Dr. Bloodmoney (11 page)

In the ruins of a cement basement of a house on Cedar Street in the Berkeley hills, Stuart McConchie spied something fat and gray that hopped from one split block and behind the next. He picked up his broom handle—one end came to a cracked, elongated point—and wriggled forward.

The man with him in the basement, a sallow, lean man named Ken, who was dying of radiation exposure, said, “You’re not going to eat that.”

“Sure I am,” Stuart said, wriggling through the dust which had settled into the open, exposed basement until he lay against the split block of cement. The rat, aware of him, squeaked with fear. It had come up from the Berkeley sewer and now it wanted to get back. But he was between it and the sewer; or rather, he thought, between her and the sewer. It was no doubt a big female. The males were skinnier.

The rat scurried in fright, and Stuart drove the sharp end of the stick into it. Again it squeaked, long and sufferingly. On the end of the stick it was still alive; it kept on squeaking. So he held it against the ground, held the stick down, and crushed its head with his foot.

“At least,” the dying man with him said, “you can cook it.”

“No,” Stuart said, and, seating himself, got out the pocket knife which he had found—it had been in the pants pocket of a dead school boy—and began skinning the rat. While the dying man watched with disapproval, Stuart ate the dead, raw rat.

“I’m surprised you don’t eat me,” the man said, afterward.

“It’s no worse than eating raw shrimp,” Stuart said. He felt much better now; it was his first food in days.

“Why don’t you go looking for one of those relief stations that helicopter was talking about when it flew by yesterday?” the dying man said. “It said—or I understood it to say—that there’s a station over near the Hillside Grammar School. That’s only a few blocks from here; you could get that far.”

“No,” Stuart said.

“Why not?”

The answer, although he did not want to say it, was simply that he was afraid to venture out of the basement onto the street. He did not know why, except that there were things moving in the settling ash which he could not identify; he believed they were Americans but possibly they were Chinese or Russians. Their voices sounded strange and echoey, even in daytime. And the helicopter, too; he was not certain about that. It could have been an enemy trick to induce people to come out and be shot. In any case he still heard gunfire from the flat part of the city; the dim sounds started before the sun rose and occurred intermittently until nightfall.

“You can’t stay here forever,” Ken said. “It isn’t rational.” He lay wrapped up in the blankets which had belonged to one of the beds in the house; the bed had been hurled from the house as the house disintegrated, and Stuart and the dying man had found it in the backyard. Its neatly tucked in covers had been still on it, all in place including its two duck-feather pillows.

What Stuart was thinking was that in five days he had collected thousands of dollars in money from the pockets of dead people he had found in the ruins of houses along Cedar Street—from their pockets and from the houses themselves. Other scavengers had been after food and different objects such as knives and guns, and it made him uneasy that he alone wanted money. He felt, now, that if he stirred forth, if he reached a relief station, he would discover the truth: the money was worthless. And if it was, he was a horse’s ass for collecting it, and when he showed up at the relief station carrying a pillowcase full of it, everyone would jeer at him and rightly so, because a horse’s ass deserved to be jeered at.

And also, no one else seemed to be eating rats. Perhaps there was a superior food available of which he knew nothing; it sounded like him, down here eating something everyone else had discarded. Maybe there were cans of emergency rations being dropped from the air; maybe the cans came down early in the morning while he was still asleep and got all picked up before he had a chance to see them. He had had for several days now a deep and growing dread that he was missing out, that something free was being dispensed—perhaps in broad daylight—to everyone but him. Just my luck, he said to himself, and he felt glum and bitter, and the rat, which he had just eaten, no longer seemed a surfeit, as before.

