Gay said, “Huh?” Jackie began to grin.
“It’s the Hook.” Alim treated himself to a whistling sigh of relief. “I know him. We can deal.”
It would take setting up. Alim had to talk to the Hook as an equal, as a commander of men. They had to talk as two men with power. He couldn’t let Hooker know just how bad things were. Alim left Jackie on the hill and went back down to camp. Time to do some shouting and screaming. Time to get those bastards to work.
By noon his camp was organized. It looked good, and it looked like there were more of them than they were. He took Jackie and his brother Harold and went toward the Army camp.
“Shit, I’m scared,” Harold said as they walked toward the shoreline.
“Scared of the Hook?”
“He beat the shit out of me once,” Harold said. “Back in ninth grade.”
“Yeah, and you had it comin’,” Alim said. “Okay, they’ve seen us. Harold, you go in. Leave the rifle here. Go in, hands up, and tell Sergeant Hooker I want to talk to him. And be nice to him, you know? Respectful.”
“You can bet your ass on that,” Harold said. He straightened and walked tall, hands out where they could see they were empty. He tried to whistle.
Alim was aware that there were movements to his right. Hooker had sent men out to flank him. Alim turned and shouted to purely imaginary followers. “Hold it up there, you bastards! This is a peace talk, dig? I’ll skin the first dude that shoots, and you know I’ll do it.” Too much, Alim thought. Like I’m worried they won’t do what I say. But the Army dudes heard me, and it stopped them. And Harold’s in the camp and nobody’s done any shootin’ yet…
And he’s done it, Alim shouted to himself. He’s talking to Hooker, and by God he’s done it. Hook’s comin’ out to meet me. We’re all right, all-fucking-right.
For the first time since Hammerfall, Alim Nassor felt hope and pride.
Two heavy farm trucks ground across the mud flats, taking a tortuous path to the new island in the San Joaquin Sea. They stopped at a supermarket, still half flooded, glass windows scraped of mud by laborious effort. Armed men jumped out and took up positions nearby.
“Let’s go,” Cal White said. He carried Deke Wilson’s submachine gun. White led the way into the drowned building, wading waist-deep in filthy water. The others followed.
Rick Delanty coughed and tried to breathe through his mouth. The smell of death was overpowering. He looked for someone to talk to, Pieter or Johnny Baker, but they were at the far end of the column. Although it was their second day at the store, none of the astronauts had got used to the smells.
“If it was up to me, I’d wait another week,” Kevin Murray said. Murray was a short, burly man with long arms. He’d been a feedstore clerk, and was lucky enough to have married a farmer’s sister.
“Wait a week and those Army bastards may be here,” Cal White called from inside. “Hold up a second.” White went on with another man and their only working flashlight, handpumped, and Deke’s submachine gun.
The gun seemed an irrelevant obscenity to Rick. There was too much death all around them. He wasn’t going to say that. Last night Deke had taken in a refugee, a man from southwards with information to trade for a meaclass="underline" a gang of blacks had been terrorizing the south valley, and now they were linked up with the Army cannibals. It might not be long before they came to Deke Wilson’s turf again.
Poor bastards, Rick thought. He could sympathize: blacks in this shattered world, no status, no place to go, wanted nowhere. Of course they’d join the cannibals. And of course the local survivors were looking strangely at Rick Delanty again…
“Clear. Let’s get at it,” White called from inside. They waded in, a dozen men, three astronauts and nine survivors. A driver brought one of the trucks around so that the headlights shone into the wrecked store. Rick wished they hadn’t. Bodies bobbed in the filthy water. He choked hard and brought the cloth to his face, White had sprinkled a dozen drops of gasoline on it. The sweet sickening smell of gasoline was better than…
Kevin Murray went to a shelf of cans. He lifted a can of corn. It was eaten through with rust. “Gone,” he said. “Damn.”
“Sure wish we had a flashlight,” another farmer said.
A flashlight would help, Rick knew, but some things are better done in gloomy darkness. He pushed rotten remains away from a shelf. Glass jars. Pickles. He called to the others, and they began carrying the pickles out.
“What’s this stuff, Rick?” Kevin Murray asked. He brought another jar.
“Mushrooms.”
Murray shrugged. “Better’n nothing. Thanks. Sure wish I had my glasses back. You ever wonder why I don’t pack a gun? Can’t see as far as the sights.”
Rick tried to concentrate on glasses, but he didn’t know anything about how you might grind lenses. He moved through the aisles, carrying things the others had discovered, searching for more, pushing aside the corpses until even that became routine, but you had to talk about something else… “Cans don’t last long, do they?” Rick said. He stared at rotten canned stew.
“Sardine cans last fine. God knows why. I think somebody’s already been here, there ain’t so much as the last store. We got most of what was here yesterday, anyway.” He looked thoughtfully at old corpses bobbing about him. “Maybe they ate it all. Trapped here…”
Rick didn’t answer. His toes had brushed glass.
They were all working in open-toed sandals taken from the shoe store up the road. They couldn’t work barefoot for fear of broken glass, and why ruin good boots? Now his toes had brushed a cool, smooth curve of glass bottle.
Rick held his breath and submerged. Near floor level he found rows of bottles, lots of them, different shapes. Fiftyfifty it was bottled water, barely worth room aboard the truck; but he picked one up and surfaced.
“Apple juice, by God! Hey, gang, we need hands here!”
They waded down the aisles, Pieter and Johnny and the farmers, all dog-tired and dirty and wet, moving like zombies. Some had strength to smile. Rick and Kevin Murray dipped for the bottles and handed them up, because they were the ones who didn’t carry guns.
White, the man in charge, turned slowly away with two bottles; turned back. “Good, Rick. You did good,” he said, and smiled, and turned slowly away and waded toward the doorway. Rick followed.
Someone yelled.
Rick set his bottles on an empty shelf to give himself speed. That had to be Sohl on sentry duty. But Rick didn’t have a gun!
Sohl yelled again. “No danger; I repeat, no danger, but you guys gotta see this!”
Go back for the bottles? Hell with it. Rick pushed past something he wouldn’t look at (but the floating mass had the feel, the weight of a small dead man or a large dead woman) and waded out into the light.
The parking lot was almost half full of cars, forty or fifty cars abandoned when the rains came. The hot rain must have fallen so fast that car motors were drowned before the customers in the shopping center could decide to move. So the cars had stayed, and many of the customers. The water washed around and in and out of the cars.
Sohl was still at his post on the roof of the supermarket. It would have done him no good to come closer; he was farsighted, and his glasses had been smashed, like Murray’s. He pointed down at what was washing against the side of a Volkswagen bus and called, “Will someone tell me what that is? It ain’t no cow!”
They formed a semicircle around it, their feet braced against the water’s gentle westward current, this same flow that held the strange body against the bus.
It was smaller than a man. It was all the colors of decay; the big, drastically bent legs were almost falling off. What was it? It had arms. For a mad moment Rick pictured Hammerfall as the first step in an interstellar invasion, or as part of a program for tourists from other worlds. Those tiny arms the long mouth gaping in death, the Chianti-bottle torso…