The Long Loud Silence

2

CORPORAL GARY sneezed and opened his eyes.

The dirty wallpaper only half clinging to the ceiling seemed ready to come loose and drop on him at any moment. He sneezed again and rolled his eyes to see the equally sad paper peeling from the side walls. The layer peeling off wore faded pink roses and below that was another of dirty blue feathers. A battered old telephone hung on the wall near the door, screwed to the cracking plaster. His rumpled trousers were on the floor beside the bed.

“Mother of Moses!” the corporal complained, “another stinking firetrap.”

He fought away a nagging ache in his back and a dull pain in his head to sit up. The movement sent a fine cloud of dust flying, and he sneezed again. Instinctively he reached under the pillow for his wallet and dislodged a whisky bottle. Savagely throwing the pillow and the bottle across the room, he snatched up his trousers from the floor and searched the pockets. His wallet was tucked in one of them, empty.

The corporal shouted one word and hurled the wallet after the pillow and the bottle.

Swinging his legs to the floor, he swore loudly when his naked toes made contact rather violently with another bottle. Gary peered down at it, was vaguely disappointed to find it empty, and saw still another one lying part way under the bed.

“That,” he said to the dirty carpet, “must have been one hell of a toot!”

The room contained a toilet and a wash basin in one corner, half concealed behind a wooden screen. Another empty floated in the stool. A thin layer of dust and powdered plaster lay over every surface. Gary twisted the single tap jutting out over the basin but no water came out. He repeated the single, shouted word with added emphasis and stalked across the room to the ancient wall telephone.

“Hey, down there! What the hell goes on here? I want some water.”

The instrument did not answer him.

“Hell of a note,” he complained, and let the earpiece bang against the wall. Behind the wallpaper some loose plaster dribbled down. “Hell of a note.”

He stopped to survey the room. Except for the dust it was no different from a dozen other cheap hotels he had previously frequented for one purpose or another. The room hadn't been cleaned for a week — and hell, he hadn't been sleeping that long. One or two days was the limit on this sort of thing. Say two days — and that was stretching it. He shoved a bottle with his toe and tried to recall events. Quite plainly he hadn't been miserly with the liquor — he must have pitched a king-sized bitch. Ten years in the damned army, thirty years old and still reasonably healthy, and if that didn't call for a birthday celebration, nothing did. So all right, he had shot the works. But he couldn't have been out for more than two days.

Somebody would have missed him by now, and he'd be on the carpet for sure.

“Hell of a note,” he said again and reached for his trousers.

They were the only article of clothing in the room. Gary searched carefully, quickly, his anger growing, but there were no shoes or socks, no underwear, shirt or cap. He pulled on the wrinkled trousers and kicked at the wallet, cursing the unknown thief who had rolled him and then stolen his clothing while he slept. In nothing but the trousers he yanked open the bedroom door and strode into the narrow hall. His room number told him he was on the third floor.

Without hesitation he walked to the stairway, dust flying from the worn carpet with each angry footfall. Approaching the dimly lighted stairs, he passed a room whose door hung open and absently looked in.

Shocked, he stopped, took a step backward, and stared again. She lay naked on the bed.

Gary turned quickly, searched the hail behind him and the stairway beneath, to find he was still alone. Silently then he moved just inside the room.

The room was dusty and unclean like his own, but it also held an offensive odor that stung his nostrils, an odor he had known and lived with long ago. The woman's clothing was scattered about the floor, her open and ransacked purse had been tossed under the bed. A cheap suitcase had been split open and thrown aside. Gary stared at her body.

She was a nondescript woman, thirty or forty years of age — it was difficult to tell now. Not pretty, not ugly, but obviously a tramp. She fitted into the cheap and smelly room, into the run-down hotel. There were old and new scars on her thin body, and a dried trickle of blood on one ear where an earring had been torn away.

Gary moved nearer the bed, ignoring the odor, to confirm his first startled suspicion. A G.I. bayonet protruded from between her bony ribs.

He hesitated only a second longer and ran from the room. The hallway remained empty. He sped for the stairs, half jumping them in his eagerness to descend, to get away from the third floor. The second floor landing and corridor were equally bare of sound or movement and he continued down without pause, seeking the lobby.