Hiding, these last few days, down in the ruined cement basement of the house on Cedar Street, Stuart had had a good deal of time to think about himself, and he had realized that it had always been hard for him to make out what other people were doing; it had only been by the greatest effort that he had managed to act as they acted, appear like them. It had nothing to do, either, with his being a Negro because he had the same problem with black people as with white. It was not a social difficulty in the usual sense; it went deeper than that. For instance, Ken, the dying man lying opposite him. Stuart could not understand him; he felt cut off from him. Maybe that was because Ken was dying and he was not. Maybe that set up a barrier; the world was clearly divided into two new camps now: people who were getting weaker with each passing moment, who were perishing, and people like himself, who were going to make it. There was no possibility of communication between them because their worlds were too different.

And yet that was not it only, between himself and Ken; there was still more, the same old problem that the bomb attack had not created but merely brought to the surface. Now the gulf was wider; it was obvious that he did not actually comprehend the meaning of most activities conducted around him … he had been brooding, for instance, about the yearly trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles for his auto license renewal. As he lay in the basement it seemed to him more clearly each moment that the other people had gone to the Department of Motor Vehicles office over on Sacramento Street for a
good reason
, but he had gone because they had gone; he had, like a littler kid, merely tagged along. And now there was no one present to tag after; now he was alone. And therefore he could not think up any action to follow, he could not make any decision or follow any plan for the life of him.

So he simply waited, and as he waited, wondered about the ’copter which flew overhead now and then and about the vague shapes in the street, and more than anything else if he was a horse’s ass or not.

And then, all at once, he thought of something; he remembered what Hoppy Harrington had seen in
his
vision at Fred’s Fine Foods. Hoppy had seen him, Stuart McConchie, eating rats, but in the excitement and fear of all that had happened since, Stuart had forgotten. This now was what the phoce had seen; this was the vision—not the afterlife at all!

God damn that little crippled freak, Stuart thought to himself as he lay picking his teeth with a piece of wire. He was a fraud; he put something over on us.

Amazing how gullible people are, he said to himself. We believed him, maybe because he’s so peculiarly built anyhow … it seemed more credible with him being like he is—or was. He’s probably dead now, buried down in the service department. Well, that’s one good thing this war has done: wiped out all the freaks. But then, he realized, it’s also brewed up a whole new batch of them; there’ll be freaks strutting around for the next million years. It’ll be Bluthgeld’s paradise; in fact he’s probably quite happy right now—because this was really bomb testing.

Ken stirred and murmured, “Could you be induced to crawl across the street? There’s that corpse there and it might have cigarettes on it.”

Cigarettes, hell, Stuart thought. It probably has a walletful of money. He followed the dying man’s gaze and saw, sure enough, the corpse of a woman lying among the rubble on the far side. His pulse raced, because he could see a bulging handbag still clutched.

In a weary voice Ken said, “Leave the money, Stuart. It’s an obsession with you, a symbol of God knows what.” As Stuart crawled out from the basement Ken raised his voice to call, “A symbol of the opulent society.” He coughed, retched. “And that’s gone now,” he managed to add.

Up yours, Stuart thought as he crawled on across the street to the purse lying there. Sure enough, when he opened it he found a wad of bills, ones and fives and even a twenty. There was also a U-No candy bar in the purse, and he got that, too. But as he crawled back to the basement it occurred to him that the candy bar might be radioactive, so he tossed it away.

“The cigarettes?” Ken asked, when he returned.

“None.” Stuart opened the pillow case, which was buried up to its throat in the dry ash which had filled the basement; he stuffed the bills in with the others and tied the pillow case shut again.

“How about a game of chess?” Ken propped himself up weakly, opened the wooden box of chessmen which he and Stuart had found in the wreckage of the house. Already, he had managed to teach Stuart the rudiments of the game; before the war Stuart had never played.

“Naw,” Stuart said. He was watching, far off in the gray sky, the moving shape of some plane or rocket ship, a cylinder. God, he thought, could it be a bomb? Dismally, he watched it sink lower and lower; he did not even lie down, did not seek to hide as he had done that first time, in the initial few minutes on which so much—their being alive now—had depended. “What’s that?” he asked.

The dying man scrutinized it. “It’s a balloon.”

