CHAPTER 35 “I want to get out of the city,” Rita said without turning around. She was standing on the small

CHAPTER 35

142 The power was still on in Manhattan, but Larry didn't think it would be for much longer. It had gone out in most other places already. Last night he had stood on the balcony after Rita was asleep and from this high up you could see that the lights were out in better than half of Brooklyn and all of Queens. There was a dark pocket across 110th all the way to that end of Manhattan Island. Looking the other way you could still see bright lights in Union City and-maybe-Bayonne, but otherwise, New Jersey was black. The blackness meant more than the loss of lights. Among other things it meant the loss of the air conditioning, the modern convenience that made it possible to live in this particular hardcore urban sprawl after the middle of June. It meant that all the people who had died quietly in their apartments and tenements were now rotting in ovens, and whenever he thought of that his mind returned to the thing he had seen in the comfort station on Transverse Number One. He had dreamed about that, and in his dreams that black, sweet treat came to life and beckoned him. On a more personal level, he supposed she was troubled by what they had found when they walked down to the park yesterday. She had been laughing and chatty and gay when they started out, but coming back she had begun to be old. The monster-shouter had been lying on one of the paths in a huge pool of his own blood. His glasses lay with both lenses shattered beside his stiff and outstretched left hand. Some monster had been abroad after all, apparently. The man had been stabbed repeatedly. To Larry's sickened eyes he looked like a human pincushion. She had screamed and screamed, and when her hysteria had finally quieted, she insisted that they bury him. So they had. And going back to the apartment, she had been the woman he had found this morning. "It's all right," he said. "Just a little scald. The skin's hardly red." "I'll get the Unguentine. There's some in the medicine cabinet." She started away, and he grabbed her firmly by the shoulders and made her sit down. She looked up at him from darkly circled eyes. "What you're going to do is eat," he said. "Scrambled eggs, toast, coffee. Then we're going to get some maps and see what's the best way to get off Manhattan. We'll have to walk, you know." "Yes... I suppose we will." He went into the kitchenette, not wanting to look at the mute need in her eyes anymore, and got the last two eggs from the refrigerator. He cracked them into a bowl, tossed the eggshells into the disposal, and began to beat them. "Where do you want to go?" he asked. "What? I don't .." "Which way?" he said with a touch of impatience. He added milk to the eggs and put the skillet back on the stove. "North? New England's that way. South? I don't really see the point in that. We could go—" A strangled sob. He turned and saw her looking at him, her hands warring with each other in her lap, her eyes shiny. She was trying to control herself and having no luck. "What's the matter?" he asked, going to her. "What is it?" "I don't think I can eat," she sobbed. "I know you want me to... I'll try... but the smell..." He crossed the living room, trundled the glass doors closed along their stainless steel tracks, then latched them firmly. "There," he said lightly, hoping the annoyance he felt with her didn't show. "Better?" "Yes," she said eagerly. "That's a lot better. I can eat now." He went back to the kitchenette and stirred the eggs, which had begun to bubble. There was a grater in the utensil drawer and he ran a block of American cheese along it, making a small pile that he sprinkled into the eggs. Behind him she moved and a moment later Debussy filled the apartment, too light and pretty for Larry's taste. He didn't care for light classical music. If you were going to have classical shit, you ought to go whole hog and have your Beethoven or your Wagner or someone like that. Why fuck around? She had asked him in a casual manner what he did for a living... the casual manner, he reflected with some resentment, of a person for whom anything so simple as "a living" had never been a problem. I was a rock and roll singer, he told her, slightly amazed at how painless that past tense was. Sing with this band for a while, then that one. Sometimes a studio gig. She had nodded and that was the end of it. He had no urge to tell her about "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man? "—that was the past now. The gap between that life and this was so large he hadn't really comprehended it yet. In that life he had been running away from a cocaine dealer; in this one he could bury a man in Central Park and accept that (more or less) as a matter of course. He put the eggs on a plate, added a cup of instant coffee with a lot of cream and sugar, the way she liked it (Larry himself subscribed to the trucker's credo of "if you wanted a cup of cream and sugar, whydja ask for coffee?"), and brought it to the table. She=was sitting on a hassock, holding her elbows and facing the stereo. Debussy strained out of the speakers like melted butter.

