The Long Loud Silence Read online

  Nineteen… and she could prove it. Had proved it. He looked back at her rumpled bed and said aloud, “Hell of a note!” And then he went into the bathroom.

  The mirrored cabinet set in the wall was empty but for a few tiny bars of hotel soap and he slammed the lid shut in disgust. A dirty, bearded face stared back at him. The water taps above the sink still refused to run and he was on the point of turning to leave the room when his eyes found the water closet. Lifting off the porcelain lid and twisting the floating ball back out of the way, he scooped his hands into the box and washed his face. The water felt good on his skin and he poured handfuls over his head, letting it run down his body. A half dozen untouched towels hung near-by. As he was drying himself he caught sight of his beard in the mirror again, and stopped.

  Gary quit the bathroom and walked to the door, forgetting it was locked until the knob resisted his hand. He muttered an impatient threat to the absent girl under his breath and crossed through the connecting doorway to the adjoining room, to let himself out into the hotel corridor. Going downstairs, he noted the room numbers nearest the lobby and on reaching the ground floor, scooped from the clerk's rack several keys to those rooms. Searching about the lobby he found a drugstore opening off it, and picked up a heavy chair to hurl through its locked door. The drugstore shelves offered him his choice of shaving equipment and he picked up a handful, taking the things up to the second floor and the nearer rooms.

  The first room he unlocked was a sample room and he backed out of it, impatient at the minor delay. The next two rooms he opened contained bodies in the beds and he vacated them just as quickly. Finally locating an empty one, he closed the door and locked it with the bolt, to dump his supplies in the bathroom. Lifting off the lid of the water box, he used his hands to scoop out water and fill the sink. Then he shaved.

  Afterwards he lay down on the bed and ripped open a package of cigarettes taken from the drugstore, smoking two in succession before the taste in his mouth satisfied him. It was then that he discovered he had forgotten to dress. Cursing his own forgetfulness, Gary swung off the bed and unlocked the door, to climb two flights of stairs to the fourth floor and his own room.

  Both doors hung open — the one he had left open and the other that the girl had locked. He checked his stride and listened. Irma Sloane was inside, crying hysterically.

  Gary paused in the doorway, saw her lying across his bed.

  “Stop that bawling, dammit!” he said with a sharp and husky voice.

  She swung around quickly, raised her head to stare at him, and then with a happy cry sped across the floor to throw herself at his chest. He caught her in selfdefense, braced himself to prevent her lunge from pushing him backward. Irma clung to him fiercely, still crying.

  “Stop it, I said! Stop it.” He shook her.

  “I thought you'd gone.” Her words were muffled, her mouth pressed against his chest. “I thought you'd left me!” Her arms encircled his waist possessively.

  “That's what I thought about you.”

  She raised her face to his. “What?”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Oh, Russell… you've shaved.”

  “Where did you go? When I woke up you were gone.”

  She smiled at him and turned her head to the bed, pointing. “Look what I have. Oh, I have lots of pretty things.”

  He saw the sack, an extra large grocery sack, its brown seams bulging with whatever was packed and crammed inside it. “What is it?”

  She released him then, straightened up from him and ran over to the bed, to dump the contents of the sack across the rumpled sheet. He stared half-believing at her loot.

  “Mother of Moses! Why do you keep picking up that junk? You can't eat it.”

  “They're mine! I'm going to keep them, keep them all!” She dipped her fingers into the pile of jewelry, letting the pieces trickle sensuously through her fingers. “Aren't they pretty, Russell?”

  “You can't eat them,” he repeated, “and if you want to stay alive you had damned well better begin collecting food. Why didn't you bring something to eat?”

  “I've never had so many nice things before… they are so pretty.” She looked up at him, and then at his body, to laugh gaily. “Hadn't you better put some clothes on, Russell?”

  He picked up his clothing from the floor and stalked into the adjoining room, slamming the door behind him.