Not believing him, Stuart said, “It’s the Chinese!”

“It really is a balloon, a little one. What they used to call a blimp, I think. I haven’t seen one since I was a boy.”

“Could the Chinese float across the Pacific in balloons?” Stuart said, imagining thousands of such small gray cigar-shaped balloons, each with a platoon of Mongolian-type Chinese peasant soldiers, armed with Czech automatic rifles, clutching handholds, clinging to every fold. “It’s just what you’d expect them to think up from the beginning; they reduce the world to their level, back a couple centuries. Instead of catching up with us—” He broke off, because now he saw that the balloon had on its side a sign in English:

HAMILTON AIR FORCE BASE

The dying man said slowly, “It’s one of ours.”

“I wonder where they got it,” Stuart said.

“Ingenious,” the dying man said, “isn’t it? I suppose all the gasoline and kerosene are gone by now. Used right up. We’ll be seeing a lot of strange transportation from now on. Or rather, you will.”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Stuart said,

“I don’t feel sorry for myself or anyone,” the dying man said as he carefully laid out the chess pieces. “This is a nice set,” he said. “Made in Mexico, I notice. Hand-carved, no doubt… but very fragile.”

“Explain to me again how the bishop moves,” Stuart said.

Overhead, the Hamilton Air Force Base balloon loomed larger as it drifted closer. The two men in the basement bent over their chess board, paying no attention to it. Possibly it was taking pictures. Or possibly it was on a strategic mission; it might have a walkie-talkie aboard and was in contact with the Sixth Army units south of San Francisco. Who knew? Who cared? The balloon drifted by as the dying man advanced his king’s pawn two spaces to open the game.

“The game begins,” the dying man said. And then he added in a low voice, “For you, anyhow, Stuart. A strange, unfamiliar, new game ahead … you can even bet your pillow case of money, if you want.”

Grunting, Stuart pondered his own men and decided to move a rook’s pawn as his opening gambit—and knew, as soon as he had touched it, that it was an idiotic move.

“Can I take it back?” he asked hopefully.

“When you touch a piece you must move it,” Ken said, bringing out one of his knights.

“I don’t think that’s fair; I mean, I’m just learning,” Stuart said. He glared at the dying man, but the sallow face was adamant. “Okay,” he said resignedly, this time moving his king’s pawn, as Ken had done. I’ll watch his moves and do what he does, he decided. That way I’ll be safer.

From the balloon, now directly overhead, bits of white paper scattered, drifted and fluttered down. Stuart and the dying man paused in their game. One of the bits of paper fell near them in the basement and Ken reached out and picked it up. He read it, passed it to Stuart.

“Burlingame!” Stuart said, reading it. It was an appeal for volunteers, for the Army. “They want us to hike from here to
Burlingame
and be inducted? That’s fifty or sixty miles, all the way down this side of the Bay and around. They’re nuts!”

“They are,” Ken said. “They won’t get a soul.”

“Why hell, I can’t even make it down to LeConte Street to the relief station,” Stuart said. He felt indignant and he glared at the Hamilton Field balloon as it drifted on. They’re not going to get me to join up, he said to himself. Fork that.

“It says,” Ken said, reading the back of the proclamation, “that if you reach Burlingame they guarantee you water, food, cigarettes, anti-plague shots, treatment for radiation burns. How about that? But no girls.”

“Can you get interested in sex?” He was amazed. “Christ, I haven’t felt the slightest urge since the first bomb fell; it’s like the thing dropped off in fear, fell right off.”

“That’s because the diencephalic center of the brain suppresses the sex instinct in the face of danger,” Ken said. “But it’ll return.”

“No,” Stuart said, “because any child born would be a freak; there shouldn’t be any intercourse for say around ten years. They ought to make it a law. I can’t stand the idea of the world populated by freaks because I have had personal experience; one worked at Modern TV Sales with me, or rather in the service department. One was enough. I mean, they ought to hang that Bluthgeld up by his balls for what he did.”