Alas, Babylon

Chapter 8

On a morning in April, four months after The Day, Randy Bragg awoke and watched a shaft of sunlight creep down the wall. At the foot of the couch, Graf squirmed and then wormed his way upward under the blanket. During the January cold spell Randy had discovered a new use for Graf. The dachshund made a most satisfactory foot warmer, mobile, automatic, and operating on a minimum of fuel which he would consume anyway. Randy flung off the blanket and swung his feet to the floor. He was hungry. He was always hungry. No matter how much he ate the night before, he was always starving in the morning. He never had enough fats, or sweets, or starches, and the greater part of each day was usually spent in physical effort of one kind or another. Downstairs, Helen and Lib would be preparing breakfast. Before Randy ate he would shower and shave. These were painful luxuries, almost his only remnant of routine from before The Day.

Randy walked to the bar-counter and began to sharpen his razor. The razor was a six-inch hunting knife. He honed its edges vigorously on a whetstone and then stropped it on a belt nailed to the wall. A clean, smooth, painless shave was one of the things he missed, but not what he missed most.

He missed music. It had been a long time since he had heard music. The record player and his collection of LP’s of course were useless without electricity. Music was no longer broadcast, anywhere. Anyway, his second and last set of batteries for the transistor radio was losing strength. Very soon, they would have neither flashlights nor any means of receiving radio except through the Admiral’s short wave. WSMF in San Marco was no longer operating. Something had happened to the diesel supplying the hospital and the radio station and it was impossible to find spare parts. This was the word that had come from San Marco, eighteen miles away. It had required two days for the word to reach Fort Repose.

He missed cigarettes, but not so much. Dan Gunn still had a few pounds of tobacco, and had lent him a pipe. Randy found more pleasure in a pipe after each meal, and one before bedtime, than he had ever found in a whole carton of cigarettes. With tobacco so limited, each pipe was a luxury, relaxing and wonderful.

He missed whiskey not at all. Since The Day, he had drunk hardly anything, nor found need for it. He no longer regarded whiskey as a drink. Whiskey was Dan Gunn’s emergency anesthetic. Whiskey, what was left of his supply, was for medical use, and for trading.

He missed his morning coffee most. It had been, he calculated, six or seven weeks since he had tasted coffee. Coffee was more precious than gasoline, or even whiskey. Tobacco could be grown, and doubtless was being grown in a strip all the way from northwest Florida to Kentucky, Maryland and Virginia in the rural areas still habitable. Whiskey you could make, given the proper equipment and ingredients. But coffee came from South America.

Randy tested his knife on a bit of paper. It was as sharp as he could ever make it. He went into the bathroom and showered. The cold water no longer chilled him as it had through January and February. He was inured to it. Soap he used sparingly. The house reserve was down to three cakes.

He dried and stepped on the scales. One fifty-two. This was exactly what he had weighed at eighteen, as a freshman at the University. Even after three months on the line in Korea, he had dropped only to one fifty-six. He had lost an average of a pound a week for the past sixteen weeks, but now, he noted, his weight loss was slower. He had held one fifty-two for the past three days. He was leaner and harder, and, truthfully, felt better than before The Day.

There was a knock on the living-room door. That would be Peyton. He slipped on his shorts and said, “Come in.”

Peyton came in, carefully balancing the tiny pot of steaming water allotted for his morning shave. She set the pot before him on the counter as if it were a crystal bowl filled with flowers. “There,” she said. “Can I watch you shave this morning, Randy?” The sight of Peyton enriched Randy’s mornings. She was brash and buoyant, bobbing like a brightly colored cork in the maelstrom, unsinkable and unafraid. “Why do you like to watch me shave?” he asked.

“Because you make such funny faces in the mirror. You should see yourself.”

“I do.”

“No, you don’t really see yourself. All you watch is the knife, as if you’re afraid of cutting your throat.”