143 "Soup's on," he called. She came to the table with a wan smile, looked at the eggs the way a track and field runner might look at a series of hurdles, and began to eat. "Good," she said. "You were right. Thank you." "You're more than welcome," he said. "Now look. What I'm going to suggest is this. We go down Fifth to Thirtyninth and turn west. Cross to New Jersey by the Lincoln Tunnel. We can follow 495 northwest to Passaic and... those eggs okay? They're not spoiled?" She smiled. "They're fine." She forked more into her mouth, followed it with a sip of coffee. "Just what I needed. Go ahead, I'm listening." "From Passaic we just ankle it west until the roads are clear enough for us to drive. Then I thought we could turn northeast and head up to New England. Make kind of a buttonhook, do you see what I mean? It looks longer, but I think it'll end up saving us a lot of hassles. Maybe take a house on the ocean in Maine. Kittery, York, Wells, Ogunquit, maybe Scarborough or Boothbay Harbor. How does that sound?" He had been looking out the window, thinking as he spoke, and now he turned back to her. What he saw frightened him badly for a moment—it was as if she'd gone insane. She was smiling, but it was a rictus of pain and horror. Sweat stood out on her face in big round droplets. "Rita? Jesus, Rita, what—" "—sorry—" She scrambled up, knocking her chair over, and fled across the living room. One foot hooked the hassock she had been sitting on and it rolled on its side like an oversized checker. She almost fell herself. "Rita?" Then she was in the bathroom and he could hear the industrial grinding sound of her breakfast coming up. He slammed his hand flat on the table in irritation, then got up and went in after her. God, he hated it when people puked. It always made you feel like puking yourself. The smell of slightly used American cheese in the bathroom made him want to gag. Rita was sitting on the robin's-egg-blue tile of the floor, her legs folded under her, her head still hanging weakly over the bowl. She wiped her mouth with a swatch of toilet paper and then looked up at him supplicatingly, her face as pale as paper. "I'm sorry, I just couldn't eat it, Larry. Really. I'm so sorry." "Well Jesus, if you knew it was going to make you do that, why did you try?" "Because you wanted me to. And I didn't want you to be angry with me. But you are, aren't you? You are angry with me." His mind went back to last night. She had made love to him with such frantic energy that for the first time he had found himself thinking of her age and had been a little disgusted. It had been like being caught in one of those exercise machines. He had come quickly, almost in selfdefense it seemed, and a long while later she had fallen back, panting and unfulfilled. Later, while he was on the borderline of sleep, she had drawn close to him and once again he had been able to smell her sachet, a more expensive version of scent his mother had always worn when they went out to the movies, and she had murmured the thing that had jerked him back from sleep and had kept him awake for another two hours: You won't leave me, will you? You won't leave me alone? Before that she had been good in bed, so good that he was stunned. She had taken him back to this place after their lunch on the day they had met, and what had happened had happened quite naturally. He remembered an instant of disgust when he saw how her breasts sagged, and how the blue veins were prominent (it made him think of his mother's varicose veins), but he had forgotten all about that when her legs came up and her thighs pressed against his hips with amazing strength. Slow, she had laughed. The last shall be first and the first last. He had been on the verge when she had pushed him off and gotten cigarettes. What the hell are you doing? he asked, amazed, while old John Thomas waved indignantly in the air, visibly throbbing. She had smiled. You've got a free hand, don't you? So do I. So they had done that while they smoked, and she chatted lightly about all manner of things- although the color had come up in her cheeks and after a while her breath had shortened and what she was saying began to drift off, forgotten. Now, she said, taking his cigarette and her own and crushing them both out. Let's see if you can finish what you started. If you can't, I'll likely tear you apart. He finished it, quite satisfactorily for both of them, and they had slipped off to sleep. He woke up sometime after four and watched her sleeping, thinking that there was something to be said for experience after all. He had done a lot of screwing in the last ten years or so, but what had happened earlier hadn't been screwing. It had been something much better than that, if a little decadent. Well, she's had lovers, of course.

