"Dr. Ransom…" She seemed visibly let down, and turned to go back to the veranda. Then, out of boredom, she beckoned him across the hall. "You look tired, doctor." She slouched off into the veranda, the soiled beachrobe trailing behind her.
The double windows were sealed to keep out the dust, and obscured the green hull of the tanker at the far end of the pool. Despite its length the veranda was claustrophobic, the air dead and unoccupied. A peculiar scent hung about, coming from the foliage of the half dead tropical plants suspended from the wall, their limp fronds outstretched as if trying to reach Miranda on their last gasp.
Miranda slumped back on one of the wicker divans. A basket of fruit spilled across a glass-topped table. She munched half a grape, peering critically at the pip, then waved Ransom in.
"Come on, doctor, don't stand there trying to look enigmatic. I won't compromise you or anything. Have you seen Quilter?"
"He's hunting your houseboy with a couple of dogs," Ransom said. "You may need me later. I'll be at home." Miranda flicked the grapeskin across the floor. He tapped his valise. "I've got to go."
"Where?" She waved his objections aside contemptuously. "Don't be damn silly, there's nowhere to go. Tell me, doctor, what exactly are you up to in Larchmont?"
"Up to?" Ransom echoed. "I'm trying to hold what's left of my practice together."
As she poked among the half-eaten fruit, Ransom looked down at the dirty cuffs and collar of the beachrobe, and at the soiled top of the slip she wore loosely around her breasts. Already she was beginning to look as derelict and faded as her plants-once she ceased to serve Lomax's purposes he would lose interest in her. Yet her skin was of an almost albino whiteness, unmarked by any freckle or blemish.
She noticed him gazing down at her and gave him an evil smirk, pushing back her hair with one wrist in an almost comically arch gesture. "What's the matter, doctor? Do you want to examine me or something?"
"Most definitely not," Ransom said evenly. He pointed to the tanker by the pool. The mechanic was winding the hose onto its winch. "Is Lomax selling his water?"
"Like hell. I wanted him to pour it into the ground near the highway!" She glanced up sharply. "Has Lomax told you about his plan? I suppose he couldn't contain himself with laughing like a small boy?"
"Do you mean his bonfire party? He invited me to take part."
"Doctor, you should." Miranda looked around with a flourish, the white hair veiling her face like a medusa's crown. "Let me tell you, though, I have a little plan of my own."
"I'm sure you have," Ransom said. "But I'll be leaving for the coast soon."
With a weary shake of the head, Miranda dismissed him. "The coast," she repeated scornfully. "There isn't any coast now. There's only _here_, you'd better face that." When he reached the door she called after him: "Doctor, have you ever seen an army of ants try to cross a stream?"
From the steps Ransom looked out across the dusty rooftops. The smoke pall hung over the distant city, but the air was brighter, reflected off the white ash that covered the chalklike bed of the river.
The mechanic opened the door of the tanker and climbed in. He pulled a rifle from the locker behind the seat and propped it in the window. A small stooped man with a patch over one eye, he glanced suspiciously at Ransom.
Ransom walked over to him. "Are you with the army?" he asked. "Have they started to requisition water now?"
"This is a private gift." The driver glanced up at Lomax's suite, as if unsure of his motives. "For Mount Royal Zoo."
Ransom recognized the green overalls. "Who's in charge now? Dr. Barnes?"
"He's gone. Flown like a bird. Only two of us are left."
"Do you mean that some of the animals are still alive?" Ransom asked. "I thought they'd all been destroyed by now."
"Why?" The driver peered down sharply. "Why should they be?"
Surprised by his aggressive tone, Ransom said: "Well, for their sake, if not for ours. This water won't last forever."
The driver leaned on the sill, pointing a sharp finger at Ransom. Although obviously not a man given to argument, he seemed to have been irritated by Ransom's remarks.
"They're all right," he said. He gestured at the dusty landscape around them. "This is what they like. A few weeks from now and maybe we'll be able to let them _out!_"
His one eye gleamed in his twisted face with a wild misanthropic hope.
Chapter 4 – The Drowned Aquarium
For half an hour they drove on toward Mount Royal Zoo, winding in and out of the deserted streets, making detours across the gardens and tennis courts when their way was blocked. Ransom sat forward on the seat beside Whitman, trying to remember the maze of turnings. The zoo was three miles from the center of the city, in what had once been a neighborhood of pleasant, well-tended homes, but the whole area now had the appearance of a derelict shanty town. The husks of trees and box hedges divided the houses from one another, and in the gardens the smoldering incinerators added their smoke to the ash-filled air. Abandoned cars lay by the roadside, or had been jerked out of the way onto the sidewalks, their doors open. They passed an empty shopping center. The storefronts had been boarded up or sealed with steel grilles, and a few lean dogs with arched backs picked among the burst cartons.
The abrupt transition from Larchmont, which still carried a faint memory of normal life, surprised Ransom. Here, within the perimeter of the city, the exodus had been violent and sudden. Now and then a solitary figure hurried head down between the lines of cars. Once an ancient truck crammed with an entire family's furniture and possessions, parents crowded into the driving cabin with three or four children, jerked across an intersection a hundred yards in front of them and disappeared into the limbo of sidestreets.
Half a mile from the zoo, the main avenue was blocked by a dozen cars jammed around a large articulated truck that had tried to reverse into a narrow drive. Whitman swore and glanced briefly to left and right, and without hesitating swung the tanker off the road into the drive of a small singlestory house. They roared past the kitchen windows, crushing a dustbin with the fender, and Ransom saw the startled faces of a gray-haired old couple, a man and his wife, watching them with terrified eyes.
"Did you see them?" Ransom shouted, casting his mind two or three weeks ahead, when the couple would be alone in the abandoned city. "Is no one helping them?"
Whitman ignored the question. Ransom had persuaded the one-eyed driver, against his better judgment, to take him to the zoo, on the pretext that he would be able to add an anti-rabies vaccine to the water. Obsessed with his animals, Whitman seemed to have lost all interest in anyone else.
A white picket fence separated the end of the alley from the drive of the house on the parallel street. A car had stalled between the gates on the edge of the sidewalk. Barely reducing speed, Whitman drove on and flattened the fence. The brittle sticks splintered like a row of matches. Carrying a section on the bumper, they moved past the windows of the house, then slowed fractionally before the impact with the car. Its doors slamming, it was catapulted out mto the road, denting the grille of a small truck, then rolled across the camber and buried its bonnet in the side of an empty convertible. The windscreen frosted and the windows splintered and fell into the roadway.