the chair.
“Why are you afraid of it?” he asked, startled at the sound of his own voice after so long.
Her eyes, suddenly on him, made him shudder. The way they glowed, the way her tongue licked across her red lips as if it were a separate life in her mouth. The way she flexed her body as if trying to move it closer to him. A guttural rumbling filled her throat like the sound of a dog defending its bone.
“The cross,” he said nervously. “Why are you afraid of it?”
She strained against her bonds, her hands raking across the sides of the chair. No words from her, only a harsh, gasping succession of breaths. Her body writhed on the chair, her eyes burned into him.
“The cross!” he snapped angrily.
He was on his feet, the glass falling and splashing across the rug. He grabbed the string with tense fingers and swung the cross before her eyes. She flung her head away with a frightened snarl and recoiled into the chair.
“Look at it!” he yelled at her.
A sound of terror stricken whining came from her. Her eyes moved wildly around the room, great white eyes with pupils like specks of soot.
He grabbed at her shoulder, then jerked his hand back. It was dribbling blood from raw teeth wounds.
His stomach muscles jerked in. The hand lashed out again, this time smashing her across the cheek and snapping her head to the side.
Ten minutes later he threw her body out the front door and slammed it again in their faces. Then he stood there against the door breathing heavily. Faintly he heard through the soundproofing the sound of them fighting like jackals for the spoils.
Later he went to the bathroom and poured alcohol into the teeth gouges, enjoying fiercely the burning pain in his flesh.
Chapter Eight
NEVILLE BENT OVER AND picked up a little soil in his right hand. He ran it between his fingers, crumbling the dark lumps into grit. How many of them, he wondered, slept in the soil, as the story went?
He shook his head. Precious few.
Where did the legend fit in, then?
He closed his eyes and let the dirt filter down slowly from his hand. Was there any answer? If only he could remember whether those who slept in soil were the ones who had returned from death. He might have theorized then.
But he couldn’t remember. Another unanswerable question, then. Add it to the question that had occurred to him the night before.
What would a Mohammedan vampire do if faced with a cross?
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The barking sound of his laugh in the silent morning air startled him. Good God, he thought, it’s been so long since I’ve laughed, I’ve forgotten how. It sounded like the cough of a sick hound. Well, that’s what I am, after all, isn’t it? he decided. A very sick dog.
There had been a light dust storm about four that morning. Strange how it brought back memories. Virginia, Kathy, all those horrible days…
He caught himself. No, no, there was danger there. It was thinking of the past that drove him to the bottle. He was just going to have to accept the present.
He found himself wondering again why he chose to go on living. Probably, he thought, there’s no real reason. I’m just too dumb to end it all.
Well-he clapped his hands with false decision-what now? He looked around as if there were something to see along the stillness of Cimarron Street.
All right, he decided impulsively, let’s see if the running water bit makes sense.
He buried a hose under the ground and ran it into a small trough constructed of wood. The water ran through the trough and out another hole into more hosing, which conducted the water into the earth.
When he’d finished, he went in and took a shower, shaved, and took the bandage off his hand. The wound had healed cleanly. But then, he hadn’t been overly concerned about that. Time had more than proved to him that he was immune to their infection.
At six-twenty he went into the living room and stood before the peephole. He stretched a little, grunting at the ache in his muscles. Then, when nothing happened, he made himself a drink.
When he got back to the peephole, be saw Ben Cortman come walking onto the lawn.
“Come out, Neville,” Robert Neville muttered, and Cortman echoed the words in a loud cry.
Neville stood there motionless, looking at Ben Cortman.
Ben hadn’t changed much. His hair was still black, his body inclined to corpulence, his face still white. But there was a beard on his face now; mostly under the nose, thinner around his chin and cheeks and under his throat. That was the only real difference, though. Ben had always been immaculately shaved in the old days, smelling of cologne each morning when he picked up
Neville to drive to the plant.
I Am Legend and Other Stories Page 5