As he pulled it from his pocket the striker wheel caught on the lining momentarily and the lighter tumbled from his hand. He heard a clink as it struck the railing, and then there was a softbonkas it struck the hood or trunk of a car below.
The sliding footstep came again, a little closer now, impossible to tell how close. Someone coming to kill him and his terror-locked mind gave him a picture of the soldier with the switchblade in his neck, moving slowly toward him in the dark—
The soft, gritting step again.
Larry remembered the rifle. He threw the butt against his shoulder, and began to fire. The explosions were shatteringly loud in the closed space; he screamed at the sound of them but the scream was lost in the roar. Flashbulb images of tile and frozen lanes of traffic exploded one after another like a string of black and white snapshots as fire licked from the muzzle of the .30-.30. Ricochets whined like banshees. The gun whacked his shoulder again and again until it was numb, until he knew that the force of the recoils had turned him on his feet and he was shooting out over the roadway instead of back along the catwalk. He was still unable to stop. His finger had taken over the function of the brain, and it spasmed mindlessly until the hammer began to fall with a dry and impotent clicking sound.
The echoes rolled back. Bright afterimages hung before his eyes in triple exposures. He was faintly aware of the stench of cordite and of the whining sound he was making deep in his chest.
Still clutching the gun he whirled around again, and now it was not the soldiers in their sterileAndromeda Strainsuits that he saw on the screen of his interior theater but the Morlocks from the Classic Comics version of H.G. Wells’sThe Time Machine , humped and blind creatures coming out of their holes in the ground where engines ran on and on in the bowels of the earth.
He began to struggle across the soft yet stiff barricade of bodies, stumbling, almost falling, clutching the railing, going on. His foot punched through into some dreadful sliminess and there was a gassy, putrid smell that he barely noticed. He went on, gasping.
Then, from behind him, a scream rose in the darkness, freezing him on the spot. It was a desperate, wretched sound, close to the limits of sanity: “ Larry! Oh, Larry, for God’s sake —”
It was Rita Blakemoor.
He turned around. There was sobbing now, wild sobbing that filled the place with fresh echoes. For one wild moment he decided to go on anyway, to leave her. She would find her way out eventually, why burden himself with her again? Then he got hold of himself and shouted, “Rita! Stay where you are! Do you hear me?”
The sobbing continued.
He stumbled back across the bodies, trying not to breathe, his face twisted in an expression of grimacing disgust. Then he ran toward her, not sure how far he had to go because of the distorting quality of the echo. In the end he almost fell over her.
“Larry—” She threw herself against him and clutched his neck with a strangler’s force. He could feel her heart skidding along at a breakneck pace under her shirt. “Larry Larry don’t leave me alone here don’t leave me alone in the dark—”
“No.” He held her tightly. “Did I hurt you? Are… are you shot?”
“No… I felt the wind… one of them went by so close I felt the wind of it… and chips… tile-chips, I think… on my face… cut my face…”
“Oh Jesus, Rita, I didn’t know. I was freaking out in here. The dark. And I lost my lighter… you should have called. I could have killed you.” The truth of it came home to him. “ I could have killed you ,” he repeated in stunned revelation.
“I wasn’t sure it was you. I went into an apartment house when you went down the ramp. And you came back and called and I almost… but I couldn’t… and then two men came after the rain started… I think they were looking for us… or for me. So I stayed where I was and when they were gone I thought, maybe they’re not gone, maybe they’re hiding and looking for me and I didn’t dare go out until I started to think you’d get to the other side, and I’d never see you again… so I… I… Larry, you won’t leave me, will you? You won’t go away?”
“No,” he said.
“I was wrong, what I said, that was wrong, you were right, I should have told you about the sandals, I mean the shoes, I’ll eat when you tell me to… I… I…oooohhhowww —”
“Shh,” he said, holding her. “It’s all right now. All right.” But in his mind he saw himself firing at her in a blind panic, and thought how easily one of those slugs could have smashed her arm or blown out her stomach. Suddenly he had to go to the bathroom very badly and his teeth wanted to chatter. “We’ll go when you feel like you can walk. Take your time.”
“There was a man… I think it was a man… I stepped on him, Larry.” She swallowed and her throat clicked. “Oh, I almost screamed then, but I didn’t because I thought it might be one of those men up ahead instead of you. And when you called out… the echo… I couldn’t tell if it was you… or…or…”
“There are more dead people up ahead. Can you stand that?”
“If you’re with me. Please… if you’re with me.”
“I will be.”
“Let’s go, then. I want to get out of here.” She shuddered convulsively against him. “I never wanted anything so badly in my life.”
He felt for her face and kissed her, first her nose, then each eye, then her mouth.
“Thank you,” he said humbly, having not the slightest idea what he meant. “Thank you. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” she repeated. “Oh dear Larry. You won’t leave me, will you?”
“No,” he said. “I won’t leave you. Just tell me when you feel like you can, Rita, and we’ll go together.”
When she felt she could, they did.
They got over the bodies, their arms slung about each other’s necks like drunken chums coming home from a neighborhood tavern. Beyond that they came to a blockage of some sort. It was impossible to see, but after running her hands over it, Rita said it might be a bed standing on end. Together they managed to tip it over the catwalk railing. It crashed onto a car below with a loud, echoing bang that made them both jump and clutch each other. Behind where it had been there were more sprawled bodies, three of them, and Larry guessed that these were the soldiers that had shot down the Jewish family. They got over them and went on, holding hands.
A short time later Rita stopped short.
“What’s the matter?” Larry asked. “Is there something in the way?”