Dan Gunn came out of the bedroom, dressed in Levi’s and a blue checked sports shirt. Until The Day, Dan had used an electric razor. Now, rather than learn to shave with a knife or what ever was available, he did not shave at all. His beard had bloomed thick and flaming red. He looked like a Klondike sourdough or Paul Bunyan transplanted to the semi-tropics. On those rare days when his beard was freshly trimmed and he dressed formally in white shirt and a tie, he looked like a physician, outsized 1890 model.

“You can’t watch today,” Randy told the child. “I want to talk to Doctor Gunn.” He poured his hot water into the basin and returned the pot to Peyton. Peyton smiled at Dan and left.

Randy soaped and soaked his face. “Did you know that Einstein never used shaving soap?” he said. “Einstein just used plain soap like this. Einstein was a smart man and what was good enough for Einstein is good enough for me.” He scraped at his beard, winced, and said, “Einstein must have had an awfully good razor. Einstein must’ve used a fresh blade every morning. I’ll bet Einstein never shaved with a hunting knife.”

Dan said, “I had an awful dream last night. Dreamed I’d forgotten to pay my income tax and was behind in my alimony and the Treasury agents and a couple of deputy sheriffs were chasing me around the courthouse with shotguns. They finally cornered me. They were arguing about whether to send me to the Federal pen or state prison. I tried to sneak out. I think they shot me. Anyway, I woke up, shaking. All I could think of was that I really hadn’t paid my income tax, or alimony either. What day is it, anyway?”

“I don’t know what day it is but I know the date. April fourteenth.”

Dan smiled through the red beard. “My subconscious must be a watchdog. Income tax day tomorrow. And we don’t have to file a return, Randy. No tax. No alimony. Let us count our blessings. Never thought I’d see the day.”

“No coffee,” Randy said. “I would gladly pay my tax tomorrow for a pound of coffee. Dan, if you drive to town today I want to go with you. I want to trade for coffee.”

Dan had evolved a barter system for his services. He charged a gallon of gas, if the patient had it, for house calls. Most families had somehow managed to obtain and conserve a few gallons of gasoline. It was their link with a mobile past, insurance of mobility in some emergency of the future. Sickness and injury were emergencies for which they would gladly dip into their liquid reserve. Dan made little profit. Perhaps half his patients were able and willing to pay with gasoline. Still, he managed to keep the Model-A’s tank nearly full, and on his rounds he was continuously charging batteries. Bill McGovern had instituted a system of rotating the batteries in the car. In turn, the charged batteries powered Admiral Hazzard’s short-wave receiver. Not only was the car transport for Randy’s water-linked enclave of families, it was necessary to maintain their ear to the world outside. Not that the world, any longer, said much.

Dan said, “Sure, Randy, but it’s going to take all morning. I’ve got a bad situation in town.”

“What’s the trouble?”

From downstairs they heard Helen’s voice, “Breakfast!”

“Tell you later,” Dan said.

Randy was last to reach the dining room. There was a tall glass of orange juice at his place, and a big pitcher of juice in the center of the table. Whatever else they might lack, there was always citrus. Yet even orange juice would eventually disappear. In late June or early July they would squeeze the last of the Valencias and use the last grapefruit. From then until the new crop of early oranges ripened in October, citrus would be absent from their diet.

He saw that this morning there was a single boiled egg and small portion of broiled fish left over from the night before. “Where’s my other boiled egg?” he said.

“Malachai only brought over eight eggs this morning,” Helen said. “The Henrys have been losing chickens.”

“What do you mean, losing them?”

“They’re being stolen.”

Randy put down his juice. Citrus, fish, and eggs were their staples. A drop in the egg supply was serious. “I’ll bet it’s an inside job,” he said. “I’ll bet that no-good Two-Tone has been swapping hens for liquor.”

Lib spoke. “Malachai thinks it’s wild cats—that is, house cats that have gone wild.”

“That’s not the worst of it,” Helen said. “One of the Henrys’ pigs is missing. They heard it squeal, just once. Preacher thinks a wolf took it. Preacher says he found a wolf track.”