144 This had excited him again, and he woke her up. And so it had been until they had found the monstershouter, and last night. There had been other things before then, things that troubled him, but which he had accepted. Something like this, he had rationalized it, if it only makes you a little bit psycho, you're way ahead. Two nights ago he had awakened sometime after two and had heard her running a glass of water in the bathroom. He knew she was probably taking another sleeping pill. She had the big red-and- yellow gelatine capsules that were known as "yellowjackets" on the West Coast. Big downers. He told himself she'd probably been taking them long before the superflu had happened. And there was the way she followed him from place to place in the apartment, too, even standing in the bathroom door and talking to him while he was showering or relieving himself. He was a private bathroom person, but he told himself that some weren't. A lot of it depended on your upbringing. He would have a talk with her... sometime. But now... Was he going to have to carry her on his back? Christ, he hoped not. She had seemed stronger than that, at least she had at first. It was one of the reasons she had appealed to him so strongly that day in the park... the main reason, really. There's no more truth in advertising, he thought bitterly. How the hell was he qualified to take care of her when he couldn't even watch out for himself? He'd shown that pretty conclusively after the record had broken out. Wayne Stukey hadn't been shy about pointing it out, either. "No," he told her, "I'm not angry. It's just that... you know, I'm not your boss. If you don't feel like eating, just say so." "I told you... I said I didn't think I could—" "The fuck you did," he snapped, startled and angry. She bent her head and looked at her hands and he knew she was struggling to keep from sobbing because he wouldn't like that. For a moment it made him angrier than ever and he almost shouted: I'm not your father or your fat-cat husband! I'm not going to take care of you! You've got thirty years on me, for Christ's sake! Then he felt the familiar surge of self-contempt and wondered what the hell could be the matter with him. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm an insensitive bastard." "No you're not," she said, and sniffled. "It's just that... all of this is starting to catch up with me. It... yesterday, that poor man in the park... I thought: no one is ever going to catch the people who did that to him, and put them in jail. They'll just go on and do it again and again. Like animals in the jungle. And it all began to seem very real. Do you understand, Larry? Can you see what I mean?" She turned her tear-wet eyes up to him. "Yes," he said, but he was still impatient with her, and just a trifle contemptuous. It was a real situation, how could it not be? They were in the middle of it and had watched it develop this far. His own mother was dead; he had watched her die, and was she trying to say that she was somehow more sensitive to all this than he was? He had lost his mother and she had lost the man who brought her Mercedes around, but somehow her loss was supposed to be the greater. Well, that was bullshit. Just bullshit. "Try not to be angry with me," she said. "I'll do better." I hope so. I sure do hope so. "You're fine," he said, and helped her to her feet. "Come on, now. What do you say? We've got a lot to do. Feel up to it?" "Yes," she said, but her expression was the same as it had been when he offered her the eggs. "When we get out of the city, you'll feel better." She looked at him nakedly. "Will I?" "Sure," Larry said heartily. "Sure you will."

They went first-cabin. Manhattan Sporting Goods was locked, but Larry broke a hole in the show window with a long iron pipe he had found. The burglar alarm brayed senselessly into the deserted street. He selected a large pack for himself and a smaller one for Rita. She had packed two changes of clothes for each of them-it was all he would allow-and he was carrying them in a PanAm flight bag she had found in the closet, along with toothbrushes. The toothbrushes struck him as slightly absurd. Rita was fashionably attired for walking, in white silk deckpants and a shell blouse. Larry wore faded bluejeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. They loaded the packs with freeze-dried foods and nothing else. There was no sense, Larry told her, in weighting themselves down with a lot of other stuffincluding more clothes hen they could simply take what they wanted on the other side of the river. She agreed wanly, and her lack of interest nettled him again.

145 After a short interior debate with himself, he also added a . 30-. 30 and two hundred rounds of ammunition. It was a beautiful gun, and the pricetag he pulled from the triggerguard and dropped indifferently on the floor said four hundred and fifty dollars. "Do you really think we'll need that?" she asked apprehensively. She still had the . 32 in her purse. "I think we'd better have it," he told her, not wanting to say more but thinking about the monster-shouter's ugly end. "Oh," she said in a small voice, and he guessed from her eyes that she was thinking about that, too. "That pack's not too heavy for you, is it?" "Oh, no. It isn't. Really." "Well, they have a way of getting heavier as you walk along. You just say the word and I'll carry it for a while." "I'll be all right," she said, and smiled. After they were on the sidewalk again, she looked both ways and said, "We're leaving New York." "Yes." She turned to him. "I'm glad. I feel like... oh, when I was a little girl. And my father would say, `We're going on a trip today. ' Do you remember how that was?" Larry smiled a little in return, remembering the evenings his mother would say, "That Western you wanted to see is down at the Crest, Larry. Clint Eastwood. What do you say?" "I guess I do remember," he said. She stretched up on her toes, and readjusted the pack a little bit on her shoulders. "The beginning of a journey," she said, and then so softly he wasn't sure he'd heard her correctly: "The way leads ever on .. "What?" "It's a line from Tolkien," she said. "The Lord of the Rings. I've always thought of it as sort of a gateway to adventure." "The less adventure the better," Larry said, but almost unwillingly he knew what she meant. Still she was looking at the street. Near this intersection it was a narrow canyon between high stone and stretches of sun-reflecting thermopane, clogged with cars backed up for miles. It was as if everyone in New York had decided at the same time to park in the streets. She said: "I've been to Bermuda and England and Jamaica and Montreal and Saigon and to Moscow. But I haven't been on a journey since I was a little girl and my father took my sister Bess and me to the zoo. Let's go, Larry. "

