CHAPTER 47
When it happened, it happened fast. It was around quarter of ten on July 30, and they had been on the road only an hour. Going was slow because there had been heavy showers the night before and the road was still slippery. There had been little talk among the four of them since yesterday morning, when Stu had awakened first Frannie, then Harold and Glen, to tell them about Perion's suicide. He was blaming himself, Fran thought miserably, blaming himself for something that was no more his fault than a thunderstorm would have been. She would have liked to have told him so, partly because he needed to be scolded for his self- indulgence and partly because she loved him. This latter was a fact she could no longer conceal from herself. She thought she could convince him that Peri's death wasn't his fault... but the convincing would entail showing him what her own true feelings were. She thought she would have to pin her heart to her sleeve, where he could see it. Unfortunately, Harold would be able to see it, too. So that was out... but only for the time being. She thought she would have to do it soon, Harold or no Harold. She could only protect him so long. Then he would have to know... and either accept or not accept. She was afraid Harold might opt for the second choice. A decision like that could lead to something horrible. They were, after all, carrying a lot of shooting irons. She was mulling these thoughts over when they swept around a curve and saw a large housetrailer overturned m the middle of the road, blocking it from one end to the other. Its pink corrugated side still glistened with last night's rain. This was surprising enough, but there was more- three cars, all station wagons, and a big auto-wrecker were parked along the sides of the road. There were people standing around, too, at least a dozen of them. Fran was so surprised she braked too suddenly. The Honda she was riding skidded on the wet road, and almost dumped her before she was able to get it under control. Then all four of them had stopped, more or less in a line which crossed the road, blinking and more than a little stunned at the sight of so many people who were still alive. "Okay, dismount," one of the men said. He was tall, sandy-bearded, and wearing dark sunglasses. Fran timetraveled for a moment inside her head, back to the Maine Turnpike and being hauled down by a state trooper for speeding. Next he'll ask to see our drivers' licenses, Fran thought. But this was no lone State Trooper, bagging speeders and writing tickets. There were four men here, three of them standing behind the sandy-bearded man in a short skirmish line. The rest were all women. At least eight of them. They looked pale and scared, clustered around the parked station wagons in little groups. The sandy-bearded man was carrying a pistol. The men behind him all had rifles. Two of them were wearing bits and pieces of army kit. Dismount, goddam you," the bearded man said, and one of the men behind him levered a round into the breech of his rifle. It was a loud, bitterly imperative sound in the misty morning air. Glen and Harold looked puzzled and apprehensive. That, and no more. They're sitting ducks, Frannie thought with rising panic. She did not fully understand the situation herself yet, but she knew the equation here was all wrong. Four men, eight women, her brain said, and then repeated it, louder, in tones of alarm: Four men! Eight women! "Harold," Stu said in a quiet voice. Something had come up in his eyes. Some realization. "Harold, don't—2' And then everything happened. Stu's rifle was slung over his back. He dropped one shoulder so that the strap slid down his arm, and then the rifle was in his hands. "Don't do it!" the bearded man shouted furiously. "Garvey! Virge! Ronnie! Get them! Save the woman!" Harold began to grab for his pistols, at first forgetting they were still strapped into their holsters. Glen Bateman still sat behind Harold in stunned surprise. "Harold!" Stu yelled again.
258 Frannie began to unsling her own rifle. She felt as if the air around her had suddenly been packed with invisible molasses, treacly stuff she would never be able to struggle through in time. She realized they were probably going to die here. One of the girls screamed: "NOW!" Frannie's gaze switched to this girl even as she continued to struggle with her rifle. Not really a girl; she was at least twenty-five. Her hair, ash-blond, lay against her head in a ragged helmet, as if she had recently lopped it off with a pair of hedge-clippers. Not all of the women moved; some of them appeared to be nearly catatonic with fright. But the blond girl and three of the others did. All of this happened in the space of seven seconds. The bearded man had been pointing his pistol at Stu. When the young blond woman screamed, "Now!," the bar rel jerked slightly toward her, like a divining rod sensing water. It went off, making a loud noise like a piece of steel being punched through cardboard. Stu fell off his bike and Frannie screamed his name. Then Stu was up on both elbows (both were scraped from hitting the road, and the Honda was lying on one of his legs), firing. The bearded man seemed to dance backward like a vaudeville hoofer leaving the stage after his encore. The faded plaid shirt he was wearing puffed and billowed. His pistol, an automatic, jerked up toward the sky and that steel-punching-through-cardboard sound happened four more times. He fell over on his back. Two of the three men behind him had jerked around at the blond woman's cry. One pulled both triggers of the weapon he was holding, an old-fashioned Remington twelvegauge. The stock of the gun was not resting against anything—he was holding it outside his right hip-and when it went off with a sound like a thunderclap in a small room, it flew backward out of his hands, ripping skin from his fingers as it went. It clattered on the road. The face of one of the women who had not reacted to the blond woman's shout dissolved in an unbelievable fury of blood, and for a moment Frannie could actually hear blood raining down on the pavement, as if there had been a sudden shower. One eye peered unharmed through the mask