“Nothing, I suppose,” Siferra said, her voice barely audible.
The image of the burning house still seared her mind. And the sight of those ragged, shabby people, running down the street.
But they had fired first, she told herself. They had started the trouble. There was no telling how far they would have carried it, if Theremon hadn’t hit on the idea of burning the house down.
The house—somebody’s house—
Nobody’s house, she corrected.
“There it is,” Theremon said. “The Great Southern Highway. It’s a nice smooth five-hour drive to Amgando. We could be there by dinnertime.”
“If we only had something to drive,” said Siferra.
“If,” he said.
39
Even after all he had seen in the course of having come this far, Theremon wasn’t prepared for the way the Great Southern Highway looked. A traffic engineer’s worst nightmare would not have been as bad.
Everywhere in their crossing of the southern suburbs, Theremon and Siferra had passed abandoned vehicles in the streets. No doubt many drivers, overcome by panic at the moment of the emergence of the Stars, had stopped their cars and fled from them on foot, hoping to find someplace to hide from the terrifying overpowering brilliance that blazed suddenly from the skies.
But the abandoned cars that littered the streets of these quiet residential sectors of the city through which he and Siferra had come so far had been scattered in a sparse random manner, here and there at relatively wide intervals. In these neighborhoods vehicular traffic must have been fairly light at the time of the eclipse, coming as it had after the end of the regular working day.
The Great Southern Highway, though—crowded with late intercity commuters—must have become an utter madhouse in the instant when calamity struck the world.
“Look at it,” Theremon whispered, awestruck. “Will you look at it, Siferra!”
She shook her head in wonder. “Incredible. Incredible.”
There were cars everywhere—clotted masses of them, piled up everywhere in a chaotic scramble, stacked two or three high in places. The wide roadway was almost completely blocked by them, an all but impassable wall of wrecked vehicles. They were facing in every direction. Some were upside down. Many were burned-out skeletons. Bright puddles of spilled fuel gleamed like little crystalline lakes. Streaks of pulverized glass gave the roadbed a sinister sheen.
Dead cars. And dead drivers.
It was the most grisly sight they had seen thus far. A vast army of the dead stretched before them. There were bodies slumped at the controls of their cars, bodies wedged between vehicles that had collided, bodies pinned beneath the wheels of cars. And a host of bodies simply strewn like pitiful discarded dolls along the sides of the road, their limbs frozen in the grotesque attitudes of death.
Siferra said, “Probably some drivers stopped right away, when the Stars came out. But others speeded up, trying to get off the highway and head for home, and went piling into the cars that had stopped. And still other people were so dazed they forgot how to drive altogether—look, they went right off the edge of the road over there, and this one here must have turned around and tried to drive back through the oncoming traffic—”
Theremon shuddered. “A horrendous colossal pileup. Cars crashing in from all sides at once. Spinning around, turning over, flung right across the road to the opposite lanes. People getting out, running for cover, getting hit by other cars just arriving. Everything gone crazy in fifty different ways.”
He laughed bitterly.
Siferra said in surprise, “What can you possibly find to laugh about, Theremon?”
“Only my own foolishness. Do you know, Siferra, a wild idea crossed my mind half an hour ago, as we were getting close to the highway, that we could just sit down in somebody’s abandoned car and find it fueled up and ready to go, and drive ourselves off to Amgando? Just like that, convenient as could be. I didn’t stop to think that the road would be totally blocked—that even if we were lucky enough to find a car we could use, we wouldn’t be able to drive so much as fifty feet in it—”
“It’ll be hard enough just to walk along the road, in the shape it’s in.”
“Yes. But we’ll have to.”
Grimly, they set out on their long journey south.
By the warm Onos-light of early afternoon they picked their way through the carnage of the highway, scrambling over the twisted and battered wreckage of the cars, trying hard to ignore the charred and mutilated bodies, the dried pools of blood, the reek of death, the total horror of it all.
Theremon felt himself growing desensitized to it almost at once. Perhaps that was an even greater horror. But after a short while he simply stopped noticing the gore, the staring eyes of the corpses, the vastness of the disaster that had taken place here. The task of clambering over mountainous heaps of shattered cars and squeezing himself past dangerous jutting masses of jagged metal was so exacting that it required all his concentration, and he quickly ceased to pay attention to the victims of the debacle. He already knew there was no point in searching for survivors. Anyone who had been trapped here this many days would surely have died of exposure by now.
Siferra too seemed to have quickly adapted to the nightmare scene that was the Great Southern Highway. Scarcely saying a word, she picked her way through the obstacles alongside him, now pausing to point to an opening in the tangle of debris, now dropping to her hands and knees to crawl under some overhang of crumpled metal.
They were virtually the only living people using the road. Now and then they caught sight of someone moving southward on foot far ahead of them, or even coming up out of the south heading toward the Saro City end of the road, but there were never any encounters. The other wayfarers would hastily duck down out of sight and lose themselves in the wreckage, or, if they were up ahead, would begin frantically to scramble forward at a pace that spoke of terrible fear, disappearing quickly in the distance.
What are they afraid of? Theremon wondered. That we’ll attack them. Is everyone’s hand lifted against everyone else, now?
Once, an hour or so from their starting point, they saw a bedraggled-looking man going from car to car, reaching in to fumble in the pockets of the dead, despoiling the bodies of their possessions. There was a great sack of loot on his back, so heavy that he was staggering under the weight of it.
Theremon cursed angrily and pulled out his needle-gun.
“Look at the filthy ghoul! Look at him!”
“No, Theremon!”
Siferra deflected his arm just as Theremon fired a bolt at the looter. The shot struck a nearby car, and for a moment set up a glittering sunburst of reflected energy.
“Why did you do that?” Theremon asked. “I was only trying to scare him.”
“I thought—that you—”
Bleakly Theremon shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. There—look at him run!”
The looter had swung around at the sound of the shot, staring in berserk manic astonishment at Theremon and Siferra. His eyes were blank; a trail of spittle dribbled from his lips. He gaped at them for a long moment. Then, dropping his sack of booty, he went scrabbling away in a wild, desperate flight over the tops of the cars and soon was lost from view.
They went onward.
It was slow, dreadful going. The road-signs that rose high above them on shining stanchions mocked their pitiful progress by telling them what a very small distance from the beginning of the highway they had succeeded in traversing so far. By Onos-set they had gone only a mile and a half.