They sheltered in the ruins, in a forest of melted plastic drippings. She woke with the sunlight shining in her face. Bunker lay beside her. He had her shirt open down the front; his hand cupped her breast. She put her arms out to him.
“That was nice,” he said, after. “I kept telling myself the first thing I’d do when I escaped was get laid.”
Paula picked black chunks of grit off her clothes and out of her hair. “Do you want to stay together?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. Do you?”
She sat up, spreading out the coat he had found in the bin. It was stained and torn, a long heavily lined man’s coat with a notched collar. “For a while, at least. Until we find out what’s going on here.”
He stood to pull on his pants. His body was thin and bony, his chest sprinkled with crisp hair, graying like the hair on his head. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
By daylight the whole dome seemed changed. Nothing was left of the wood but the stumps of trees. She could see from the ridge near the old campus all the way across the lake to the yellow hills south of the water. Everything looked much smaller. Many of the buildings had been blown up and packs of dogs drifted around the middle and south of the dome. The only birds she saw were crows.
Tony Andrea’s building was still lived in. She left Bunker digging through a trash can at the edge of the meadow and went cautiously in the side door. There was a big poster on the wall at the foot of the stairs reading: WORK IS LIFE. The floor was dirty and black handprints marked the walls around the doorways. She knocked on Tony’s door.
“Who’s ’ere?” a woman called, behind it.
“I’m looking for Tony Andrea.”
“Who?”
Paula backed away, looking up and down the hall. At the far end she saw another poster: HELP THE STATE—COOPERATE! In red paint across it and part of the wall beside it was scrawled: STRIKE—STRIKE—STRIKE. The woman behind the door called, “Who’s ’ere?” Paula went away.
She remembered An Chu’s message and went down the dome to the Nikoles Building. It was underground; she was shy of going into a place with so few ways out. At last she went down into the guts of the building and found the corridor where An Chu had said she was living. She could not remember the number of the apartment. On the corner of the green corridor was a list of the tenants. She stood before it, reading through it, without finding An Chu’s name. While she was looking down the list for the third time, a woman’s voice said, “Can I help you?”
She wheeled around, her hair standing on end. It was a tall, black-haired woman, too dark to be a Martian. Paula swallowed. “I’m looking for An Chu.”
“Who?”
The closed space around her suddenly pressed tighter on her mind. She turned down the corridor. The woman cried, “Wait!” Paula broke into a run. She reached the stairs and went up into the open day.
Bunker was waiting for her on the surface and they went off along the edge of the drying lake. There seemed to be a boundary of a sort, at the head of the lake, cutting the dome in half. South of this border, no building stood intact. Here and there a tree still grew, its branches fuzzed with leaves just unfolding from buds. The lake shore was scummed with dead weed. She saw no animals until just before dark, when a brown dog began to trail them.
“Dick.”
“I see her,” he said. He gestured at her. “You go that way.”
They split up. The dog followed Paula. Patiently she led it along the shore, moving slowly, careful not to look at it too much. Bunker circled around behind it. Paula sat down on the mud beach. There was a thick yellow froth in the water at the edge of the lake, like soap. The lake smelled of rot. The dog slunk toward her, until about fifty yards from her it lay down on its belly, its ears flat to its head. Under its rough dun-colored hide its ribs looked round and sharp as wire hoops. When she moved, it leaped up, its tail curled between its legs. Its dugs hung down along its belly. Paula settled on her hams again. She was painfully hungry. The dog watched her from the weeds, its head on its paws.
Bunker crept up on it, but he made some sound, and the dog bolted away. The man retreated, and the dog paused, its ears pricked up. Paula swore.
“Come on,” Bunker said. “Let’s walk it down.”
Her legs were already sore. She got up and went after him. The sun was setting. They followed the dog into the darkness. It ran in short bursts ahead of them, galloping out of reach, turning to watch them, dashing away again when they got too close. About an hour after dark, they lost it in the gulleys south of the lake.
Paula was too tired and hungry even to complain. They slept in the shelter of a sheer hillside, shivering. Three or four times during the night air cars flew overhead, waking them. Once a searchlight sliced through the dark around them, and they huddled against the cold ground, their heads buried in their jackets, until it left. Before dawn hunger drove them out again.
Crisscrossing the ridges and notched hills below the lake, they divided up, moving along on parallel courses three hundred feet apart, searching for food. She chased a gray snake along a dusty hillside from tuft to tuft of grass. The air was smoky yellow. The dry ground gave up an odor like an empty husk. Her thigh bones ground in the sockets of her hips. Her mouth was filmed and gluey.
In the late afternoon Bunker shouted on the far side of a gulley. She scrambled down the steep bank, knocking loose a shower of small stones and dirt, and ran toward his voice. He was on his knees digging into the bank of the ravine. His arms were gray with dirt.
“I knew that mutt had a den up here somewhere.” He scooped dirt away. “Watch out—she’ll be back.” He plunged his sleeve down over his hand, reached deep into the hole he had dug, and took out a squirming black puppy.
Its yips were small as rabbit sounds. Paula straightened. The brown dog came running along the floor of the ravine. Paula charged it, shouting, and the dog veered off. Its stained teeth showed. Bunker was taking pup after pup out of the den. Their squeaks brought their mother forward, snarling. Paula moved between her and the den. She snatched a long branch off the ground. The dog faced her, its ears flat, and growled.
“Don’t take them all—leave her a few.”
“Paula Pityheart.” He took off his jacket and wrapped the puppies up in it. “Let’s go.” He slung the wiggling bundle onto his shoulder. When Paula moved, the dog darted past her and rushed into its den. Paula and Bunker went down the gulley to the open ground, made a fire, and roasted five puppies.
Day after day, from the first light to the last, they searched for food. Some days they found nothing at all. Paula fell sick, but she dared not stop hunting even for an hour. One resting while the other tracked, they walked down wild dogs and foxes. In the bombed-out buildings they cornered rats. They went north again, past the head of the lake. Paula dug sacks of rotting garbage out of the trash bins. They broke into an apartment but found nothing to steal except water. Even the clothes in the closets were as shabby as their own. As the lake dried up and turned foul, good water was nearly as scarce as food, until they found the narrow opening into the underground river, whose water was sweet. One evening, while she was rummaging through a garbage can outside the Nikoles Building, someone called her name.
She ran. The voice screamed, “Wait!” Twenty strides away, at the corner of the building, she turned to look back, ready to run again. A small figure was walking after her.
“An Chu.” She took a step forward. Maybe it was a trap. A smile spread across the other woman’s round face. She put out her hands, and Paula rushed toward her.
“I knew it was you—Jennie said it was somebody with brassy hair—”