of blood this woman now wore. It was dazed and unknowing. Then the woman fell forward onto the road. The Country Squire station wagon behind her was peppered with buckshot. One of the windows was a cataract of milky cracks. The blond girl grappled with the second man who had turned toward her. The rifle the man held went off between their bodies. One of the girls scrambled for the lost shotgun. The third man, who had not turned toward the women, began to fire at Fran. Frannie sat astride her bike, her rifle in her hands, blinking stpidly at him. He was an oliveskinned man who looked Italian. She felt a bullet drone by her left temple. Harold had finally gotten one of his pistols free. He raised it and fired at the olive-skinned man. The distance was about fifteen paces. He missed. A bullet hole appeared in the skin of the pink housetrailer just to the left of the olive-skinned man's head. The olive-skinned man looked at Harold and said, "Now I gonna keel-a you, you sonnabeesh." "Don't do that!" Harold screamed. He dropped his pistol and held out his open hands. The olive-skinned man fired three times at Harold. All three shots missed. The third round came the closest to doing damage; it screamed off the exhaust-pipe of Harold's Yamaha. It fell over, spilling Harold and Glen off. Now twenty seconds had passed. Harold and Stu lay flat. Glen sat cross-legged on the road, still looking as if he didn't know exactly where he was, or what was going on. Frannie was trying desperately to shoot the olive-skinned man before he could shoot Harold or Stu, but her gun wouldn't fire, the trigger wouldn't even pull, because she had forgotten to thumb the safety-catch to its off position. The blond woman continued to struggle with the second man, and the woman who had gone after the dropped shotgun was now fighting with a second woman for possession of it. Cursing in a language which was undoubtedly Italian, the olive-skinned man aimed at Harold again and then Stu fired and the olive-skinned man's forehead caved in and he went down like a sack of potatoes. Another woman had now joined the fray over the shotgun. The man who had lost it tried to throw her aside. She reached between his legs, grabbed the crotch of his jeans, and squeezed. Fran saw her hamstrings pop out all the way up her forearm to the elbow. The man screamed. The man lost interest in the shotgun. The man grabbed his privates and stumbled away bent-over. Harold crawled to where his dropped pistol lay on the road and pounced on it. He raised it and fired at the man holding his privates. He fired three times and missed every time. It's like Bonnie and Clyde, Frannie thought. Jesus, there's blood everywhere! The blond woman with the ragged hair had lost her struggle for possession of the second man's rifle. He jerked it free and kicked her, perhaps aiming for her stomach, catching her in the thigh with
259 one of his heavy boots instead. She went quick-stepping backward, whirling her arms for balance, and landed on her fanny with a wet splat. Now he'll shoot her, Frannie thought, but the second man whirled around like a drunken soldier doing an about-face and began to fire rapidly into the group of three women still cringing against the side of the Country Squire. "Yaaah! You bitches!" this gentleman screamed. "Yaaaah! You bitches!" One of the women fell over and began to flop on the pavement between the station wagon and the overturned trailer like a stabbed fish. The other two women ran. Stu fired at the shooter and missed. The second man fired at one of the running women and did not. She threw her hands up to the sky and fell down. The other buttonhooked left and ran behind the pink trailer. The third man, the one who had lost and failed to regain the shotgun, was still staggering around and holding his crotch. One of the women pointed the shotgun at him and pulled both triggers, her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth grimacing in anticipation of that thunder. The thunder didn't come. The shotgun was dry. She reversed it so she was holding it by the barrels and brought the stock down in a hard arc. She missed his head, but got the place where his neck joined his right shoulder. The man was driven to his knees. He began to crawl away. The woman, who was wearing a blue sweatshirt which said KENT STATE UNIVERSITY and tattered bluejeans, walked along after him, bludgeoning him with the shotgun as she went. The man continued to crawl, blood now running off him in rivers, and the woman in the Kent State sweatshirt continued to whale on him. "Yaaaaah, you bitches!" the second man screamed, and fired at a dazed and muttering middle- aged woman. The distance between muzzle and woman was at the most three feet; she could almost have reached out and plugged the barrel with her pinky finger. He missed. He pulled the trigger again, but this time the rifle only dry-fired. Harold was now holding his pistol in both hands, as he had seen cops do in the movies. He pulled the trigger and his bullet smashed the second man's elbow. The second man dropped his rifle and began to dance up and down, making high jabbering noises. To Frannie, he sounded a little like Roger Rabbit saying "P-PPleeeeze!" "I got im!" Harold cried ecstatically. "Got im! By God, I got im!" Frannie finally remembered the safety catch on her rifle. She thumbed it off just as Stu fired again. The second man fell down, now clutching his stomach instead of his elbow. He went on screaming. "My God, my God," Glen said mildly. He put his face into his hands and began to weep. Harold fired his pistol again. The second man's body jumped. He stopped screaming. The woman in the Kent State University sweatshirt brought the stock of the shotgun down again, and this time she connected solidly with the crawling man's head. It sounded like Jim Rice connecting solidly with a high, hard fastball. The shotgun's walnut stock and the man's head both shattered. For a moment there was silence. A bird called in it: Whitwhit... whitwhit... whitwhit. Then the girl in the sweatshirt stood astride the third man's body and gave a long, primeval scream of triumph that haunted Fran Goldsmith for the rest of her life.
