The Long Loud Silence

6

GARY hugged the blacker shadows along the shore and waited without emotion for the sound of the shot, for the sharp crack of a carbine. The doddering old woman had been a fool to believe she could sneak across the bridge, either she was starved to the point of sheer desperation or she was a fool. The darkness of the night couldn't hide her, not any more, not when the troops guarding the other end of the bridge were equipped with infrared lamps and sniperscopes on their rifles.

This was the only bridge left intact along a six or seven hundred mile stretch of the Mississippi; he'd discovered that as he slowly worked his way north from New Orleans. Many of the spans that had been left open a year ago were now blown up, one more indication of the government's determination to maintain the barrier, to keep the quarantine. The troops now concentrated in strength at the western ends of the remaining bridges were hardened to their duty, almost calloused after a year of stopping the sneakers.

The old woman had no more chance of slipping across to the Iowa shore than a snowball in a cyclotron, not as much chance as ridding her body of the seeds of plague.

Gary crawled behind a concrete abutment and waited. He was careful not to expose his body on the roadway, not to cross over to the opposite side of the two-lane bridge. While he was too distant from the troops to be in any real danger, still some gun-happy soldier just might catch him in his 'scope and open fire. The old woman didn't know the army, didn't know their equipment as he did. In her foolish, hungry mind she might have thought she could cross over under the mantle of darkness. She should have known better, she should have known what quick death to expect after a year of it.

Or perhaps she no longer cared.

The old woman surely knew she couldn't live to reach the Iowa side — no one from the contaminated area crossed the river and lived more than a few seconds, a few minutes. She must have known it and counted on it. She was one of the unlucky thousands still struggling for an existence east of the river, and she would remain there until she died. There was no other real choice, no other future. But sometimes the death on the bridge was much preferred to the death in what remained of a home.

The rifle cracked in the blackness. Good night, old woman.

Gary lay still, waiting. There was no other sound for long minutes. He knew the routine now, had watched it many times during the daylight hours on his slow, plodding trip upstream from the Gulf. Some soldier garbed in a white radiation suit would walk out onto the bridge while his mates covered him, move the old body with a toe of his boot, searching for a spark of life. If there was still movement he would put a pistol shot through her head. Finally he would pick up the body and hurl it over the guardrail. And then the man in the white suit would retire to a small brick building at the opposite foot of the bridge.

He seemed to hear a faint splash. The wind was in the wrong direction and he couldn't be sure, but the hungry old woman was undoubtedly floating downstream by now. She had reached out and secured what she must have wanted.

He crawled backward off the bridge approach and sought the sanctuary of a near-by field, cautiously seeking out the hollow depression where he had been lying when the old woman passed a half hour before. Nearing the spot, he stopped to listen and sniff the air, to satisfy himself no intruder had hidden there while he was away. Curiosity had made him follow the woman, the morbid curiosity of an onlooker who knows the game will end in disaster. She had been carrying no food, he saw that in his first swift scrutiny and again realized it when he became aware of her intentions. Had she been carrying anything to eat she wouldn't have attempted to cross the bridge, and he would have forcibly taken it from her. The old and the lame lose their meager rations to the quick and the young.

But her arms had been bare and there were no bulges to her pockets. So he had indifferently let her go onto the bridge, silently following for no real reason. Now he lay on his back in the unkempt field, studying the clouded, moonless sky. The night was hot and sticky with a high temperature, a typical midsummer night along a riverbank in Illinois There would be rain eventually, if not tonight or tomorrow, then the following night. It didn't matter.

Nothing mattered except the real problems of living, the day-to-day existence. Where tomorrow's meals were to be found, the careful avoidance of armed men, how to live until the following day and the day after that. How to stay alive and reasonably healthy until the quarantine was lifted.

The army owed him a year's pay — maybe more. And sometime during the summer he had passed his thirty-first birthday; there was no knowing what particular day. But he remembered vividly the day of his thirtieth birthday, the day he had gotten blind drunk celebrating his ten years of service. He could have been among those lucky troops on the other side of the river, the safe side. If he hadn't tossed that big one. He could have been over there with them, continuously on the prowl, taking part in the river watch that never ended. And shooting at old women who tried to sneak across under cover of darkness, or who were damned sick and tired of quarantined starvation and wanted to commit suicide. He could have been dumping their bodies in the river, and waiting for the next ones. How long could he have kept at that?

His tenure on the beach at Salerno was five brief days but he hadn't wanted to stay there. The swing across France, sometimes at a run and sometimes at a crawl, was much better than Salerno but he hadn't wanted that either. No more than he had wanted the past year or thirteen months on the wrong side of the river. But — here he was and here he'd have to stay until the powers beyond saw fit to remove him, the same as at Salerno, the same at the Rhine. The one small difference to the predicament was that he had drunk himself into this one.

The awakening from that was vivid, too.

He remembered the dusty, lonely awakening, the firetrap of a hotel, the stabbed woman lying on the bed, the loss of his money and clothes. The bombed and deserted streets of cities had become a common sight but he still remembered that first one, the morning he awoke from the celebration. He had taken his meals on the sidewalk, eating from cans picked up in the grocery store. There had been the crash of a window — and that girl. The one who looted shops; now what in the hell was her name? Not Sally. Sally had been the winter in Florida and the dissolved partnership. Not Bea. Bea was the tiger-tempered three weeks in New Orleans before he struck out for the north. The name of the looter, then? The kid who had laughed at him and proved herself nineteen? She —

A sound alerted him.