“No wolves in Florida,” Randy said. “No four-legged wolves.” The loss of hens was serious, but the loss of pigs disastrous. The Henry sow had produced a farrow that in a few weeks would add real meat to everybody’s diet. Even now they weighed twelve to fifteen pounds. Each evening, all food scraps from the Bragg, Wechek, and Hazzard households were carried to the Henry place to help feed the pigs and chickens. Every day, Randy had to argue with Helen and Lib to save scraps for Graf. Randy was conscious that the Henrys supplied more than their own share of food for the benefit of all. When Preacher’s corn crop ripened in June, the disparity would be even greater. And it had been Two-Tone, of all people, who had suggested that they grow sugar cane and then had explored the river banks in the Henrys’ leaky, flat bottomed skiff until he had found wild cane. He had sprigged, planted, and cultivated it. Because of the Henrys, they could all look forward, one day, to a breakfast of corn bread, cane syrup, and bacon. He was sure they would find a way to convert the corn to meal, even if they had to grind it between flagstones. “I don’t think we’re doing enough for the Henrys,” Randy said. “We’ll have to give them more help.”

“What kind of help?” Bill McGovern asked.

“At the moment, help them guard the food supply. Keep away the prowlers—cats, wolves, humans, or whatever.”

“Can’t the Henrys do it themselves?” Helen asked. “Don’t they have a gun?”

“They’ve got a gun—an old, beat-up single barrel twelve gauge—but they don’t have time. You can’t expect Preacher and Malachai to work as hard as they do every day and then sit up all night. And I wouldn’t trust Two-Tone. He’d just sleep. Do I hear volunteers?”

“Me!” said Ben Franklin.

Randy’s first impulse was to say no, that this wasn’t a job for a thirteen-year-old boy. Yet Ben was eating as much as a man, or more, and he would have to do a man’s work. “I thought you and Caleb were chopping firewood today?”

“I can chop wood and stand watch too.”

“Better let me take it the first night,” said Bill McGovern. “I wouldn’t want to see anything happen to those pigs.” Bill was thinner, as they all were, and yet it seemed that he had dropped years as well as weight. With his fork he touched a bit of fish at the edge of his plate. “You know, for years I looked forward to my vacation in the bass country. That’s why I built a house on the Timucuan when I retired. But now I can hardly look a bass in the face. I want meat—real red meat.”

Randy had his decision. “All right, Bill, you can take the watch tonight, and we’ll rotate thereafter. I’m sure the Admiral will take a night too.”

“Do I get a night?” Ben Franklin asked. His eyes were pleading.

“You get a night, Ben. I’ll make up a schedule and post it on the bulletin board.” A bulletin board in the hallway, with assignment of duties, had become a necessity. In this new life there was no leisure. If everybody worked as hard as he could until sundown every day, then everybody could eat, although not well. Each day brought a crisis of one kind or another. They faced shortages of the most trivial but necessary items. Who would have had the foresight to buy a supply of needles and thread? Florence Wechek owned a beautiful new sewing machine, electric and useless of course. Florence, Helen, and Hannah Henry did the sewing for Randy’s community. Yesterday Florence had broken a needle and had come to Randy, close to tears, as if it were a major disaster, as indeed it was. And everybody had unthinkingly squandered matches, so that now there were no matches. He still had five lighter flints and one small can of lighter fluid. Luckily, his old Army lighter would burn gasoline, but flints were priceless and impossible to find. Within a few months it might be necessary to keep the dining-room fire going day and night in spite of unwelcome heat and added labor. Nor would their supply of wood last forever. They would have to scout farther and farther a field for usable timber. Hauling it would become a major problem. When Dan could no longer collect his gasoline fees and the tank in the Model-A finally ran dry their life was bound to change drastically, and for the worse.

Staring down at his plate, he thought of all this.

Lib said, “Randy, finish your fish. And you’d better drink another glass of orange juice. You’ll be hungry before lunch, if Helen and I can put a lunch together.”

“I hate orange juice!” Randy said, and poured himself another glass.