The blond girl was Dayna Jurgens, from Xenia, Ohio. The girl in the Kent State sweatshirt was Susan Stern. A third woman, the one who had squeezed Shotgun's crotch, was Patty Kroger. The other two were quite a bit older. The eldest, Dayna said, was Shirley Hammet. They didn't know the name of the other woman, who looked to be in her mid-thirties; she had been in shock, wandering, when Al, Garvey, Virge, and Ronnie had picked her up in the town of Archbold, two days before. The nine of them got off the highway and camped in a farmhouse somewhere just west of Columbia, now over the Indiana state line. They were all in shock, and Fran thought in later days that their walk across the field from the overturned pink trailer on the turnpike to the farmhouse would have looked to an observer like a fieldtrip sponsored by the local lunatic asylum. The grass, thigh-high and still wet from the previous night's rain, had soon soaked their pants. White butterflies, sluggish in the air because their wings were still heavy with moisture, swooped toward them and then away in drugged circles and figureeights. The sun was struggling to break through but hadn't made it yet; it was a bright smear feebly illuminating a uniform white cloud cover that stretched from horizon to horizon. But cloud cover or no cloud cover, the day was hot already, wringing with humidity, and the air was filled with whirling flocks of crows and their raucous, ugly cries. There are more crows than people now, Fran thought dazedly. If we don't watch out, they'll peck us right off the face of the earth. Revenge of the blackbirds. Were crows meat-eaters? She very much feared that they were. Below this steady trickle of nonsense, barely visible, like the sun behind the melting cloud cover (but full of power, as the sun was on this awful, humid morning, the thirtieth of July, 1990), the gunbattle played over and over in her mind. The woman's face disintegrating under the shotgun
260 blast.,Stu falling over. The instant of stark terror when she had been sure he was dead. One man crying out Yaaah, you bitches! and then sounding like Roger Rabbit when Harold plugged him. The steel-punching-through-cardboard sound of the bearded man's pistol. Susan Stern's primitive cry of victory as she stood astride the body of her enemy while his brains, still warm, leaked out of his cloven skull. Glen walked beside her, his thin, rather sardonic face now distraught, his gray hair flying wispily around his head as if in imitation of the butterflies. He held her hand, and he kept patting it compulsively. "You mustn't let it affect you," he said. "Such horrors... bound to occur. Best protection is in numbers. Society, you know. Society is the keystone of the arch we call civilization, and it is the only real antidote to outlawry. You must take... things... things like this... as a matter of course. This was an isolated occurrence. Think of them as trolls. Yes! Trolls or yogs or affrits. Monsters of a generic sort. I accept that. I hold that truth to be self-evident, a socioconstitutional ethic, one might say. Ha! Ha!" His laugh was half moan. She punctuated each of his elliptical sentences with "Yes, Glen," but he seemed not to hear. Glen smelled a trifle vomitous. The butterflies banged against them and then banged off again on their butterfly errands. They were almost to the farmhouse. The battle had lasted less than a minute. Less than a minute, but she suspected it was going to be held over by popular demand inside her head. Glen patted her hand. She wanted to tell him to please stop doing that, but she was afraid that he might cry if she did. She could stand the patting. She wasn't sure she could stand to see Glen Bateman weeping. Stu was walking with Harold on one side and the blond girl, Dayna Jurgens, on the other. Susan Stern and Patty Kroger flanked the unnamed catatonic woman who had been picked up in Archbold. Shirley Hammet, the woman who had been missed at pointblank range by the man who had imitated Roger Rabbit before he died, walked a little way off to the left, muttering and making the occasional grab at the passing butterflies. The party was walking slowly, but Shirley Hammet was slower. Her gray hair hung untidily about her face, and her dazed eyes peered out at the world like frightened mice peering out of a temporary bolthole. Harold looked at Stu uneasily. "We wiped them out, didn't we, Stu.? We blew them up. Scragged their asses." "I guess so, Harold." "Man, but we had to," Harold said earnestly, as if Stu had suggested things might have been otherwise. "It was them or us!" "They would have blown your heads off," Dayna Jurgens said quietly. "I was with two guys when they hit us. They shot Rich and Damon from ambush. After it was over, they put a round in each of their heads, just to make sure. You had to, all right. By rights you should be dead now." "By rights we should be dead now!" Harold exclaimed to Stu. "It's all right," Stu said. "Take her easy, Harold." "Sure! Negative perspiration!" Harold said heartily. He fumbled jerkily in his pack, got a chocolate Payday, and almost dropped it while stripping off the wrapper. He cursed it bitterly and then began to gobble it, holding it in both hands like a lollypop. They had reached the farmhouse. Harold had to keep touching himself furtively as he ate his candybar-had to keep making sure he wasn't hurt. He felt very sick. He was afraid to look down at his crotch. He was pretty sure he had wet himself shortly after the festivities back at the pink trailer got into high gear.
Dayna and Susan did most of the talking over a distraught brunch which some picked at but none really ate. Patty Kroger, who was seventeen and absolutely beautiful, occasionally added something. The woman with no name scrunched herself into the farthest corner of the dusty farmhouse kitchen. Shirley Hammet sat at a table, ate stale Nabisco Honey Grahams, and muttered. Dayna had left Xenia in the company of Richard Darliss and Damon Bracknell. How many others had been alive in Xenia after the flu? Only three that she had seen, a very old man, a woman, and a little girl. Dayna and her friends asked the trio to join them, but the old man waved them off, saying something about "having business in the desert." By the eighth of July, Dayna, Richard, and Damon had begun to suffer bad dreams about a sort of boogeyman. Very scary dreams. Rich had actually gotten the idea that the boogeyman was real, Dayna said, and living in California. He had an idea that this man, if he really was a man, was the business the other three people they'd met had in the desert. She and Damon had begun to fear for Rich's sanity. He called the dreamman "the hardcase" and said he was getting an army of hardcases together. He said this army would soon sweep out of the west and enslave everyone left alive, first in America, then in the rest of-the world. Dayna and Damon had begun to privately discuss the possibility of slipping away from Rich some night, and had begun to believe that their own dreams were the result of Rich Darliss's powerful delusion.