It was a walk that Larry Underwood never, forgot. He found himself thinking that she hadn't been so wrong to quote Tolkien at that, Tolkien with his mythic lands seen through the lens of time and half-mad, half-exalted imaginings, peopled with elves and ents and trolls and orcs. There were none of those in New York, but so much had changed, so much was out of joint, that it was impossible not to think of it in terms of fantasy. A man hung from a lamppost at Fifth and East Fifty-fourth, below the park and in a once congested business district, a placard with the single word LOOTER hung around his neck. A cat lying on top of a hexagonal litter basket (the basket still had fresh-looking advertisements for a Broadway show on its sides) with her kittens, giving them suck and enjoying the midmorning sun. A young man with a big grin and a valise who strolled up to them and told Larry he would give him a million dollars for the use of the woman for fifteen minutes. The million, presumably, was in the valise. Larry unslung the rifle and told him to take his million elsewhere. "Sure, man. Don't hold it against me, you dig it? Can't blame a—guy for tryin, can you? Have a nice day. Hang loose." They reached the corner of Fifth and East Thirty-ninth shortly after meeting that man (Rita, with a hysterical sort of good humor, insisted on referring to him as John Bearsford Tipton, a name which meant nothing to Larry). It was nearly noon, and Larry suggested lunch. There was a delicatessen on the corner, but when he pushed the door open, the smell of rotted meat that came out made her draw back. "I'd better not go in there if I want to save what appetite I have," she said apologetically. Larry suspected he could find some cured meat insidesalami, pepperoni, something like that-but after running across "John Bearsford Tipton" four blocks back, he didn't want to leave her alone for even the short time it would take to go in and check. So they found a bench half a block west, and ate dehydrated fruit and dehydrated strips of bacon. They finished with cheese spread on Ritz crackers and passed a thermos of iced coffee back and forth. "This time I was really hungry," she said proudly. He smiled back, feeling better. Just to be on the move, to be taking some positive action-that was good. He had told her she would feel better when they got out of New York. At the time it had just been something to say. Now, consulting the rise in his own spirits., he guessed it was true. Being in