Dan drove. Randy sat beside him. It was warm, and Randy was comfortable in shorts, boat shoes, and a pullover shirt. He carried his pistol holstered at his hip. The pistol had become a weightless part of him now. He had dry-fired it a thousand times until it felt good in his hand, and even used it to kill a rattlesnake in the grove and two moccasins on the dock. Shooting snakes was a waste of ammunition but he was now confident of the pistol’s accuracy and the steadiness of his hand. In Randy’s lap, encased in a paper bag, was the bottle of Scotch he hoped to trade for coffee. They smoked their morning pipes. Randy said, “Dan, what’s this bad situation in town?”

“I haven’t said anything about it,” Dan said, “because I can’t get to the bottom of it and I didn’t want to frighten anybody. I’ve got three serious cases of radiation poisoning.”

“Oh, God!” Randy said, not an exclamation but a prayer. This was the sword that had been hanging over all of them. If a man kept busy enough, if his troubles and problems were immediate and numerous, if he was always hungry, then he could for a time wall off this thing, forget for a time that he lived in what had officially been designated a contaminated zone. He could forget the insidious, the invisible, the implacable enemy, but not forever.

“This is very strange,” Dan said. “I can’t believe it’s caused by delayed fallout. If it were, I’d have three hundred cases, not three. This is more like a radium or X-ray burn. All of them have burned hands in addition to the usual symptoms, nausea, headache, diarrhea, hair falling out.”

“When did it start?” Randy asked.

“Porky Logan was the first man hit. His sister caught me at the school three weeks ago and begged me to look at him.”

“Wasn’t Porky somewhere in the southern part of the state on The Day? Couldn’t he have picked up radiation then?”

“Porky was perfectly all right when he got back here and since then he hasn’t received any more exposure than the rest of us. And the other two have not left Fort Repose. Porky’s a mess. Every time I see him he’s drunk. But the radiation is killing him faster than the liquor.”

“Who else is sick?”

“Bigmouth Bill Cullen—we’ll stop at his fish camp on the way to town—and Pete Hernandez.”

“It couldn’t be sort of an epidemic, could it?” Randy asked.

“No, it couldn’t. Radiation’s not a germ or a virus. You can eat or drink radioactive matter, like strontium 90 in milk. It can fall on you in rain. It can sift down on you in dust, or in particles you can’t see on a day that seems perfectly clear. You can track it into the house on your shoes, or pick it up by handling any metal or inorganic matter that has been exposed. But you can’t catch it by kissing a girl, unless, of course, she has gold teeth.”

At the bend of River Road they caught up with Alice Cooksey riding Florence’s Western Union bicycle. Alone of all the people in Fort Repose, Alice continued with her regular work. Every morning she left the Wecheck house at seven. Often, ignoring the unpredictable dangers of the road, she did not return until dark. Since The Day, the demand for her services had multiplied. They slowed when they overtook her, shouted a greeting, and waved. She waved back and pedaled on, a small, brave, and busy figure.

Watching the car chuff past, Alice reminded herself that this evening she must bring back new books for Ben Franklin and Peyton. It was a surprise, and a delight, to see children devour books. Without ever knowing it, they were receiving an education. Alice would never admit it aloud, but for the first time in her thirty years as librarian of Fort Repose she felt fulfilled, even important.

It had not been easy or remunerative to persist as librarian in Fort Repose. She recalled how every year for eight years the town council had turned down her annual request for air conditioning. An expensive frill, they’d said. But without air conditioning, how could a library compete? Drugstores, bars, restaurants, movies, the St. Johns Country Club in San Marco, the lobby of the Riverside Inn, theaters, and most homes were air conditioned. You couldn’t expect people to sit in a hot library during the humid Florida summer, which began in April and didn’t end until October, when they could be sitting in an air-conditioned living room coolly and painlessly absorbing visual pablum on television. Alice had installed a Coke machine and begged old electric fans but it had been a losing battle.