261 In Williamstown, they had come around a curve in the highway to discover a large dump-truck lying on its side in the middle of the road. There was a station wagon and a wrecker parked nearby. "We assumed it was just another smashup," Dayna. said, crumbling a graham cracker nervously between her fingers, "which was, of course, exactly what we were supposed to think." They got off their cycles in order to trundle them around the dumptruck, and that was when the four hardcases-to use Rich's word-opened up from the ditch. They had murdered Rich and Damon and had taken Dayna prisoner. She was the fourth addition to what they sometimes called "the zoo" and sometimes "the harem." One of the others had been the muttering Shirley Hammet, who at that time had still been almost normal, although she had been repeatedly raped, sodomized, and forced to perform fellatio on all four. "And once," Dayna said, "when she couldn't hold on until it was time for one of them to take her into the bushes, Ronnie wiped her ass with a handful of barbed wire. She bled from her rectum for three days." "Jesus Christ," Stu said. "Which one was he?" "The man with the shotgun," Susan Stern said. "The one I brained. I wish he was right here, lying on the floor, so I could do it again." The man with the sandy beard and sunglasses they had known only as Doc. He and Virge had been part of an army detachment which had been sent to Akron when the flu broke out. Their job had been "media relations," which was an army euphemism for "media suppression." When that job was pretty well in hand, they had gone on to "crowd control," which was an army euphemism for shooting looters who ran and hanging looters who didn't. By the twentyseventh of June, Doc had told them, the chain of command had a lot more holes than it did links. A good many of their own men were too ill to patrol, but by then it didn't matter anyway, as the citizens of Akron were too weak to read or write the news, let alone loot banks and jewelry stores. By June 30, the unit was gone-its members dead, dying, or scattered. Doc and Virge were the only two scatterees, as a matter of fact, and that was when they had begun their new lives as zoo- keepers. Garvey had come along on the first of July, and Ronnie on the third. At that point they had closed their peculiar little club to further memberships. "But after a while you must have outnumbered them," Glen said. Unexpectedly, it was Shirley Hammet who spoke to this. "Pills," she said, her trapped-mice eyes staring out at them from behind the fringe of her graying bangs. "Pills every morning to get up, pills every night to go down. Ups and downs." Her voice had been sinking, and this last was barely audible. She paused, then began to mutter again. Susan Stern took up the thread of the story. She and one of the dead women, Rachel Carmody, had been picked up on July 17, outside Columbus. By then the party was traveling in a caravan which consisted of two station wagons and the wrecker. The men used the wrecker to move crashed vehicles out of their way or to roadblock the highway, depending on what opportunities offered. Doc kept the pharmacy tied to his belt in an outsized poke. Heavy downers for bedtime; tranks for travel; reds for recess. "I'd get up in the morning, be raped two or three times, and then wait for Doc to hand out the pills," Susan said matter-of-factly. "The daytime pills, I mean. By the third day I had abrasions on my... well, you know, my vagina, and any sort of normal intercourse was very painful. I used to hope for Ronnie, because all Ronnie ever wanted was a blowjob. But after the pills, you got very calm. Not sleepy, just calm. Things didn't seem to matter after you got yourself wrapped around a few of those blue pills. All you wanted to do was sit with your hands in your lap and watch the scenery go by or sit with your hands in your lap and watch them use the wrecker to move something out of the way. One day Garvey got mad because this one girl, she couldn't have been any more than twelve, she wouldn't do... well, I'm not going to tell you. It was that bad. So Garvey blew her head off. I didn't even care. I was just... calm. After a while, you almost stopped thinking about escape. What you wanted more than getting away was those blue pills." Dayna and Patty Kroger were nodding. But they seemed to recognize eight women as their effective limit, Patty said. When they took her on July 22 after murdering the fiftyish man she had been traveling with, they had killed a very old woman who had been a part of "the zoo" for about a week. When the unnamed girl sitting in the corner had been picked up near Archbold, a sixteen-year-old girl with strabismus had been shot and left in a ditch. "Doc used to joke about it," Patty said. "He'd say, `I don't walk under ladders, I don't cross black cats' paths, and I'm not going to have thirteen people traveling with me. '" On the twenty-ninth, they had caught sight of Stu and the others for the first time. The zoo had been camped in a picnic area just off the interstate when the four of them passed by. "Garvey was very taken with you," Susan said, nodding toward Frannie. Frannie shuddered. Dayna leaned closer to them and spoke softly. "And they'd made it pretty clear whose place you were going to take." She nodded her head almost imperceptibly at Shirley Hammet, who was still muttering and eating graham crackers. "That poor woman," Frannie said.
262 "It was Dayna who decided you guys might be our best chance," Patty said. "Or maybe our last chance. There were three men in your party-both she and Helen Roget had seen that. Three armed men. And Doc had gotten just the teeniest bit overconfident about the trailer-overturned-in-the-road bit. Doc would just act like somebody official, and the men in the parties they met-when there were menjust caved in. And got shot. It had been working like a charm." "Dayna asked us to try and palm our pills this morning," Susan went on. "They'd gotten sort of careless about making sure we really took them, too, and we knew that this morning they'd be busy pulling that big trailer out into the road and tipping it over. We didn't tell everyone. The only ones in on it were Dayna and Patty and Helen Roget... one of the girls Ronnie shot back there. And me, of course. Helen said, `If they catch us trying to spit the pills into our hands, they're going to kill us. ' And Dayna said they would kill us anyway, sooner or later, and only sooner if we were lucky, and of course we knew that was tine. So we did it." "I had to hold mine in my mouth for quite a while," Patty said. "It was starting to dissolve by the time I got a chance to spit it out." She looked at Dayna. "I think Helen actually had to swallow hers. I think that's why she was so slow." Dayna nodded. She was looking at Stu with a clear warmth that made Frannie uneasy. "It still would have worked if you hadn't gotten wise, big fella." "I didn't get wise near soon enough, looks like," Stu said. "Next time I will." He stood up, went to the window, and looked out. "You. know, that's half of what scares me," he said. "How wise we're all getting." Fran cared even less for the sympathetic way Dayna looked after him. She had no right to look sympathetic after all she'd been through. And she's much prettier than I am, in spite of everything, Fran thought. Also, I doubt if she's pregnant. "It's a get-wise world, big fella," Dayna said. "Get wise or die." Stu turned to look at her, really seeing her for the first time, and Fran felt a stab of pure jealous agony. I waited too long, she thought. Oh my God, I went and did it, I went and waited too long. She happened to glance at Harold and saw that Harold was smiling in a guarded way, one hand up to his mouth to conceal it. It looked like a smile of relief. She suddenly felt that she would like to stand up, walk casually over to Harold, and hook his eyes out of his head with her fingernails. Never, Harold! she would scream as she did it. Never! Never?