It was a small lobby, dirty, dusty, empty.

“Hey,” he shouted nervously, “wake up!” He ran to the desk. “It's me, Corporal Gary!”

There was no answer, no appearance.

He hit the old desk with his fist, pounding on its scarred surface. Dust flew upward and he sneezed. The lobby remained empty of life. A calendar pad caught his eye and he snatched it up, blowing a fine film of dust from its surface. Wednesday, June 20th. The day after his birthday, the day after the evening on which he had begun the celebrated binge. But the calendar couldn't be right because he knew damned well he had not gotten drunk only the night before. That had been two or three days ago, maybe more, and he had slept it off upstairs. It was two or three days ago. The calendar had dust on it. To hell with the calendar!

He hurled the metal base and its papers through a lobby window, hearing the shards of glass sprinkle the pavement outside.

“I'm in here!” he shouted after the calendar.

Silence.

In sudden anger he picked up a heavy inkwell from the desk and tossed it through a second window, with the same negative result. No one came to investigate. Gary waited until he had counted fifty, aloud, and turned away from the desk. Sunlight shining through the unwashed glass of a street door caught his eye. He crossed the lobby, pushed through the door and stood on the sidewalk outside. The hot sun felt good on his half naked body but the pavement was uncomfortable to his feet.

He saw only a mongrel dog trotting along the gutter. The dog and a car.

Gary ignored the dog and concentrated on the car. The nose and radiator of the car were rammed through a plate glass window of a clothing store, the front tires flat and shredded where they had exploded upon violent contact with first the curb and then the building. Both fenders were crumpled and the windshield cracked and shattered to the limit of its resistance. A window dummy had toppled forward across the hood, while within the car another lifeless body hung across the wheel, impaled. The odor he had found in the room upstairs was multiplied here on the street.

Gary walked slowly from the hotel, fighting to read some kind of sense into what he had found. The bomb crater stopped him, shocked him. And then he knew.

The round, uneven crater occupied the whole width of the street and a truck had tumbled into it, unable to stop. The driver of the truck was still in the cab, dead. Beyond that was another crater, and he quickly saw the signs of an air strike that had been so familiar eight to ten years before. Show windows shattered, buildings chipped and battered, the street a crazy tangle of automobiles and debris. The city had been bombed. Bombed while he slept like a drunken fool.

But bombs — here, in Illinois! Towns and cities like this were common in Italy, in France, in Germany. He had been through hundreds of them, fought through and helped raze scores of them — in Italy, in France, in Germany. But not here in Illinois! Who would bomb Illinois? Who would make war on the United States?

This was why the hotel was empty of life, this was why the murdered woman lay up there on the third floor bed. The city had been bombed, the survivors evacuated.

The survivors?

Gary ran along the street, searching for a living man. Some automobiles stood at the curb, unoccupied, while others were smashed in their flight. None contained anything living. Debris littered the street and only an occasional breeze moved a bit of trash, a discarded newspaper. Eagerly he snatched up the newspaper, scanned the headlines. Nothing. The paper held no mention of war, no hint of war, no threat of a bombing, no clue or forewarning to any sort of catastrophe — to America. The front page and the others inside mirrored only the day-to-day violence of usual nature at home and abroad. The date?

Like the dusty calendar. Wednesday, June 20th. The day after his birthday.

He dropped the paper and ran to the nearest automobile, reached inside and snapped on the radio. The battery was dead. Running along the street, Gary paused at another car parked alongside the curb, tried the radio. It hummed into life. The airwaves were dead — either dead or deliberately silent. He slowly worked the dial from one end to the other, hoping to catch even the faintest whisper of sound, a spoken word or a bit of music, but there was nothing.

He decided they were maintaining radio silence. The absence of living people around him was proof they had been evacuated, that authority still existed somewhere. But that authority was keeping a rigid silence on the air, still fearing attack. He turned off the radio and slumped in the seat, wondering what he should do.