In thirty years her book budget had been raised ten percent, but the cost of books had doubled. Her magazine budget was unchanged, but the cost of magazines had tripled. So while Fort Repose grew in population, book borrowings dwindled. There had been so many new distractions, drive-in theaters, dashing off to springs and beaches over the weekends, the mass hypnosis of the young every evening, and finally the craze for boating and water-skiing. Now all this was ended. All entertainment, all amusements, all escape, all information again centered in the library. The fact that the library had no air conditioning made no difference now. There were not enough chairs to accommodate her readers. They sat on the front steps, in the windows, on the floor with backs against walls or stacks. They read everything, even the classics. And the children came to her, when they were free of their chores, and she guided them. And there was useful research to do. Randy and Doctor Gunn didn’t know it, but as a result of her research they might eat better thereafter. It was strange, she thought, pedaling steadily, that it should require a holocaust to make her own life worth living.

At the town limits, Dan turned into Bill Cullen’s fish camp, cafe, and bar. The grounds were more dilapidated and filthier than ever. The liquor shelves were bare. The counters in the boathouse tackle shop were empty. Not a plug, fly, or hook remained. Bigmouth Bill had been cleaned out months before. His wife, strawhaired and barrel-shaped, stepped out of the living quarters. Randy sniffed. She didn’t smell of spiked wine this day. She simply smelled sour. Alone of all the people he had seen, she had gained weight since The Day. Randy guessed that she had cached sacks of grits and had been living on grits and fried fish. She said, “He’s in here, Doc.”

Dan didn’t go in immediately. “Does he seem any better?” he asked.

“He’s worse. His hands is leakin’ pus.”

“How do you feel? You haven’t had any of his symptoms, have you?”

“Me? I don’t feel no different. I’ve felt worse.” She giggled, showing her rotting teeth. “You ever had a hangover, Doc? That’s when I’ve felt worse. Right now I wish I felt worse so I could take a drink and feel better. You get it, Doc?” She came closer to Dan and lowered her voice. “He ain’t goin’ to die, is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“The old tightwad better not die on me now. He’s not leavin’ me nuthin’, Doc. He don’t even own this place free and clear. He ain’t never even made no will. He’s holdin’ out on me, Doc. I can tell. He had six cases stashed away after The Day. Claims he sold all six to Porky Logan. But he don’t show me no money. You know what, Doc? I think he’s got that six cases hid!”

Dan brushed past her and they entered the shack. Bill Cullen lay on a sagging iron bed, a stained sheet pulled up to his bare waist. In the bad light filtering through the venetian shade over the single window, he was at first unrecognizable to Randy. He was wasted, his eyes sunken, his eyeballs yellow. Tufts of hair were gone from one side of his head, exposing reddish scalp. His hands, resting across his stomach, were swollen, blackened, and cracked. He croaked, “Hello, Doc.” He saw Randy and said, “I’ll be damned—Randy.”

The stench was too much for Randy. He gagged, said, “Hello, Bill,” and backed out. He leaned over the dock railing, coughing and choking, until he could breathe deeply of the sweet wind from the river. When Dan came out they walked silently back to the car together. All Dan said was, “She was right. He’s worse. I’ll swear he’s had a fresh dose of radiation since I saw him last.”

They drove on to Marines Park. The park had become the barter center of Fort Repose. Dan said, “Do you want to go on with me to the schoolhouse?”

“No, thanks,” Randy said. He was glad he wasn’t a doctor. A doctor required special courage that Randy felt he did not possess.

“I’ll pick you up here in an hour. Then I’ll see Hernandez and Logan and then home.”

“Okay.” Randy got out of the car.

“Don’t swap for less than two pounds. Scotch is darn near as scarce as coffee.”

“I’ll make the best deal I can,” Randy promised. Dan drove off

Randy tucked the bottle under his arm and walked toward the bandstand, an octagon-shaped wooden structure, its platform elevated three feet above what had once been turf smooth as a gold green, now unkempt, infiltrated with weeds and booby trapped with sandspurs. A dozen men, legs dangling, sat on the platform and steps. Others moved about, the alert, humorless smile of the trader on their faces. Three bony horses were tethered to the bandstand railing. Like Randy, some of the men carried holsters at their belts. A few shotguns and an old-fashioned Winchester leaned against the planking. The armed men had come in from the countryside, a risk.