From Fran Goldsmith's Diary
July 19, 1990
Oh Lord. The worst has happened. At least in the books when it happens it's over, something at least changes, but in real life it just seems to go on and on, like a soap opera where nothing ever comes to a head. Maybe I should move to clear things up, take a chance, but I'm so afraid something might happen between them and. You can't end a sentence with "and," but I'm afraid to put down what might come after the conjunction. Let me tell you everything, dear diary, even though it's no great treat to write it down. I even hate to think about it. Glen and Stu went into town (which happens to be Girard, Ohio, tonight) near dusk to look for some food, hopefully concentrates and freeze-dried stuff. They're easy to carry and some of the concentrates are really tasty, but. as far as I am concerned all the freeze-dried food has the same flavor, namely dried turkey turds. And when have you ever had dried turkey turds to serve as your basis for a comparison? Never mind, diary, some things will never be told, haha. They asked Harold and me if we wanted to come, but I said I'd had enough motorcycling for one day if they could do without me, and Harold said no, he would fetch some water and get it boiled up. Probably already laying his plans. Sorry to make him sound so scheming, but the simple fact is, he is.
(A note here: We are all fantastically sick of boiled water, which tastes flat and TOTALLY DEVOID of oxygen, but both Mark and Glen say the factories, etc., have not been shut down nearly long enough for the streams & rivers to have purified themselves, especially in the industrial Northeast & what they call the Rust Belt, so we all boil to be safe. We all keep hoping we'll find a large supply of bottled mineral water sooner or later, and should have already-so Harold says-but a lot of it seems to have mysteriously disappeared. Stu thinks that a lot of people must have decided it was the tapwater that was making them sick and used up a lot of mineral water before they died.)
Well, Mark and Perion were off somewhere, supposedly hunting for wild berries to supplement our diet, probably doing something else-they are quite modest about it & bully for them, say I—and so I
263 was first gathering wood for a fire and then getting one going for Harold's kettle of water... and pretty soon he came back with one (he'd pretty obviously stayed at the stream long enough to have a bath and wash his hair). He hung it on the whatdoyoucallit that goes over the fire. Then he comes & sits down beside me. We were sitting on a log, talking about one thing and another, when he suddenly put his arms around me and tried to kiss me. I say tried but he actually succeeded, at least at first, because I was so surprised. Then I jerked away from him-looking back it seems sorta comic altho I'm still soreand fell backward right off the log. It rucked up the back of my blouse and scraped about a yard of skin off. I let out a yell. Talk about history repeating, that was too much like the time with Jess out on the breakwater when I bit my tongue... too much like it for comfort. In a second Harold's on one knee beside me, asking if I'm all right, blushing right down to the roots of his clean hair. Harold tries sometimes to be so icy, so sophisticated-he always seems to me like a jaded young writer constantly searching for that special Sad Cafe on the West Bank where he can idle the day away talking about Jean-Paul Sartre and drinking cheap plonk-but underneath, well covered, is a teenager with a far less mature set of fantasies. Or so I believe. Saturday matinee fantasies for the most part: Tyrone Power in Captain from Castile, Humphrey Bogart in Dark Passage, Steve McQueen in Bullitt. In times of stress it's always this side of him which seems to come out, maybe because he repressed it so severely as a child, I don't know. Anyway, when he regresses to Bogie, he only succeeds in reminding me of that guy who played Bogie in that Woody Allen movie, Play It Again, Sam. So when he knelt beside me and said, "Are you all right, baby?," I started to giggle. Talk about history repeating itself! But it was more than the humor of the situation, you know. If that had been all, I could have held it in. No, it was more in the line of hysterics. The bad dreams, the worrying about the baby, what to do about my feelings for Stu, the traveling every day, the stiffness, the soreness, losing my parents, everything changed for good... it came out in giggles at first, then in hysterical laughter I just couldn't stop. "What's so funny?" Harold asked, getting up. I think it was supposed to come out in this terribly righteous voice, but by then I had stopped thinking about Harold and got this crazy image of Donald Duck in my head. Donald Duck waddling through the rains of Western civilization quacking angrily: What's so funny, hah? What's so funny? What's so fucking funny? I put my hands over my face & just giggled & sobbed & giggled until Harold must have thought I'd gone absolutely crackers. After a little bit I managed to stop. I wiped the tears off my face and wanted to ask Harold to look at my back and see how badly it was scraped. But I didn't because I was afraid he might take it as a LIBERTY. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Frannie, oh-ho, that's not so funny. "Fran," Harold sez, "I find this very hard to say." "Then maybe you better not say it," I said. "I have to," he answers, and I began to see he wasn't going to take no for an answer unless it was hollered at him. "Frannie," he says, "I love you." I guess I knew all along it was just as bald as that. It would be easier if he only wanted to sleep with me. Love's more dangerous than just balling, and I was in a spot. How, to say no to Harold? I guess there's only one way, no matter who you have to say it to. "I don't love you, Harold," is what I said. His face cracked all to pieces. "It's him, isn't it?" he said, and his face got an ugly grimace on it. "It's Stu Redman, isn't it?" "I don't know," I said. Now I have a temper, which I have not always been able to control-a gift from my mother's side, I think. But I have struggled womanfully with it as applies to Harold. I could feel it straining its leash, however. "I know." His voice had gotten shrill and self-pitying. "I know, all right. The day we met him, I knew it then. I didn't want him to come with us, because I knew. And he said..." "What did he say?" "That he didn't want you! That you could be mine!" "Just like giving you a new pair of shoes, right, Harold?" He didn't answer, maybe realizing he had gone too far. With a little effort I remembered back to that day in Fabyan. Harold's instant reaction to Stu was the reaction of a dog when a new dog, a strange dog, comes into the first dog's yard. Into his domain. I could almost see the hackles bristling on the back of Harold's neck. I understood that what Stu said, he said it to take us out of the class of dogs and put us back in the class of people. And isn't that what it's really all about? This hellacious struggle we're in now, I mean? If it isn't, why are we even bothering to try and be decent? "No one owns me, Harold," I said. He muttered something. "What?" "I said, you may have to change that idea."