  * * *

  They ate breakfast in the same manner in which he had eaten the night before: from cans, sitting on the curb before a grocery store. It was less than satisfying. Afterwards he asked about cars. He wanted a new car from some dealer's showroom or garage, and he wanted a light one that did not consume too much gas. She led him on a tour of automobile agencies and he picked a Studebaker sedan, a demonstrator with slightly under a thousand miles on its meter.

  “Why are you so fussy?” she asked impatiently. “Why not take one of those cars out in the street? There's no one here to stop us. Where are we going?”

  “God only knows! We're getting out of this town fast but I don't know where we're going. Chicago? What if it has been bombed out? Supposing we have to go all the way to New York, or out to California? How much of the country has been bombed, do you know? Where will we find living people?”

  “I don't know.” She was frightened now.

  “I don't either, but we've got to look somewhere. The army or the Red Cross is somewhere and we want to find them. The whole damned country can't be dead!” He climbed in the car and started the motor, listening to it. “I want a car that will give me mileage, I want provisions for a long haul, and then we're moving. Get in. Find a gun shop.”

  “A gun shop?”

  “Guns — rifles. Find me a store that sells them.”

  “I don't know of any,” she told him helplessly.

  “Sporting goods,” he snapped at her, “a big hardware store or a—”

  “Oh, yes,” she interrupted. “I know of a place where you can buy fishing equipment, boats, things like that.”

  “That's what I want.” He drove the Studebaker out of the garage, listening to the performance of the motor.

  While she stood absently watching him, Gary chose from the store's wall rack a heavy .30-30 and a Marlin .22. He loaded the girl down with ammunition for the two rifles, had her pack it on the rear floor of the car. Afterwards they drove by the grocery where they had taken two meals, to load the trunk with food. He stumbled over debris on the floor that hadn't been there when they visited the place for breakfast, and searched the store carefully before allowing the girl to enter. She would have chosen light, fancy and almost useless goods had not he vetoed the choices, instead filling her arms with canned soups and meats, a variety of vegetables, fruits and juices. On a second thought he picked up a case of canned milk.

  She was quick to complain. “Oh — Russell! Do we have to take all this now? Why can't we simply stop somewhere when we want to eat?”

  “Lift your nose,” he said sharply. “Smell the air. Do you want to come back into this stink every day to eat? And it'll get worse.”

  Casting another look at the litter left on the floor by some other prowler, Gary drove back to the gun shop once more and picked up a .38 revolver.

  “Now what's that for? You going to fight someone?”

  He poked a finger at the bulging paper sack she held tightly in her lap. “What if somebody takes a notion to loot us?”

  “Oh.”

  He left town quickly, picking up and following a marked route that he knew led to Chicago. Occasionally he was forced to detour around a blocked street where a falling bomb had gouged out a great crater, or a tangle of wrecked automobiles made passage difficult. The suburbs were less badly hit, with only an occasional crater revealing where some stray bomb had come down. But the suburbs were as lifeless. And still he didn't understand why, didn't comprehend why a few scattered bombs should so completely wipe out a population. Momentarily he switched on the car's radio, but the
band was silent.

  Either the army was continuing radio silence — or the entire nation was off the air permanently. Optimistically he told himself it was not the latter. Sudden and unexpected bombs had fallen a few days ago: more might come, or an enemy force might follow them to establish a bridgehead and dig in for counterattack. In either event radio stations would remain off the air to prevent information from leaking to the enemy, to deny him radio beams on which to track more bombs, or his planes. The lack of information was harmful to the country, to what remained of it, but radio silence was of paramount importance. When the radios again came back on the air, the danger would be over. He looked at his watch, mentally laying out an hourly schedule for listening.

  “Look — look, there's a man!”

  He slowed the car. “Where?”

  “There — that farmhouse ahead.”

  Gary put his foot on the brake and one hand on the horn, pulling up sharp at the mouth of a lane leading up to a cluster of farm buildings.

  “Hey there!” He leaned out the window.