A third of the traders in Marines Park, on this day, were Negroes. The economics of disaster placed a penalty upon prejudice. The laws of hunger and survival could not be evaded, and honored no color line. A back-yard hen raised by a Negro tasted just as good as the gamecocks of Carleton Hawes, the well-to-do realtor who was a vice president of the county White Citizens Council, and there was more meat on it. Randy saw Hawes, a brace of chickens dangling from his belt, drink water, presumably boiled, from a Negro’s jug. There were two drinking fountains in Marines Park, one marked “White Only,” the other “Colored Only.” Since neither worked, the signs were meaningless.

Hawes saw Randy, wiped his mouth, and called, “Hey, Randy.”

“Hello, Carleton.”

“What’re you trading?”

“A bottle of Scotch.”

Hawes’ eyes fixed on the paper bag and he moved closer to Randy, cautious as a pointer blundered upon quail. Randy recalled from Saturday nights at the St. Johns Club that Scotch was Hawes’ drink. “What’s your asking price?” Hawes asked.

“Two pounds of coffee.”

“I’ll swap you these two birds. Both young hens. See how plump they are? Better eating you’ll never have.”

Randy laughed.

“Being it’s you, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ve got eggs at home. I’ll throw in a couple of dozen eggs. Have ’em here tomorrow. On my word. If you don’t believe me, you can take the birds now, as a binder.”

“The asking price,” Randy said, “is also the selling price. Two pounds of coffee. Any brand will do.”

Hawes sighed. “Who’s got coffee? It’s been three months since I’ve had a drink of Scotch. Let me look at the bottle, will you?”

Randy showed him the label and moved on to the bandstand.

The square pillars supporting the roof had become a substitute for the county weekly’s want-ad section and the radio station announcements. Randy read the notices, some in longhand, some hand printed, a few typewritten, pinned to the timbers.

Randy closed his eyes. He could taste that ham. He had an extra kettle, the encyclopedia, the shells, and toothpaste. But he also had prospects of fresh ham if they could preserve the Henrys’ young pigs from marauders, wolves, or whatever. Anyway, it was too big a price to pay for a small ham.

Randy chuckled. Sports fishing no longer existed. There were only meat fishermen now.

Randy saw a notice that was different:

The name of the Rector of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, where there had always been a Bragg pew, was missing. Dr. Lucius Somerville, a gentle, white-haired man, a boyhood companion of Judge Bragg, had been in Jacksonville on the morning of The Day and therefore would not return to his parish.

Randy wasn’t much of a churchgoer. He had contributed to the church regularly, but not of his time or himself. Now, reading this notice, he felt an unexpected thrill. Since The Day, he had lived in the imperative present, not daring to plan beyond the next meal or the next day. This bit of paper tacked on peeling white paint abruptly enlarged his perspective, as if, stumbling through a black tunnel, he saw, or thought he saw, a chink of light. If Man retained faith in God, he might also retain faith in Man. He remembered words which for four months he had not heard, read, or uttered, the most beautiful words in the language—faith and hope. He had missed these words as he had missed other things. If possible, he would go to the service. Sunday, the seventeenth. Today was the fourteenth, and therefore Thursday.

He stepped up on the platform. The men lounging there, some of them acquaintances, some strangers, were estimating the shape of bulk of the sack he held, like a football, under his arm. Dour, bearded, hair unshorn or ludicrously cropped, they looked like ghost-town characters in a Western movie, except they were not so well fed as Hollywood extras, and their clothing, flowered sports shirts, shorts, or slacks, plaid or straw-peaked caps, was incongruous. John Garcia, the Minorcan fishing guide, asked the orthodox opening question, “What’re you trading, Randy?”

“A fifth of Scotch—twelve years old—the best.”

Garcia whistled. “You must be hard up. What’re you askin’?”

“Two pounds of coffee.”