264 A sharp retort came to mind, but I didn't let it out. Harold's eyes had gone far away, and his face was very still and open. He said: "I've seen that guy before. You better believe it, Frannie. He's the guy that's the quarterback on the football team but who just sits there in class throwing spitballs and flipping people the bird because he knows the teacher's got to pass him with at least a C so he can keep on playing. He's the guy who goes steady with the prettiest cheerleader and she thinks he's Jesus Christ with a bullet. The guy who farts when the English teacher asks you to read your composition because it's the best one in the class. "Yeah, I know fuckers like him. Good luck, Fran." Then he just walked off. It wasn't the GRAND, TRAMPLING EXIT that he'd meant to make, I feel quite sure. It was more like he'd had some secret dream, and I'd just shot it full of holes-the dream being that things had changed, the reality being that nothing really had. I felt terrible for him, God's truth, because when he walked off he wasn't playing at jaded cynicism but feeling REAL cynicism, not jaded butas sharp & hurtful as a knife-blade. He was whipped. Oh, but what Harold will never see is that his head has got to change a little first, he's got to see that the world is going to stay the same as long as he does. He stores up rebuffs the way pirates were supposed to store up treasure... Well. Now everyone is back, supper eaten, smokes smoked, Veronal handed out (mine is in my pocket instead of dissolving in my stomach), people settling down Harold and I have gone through a painful confrontation which has left me with the feeling that nothing has really been resolved, except that he is watching Stu and me to see what happens next. It makes me feel sick and pointlessly angry to write that. What right does he have to watch us? What right does he have to complicate this miserable situation we are in? Things to Remember: I'm sorry, diary. It must be my state of mind. I can't remember a single thing.
When Frannie came upon him, Stu was sitting on a rock and smoking a cigar. He had scraped a small round circle of bare earth with his boot heel and was using it for an ashtray. He was facing west, where the sun was just going down. The clouds had rifted enough to allow the red sun to poke its head through: Although they had met the four women and taken them into their party only yesterday, it already seemed distant. They had gotten one of the station wagons out of the ditch easily enough and now, with the motorcycles, they made quite a caravan as they moved slowly west on the turnpike. The smell of his cigar made her think of her father and her father's pipe. What came with the memory was sorrow that had almost mellowed into nostalgia. I'm getting over losing you, Daddy, she thought. I don't think you'd mind. Stu looked around. "Frannie," he said with real pleasure. "How are you?" She shrugged. "Up and around." "Want to share my rock and watch the sun go down?" She joined him, her heartbeat quickening a little. But after all, why else had she come out here? She had known which way he left camp, just as she knew that Harold and Glen and two of the girls had gone into Brighton to look for a CB radio (Glen's idea instead of Harold's for a change). Patty Kroger was back in camp babysitting their two combatfatigue patients. Shirley Hammet showed some signs of coming out of her daze, but she had awakened them all around one this morning, shrieking in her sleep, her hands clawing at the air in warding-off gestures. The other woman, the one with no name, seemed to be going in the other direction. She sat. She would eat if she was fed. She would perform the functions of elimination. She would not answer questions. She only really came alive in her sleep. Even with a heavy dose of Veronal, she often moaned and sometimes shrieked. Frannie thought she knew what the poor woman was dreaming of. "It seems like a long way still to go, doesn't it?" she said. He didn't answer for a moment, and then he said: "It's further than we thought. That old woman, she's not in Nebraska anymore." "I know—" she began, and then bit down on her words. He glanced at her with a faint grin. "You've been skippin your medication, ma'am." "My secret's out," she said with a lame smile. "We're not the only ones," Stu said. "I was talkin to Dayna this afternoon" (she felt that interior dig of jealousyand fear-at the familiar way he used her name) "and she said neither she nor Susan wanted to take it." Fran nodded. "Why did you stop? Did they drug you... r in that place?" He tapped ashes into his bare earth ashtray. "Mild sedatives at night, that was all. They didn't need to drug me. I was locked up nice and tight. No, I stopped three nights ago because I felt... out of touch." He meditated for a moment and then expanded. "Glen and Harold going to get that CB radio, that was a real good idea. What's a two-way for? To put you in touch. This buddy of mine back in Arnette, Tony Leominster, he had one in his Scout. Great gadget. You could talk to folks, or
265 you could holler for help if you got in a jam of trouble. These dreams, they're almost like having a CB in your head, except the transmit seems to be broken and we're only receiving." "Maybe we are transmitting," Fran said quietly. He looked at her, startled. They sat quiet for a while. The sun peered through the clouds, as if to say a quick goodbye before sinking below the horizon. Fran could understand why primitive people worshiped it. As the gigantic quiet of the nearly empty country accumulated on her day by day, imprinting its truth on her brain by its very weight, the sun-the moon, too, for that matter-began to seem bigger and more important. More personal. Those bright skyships began to look to you as they had when you were a child. "Anyway, I stopped," Stu said. "Last night I dreamed about that black man again. It was the worst yet. He's setting up somewhere out in the desert. Las Vegas, I think. And Frannie... I think he's crucifying people. The ones who give him trouble." "He's doing what?" "That's what I dreamed. Lines of crosses along Highway 15 made out of barnbeams and telephone poles. People hanging off them." "Just a dream," she said uneasily. "Maybe." He smoked and looked west at the red-tinged clouds. "But the other two nights, just before we run on those maniacs holding the women, I dreamed about herthe woman who calls herself Mother Abigail. She was sitting in the cab of an old pickup truck parked on the shoulder of Highway 76. I was standing on the ground with one arm leaning on the window, talking to her just as natural as I'm talking to you. And she says, `You got to move em along faster still, Stuart; if an old lady like me can do it, a big tough fella from Texas like you should be able to. ' " Stu laughed, threw down his cigar, and crushed it under his heel. In kind of an absent way, as if not knowing what he was doing, he put an arm around Frannie's shoulders. "They're going to Colorado," she said. "Why, yes, I think they are." "Has... has either Dayna or Susan dreamed of her?" "Both. And last night Susan dreamed of the crosses. Just like I did." "There's a lot of people with that old woman now." Stu agreed. "Twenty, maybe more. You know, we're passing people nearly every day. They just hunker down and wait for us to go by. They're scared of us, but her... they'll come to her, I guess. In their own good time." "Or to the other one," Frannie said. Stu nodded. "Yeah, or to him. Fran, why did you stop taking the Veronal?" She uttered a trembling sigh and wondered if she should tell him. She wanted to, but she was afraid of what his reaction might be. "There's no counting on what a woman will do," she said at last. "No," he agreed. "But there are ways to find out what they're thinking, maybe." "What—" she began, and he stopped her mouth with a kiss.