146 New York was like being in a graveyard where the dead were not yet quiet. The sooner they got out, the better it would be. She would perhaps revert to the way she had been that first day in the park. They would go to Maine on the secondary roads and set up housekeeping in one of those rich-bitch summer houses. North now, and south in September or October. Boothbay Harbor in the summer, Key Biscayne in the winter. It had a nice ring. Occupied with his thoughts, he didn't see her grimace of pain as he stood up and shouldered the rifle he had insisted. on bringing. They were moving west now, their shadows behind them—at first as squat as frogs, beginning tolengthen out as the afternoon progressed. They passed the Avenue of the Americas, Seventh Avenue, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth. The streets were crammed and silent, frozen rivers of automobiles in every color, predominated by the yellow of the taxicabs. Many of the cars had become hearses, their decaying drivers still leaning behind the wheels, their passengers slumped as if, weary of the traffic jam, they had fallen asleep. Larry started to think that maybe they'd want to pick up a couple of motorcycles once they got out of the city. That would give them both mobility and a fighting chance to skirt the worst of the clots of dead vehicles which must litter the highways everywhere. Always assuming she can run a bike, he thought. And the way things were going, it would turn out she couldn't. Life with Rita was turning out to be a real pain in the butt, at least in some of its aspects. But if push came down to shove, he supposed she could ride pillion behind him. At the intersection of Thirty-ninth and Seventh, they saw a young man wearing cutoff denim shorts and nothing else lying atop a Ding-Dong Taxi. "Is he dead?" Rita asked, and at the sound of her voice the young man sat up, looked around, saw them, and waved. They waved back. The young man lay placidly back down. It was just after two o'clock when they crossed Eleventh Avenue. Larry heard a muffled cry of pain behind him and realized Rita was no longer walking on his left. She was down on one knee, holding her foot. With something like horror, Larry noticed for the first time that she was wearing expensive open-toed sandals, probably in the eighty-dollar range, just the thing for a four-block stroll along Fifth Avenue while window-shopping, but for a long walk-a hike, reallylike the one they hart been making... The ankle-straps had chafed through her skin. Blood was trickling down her ankles. "Larry, I'm s—" He jerked her abruptly to her feet. "What were you thinking about?" he shouted into her face. He felt a moment's shame at the miserable way she recoiled, but also a mean sort of pleasure. "Did you think you could cab back to your apartment if your feet got tired?" "I never thought—" "Well, Christ!" He ran his hands through his hair. "I guess you didn't. You're bleeding, Rita. How long has it been hurting?" Her voice was so low and husky that he had trouble hearing her even in the preternatural silence. "Since... well, since about Fifth and Forty-ninth, I guess." "Your feet have been hurting you for twenty fucking blocks and you didn't say anything?" "I thought... it might... go away... not hurt anymore... I didn't want to... we were making such good time... getting out of the city... I just thought..." "You didn't think at all," he said angrily. "How much good time are we going to make with you like this? Your fucking feet look like you got fucking crucified." "Don't swear at me, Larry," she said, beginning to sob. "Please don't... it makes me feel so bad when you... please don't swear at me." He was in an ecstasy of rage now, and later he would not be able to understand why the sight of her bleeding feet had blown all his circuits that way. For the moment it didn't matter. He screamed into her face: "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" The word echoed back from the high-rise apartment buildings, dim and meaningless. She put her hands over her face and leaned forward, crying. It made him even angrier, and he supposed that part of it was that she really didn't want to see: she would just as soon put her hands over her face and let him lead her, why not, there had always been someone around to take good care of Our Heroine, Little Rita. Someone to drive the car, do the marketing, wash out the toilet bowl, do the taxes. So let's put on some of that gagging-sweet Debussy and put our well-manicured hands over our eyes and leave it all up to Larry. Take care of me, Larry, after seeing what happened to the monster-shouter, I've decided I don't want to see anymore. It's all rawther sordid for one of my breeding and background. He yanked her hands away. She cringed and tried to put them over her eyes again. "Look at me." She shook her head. "Goddammit, you look at me, Rita." She finally did in a strange, flinching way, as if thinking he would now go to work on her with his fists as well as his tongue. The way a part of him felt now, that would be just fine.