He supposed he was technically classed as a deserter by this time — that or listed as missing in action. The absence of a comparatively unimportant recruiting corporal would be noticed after two or three days. But for the moment it didn't make much difference; sooner or later he would find a military post and report in. Where? Might as well go back to Chicago — he was known there. How? He'd have to help himself to a car and drive — he rather doubted that trains would still be running. The enemy always goes for the rail lines first.

His feet burned. So first he'd have to find some shoes. And after that, something to eat…

Corporal Gary sat on the deserted curb before a grocery store, watching the tired sun go down and eating his supper from an assortment of pilfered cans and jars. He had helped himself to the food, there being no one in the store to either help or hinder him. The absence of clerks led him to suspect the bombing had happened at night; the display windows were smashed and the door hung askew but there were no bodies within the store itself. The grocery offered itself to him.

The bread he passed by because it was beginning to glaze over with a green mold, the fruit and vegetables were inedible. The big refrigerators had been neutralized with the failure of electricity, and the meats, milk and cheeses within them made unsafe. Angrily he had slammed the doors on the odor. He had discovered and pulled from a slowly thawing freezer a whole chicken, which now lay wrapped in a sack on the pavement beside him. There had been other foods in the freezing unit but they were much too hard to eat now, and did not represent the value of the chicken to his mind. They could wait. Cans, jars, and a wax-sealed box of crackers made up his meal. Unable to locate running water, he drank canned juices and bottled soda water.

And then he threw an empty can across the wide street, listening to its clatter in the stillness. When the noise had died away he ripped open a carton of cigarettes and lit one.

“A hell of a note!” he said to the oncoming evening.

A borrowed automobile stood at the curb a few feet away, its radio humming. He had set the dial at what he thought to be one of the most popular Chicago wavebands, and let it run. As yet there had been no rewarding voice.

During the remainder of the afternoon he had driven around the town, ranging it from one end to the other in search of any living thing. He had found no one, the city was dead or deserted. It did occur to him belatedly that there might be someone there, someone who would hide at the sound of the approaching car. Looters, the thieves and murderers who had stolen his money and killed the woman, lost survivors like himself. But no living person had made himself seen. The dead were everywhere, lying in the street, slumped on the porches of homes, folded up in smashed automobiles. Nothing alive moved, other than himself. And that straggling dog he had first seen when he emerged from the hotel.

And during the afternoon another strange thing had occurred to him, a thought that quietly took shape and grew in his mind as he drove along the rubbled streets. The bombing hadn't been heavy. The few bomb craters that pockmarked the city hadn't been nearly enough to wipe out the population, hardly enough to account for the dead he found everywhere. The city may have panicked and fled, yes. Any American city, never before subjected to enemy fire, would quickly panic and run at the first few bombs. The city may have been hurriedly evacuated by the military, yes. But how to account for the large number of dead? There were bodies lying in streets that contained no craters, no evidence of war at all.

“Holy Mother of Moses! Gas!” And then he paused. No, not gas. Gas would have found him in his third floor room unless it were some strange new kind that clung to the surface, did not rise. He stooped and sniffed the street, the grass growing on the lawns. There was no odor of gas. And that dog was still alive. Not gas then. What?

Atomic radiation? Bacterial bombs? He didn't know; he knew nothing about them. He knew as much about them as any other G.I. did, which was next to nothing. But those craters could have been made by special, hellish bombs that killed without steel splinters, without shrapnel. It could account for those lifeless bodies lying far from the craters, could account for the dead and deserted city. How did you go about looking for radiation? Oh yes — Geiger counters.

Gary didn't have a counter, wouldn't know where they could be found, wouldn't know how to use one if he had it. Bacteria? Germs of some kind. You can't fight germs. If his induction shots didn't protect him, to hell with it.

He was still alive. So he was immune to whatever hit the city, or the stuff didn't reach to the third floor. He was still alive in a city of the dead.

The jarring crash of a plate glass window brought him to his feet. Someone else was alive.