They lay on the grass in the last of the twilight. Flagrant red had given way to cooler purple as they made love, and now Frannie could see stars shining through the last of the clouds. It would be good riding weather tomorrow. With any luck they would be able to get most of the way across Indiana. Stu slapped lazily at a mosquito hovering over his chest. His shirt was hung on a nearby bush. Fran's shirt was on but unbuttoned. Her breasts pushed at the cloth and she thought, I'm getting bigger, just a little right now, but it's noticeable... at least tome. "I've wanted you for a pretty long time now," Stu said without looking directly at her. "I guess you know that." "I wanted to avoid trouble with Harold," she said. "And there's something else that—" "Harold's got a ways to go," Stu said, "but he's got the makings of a fine man somewhere inside him if he'll toughen up. You like him, don't you?" "That's not the right word. There isn't a word in English for how I feel about Harold." "How do you feel about me?" he asked. She looked at him and found she couldn't say she loved him, couldn't say it right out, although she wanted to. "No," he said, as if she'd contradicted him, "I just like to get things straight. I guess you'd just as soon not have Harold know anything about this yet. Isn't that right?" "Yes," she said gratefully. "It's just as well. If we lie low, it may take care of itself. I've seen him lookin at Patty. She's about his age." "I don't know..."
266 "You feel a debt of gratitude to him, don't you?" "I suppose so. We were the only two left in Ogunquit, and—" That was luck, no more, Frannie. You don't want to let anyone put you in a headhold over something that was pure luck." "I suppose." "I guess I love you," he said. "That's not so easy for me to say." "I guess I love you, too. But there's something else..." "I knew that." "You asked me why I stopped taking the pills." She plucked at her shirt, not daring to look at him. Her lips felt unnaturally dry. "I thought they might be bad for the baby," she whispered: "For the." He stopped. Then he grasped her and turned her to face him. "You're pregnant?" She nodded. "And you didn't tell anyone?" "No." "Harold. Does Harold know?" "No one but you." "God-almighty-damn," he said. He was peering into her face in a concentrated way that scared her. She had imagined one of two things: he would leave her immediately (as Jess undoubtedly would have done if he had discovered she was pregnant with another man's child) or he would hug her, tell her not to worry, that he would take care of everything. She had never expected this startled, close scrutiny, and she found herself remembering the night she had told her father in the garden. His look had been very much like this one. She wished she had told Stu what her situation was before they had made love. Maybe then they wouldn't have made love at all, but at least he wouldn't have been able to feel he had somehow been taken advantage of, that she was... what was the old phrase? Damaged goods. Was he thinking that? She simply could not tell. "Stu?" she said in a frightened voice. "You didn't tell anyone," he repeated. "I didn't know how." Her tears were close to the surface now. "When are you due?" "January," she said, and the tears came. He held her and made her know it was all right without saying anything. He didn't tell her not to worry or that he would take care of everything, but he made love to her again and she thought that she had never been so happy. Neither of them saw Harold, as shadowy and as silent as the dark man himself, standing in the bushes and looking at them. Neither of them knew that his eyes squinted down into small, deadly triangles as Fran cried out her pleasure at the end of it, as her good orgasm burst through her. By the time they had finished, it was full dark. Harold slipped away silently.
