Damnation Alley (18 page)

She was right, and as they lay there he thought of the Alley and its ways, but did not say aloud what he felt.

"Soon," she told him. "Soon. Don't worry so much."

He stroked her shoulder.

"Do you remember the Three Days?" he asked.

"No."

"I do," he said. "We put people on the moon and Mars and Titan. We conquered space. We lost time. We had a United Nations. But what happened? Three lousy days, that's what, and everything went to hell. I was there when the rockets came down, Karen. I was there, and I listened to the radio until it stopped. They threw them all over the place. New York is a Hot Spot. So are most of the big cities. Maybe only the islands made it: the Caribbean, Hawaii, Japan, the Greek isles. They kept broadcasting for a long time, you know, after the others quit. Maybe there are still people alive in Japan and the Mediterranean. We know there are some in the Caribbean. I don't know. But I was there when it happened. It was terribly like this, the feeling of doom. I thought for a while recently that we might make it, though. I wonder if the people on Mars are still alive? Or Titan? Will they ever come back? I doubt they could. I think we're already dead, Karen. I think it's time for everybody to lie down and admit it. If we haven't screwed everything up, it's not because we didn't try. If the sky ever purges itself, I wonder if there'll be anyone left to know it? Maybe there will, on some island, or the West Coast. But I doubt it. If we make it, there'll be even more freaks than there are now. Man may cease beifig man, for God's sake!"

"We'll make it," she said. "People always screw up. But there are so many. Some will live."

"I hope you're right."

"Listen to the bells," she said. "Each one signifies death. They used to ring them on festival days too, signifying life. Some man will come, and he'll run the Alley, I think. But if he doesn't, we won't all die. The Three Days were bad. I know. I've heard about them. Don't give up, though, on that accoUnt."

"I can't help it. I feel…lost."

Then she touched him and said, "All you can do is what you're doing. The only other thing is how you feel about it. I don't remember the Three Days, but even that wasn't final. Remember that. We're still here, come everything."

He kissed her then, and the room was dark and antiseptic around them. "You're the kind of people we need," he said, and she shook her head.

"I'm just a nurse. Why don't you sleep now? I'll make the rounds for you. You rest. Maybe tomorrow . .

"Yeah. Maybe tomorrow," he said. "I don't believe it, but thanks."

After a while she heard him snore, and she rose up from the bed. She departed Room 136, all in white, and made his rounds for him.

The bells shattered the air about her, for the clinic was near to three churches, but she made the rounds, taking pulses and temperatures, pouring water, smiling; and although she did not remember the Three Days, she knew that she lived in them still, each time that she entered a ward.

But she smiled, which was man's last weapon, perhaps.

In the morning, Tanner walked back through the mud and the fallen branches, the rocks and the dead fish, and he opened the rear compartment and unbolted the bikes. He fueled them and checked them out and wheeled them down the ramp.

He crawled into the back of the cab then and removed the rear seat. Beneath it, in the storage compartment, was the large aluminum chest that was his cargo. It was bolted shut. He lifted it, carried it out to his bike.

"That the stuff?"

He nodded and placed it on the ground.

"I don't know how the stuff is stored, if it's refrigerated in there or what," he said, "but it ain't too heavy that I might not be able to get it on the back of my bike. There's straps in the far-right compartment. Go get 'em and give me a hand, and get me my pardon out of the middle compartment. It's in a big cardboard envelope."

She returned with these things and helped him secure the container on the rear of his bike.

He wrapped extra straps around his left bicep, and they wheeled the machines to the road.

"We'll have to take it kind of slow," he said, and he slung the rifle over his right shoulder, drew on his gloves, and kicked his bike to life.

She did the same with hers, and they moved forward, side by side, along the highway.

After they had been riding for perhaps an hour, two cars passed them, heading west. In the rear seats of both there were children, who pressed their faces to the glass and watched them as they went by. The driver of the second car was in his shirt sleeves, and he wore a black shoulder holster.

The sky was pink, and there were three black lines that looked as if they could be worth worrying about. The sun was a rose-tinted silvery thing, and pale, but Tanner still had to raise his goggles against it.

The cargo was riding securely, and Tanner leaned into the dawn and thought about Boston. There was a light mist on the foot of every hill, and the air was cool and moist. Another car passed them. The road surface began to improve.

It was around noontime when he heard the first shot above the thunder of their engines. At first he thought it was a backfire, but it came again, and Corny cried out and swerved off the road and struck a boulder.

Tanner cut to the left, braking, as two more shots struck about him, and he leaned his bike against a tree and threw himself flat. A shot struck near his head, and he could tell the direction from which it had come. He crawled into a ditch and drew off his right glove. He could see his girl lying where she had fallen, and there was blood on her breast. She did not move.

He raised the 30.06 and fired.

The shot was returned, and he moved to his left.

It had come from a hill about two hundred feet away, and he thought he saw the rifle's barrel.

He aimed at it and fired again.

The shot was returned, and he wormed his way farther left. He crawled perhaps fifteen feet, until he reached a pile of rubble he could crouch behind. Then he pulled the pin on a grenade, stood, and hurled it.

He threw himself flat as another shot rang out, and he took another grenade into his hand.

There was a roar and a rumble and a mighty flash, and the junk fell about him as he leaped to his feet and threw the second one, taking better aim this time.

After the second explosion, he ran forward with his rifle in his hands, but it wasn't necessary.

He found only a few small pieces of the man, and none at all of his rifle.

He returned to Cornelia.

She wasn't breathing, and her heart had stopped beating, and he knew what that meant.

He carried her back to the ditch in which he had lain, and he made it deeper by digging, using his hands.