The sound had come from somewhere off to his left, surprisingly near, and after a moment of frozen surprise and indecision, he leaped for the car. A following thought stopped him. The sound of the motor might scare them away, might scare them — whoever they were — into hiding. He turned from the car and ran lightly up the street, swinging his eyes from side to side. Broken glass lay everywhere and it was impossible to determine which window had been breached. He slowed, trotting cautiously, eyes and ears alert.

He came to a cross street, peered up and down its length without seeing anything, and crossed over to continue his route. The darkness of evening was closing in. Slowly now he paced along the street, avoiding the glass that might crunch underfoot and betray him, sidestepping the rubble that barred his way. He hurried along to the next cross street, and the next after that, until he felt that he had come too far. It was like the house-to-house searches in those bombed-out French towns — you sometimes sensed the presence of humans and again you knew beforehand that a house was empty. He realized now, with a surprising return of that old sense, that he had passed the person who smashed the window.

Gary turned and retraced his route, cautiously.

He spotted the brief flicker of a flashlight ahead of him and dropped to the street, studying the building as he approached it. Quite apparently a jewelry shop. Looters then — but the whole city lay open for the taking. What was the especial crime of this one act? In a sense he had looted a grocery and a clothing store himself. Somebody wanted the valuable stuff.

The light flicked on again, scanning a row of display cases along one wall. He caught a faint silhouette created by the small light. He crept nearer, was rising to his feet when he heard the joyous exclamation.

The looter was a woman.

Gary sank back to the pavement, thinking better of rushing her. The woman on the hotel's third floor had been murdered by a thief; this feminine looter could be well armed. She might misinterpret his approach and shoot him. He had no desire to stop her, to prevent her from taking what she wanted. He was interested only in her, not in what she was doing. She was the only living thing he had found in the town except for the dog, and the dog wouldn't make good company. He stayed in the street, waiting.

The woman in the shop took her time, picking over the stock, obviously enjoying herself. Once or twice she flicked off the light and stepped to the broken window, searching the street for people. Gary was only another shapeless bundle of nothing on the black street. She did not see him. He heard the tinkle of gems and rings as she gathered them up in a bundle.

When she had satisfied herself and at last came out of the shop she was carrying a brown paper sack stuffed with loot. She briefly switched on the light to find her footing and left the store as she had entered, through the gaping hole knocked in the heavy window. Gary tensed his muscles and waited. She turned toward him. Holding the sack clutched tightly in one hand and the flash in the other, she made her way along the street as he had done, avoiding the rubble. Accepting his flattened body as just another obstacle, she was steering a course around him when he leaped.

The woman screamed in terror and struck out with the flashlight. He knocked it from her hand and shoved her backward, crooking one foot behind her legs as she stumbled. She fell back, sprawling and screaming, the paper sack bursting as it hit the pavement.

He was on her in an instant, pinning her down, trying vainly to clamp a hand over her month to throttle the screams.

“Shut up!” he shouted. He got a palm over her mouth and she bit it. “Shut up — I won't hurt you!”

“You're a cop…” Her voice was girlish and shrill with terror. “You're a cop!”

“I'm not a cop. Dammit, shut up. Shut up!”

He caught a piece of cloth from her dress collar and stuffed it in her mouth, holding it down with his hand. The screams were cut short. She tried to kick but he threw his legs over hers, holding her to the ground. A hand came up and pointed fingernails raked his cheek agonizingly. He slapped her then, slapped her sharply and with force across the face. She went limp. He didn't relax his grip but cautiously kept her pinned down, alert for any trick. In the uncertain darkness her body seemed small and frail.

When he saw she was choking, he pulled the gag from her mouth to discover she was crying.

“Oh hell, shut that up! That's worse than screaming.”

“Take it, take it,” she shrilled at him. “I can't stop you. Take it and leave me alone!”

“Stop it, will you? Listen to me. I'm not going to hurt you.”

The crying continued. “You're a cop.”

“I'm not a cop but if you don't stop that damned blubbering I'll make you wish I was.” He balled a fist and pushed it into her face, shoved it so close to her eyes that she couldn't mistake it even in the darkness. “Stop it — now.”

She stopped. The stopping was drawn out like a motor choked off with a fouled feed line, but she stopped. He rolled off her body and sat up to watch her.