147 "I want to tell you the facts of life because you don't seem to understand them. The fact is, we may have to walk another twenty or thirty miles. The fact is, if you get infected from those scrapes, you could get blood poisoning and die. The fact is, you've got to get your thumb out of your ass and start helping me." He had been holding her by the upper arms, and he saw that his thumbs had almost disappeared into her flesh. His anger broke when he saw the red marks that appeared when he let her go. He stepped away, feeling uncertain again, knowing with sick certainty that he had overreacted. Larry Underwood strikes again. If he was so goddam smart, why hadn't he checked out her footgear before they started out? Because that's her problem, part of him said with surly defensiveness. No, that wasn't true. It had been his problem. Because she didn't know. If he was going to take her with him (and it was only today that he had begun to think how much simpler life would be if he hadn't), he was just going to have to be responsible for her. Be damned if I will, the surly voice said. His mother: You're a taker, Larry. The oral hygienist from Fordham, crying out her window after him: I thought you were a nice guy! You ain't no nice guy! There's something left out of you, Larry. You're a taker. That's a lie! That is a goddamned LIE! "Rita," he said, "I'm sorry." She sat down on the pavement in her sleeveless blouse and her white deckpants, her hair looking gray and old. She bowed her head and held her hurt feet. She wouldn't look at him. "I'm sorry," he repeated. "I... look, I had no right to say those things." He did, but never mind. If you apologized, things got smoothed over. It was how the world worked. "Go on, Larry," she said, "don't let me slow you down." "I said I was sorry," he told her, his voice a trifle petulant. "We'll get you some new shoes and some white socks. We'll..." "We'll nothing. Go on." "Rita, I'm sorry—" "If you say that one more time, I'll scream. You're a shit and your apology is not accepted. Now go on." "I said I was—" She threw back her head and shrieked. He took a step backward, looking around to see if anyone had heard her, to see if maybe a policeman was running over to see what kind of awful thing that young fellow was doing to the old lady who was sitting on the sidewalk with her shoes off. Culture lag, he thought distractedly, what fun it all is. She stopped screaming and looked at him. She made a flicking gesture with her hand, as if he was a bothersome fly. "You better stop," he said, "or I really will leave you." She only looked at him. He couldn't meet her eyes and so dropped his gaze, hating her for making him do that. "All right," he said, "have a good time getting raped and murdered." He shouldered the rifle and started off again, now angling left toward the car-packed 495 entrance ramp, sloping down toward the tunnel's mouth. At the foot of the ramp he saw there had been one hell of a crash; a man driving a Mayflower moving van had tried to butt his way into the main traffic flow and cars were scattered around the van like bowling pins. A burned-out Pinto lay almost beneath the van's body. The van's driver hung halfway out of the cab window, head down, arms dangling. There was a fan of dried blood and puke sprayed out below him on the door. Larry looked around, sure he would see her walking toward him or standing and accusing him with her eyes. But Rita was gone. "Fuck you," he said with nervous resentment. "I tried to apologize." For a moment he couldn't go on; he felt impaled by hundreds of angry dead eyes, staring out at him from all these cars. A snatch of Dylan occurred to him: "I waited for you inside the frozen traffic... when you knew I had some other place to be... but where are you tonight, sweet Marie?" Ahead, he could see four lanes of westbound traffic disappearing into the black arch of the tunnel, and with something like real dread he saw that the overhead fluorescent bars inside the Lincoln were out. It would be like going into an automobile graveyard. They would let him get halfway and then they would all begin to stir... to come alive... he would hear car doors clicking open and then softly chunking closed... their shuffling footsteps... A light sweat broke on his body. Overhead a bird called raucously and he jumped. You're being stupid, he told himself. Kid's stuff, that's what this is. All you have to do is stay on the pedestrian catwalk and in no time at all you'll be —strangled by the walking dead.

148 He licked his lips and tried to laugh. It came out badly. He walked five paces toward the place where the ramp joined the highway and then stopped again. To his left was a Caddy, an El Dorado, and a woman with a blackened troll face was staring out at him. Her nose was pressed into a bulb against the glass. Blood and snot had trickled out onto the window. The man who had been driving the Caddy was slumped over the wheel as if looking for something on the floor. All the Caddy's windows were rolled up; it would be like a greenhouse in there. If he opened the door the woman would spill out and break open on the pavement like a sack of rotten melons and the smell would be warm and steamy, wet and crawling with decay. The way it would smell in the tunnel. Abruptly Larry turned around and trotted back the way he had come, feeling the breeze he was making cool the sweat on his forehead. "Rita! Rita, listen! I want to—" The words died as he reached the top of the ramp. Rita was still gone. Thirtyninth Street dwindled away to a point. He ran from the south sidewalk to the north, squeezing between bumpers and scrambling over hoods almost hot enough to blister his skin. But the north sidewalk was also empty. He cupped his hands around his mouth and cried: "Rita! Rita!" His only answer a dead echo: "Rita... ita... ita... ita..."