  To his astonishment the farmer whirled and ran into the nearer barn, to emerge a moment later brandishing a double-barreled shotgun. Immediately behind him the barn door ejected two boys, the taller of the two carrying another gun and wearing on his frightened face a stamp of determination.

  The red-faced farmer waved his weapon. “Git out of here!”

  “Hey — now wait!” Gary shouted at him. “All I want is information.”

  “You ain't getting nothing here but buckshot. Now git!” He hoisted the shotgun into firing position, and beside him the older boy did likewise. “I've had enough of you double-damned thieves!”

  Gary slipped the idling motor into gear and poised for a quick getaway. “Information,” he shouted once more. “Where is the army?”

  “Ain't seen no army!” And the shotgun blasted the air.

  The Studebaker's rear tires spun madly, throwing a shower of dirt and gravel into the air. Gary piloted it a fast mile down the highway before taking his foot from the gas, and then he slowed to a stop, to climb out and circle the car looking for damage. The buckshot had missed them. He settled behind the wheel to light a cigarette.

  “Sort of mad, wasn't he?” he asked mildly.

  “What in heaven's name was the matter with him?” She reached over and helped herself to a cigarette.

  His answering laugh was bitter. “You looters are giving us decent people a bad name.”

  “Well, we certainly didn't get any information from him.”

  “On the contrary,” Gary corrected her, “we did. We learned that the countryside is already overrun with looters. That means people from the cities, the survivors running into the open country to get away from… well, from the city. That farmer has had so much food stolen from him he won't talk to anybody. Shoot first and answer questions afterward.” He reached into the back seat for the revolver.

  She watched him. “You aren't going to—”

  “I'm not going to what? Go back and fight it out with him? Don't be silly.” Methodically he opened a box of cartridges and loaded the revolver, to lay it on the floor between his feet. “We also learned that people in the open country have survived; that was his family behind him. The bombs — and whatever death they carried — didn't fall here, didn't spread their gas or radiation or germs out here. Only the cities. Maybe only the big cities. We'll find out soon, when we come to some whistle stop.”

  “What are we going to do? I mean — about this?”

  He studied her childish face, dwelling on the almost mature mind that existed behind it, the almost mature body that existed below it. She had dumbfounded him last night.

  “I'm going back to the army,” he told her, “as soon as I can find it. I'm supposed to be there right now. I'm going to locate a command post somewhere and report in. And when that happens, they'll outfit me with clothing and equipment and ship me off to someplace. That's the end of it.”

  “But it isn't the end of it! What about me?”

  “You? I can't take you along, Irma.”

  She laughed at him again, an echo of last night's wild laughter which had burned his ears, made him ashamed of himself. “I'm nineteen… and I could be a nice mascot.”

  “Hell's fire, you'd have the army on its ear and I'd be in the guardhouse for life. If you want to do something, the Red Cross people could put you to work.”

  “I don't want the Red Cross people,” she snapped at him peevishly, “I want you.”

  He flicked away his half-smoked cigarette. “Tough, sister. The army saw me first.”

  “Russell…” She turned to him, easily forcing the tears into her eyes. “Russell, supposing I'm in trouble?”

  He eyed her silently, contemptuously.

  “Well,” she wavered, “I was only supposing…”

  “You can get out and walk any time you want to, Irma.”

  “I won't talk about it any more, Russell. I promise. Russell… will you really leave me?”

  “I haven't any choice. When I meet up with the army, we say good-bye.”

  She settled back in the seat as he started the car. “All right, Russell.”

  “We'll try Chicago first.”

  They did not drive into Chicago. Gary drove near the metropolis, moving slowly and incredulously through the small fringe-area towns which infest every major highway leading into the city. He was turned back by the fire and the smell of death borne on the night wind. The wind whipped the odor south, to where he finally stopped the car on the highway and got out to stare at the flames in the night sky. The fire had evidently been burning for days and now it was eating rapidly toward them, pushed on by the torrid winds. The unholy red glow of it stretched from one horizon to the other, indicative of methodical and widespread bombardment, making the city a vast crematorium. Chicago: bottleneck and major target, terminus of every railroad north of Saint Louis, possessor of the only waterway connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi and the Gulf, headquarters of a vast defensive ring designed to protect the nation from invasion from the north. Chicago: obsolete now in the strictest sense.