“No.
I can see, Larry! It’s the end of the tunnel!”
He blinked and realized that he could see, too. The glow was dim and it had come so gradually that he hadn’t been aware of it until Rita had spoken. He could make out a faint shine on the tiles, and the pale blur of Rita’s face closer by. Looking over to the left he could see the dead river of automobiles.
“Come on,” he said, jubilant.
Sixty paces farther along there were more bodies sprawled on the walkway, all soldiers. They stepped over them.
“Why would they only close off New York?” she asked. “Unless maybe… Larry, maybe it only happened in New York!”
“I don’t think so,” he said, but felt a touch of irrational hope anyway.
They walked faster. The mouth of the tunnel was ahead of them now. It was blocked by two huge army convoy trucks parked nose to nose. The trucks blotted out much of the daylight; if they hadn’t been there, Larry and Rita would have had some light much farther back in the tunnel. There was another sprawl of bodies where the catwalk descended to join the ramp leading outside. They squeezed between the convoy trucks, scrambling over the locked bumpers. Rita didn’t look inside, but Larry did. There was a half-assembled tripod machine gun, boxes of ammunition, and canisters of stuff that looked like teargas. Also, three dead men.
As they came outside, a rain-dampened breeze pressed against them, and its wonderfully fresh smell seemed to make it all worthwhile. He said so to Rita, and she nodded and put her head against his shoulder for a moment.
“I wouldn’t go through there again for a million dollars, though,” she said.
“In a few years you’ll be using money for toilet paper,” he said. “Please don’t squeeze the greenbacks.”
“But are you sure—”
“That it wasn’t just New York?” He pointed. “Look.”
The tollbooths were empty. The middle one stood in a heap of broken glass. Beyond them, the westbound lanes were empty for as far as they could see, but the eastbound lanes, the ones which fed into the tunnel and the city they had just left, were crowded with silent traffic. There was an untidy pile of bodies in the breakdown lane, and a number of seagulls stood watch over it.
“Oh dear God,” she said weakly.
“There were as many people trying to get into New York as there were trying to get out of it. I don’t know why they bothered blockading the tunnel on the Jersey end. Probably they didn’t know why, either. Just somebody’s bright idea, busywork—”
But she had sat down on the road and was crying.
“Don’t,” he said, kneeling beside her. The experience in the tunnel was still too fresh for him to feel angry with her. “It’s all right, Rita.”
“What is?” she sobbed. “What is? Just tell me one thing.”
“We’re out, anyway. That’s something. And there’s fresh air. In fact, New Jersey never smelled so good.”
That earned him a wan smile. Larry looked at the scratches on her cheek and temple where the shards of tile had cut her.
“We ought to get you to a drugstore and put some peroxide on those cuts,” he said. “Do you feel up to walking?”
“Yes.” She was looking at him with a dumb gratitude that made him feel uneasy. “And I’ll get some new shoes. Some sneakers. I’ll do just what you tell me, Larry. I want to.”
“I shouted at you because I was upset,” he said quietly. He brushed her hair back and kissed one of the scratches over her right eye. “I’m not such a bad guy,” he added quietly.
“Just don’t leave me.”
He helped her to her feet and slipped an arm around her waist. Then they walked slowly toward the tollbooths and slipped through them, New York behind them and across the river.
Chapter 36
There was a small park in the center of Ogunquit, complete with a Civil War cannon and a War Memorial, and after Gus Dinsmore died, Frannie Goldsmith went there and sat beside the duck pond, idly throwing stones in and watching the ripples spread in the calm water until they reached the lily pads around the edges and broke up in confusion.
She had taken Gus to the Hanson house down on the beach the day before yesterday, afraid that if she waited any longer Gus wouldn’t be able to walk and would have to spend his “final confinement,” as her ancestors would have termed it with such grisly yet apt euphemism, in his hot little cubicle near the public beach parking lot.
She had thought Gus would die that night. His fever had been high and he had been crazily delirious, falling out of bed twice and even staggering around old Mr. Hanson’s bedroom, knocking things over, falling to his knees, getting up again. He cried out to people who were not there, answered them, and watched them with emotions varying from hilarity to dismay until Frannie began to feel that Gus’s invisible companions were the real ones and she was the phantom. She had begged Gus to get back into bed, but for Gus she wasn’t there. She had to keep stepping out of his way; if she hadn’t, he would have knocked her over and walked over her.
At last he had fallen onto the bed and had passed from energetic delirium to a gasping, heavy-breathing unconsciousness that Fran supposed was the final coma. But the next morning when she looked in on him, Gus had been sitting up in bed and reading a paperback Western he had found on one of the shelves. He thanked her for taking care of him and told her earnestly that he hoped he hadn’t said or done anything embarrassing the night before.
When she said he hadn’t, Gus had looked doubtfully around the wreckage of the bedroom and told her she was good to say so, anyway. She made some soup, which he ate with gusto, and when he complained of how hard it was to read without his spectacles, which had been broken while he had been taking his turn on the barricade at the south end of town the week before, she had taken the paperback (over his weak protests) and had read him four chapters in a Western by that woman who lived up north in Haven.Rimfire Christmas , it was called. Sheriff John Stoner was having problems with the rowdier element in the town of Roaring Rock, Wyoming, it seemed—and, worse, he just couldn’t find anything to give his lovely young wife for Christmas.
Fran had gone away more optimistic, thinking that Gus might be recovering. But last night he had been worse again, and he had died at quarter to eight this morning, only an hour and a half ago. He had been rational at the end, but unaware of just how serious his condition was.