On this road fewer lights were working. There were often five or six dark in a row, so that they moved with only the glow of a neighboring roadway twenty yards to the side to light them. They were just about to enter another of these dark sections when a figure appeared in silhouette at the other end.
They stopped.
The figure was gone.
Deciding it was only their imagination, they started again, peering through the incomplete darkness on either side. A little farther, Geo suddenly halted. “There…”
Two hundred feet ahead of them, what may have been a naked woman rose from the ground and began to walk backward until she disappeared into the next length of dark road.
“Do you think she was running away from us?” Iimmi asked.
Urson touched the jewel on Iimmi’s chest. “I wish we had some more light around here.”
“Yeah,” Iimmi agreed. They continued.
The skeleton lay at the beginning of the next stretch of functioning lights. The rib cage marked sharp shadows on the pavement. The hands lay above its head, and one leg twisted over the other in an impossible angle.
“What the hell is that?” Urson asked. “And how did it get there?”
“It looks like it’s been there a little while,” said Iimmi.
“Do we turn back now?” Urson asked.
“A skeleton can’t hurt you,” Geo said.
“But what about the live one we saw?” countered Urson.
“And here she comes now,” Geo whispered.
In fact, two figures approached them. As Urson, Geo, and Iimmi moved closer, they stopped, one a few steps before the other. Then they dropped. Geo couldn’t tell if they fell or lay down quickly on the roadway.
“Go on?” asked Urson.
“Go on.”
Pause.
“Go on,” Geo repeated.
Two skeletons lay on the road where the figures had disappeared a minute before. “They don’t seem dangerous,” Geo said. “But what do they do? Die every time they see us?”
“Hey,” Iimmi said. “What’s that? Listen.”
It was a sickly, liquid sound, like mud dropping into itself. Something was falling from the sky. No, not from the sky, but from the roadway that crossed theirs fifty feet overhead. Looking down again, they saw that a blob of something was growing on the pavement ten feet from them.
“Come on,” Geo said, and they skirted the mess dripping from the road above and continued up the road. They passed four more skeletons. The plopping behind them became a sloshing.
As they turned, it emerged under the white and flaring lamps. Translucent insides bubble-pocked and quivering, it slipped forward across the road toward the skeletons. Impaling itself on the bones, it flowed around them, covered them, molded to them. A final surge, and its shapelessness contracted into arms, a head, legs. The naked man-thing pushed itself to its knees and then stood, its flesh now opaque. Eye sockets caved into the face. A mouth ripped low on the skull, and the chest began to move. A wet, steamy sound came from the mouth hole in irregular gasps.
It began to walk toward them, raising its hands from its sides. Then, behind it in the darkness, they saw the others.
“Damn,” said Urson. “What do they…”
“One or both of two things,” Geo answered, backing away. “More meat or more bones.”
“Whoops!” Iimmi said. “Back there —!”
Behind them seven more stood, while the ones in front advanced. Urson slipped his sword from his belt. The gleam of the streetlight ran down the blade. Suddenly he lunged at the leading figure, hacked at an upraised arm, sprang back. Severed at the elbow, the wound dribbled down the figure’s side.
The arm splashed on the macadam. Quivering, the gelatinous mud contracted from the bone. As Urson danced back, one of the figures behind the injured one stepped squarely on the blob, which attached itself to its ankle and was absorbed.
A covered flight of stairs had its entrance here, leading to the next level of highway. They ducked into it and fled up the steps. Geo glanced back once: one of the forms had reached the entrance and had started to climb. They were high enough to get some idea of the city. Outside the transparent covering of the steps, the city spread in a web of lights, rising, looping, descending like roller-coaster tracks. Two glows caught him: beyond the river, a pale red haze flickered behind the jungle and was reflected on the water. The other was within the city, a pale orange nested among the buildings.
He took all this in during a glance as he ran up the steps. A gurgling became a roar behind them as they reached the top. Geo was only clear of the entrance when he yelled, “Run!”
They slipped from the doorway and staggered back. A mass of jelly the size of a two-story house flopped against the entrance. They edged by its pulsing sides. The lamplight pierced its translucent sides, where a skull caught in the jelly swirled to the surface, then sank.
“By Argo…” swore Urson.
“Don’t try to cut it again, Urson!” Geo said. “It’ll drown us!”
It sucked from the entrance and shivered ponderously. Something was happening at the front. A half-dozen figures were detaching themselves from the parent and preceding it.
Geo: “They can’t go very fast — ”
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Urson said.
They ran up the road, plunging suddenly into a darkened section. There was a glow in front of them. Suddenly Urson yelled, “Watch it!”
Abruptly the road sheared away. They halted and approached the edge slowly. The surface of the road tore away and the girders, unsupported, sagged toward the ruined stump of the building from which rose the orange glow. One wall of the building still stood, topped by a few girders that spiked the darkness. The glow came from the ruin’s heart.
“What do you think that is?” asked Geo.
“I don’t know,” Iimmi said.
It sloshed along the road behind them. They looked. In the shadow, numberless figures marched toward them. Suddenly the figures fell to the ground, and without a halt in the sound, flesh rolled from bone, congealed, and rose, quivering, into the light.
“Get going!” Geo ordered.
Iimmi started out first on the twisted beams that descended to the glowing pit.
“You’re crazy,” Urson said. It flopped another meter. “Hurry up,” he added. With Urson in the middle, they started along the twenty-inch width of girder. Lit from beneath, most of their bodies were in the shadow of the beam. Only their arms, outstretched for balance, burned with pale orange.
Before them, legible on the broken wall,
ATOMIC ENERGY FOR THE BETTERMENT OF MAN
was flanked by purple trefoils. The beams twisted sideways and then dropped to join others. Iimmi made the turn, dropped to his knees and hands, and then started to let himself down the four feet to the next small section of concrete. Once he saw something, let out a low whistle, but continued to lower himself to the straightened girder. Urson made the turn next. When he saw what Iimmi had seen, his hand shot to Geo’s chest and grabbed the jewel.
Geo took his wrist. “That won’t help us now,” he said. “What is it?”
Urson expelled a breath and then continued down slowly, without speaking. Quickly Geo turned to drop —
The beam structure over which they had just come was coated with trembling thicknesses of the stuff. Globs hung pendulously from the steel shafts, glowing in the light from below, quivering, smoking, dropping off into the darkness. Here and there something half human rose to look around, to pull the collective mass farther on; but then it would fall back, dissolve. Sagging between the girders, noisome, thick, it bulged forward, burning in the pale light, smoking now, bits shriveling, falling away. Geo was about to go on. Then he called, “Wait a minute.”