From Fran Goldsmith's Diary
August 1, 1990
No entry last night, too excited, too happy. Stu and I are together. He has agreed that I'd better keep the secret of my Lone Ranger as long as possible, hopefully until we are settled. If it's to be Colorado, that's okay with me. The way I feel tonight, the mountains of the moon would be okay with me. Do I sound like a dizzy schoolgirl? Well-if a lady can't sound like a dizzy schoolgirl in her diary, where can she sound like one? But I must say one other thing before I drop the subject of the Lone Ranger. It has to do with my "maternal instinct." Is there such a thing? I think yes. Probably hormonal. I have not felt my old self for some weeks now, but it's very hard to separate the changes caused by my pregnancy from the changes caused by the terrible disaster which has overtaken the world. But there IS a certain jealous feeling ("jealousy" isn't really the right word, but it's the closest I can seem to come to the right word tonight), a feeling that you have moved a little closer to the center of the universe and must protect your position there. That's why the Veronal seems a geater risk than the bad dreams, although my rational mind believes that Veronal would not hurt the baby at all-not, at least, at the low levels the others have been maintaining. And I suppose that jealous feeling is also a part of the love I feel for Stu Redman. I feel I am loving, as well as eating, for two. Otherwise, I must be quick. I need my sleep, no matter what dreams may come. We haven't made it all the way across Indiana as quickly as we had hoped—a horrible clog of vehicles near the Elkhart interchange slowed us down. A good many of the vehicles were army. There were dead soldiers. Glen, Susan Stern, Dayna, and Stu took as much firepower as they could find—about 2 dozen rifles, some grenades, and-yes, folks, it's true-a rocket launcher. As I write now, Harold and
267 Stu are trying to figure out the rocket launcher, for which there are 17 or 18 rockets. Please God they don't blow themselves up. Speaking of Harold, I must tell you, dear diary, that he doesn't SUSPECT A THING (sounds like a line from an old Bette Davis movie, doesn't it). When we catch up with Mother Abigail's party I suppose he will have to be told; it would not be fair to hide it any longer, come what may. But today he was brighter & more cheerful than I have ever seen him. He grinned so much I thought his face would crack! He was the one who suggested Stu help him with that dangerous rocket launcher, and But here they come back now. Will finish later.
Frannie slept heavily and dreamlessly. So did they all, with the exception of Harold Lauder. Sometime shortly after midnight he rose and walked softly to where Frannie lay, and stood looking down at her. He was not smiling now, although he had smiled all day. At times he had felt that the smile would crack his face right up the middle and spill out his whirling brains. That might have been a relief. He stood looking down at her, listening to the chin of summer crickets. We're in dog days now, he thought: Dog days, from July the twenty-fifth to August twenty-eighth, according to Webster's. So named because rabid dogs were supposed t9 be the most common then. He looked down at Fran, sleeping so sweetly, using her sweater for a pillow. Her pack was beside her. Every dog has his day, Frannie. He knelt, freezing at the gunshots of his bending knees, but no one stirred. He unbuckled her pack, untied the drawstring, and reached inside. He trained a small pencil flash on the pack's contents. Frannie muttered from deep down in sleep, stiffed, and Harold held his breath. He found what he wanted way at the bottom, behind three clean blouses and a lap-eared pocket road atlas. A Spiral notebook. He pulled it out, opened to the first page, and shone his light on Frannie's close but extremely legible handwriting. July 6, 1990-After some persuasion, Mr. Bateman has agreed to come along with us... Harold shut the book and crept back to his sleeping bag with it. He was feeling like the little boy he had once been, the boy with few friends (he had enjoyed a brief period of babyhood beauty until about age three, had been a fat and ugly joke ever since) but many enemies, the boy who had been more or less taken for granted by his parents—their eyes had been trained on Amy as she began her long walk down the Miss America/Atlantic City runway of her lifethe boy who had turned to books for solace, the boy who had escaped never being picked for baseball or always being passed over for School Patrol Boy by becoming Long John Silver or Tarzan or Philip Kent... the boy who had become these people late at night under his covers with a flashlight trained on the printed page, his eyes wide with excitement, barely smelling his own bedfarts; this boy now crawled upside down to the bottom of his sleeping bag with Frannie's diary and his flashlight. As he trained its beam on the front cover of the Spiral, there was a moment of sanity. For just a moment part of his mind cried out Harold! Stop! so strongly that he was shaken to his heels. And stop he almost did. For just a moment it seemed possible to stop, to put the diary back where he had found it, to give her up, to let them go their own way before something terrible and irrevocable happened. For that moment it seemed he could put the bitter drink away, pour it out of the cup, and refill it with whatever there was for him in this world. Give it over, Harold, this sane voice begged, but maybe it was already too late. At age sixteen he had given up Burroughs and Stevenson and Robert Howard in favor of other fantasies, fantasies that were both well loved and much hated-not of rockets or pirates but of girls in silk see-through pajamas kneeling before him on satin pillows while Harold the Great lolled naked on his throne, ready to chastise them with small leather whips, with silver-headed canes. They were bitter fantasies through which every pretty girl at Ogunquit High School had strolled at one time or another. These daydreams always ended with a gathering expletive in his loins, an explosion of seminal fluid that was more curse than pleasure. And then he would sleep, the sperm drying to a scale on his belly. Every doggy has his day. And now it was those bitter fantasies, the old hurts, that he gathered around him like yellowed sheets, the old friends who never died, whose teeth never dulled, whose deadly affection never wavered. He turned to that first page, trained his flashlight on the words, and began to read.
In the hour before dawn, he replaced the diary in Fran's pack and secured the buckles. He took no special precautions. If she woke, he thought coldly, he would kill her and then run. Run where? West. But he would not stop in Nebraska or even in Colorado, oh no. She didn't wake. He went back to his sleeping bag. He masturbated bitterly. When sleep came, it was thin. He dreamed he was dying halfway down a steep grade of tumbled rocks and moonscape boulders. High
268 above, riding the night thermals, were cruising buzzards, waiting for him to make them a meal. There was no moon, no stars And then a frightful red Eye opened in the dark: vulpine, eldritch. The Eye terrified him yet held him. The Eye beckoned him. To the west, where the shadows were even now gathering, in their twilight dance of death.
When they made camp at sundown that evening, they were west of Joliet, Illinois. There was a case of beer, good talk, laughter. They felt they had put the rain behind them with Indiana. Everyone remarked specially on Harold, who had never been so cheerful. "You know, Harold," Frannie said later that evening, as the party began to break up, "I don't think I've ever seen you feeling so good. What is it?" He gave her a jolly wink. "Every dog has his day, Fran." She smiled back at him, a little puzzled. But she supposed it was just Harold, being elliptical. It didn't matter. What mattered was that things were finally coming right. That night Harold began his own journal.