She made no move, simply lay there in the street staring up at his dark shape against the sky. The silence of the street and the city fell around them.

“What do you want?” she asked finally.

“You.”

“I can't stop you,” she threw back sarcastically.

“Don't act stupid. You.” He thrust a pointed finger at her shoulder. “You're alive — you're the only one left alive in this man's town. You're alive and I'm alive. Does that make sense to you?”

“I suppose so.” Her voice was small, faraway.

Acting on a sudden suspicion, he groped around in the street for the flashlight, found it and put the beam on her face. The face was white with the last lingering traces of her fright, her eyes wide and brilliant blue in the darkness. She flinched under the probing beam.

“Mother of Moses — you're just a kid!”

“I'm not,” she snapped. “I'm nineteen.”

“You're a liar. You're just a kid, fifteen or sixteen maybe.”

“I'm nineteen,” she insisted. “I can prove it.”

“How?” he asked skeptically, dousing the flash.

“I'm in college — a junior.”

“That doesn't mean a thing to me.” He stared along the street, alert for any movement in the night. Turning over her answer, he admitted grudgingly: “Well, maybe seventeen.”

“Nineteen,” she still insisted.

“Skip it.” He got to his knees. “Are you going to behave? What's your name?”

“Irma. Irma Sloane. What's yours?”

“Call me Gary. Are you going to behave now?”

“Gary what?”

“Russell Gary. Answer me.”

“All right, don't get mad.” She sat up, felt around on the pavement for the scattered jewelry. “Look what you made me do!” Abruptly she was on her knees and frantically searching the street. “Help me find them. I want them, I want them all. Help me!”

He held the light for her, contemptuously watching and sweeping it around in ever widening circles as she scrabbled over the street gathering up the spilled loot. When she had recovered all that could be found in the light's dim beam, she brought the double handful of gems over to dump them in his trouser pockets.

“We'll have to come back here tomorrow. I know I've missed some.”

“To hell with that,” he told her. “There's other stores around here.”

“Yes!” She paused in pleased surprise. “That's right. There are many of them; I know where they all are. We'll find them tomorrow, you and I.”

He contradicted her. “We'll get the devil out of here tomorrow, and fast. Don't you know what this city will be like this time tomorrow night?”

“But Russell, my jewelry — What will it be like?”

“What do you think, with those bodies under two or three days of baking sun?”

“Oh…” She was silent, and took the flashlight from his hand to direct the beam up into his face. He squinted against the sudden light and heard her indrawn breath.

“What's the matter?”

“Nothing, Russell. But you need a shave.”

He took the light from her hand and shut it off. “Let's get away from here.”

“Where are we going?”

He hesitated. Where were they going?

They stood like silent sentinels in the middle of a dead, deserted city, an odorous city lying lifeless under a black night sky — the victim of some enemy's bombs. They alone, for all he knew, among uncounted dead. They and a stray dog. Where to go? Certainly not back to that place where he had spent the previous nights. Were it not for the girl he knew what he would have preferred, what he would have done. A pair of blankets from the first shop offering such merchandise, and a bunk in the fields outside of town, out of reach of the smell and reminder of death. Or a vacant farmhouse whose occupants had left before disaster struck.

She put a small hand in his, anxiously waiting.

“Do you live here?” he asked. “Do you know the town?”

“I've lived here all my life. I know it all.”

“Find us a hotel,” he directed then, “a big one.”

She hesitated only a moment and he could guess what she might be thinking. “Where are we now?” she asked him.

They picked their way to the nearest intersection and he turned the light on the street sign.

“Oh, yes,” she said then. “This way.”

The lobby seemed empty. He searched it carefully in the beam of the flashlight before advancing across it. The desk clerk was slumped on the floor behind his desk.

“This bombing,” Gary said, “did it come at night?”

“The bom — oh, yes. In the early evening. The radio said some planes had been shot down, and something about long-range rockets. It wasn't very clear.”

He went behind the clerk's desk and scanned the key rack, finally taking several of them from their slots. “How did you escape? Where were you?”

“Oh, I wasn't here. I was with my class in Havana. Do you know where that is?”