By four o'clock dark clouds had begun to build over Manhattan and the sound of thunder rolled back and forth between the city's cliffs. Lightning forked down at the buildings. It was as if God were trying to frighten the few remaining people out of hiding. The light had become yellow and strange, and Larry didn't like it. His belly was cramped and when he lit a cigarette it trembled in his hand the way the coffee cup had trembled in Rita's this morning. He was sitting at the street end of the access ramp, leaning his back against the lowest bar of the railing. His pack was on his lap, and the . 30-. 30 was leaning against the railing beside him. He had thought she would get scared and come back before long, but she hadn't. Fifteen minutes ago he had given up calling her name. The echoes freaked him out. Thunder rolled again, close this time. A chilly breeze ran its hand over the back of his shirt, which was pasted to his skin with sweat. He was going to have to get inside somewhere or else stop shitting around and go through the tunnel. If he couldn't work up the guts to go through, he'd have to spend another night in the city and go over the George Washington Bridge in the morning, and that was 140 blocks north. He tried to think rationally about the tunnel. There was nothing in there that was going to bite him. He'd forgotten to pick up a good big flashlight-Christ, you never remembered everything-but he did have his butane Bic, and there was a guardrail between the catwalk and the road. Anything else... thinking about all those dead people in their cars, for instance... that was just panic talking, comic-book stuff, about as sensible as worrying about the boogeyman in the closet. If that's all you can think about, Larry (he lectured himself), then you're not going to get along in this brave new world. Not at all. You're A stroke of lightning split the sky almost directly overhead, making him wince. It was followed by a heavy caisson of thunder. He thought randomly, July 1, this is the day you're supposed to take your sweetie to Coney Island and eat hotdogs by the score. Knock down the three wooden milk- bottles with one ball and win the Kewpie doll. The fireworks at night A cold splash of rain struck the side of his face and then another hit the back of his neck and trickled inside the collar of his shirt. Dime-sized drops began to hit around him. He stood up, slung the pack over his shoulders, and hoisted the rifle. He was still not sure which way to go-back to Thirty-ninth or into the Lincoln Tunnel. But he had to get undercover somewhere because it was starting to pour. Thunder broke overhead with a gigantic roar, making him squeal in terror-a sound no different than those made by Cro-Magnon men two million years before. "You fucking coward," he said, and trotted down the ramp toward the maw of the tunnel, his head bent forward as the rain began to come harder. It dripped from his hair. He passed the woman with her nose against the El Dorado's passenger window, trying not to look but catching her out of the tail of his eye just the same. The rain drummed on the car roofs like jazz percussion. It was coming down so hard it bounced back up again, causing a light mist-haze. Larry stopped for a moment just outside the tunnel, undecided and frightened again. Then it began to hail, and that decided him. The hailstones were big, stinging. Thunder bellowed again. Okay, he thought. Okay, okay, okay, I'm convinced. He stepped into the Lincoln Tunnel.

It was much blacker inside than he had imagined it would be. At first the opening behind him cast dim white light ahead and he could see yet more cars, jammed in bumper to bumper (it must have

149 been bad, dying in here, he thought, as claustrophobia wrapped its stealthy banana fingers lovingly around his head and began to first caress and then to squeeze his temples, it must have been really bad, it must have been fucking horrible), and the greenish-white tiles that dressed the upward- curving walls. He could see the pedestrian railing to his right, stretching dimly ahead. On his left, at thirtyor forty-foot intervals, were big support pillars. A sign advised him DO NOT CHANGE LANES. There were dark fluorescents embedded in the tunnel's roof, and the blank glass eyes of closed- circuit TV cameras. And as he negotiated the first slow, banked curve, bearing gently to the right, the light grew dimmer until all he could see were muted flashes of chrome. After that the light simply ceased to exist at all. He fumbled out his Bic, held it up, and spun the wheel. The light it provided was pitifully small, feeding his unease rather than assuaging it. Even with the flame turned up all the way it only gave him a circle of visibility about six feet in diameter. He put it back in his pocket and kept walking, trailing his hand lightly along the railing. There was an echo in here, too, one he liked even less than the one outside. The echo made it sound like someone was behind him... stalking him. He stopped several times, head cocked, eyes wide (but blind), listening until the echo had died off. After a bit he began to shuffle along, not lifting his heels from the concrete, so the echo wouldn't recur. Sometime after that he stopped again and flicked the lighter close to his wristwatch. It was four- twenty, but he wasn't sure what to make of that. In this blackness time seemed to have no objective meaning. Neither did distance, for that matter; how long was the Lincoln Tunnel, anyway? A mile? Two? Surely it couldn't be two miles under the Hudson River. Let's say a mile. But if a mile was all it was, he should have been at the other end already. If the average man walks four miles an hour, he can walk one mile in fifteen minutes and he'd already been in this stinking hole five minutes longer than that. "I'm walking a lot slower," he said, and jumped at the sound of his own voice. The lighter dropped from his hand and clicked onto the catwalk. The echo spoke back, changed into the dangerously jocular voice of an approaching lunatic: "...lot slower... lower... lower..." "Jesus," Larry muttered, and the echo whispered back: "zuss... zuss... zuss..." He wiped a hand across his face, fighting panic and the urge to give up thought and just run blindly forward. Instead he knelt (his knees popped like pistol shots, frightening him again) and walked his fingers over the miniature topography of the pedestrian catwalk-the chipped valleys in the cement, the ridge of an old cigarette butt, the hill of a tiny tinfoil ball-until at last he happened on his Bic. With an inner sigh he squeezed it tightly in his hand, stood up, and walked on. Larry was beginning to get himself under control again when his foot struck something stiff and barely yielding. He uttered an inhalatory sort of scream and took two staggering steps backward. He made himself hold steady as he pulled the Bic lighter from his pocket and flicked it. The flame wavered crazily in his trembling grasp. He had stepped on a soldier's hand. He was sitting with his back against the tunnel wall, his legs splayed across the walkway, a horrible sentinel left here to bar passage. His glazed eyes stared up at Larry. His lips had fallen away from his teeth and he seemed to be grinning. A switchblade knife jutted jauntily from his throat. The lighter was growing warm in his hand. Larry let it go out. Licking his lips, holding the railing in a deathgrip, he forced himself forward until the toe of his shoe struck the soldier's hand again. Then he stepped over, making a comically large stride, and a kind of nightmarish certainty came over him. He would hear the scrape of the soldier's boots as he shifted, and then the soldier would reach out and clasp his leg in a loose cold grip. In a shuffling sort of run, Larry went another ten paces and then made himself stop, knowing that if he didn't stop, the panic would win and he would bolt blindly, chased by a terrible regiment of echoes. When he felt he had himself under some sort of control, he began to walk again. But now it was worse; his toes shrank inside his shoes, afraid that at any second they might come in contact with another body sprawled on the catwalk... and soon enough, it happened. He groaned and fumbled the lighter out again. This time it was much worse. The body his foot had struck was that of an old man in a blue suit. A black silk skullcap had fallen from his balding head into his lap. There was a six-pointed star of beaten silver in his lapel. Beyond him were another half a dozen corpses: two woman, a man of middle age, a woman who might have been in her late seventies, two teenage boys. The lighter was growing too hot to hold any longer. He snapped it off and slipped it back into his pants pocket, where it glowed like a warm coal against his leg. Captain Trips hadn't taken this group off any more than it had taken the soldier back there. He had seen the blood, the torn clothes, the chipped tiles, the bullet holes. They had been gunned down. Larry remembered the rumors that