He laid her down in it, and he covered her with the dirt. Then he wheeled her machine over, set the kickstand, and stood it upon the grave. With his knife he scratched on the fender: _Her name was Cornelia and I dont know how old she was or where she came from or what her last name was but she was Hell Tanner's girl and I love her_. Then he went back to his own machine, started it, and drove ahead. Boston was maybe thirty miles away.

* * *

Setting without plot or characters. Put a frame around it if you would, and call it what you would, if you would: Chaos, Creation, Nightmare of the Periodic Table or ------- [fill in your own].

It looks like this: There are thousands of pillars such as those the gallant airman Mermoz saw when first he crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane and negotiated that region called the Black Hole off the coast of Africa, giant pillars in which rumbles the upsurge of the sea and the land, the tails of tornadoes, as Saint-Exupéry described them, "rising as a wall is built”...and they sway at first, swelling at their tops and stand then as immobile as architecture, supporting the arch of the mighty winds that circle the world unceasing, feeding those winds with the harvest of the waters and the lands, limned, etched, sketched, sometimes charcoaled by the lightnings that flicker first, then pulse, like pinwheels or spiders with too many legs or Chinese characters that trace, chase, rewrite themselves in baleful red, lavish yellow, cold blue, blinding white, and occasional green and mystic violet, according to the changing medium through which they move, all in the space of the eyeball's twitching, if you're there to see, and may you never, how the sky takes up within itself the land and the water, separated since the days of creation, turns them to plasma, pinches them into rivers that race darkly through its dotted aerography, disperses them into clouds like nebulae, harasses them from sunset to sunrise and on into the night, drowns stars in their depths, cancels out the moon or colors it any, throttles the sun or dyes it, blackens the dome of the world or Easter-eggs it, moving at great heights or lesser ones, shifting, always shifting, juggling a billion particles of solids, liquids, and gases, through orbits that only such winds may maintain for a time, sometimes shattering, or being shattered against the tops of mountains, high trees, tall buildings, sometimes bellying to devastate the flat land itself and deck it with smashings, color it ruined, plowed, fertilized, dropping also rains, of stone, wood, the dead of the sea and the land, masonry, metal, sand, fire, fabric, glass, coral, and water sometimes, too, as it disciplines the earth and the seas which perhaps abused it too much, too long, by bringing forth those who respected no pacts between the basic elements, who smudged the heavens with a million pollutants and fear, filling the bottle above the air with the radioactivity of five hundred prematurely detonated warheads, aborted by a radiation level already raised to the point where it broke them apart with spontaneous chain reactions, troubling its still blue on those three days when the pacts were broken, so that within its still heights the clouds were torn apart and swept away before the wailing it raised up to protest this final too familiar familiarity, so that perhaps the word it cries is "Rape!" or maybe "Help!" or "God!" even, and the fact that it cries at all may hold hope and the promise of an eventual purging, of the land and the sea as well as the air, and then again, perhaps not, for it could equally be the banshee wail of doom near at hand that rises from its round throat that swalloweth and spitteth forth again; and as it surges by, perhaps it takes fire from the hot spots where the cobalt bombs fell and, of course, perhaps not also; for these, with their own pulses of death, are of the earth, if anything, and that which they do may not offend the low-stooping heavens or provoke them to greater movement; but consider for a moment the thousand pillars of the sky, plus many, which force the premonition that the world is a forbidden place for man to enter: standing as they do to feed the circling winds, these things may even be worshiped one day, if they persist and prospective worshipers do likewise, for they rise like angels from the dust or the green tiles of the sea, shrug their unhuman shoulders and soar up into the place where no man may go, and then like the communion of saints link that which is above with that which is below, effecting a transference of essence before they lapse into quietude, winding or unwinding themselves like barbers' poles or springs; and of all these things which the sky gives and takes back again, altered, to be sure, there is none which breaks the heart more than life, if you're there to see, and may you never, how brightness is traded for darkness and undergoes a sea-change where once there was no sea, but sunlight and blue and cirrus and piles of cumulus, as a city, a house, a dog, a man ascends into the heavens, is transfigured, returns again as dross, the straw and mud of the primal ooze that drips like spittle from the lips that were blue, perhaps to start again all single-celled and still, but probably not, for the ways of the winds seem not the ways of man or of life, but rather, as the gallant Mermoz must have noted that day, that night, despite their nearness they are distant.

It is this, more than anything else in the entire world, that demands regard.

A setting, nothing more, no plot, no characters.

Because of this nearness and this distance.

Put a frame around it if you would, and call it what you would, if you would.

But the winds will scream with the seven voices of judgment, if you're there to hear them, and may you never, and it just doesn't seem that any name will fit.

He drove along, and after a time he heard the sound of another bike. A Harley cut onto the road from the dirt path to his left, and he couldn't try running away from it because he couldn't speed with the load he bore. So he allowed himself to be paced.

After a while the rider of the other bike, a tall, thin man with a flaming beard, drew up alongside him, to the left. He smiled and raised his right hand and let it fall and then gestured with his head.

Tanner braked and came to a halt. Redbeard was right beside him when he did. He said, "Where you going, man?"

"Boston."

"What you got in the box?"

"Like, drugs."

"What kind?" and the man's eyebrows arched and the smile came again onto his lips.

"For the plague they got going there."

"Oh. I thought you meant the other kind."

"Sorry."

The man held a pistol in his right hand, and he said, "Get off your bike."

Tanner did this, and the man raised his left hand, and another man came forward from the brush at the side of the road. "Wheel this guy's bike about two hundred yards up the highway," he said, "and park it in the middle. Then take your place."