“No.”

“A small town south of here; my class was on an archeological field trip. There are Indian mounds at Havana.”

“Still sticking to your story?”

“I am nineteen!” she declared with anger.

“I won't argue about it; I don't give a damn how old you are. Come on.” He walked to the stairs. “What happened to the rest of the class?”

“I don't know. When we heard the news on the radio, I came home. Home was… home was…”

“Bombed out?” He led her up the stairway.

“No. It hadn't been touched. But inside, Mother was… dead. Her body had turned color, sort of purple.”

“Purple?”

“Bluish-purple. I can't describe it. It was ugly.”

“I can't figure that one out. Some disease? It worked fast, damned fast. Say — when did this happen, this bombing? Wednesday night?”

“I think so. Yes, Wednesday evening.”

“And this is Friday.” He shook his head.

They continued to climb the carpeted stairs. At the second floor landing he paused only long enough to send the light flashing down the corridor, to assure himself that it was empty, and started upward again, pulling the girl along. He believed the third or the fourth floor would be the safest, away from the street. The silent city might contain other prowlers besides themselves.

“What have you been doing since Wednesday night?”

“I don't know. Honestly I don't.” She shuddered. “I came home and found — It was unpleasant. I cried a lot, and I was sick. Every time I attempted to eat I was sick. I guess I've lived on canned juices, and soup. There was no electricity, no running water.”

“Power station must be out,” he explained. “Either a bomb struck it or something went wrong and the machinery shut itself off. Automatic cutouts, things like that. Nobody was around to start it again. That explains the water, too. The pumping stations are run by electricity. I'm surprised the whole damned town isn't burning down.” He thought about her remarks on food. “Soup?” he asked.

“The gas stove worked, after a fashion. The flame was very low.”

“Pressure giving out. It'll be gone in a day or so.”

“What will we do then?”

“We won't be here,” he assured her. “We're getting out of this town tomorrow.”

“There's no place to go.”

When they reached the fourth floor he paused to examine the keys he carried in his hand, and then flicked the light along the door numbers. The keys directed them away from the stairway toward the rear of the building. The first room he unlocked and kicked open proved to be a narrow one, holding but a single bed; the following two were replicas of the first. On the next try a large room having a double bed stood revealed in the gleam, and adjoining that a similarly large room with twin beds. He pulled her inside, locked the hall door, unlocked the connecting door between the rooms and locked the remaining outside doorway of the other bedroom.

“This is where we bunk,” he told her.

She watched him, saying nothing.

He waggled his thumb at the connecting door. “Which room do you want?”

Irma shook her head, not answering.

“Come on, kid, pick your room. I'm not robbing the cradle!” He put the flash down on the bureau top, still lit, and emptied his pockets of the stolen jewels. They made dim fires in the weak light. Belatedly he remembered to pull down the shades to prevent the light from betraying them. When he turned away from the windows she was still standing in the center of the room, watching him. “Which room?” he asked sharply.

“I'm frightened.”

“Not that frightened.”

“I'm afraid to sleep in another room.”

“To hell with that. I locked the doors.”

“I will not sleep in a separate room,” Irma declared. Her voice climbed with an hysterical note. “This place is… is… dead!”

Russell Gary studied her youthful face briefly in the light of the torch, wondering what he was to do with her. He'd like to leave her, walk off and pretend he'd never found her, be rid of her… but he couldn't just abandon a child. In sudden decision he snapped off the light. “Suit yourself. I'm taking the bed by the window.” And he sat down on it.

He undressed, taking off everything but the twin dog tags hanging around his neck. It was the way he usually slept; he hadn't even considered adding pajamas to his wardrobe when he had helped himself in that clothing store during the afternoon. After long minutes spent in relaxing on the hotel sheets, he reached out to raise the shade and pry open the window a few inches.

There was the quiet sound of the girl moving on the opposite bed.

His mouth was dry with a consuming thirst and he got up in the darkness for water, only to remember there was none. Swearing, he climbed back into bed.

Irma laughed at him with unconcealed satisfaction.

“Now,” she said boastfully, “am I nineteen?”