  Gary clung to the car door and stared at the fiery spectacle in the sky, unable even to utter the curse on his tongue. It shocked him as that first city never had.

  “Russell…” the girl inched toward him on the Seat, staring forward through the windshield. “Russell, isn't it dangerous? If atom bombs did that, isn't is dangerous for us to be here?”

  He shook his head. “I don't know. The radiation is supposed to disappear after a few days… but I don't know. Mother of Moses! What they must have poured on that place!” He had read descriptions, had seen the army films of the destruction caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki… and as he remembered it, something like sixty percent of the cities were obliterated and over a hundred thousand had died in those two places. One bomb on each city. And Chicago with a population of almost four million had quite apparently received many direct hits.

  “Let's leave, Russell. I'm afraid.”

  He slowly turned the car around, staring first through the open window and then in the rear-vision mirror at the towering flames. Driving south again, away from the vanishing city, he couldn't help from turning his head to look behind. The glow persisted, hung in the sky after they had traveled many miles. It left him with a deep sense of despair that he could not shake off, plunged him into a mood and a silence so deep that the girl was forced to speak twice to make herself heard.

  “Russell! I said, where shall we sleep?”

  “I don't know. Anywhere.”

  “We passed some motor courts.”

  “I'm not turning around. Find another one.”

  * * *

  Sunrise the following morning was no better than the two previous dawns, no different from those other two unpleasant awakenings to a changed world. He rolled his head on the twisted pillow, trying to clear away the ghastly memory of the burning city. The image of the flames persisted and he
found himself wondering if anything alive still moved in Chicago's streets, wondering what it would be like to be in their shoes. The picture would not erase itself. He had gone to sleep with the fire burning fitfully behind his eyelids, had dreamed of it, talked aloud of it in the night, and awakened in the morning with the red sky still fresh in his mind. It shouldn't be! Chicago was different from those cities in Europe, big and little cities that had undergone brutal destruction from the skies. Chicago was ours… and our cities were not meant to be touched. Chicago was not at all like those foreign towns that belonged to strangers.

  Chicago hurt him.

  He arose and dressed, ignoring the sleeping girl, to walk outside and scan the sky.

  * * *

  Gary turned the car west toward the Mississippi.

  His reasoning was that the east was dead or deserted like the towns they had driven through, that the large cities crowding the eastern sections of the country must by now be only counterparts of the death and silence they found everywhere. Or else they were like Chicago. Deeper in the west there was more room, more space, and cities were greater distances apart. The place to find sane, living people, to find the army was somewhere in the west. He filled the gas tank from an abandoned station and started.

  The countryside they traversed was the same as the day before, the road and the few people unchanged from the previous unfriendly attitudes. Disaster had overtaken the nation and strangers were regarded with open Suspicion. Occasionally Gary discovered an isolated farmer still working his fields, and more often a few men and boys hovering close to their farm buildings with shotguns very much in evidence. Some few farmhouses were silent with an air of desertion, while one had burned to the ground, smoking embers the only remaining trace of it. The small towns and villages along the highway were fast becoming islands of feudalism.

  Some, like the farms, were empty, the population having gone elsewhere. Others only appeared to be empty as the automobile passed the length of the one, long main street. Gary saw signs of unfriendly people behind the curtained windows, the closed doors. Storekeepers were armed. And in one a heavily armed delegation met him at the village limits, stopped him. He explained his mission, his desired destination, and showed them the army identification tags hanging about his neck. After a while they allowed him to proceed through the village, one of the armed townsmen riding in the back seat to make certain they did not stop. The man had no news to offer, apparently knew no more of the general situation that Gary had already discovered for himself.