150 soldiers had blocked off the points of exit from Island Manhattan. He hadn't known whether to believe them or not; he had heard so many rumors last week as things were breaking down. The situation here was easy enough to reconstruct. They had been caught in the tunnel, but they hadn't been too sick to walk. They got out of their car and began to make their way toward the Jersey side, using the catwalk just as he was doing. There had been a command post, machine-gun emplacement, something. Had been? Or was now? Larry stood sweating, trying to make up his mind. The solid darkness provided the perfect theater screen on which the mind could play out its fantasies. He saw: grim-eyed soldiers in germproof suits crouched behind a machine gun equipped with an infrared peeper-scope, their job to cut down any stragglers who tried to come through the tunnel; one single soldier left behind, a suicide volunteer, wearing infrared goggles and creeping toward him with a knife in his teeth; two soldiers quietly loading a mortar with a single poison gas canister. Yet he couldn't bring himself to go back. He was quite sure that these imaginings were only vapors, and the thought of retracing his steps was insupportable. Surely the soldiers were now gone. The dead one he'd stepped over seemed to support that. But... But what was really troubling him, he supposed, were the bodies directly ahead. They were sprawled all over each other for eight or nine feet. He couldn't just step over them as he had stepped over the soldier. And if he went off the catwalk to go around them, he risked breaking his leg or his ankle. If he was to go on, he would have to... well... he would have to walk over them. Behind him, in the darkness, something moved. Larry wheeled around, instantly engulfed with fear at that single gritting sound... a footstep. "Who's there?" he shouted, unslinging his rifle. No answer but the echo. When it faded he heard-or thought he did-the quiet sound of breathing. He stood bug-eyed in the dark, the hairs along the nape of his neck turning into hackles. He held his breath. There was no sound. He was beginning to dismiss it as imagination when the sound came again... a sliding, quiet footstep. He fumbled madly for his lighter. The thought that it would make him a target never occurred to him. 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 soft bonk as 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 sterile Andromeda Strain suits that he saw on the screen of his interior theater but the Morlocks from the Classic Comics version of H. G. Wells's The 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.

151 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... ooooh-hhowww—" "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.

152 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.