Gary rolled over on his stomach to bury his beard in the dirt. Slowly and with much care he brought up his rifle, muffling with his clothing the slipping of the safety so that it would make no answering sound in the night.

He peered into the night around him, straining to pick out a blacker shape moving against the darkness, listening for an incautious footfall or perhaps the odor of stale tobacco. A few near-by crickets continued to chirp, moderate assurance that he was still alone. The sound came again, between him and the river, and he aimed the rifle that way.

Presently he made out a moving mass not too far away, a mass that divided itself into three shapes as it approached. Three men, prowling the field. He followed them with the gun, drawing a bead on the nearest. They moved along in the night with a stealth born of practice but betraying themselves nonetheless because of their number. He waited. They did not stop, did not make the slightest attempt to inspect the field in which he lay hidden.

Gary relaxed slightly.

The three shadows moved closer to the bridge, slowing their steps too late to muffle the noise of movement, and as they reached the concrete abutment where he had lain earlier, they dropped to their hands and knees to become lost to his sight.

Gary lowered the rifle and began to breathe again. With that last movement he knew their purpose. The trio were scavengers, attracted by the sound of the shot from across the river; they came to the bridge in hopes the body had fallen on this side, or failing that, had left something behind worth salvaging or eating. After their short, fruitless search they would continue on their way.

He remained watchfully alert until they had gone.

A man, or a woman or a child for that matter, lived by his wits and his nature. The reversion had come fast in the year following the calamity. Whether that nature lay shallow or deeply buried, it had quickly come to the surface of every man who stayed alive. Wits were of the utmost importance, often marking the dividing line between those who lived and those who did not. On his journey up from the South during the spring and early summer months, Gary had noticed solitary plunderers raiding farmhouses, quietly and at great peril to themselves; and again he had watched a noisy, armed band burn another house to the ground and take what they wanted — at a cost of four or five lives in the mob.

Somewhere in Alabama a hulking, amiable Negro had shared a poor supper with him and warned him of some of the more dangerous colored men to the immediate north. The Negro then tried to stab him while he slept. And also in Alabama he had stopped to watch a dozen women and children scouring the fields for grasshoppers, sweeping them into gunnysacks they carried for the purpose. Those who couldn't obtain food by force or wile obtained it in another way.

In the hills along the Kentucky-Tennessee line he had discovered a squad of armed soldiers like himself, a half-dozen men who shared the common disaster of awakening on the wrong side of the river. Their leader, a private who possessed in brawn what he lacked in rank, had invited Gary to join them.

Gary refused. “You're too much of a target — I heard you coming a mile away. And it's tougher to feed seven than six. Thanks, anyway.”

“Suit yourself, Jack,” the private told him. He stared at the tanned, well-fed body Gary had acquired on the beach. “Where'd you winter?”

“Texas,” Gary answered promptly. “Lots of cattle.”

“I'll keep it in mind. Hey — wait a minute, you can't get across to Texas!”

“No? Well maybe it was Arkansas — I'm not much good on geography.”

“Wise guy! Just don't ever cross us again, Jack, if you're packing grub. You don't get a second chance.”

“That goes double,” Gary replied. “But I'll see you long before you spot me. If you've never been up in the line, soldier, put somebody in charge who has. You won't last long without scouts.”

He watched them out of sight, working their slow way over the hills to the east. The last man in the troop turned around to wave briefly at him before vanishing over a ridge. Later, Gary wondered if they complained to the private about their back pay.

Little good it would do any of them to complain, himself included — they'd probably never see it. The high brass would trot out some fancy excuse for not paying up — like A.W.O.L. And there would be a full year shot to hell. Thirteen or even fourteen months perhaps — it had been at least that long since the unforgettable day he had celebrated his thirtieth birthday. More than a full year for certain, for he had already spent most of this summer working his way northward.

He had no particular destination, nothing but a vague desire to see how far up the Mississippi he could go and still encounter troops. Someone he had met, someone coming downstream from the north had told him the river watch extended all the way to the Canadian border, and that after the river ended — or began rather, in a Minnesota lake — the troops patrolled overland to the border. The Canadian Mounties took over at that point but the risks and chances of slipping between their patrols were useless, for the United States had armed the border and the friendly nationals to the north were no longer permitted entry.

Gary squirmed on the hard ground and rested the rifle in the crook of his arm. The long, scraggly beard on his face was dirty and itched continually. He wondered again when the quarantine would be lifted. He had seen no exploratory patrols coming across the bridges as yet, testing and sampling as the schoolteacher had said they would. As far as he knew there had been nothing done to reunite the two halves of the country. The river spans remained closed and no one crossed to either side. There had been an occasional plane overhead but it did not attempt contact with anyone on the ground — reconnaissance, he guessed, photographing the towns and perhaps the people who stood in the open to watch it.

A full year now had passed, and perhaps even more.

A year. And in the dim beginning he and a thousand like him had supposed it might last a couple of days, perhaps a week or so. What blind and stupid fools they had been. The schoolteacher had been more of a pessimist in his opinions — his early thoughts were that the quarantine would last a month, even two. And now the first full year had passed and he was in the beginning months of another. How much longer would the cursed thing continue? Wasn't a year long enough to wear away the dangers? Wasn't a year much, much too long to be cut off from your own kind?

The damned brass was responsible.

The first few drops of rain fell on his upturned face and he waited to see if it were a false alarm, or the beginning of a shower. The rifle was snuggled under his coat to keep it dry. After a few hesitant minutes the rain began in earnest and Gary struggled up out of his earthy bed. Down near the river there were ragged trees and a hedge that would offer brief shelter from the sky.

He trudged across the field, soggy and dispirited.