Several of the men on the platform shifted their position. One snickered. None spoke. Randy realized that these men had no coffee, either for trading or drinking. No matter how well stocked their kitchens might once have been, or what they had purchased or pillaged on The Day and in the chaotic period immediately after, four months had exhausted everything. Randy’s community was far more fortunate with the bearing groves, fish loyally taking bait, the industrious Henrys and their barnyard, and some small game—squirrels, rabbits, and an occasional possum.

John Garcia was trading two strings of fish, a four-pound catfish and small bass on one, warmouth perch and bream on the other. Garcia’s brown and weathered skin had shriveled on his slight frame until he seemed only bones loosely wrapped in dried leather. The sun was getting warm. With his toe Garcia nudged his fish into the shadow. “Wouldn’t trade for fish, would you, Randy?” he asked, smiling.

“Fish we’ve got,” Randy said.

“You River Road people do all right by yourselves, don’t you?” a stranger said. “If you got Scotch likker, you got everythin’. Us, we ain’t got nuthin’.” The stranger was trading a saw, two chisels, and a bag of nails. Randy guessed he was an itinerant carpenter settled in Pistolville.

Randy ignored him and asked Marines Park’s inevitable second question, “What do you hear?”

Old Man Hockstatler, who was trading small tins of aspirins and tranquilizers, salvage from his looted pharmacy, said, “I hear the Russians are asking that we surrender.”

“No, no, you got that all wrong,” said Eli Blaustein. “Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown demanded that the Russians surrender. They said no and then they said we should be the ones to surrender.”

“Where did you hear that?” Randy asked.

“My wife got it from a woman whose husband’s battery set still works,” Blaustein said. Blaustein was trading work pants and a pair of white oxfords and he was asking canned corn beef or cheese. Randy knew that as the sun got higher John Garcia’s asking price for his fish would drop lower. At the same time Blaustein’s hunger would grow, or he would be thinking of his protein-starved family. Before the fish were tainted, there would be a meeting of minds. John Garcia would have a new pair of work pants and Blaustein would have food.

“What I would like to know,” said Old Man Hockstatler, “is who won the war? Nobody ever tells you. This war I don’t understand at all. It isn’t like World Wars One or Two or any other wars I ever heard of. Sometimes I think the Russians must’ve won. Otherwise things would be getting back to normal. Then I think no, we won. If we hadn’t won the Russians would still be bombing us, or they would invade. But since The Day I’ve never seen any planes at all.”

“I have,” said Garcia. “I’ve seen ’em while I was fishing for cats at night. No, that ain’t exactly right. I’ve heard ’em. I heard one two nights ago.”

“Whose?” Blaustein asked. Garcia shrugged. “Beats me.”

This discussion, Randy knew, would continue through the day. The question of who won the war, or if the war still continued, who was winning, had replaced the weather as an inexhaustible subject for speculation. Each day you could hear new rumors, usually baseless and always garbled. You could hear that Russian landing craft were lined up on Daytona Beach or that Martian saucers were unloading relief supplies in Pensacola. Randy believed nothing except what he himself heard or saw, or those sparse hard grains of fact sifted from the air waves by Sam Hazzard. Randy had been leaning on the bandstand railing. He straightened, stretched, and said, “Guess I’ll circulate around and look for somebody who’s holding coffee.”

John Garcia said, “You coming to the Easter service, Randy?”

“Hope so. Hope to come and bring the family.” As he stepped from the bandstand he looked again at the two useless drinking fountains. There was something important about them that he could not recall. This was irritating, as when the name of an old friend capriciously vanishes from memory. The drinking fountains made his mind itch.

He saw Jim Hickey, the beekeeper, a picnic basket under his long, outstretched legs, relaxed on a bench. Before The Day Jim had rented his hives to grove owners pollinating young trees. Before The Day, Jim’s honey was a secondary source of income; “gravy,” he called it. Now, honey was liquid gold, and beeswax, with which candles could be dipped, another valuable item of barter. Jim Hickey, who was Mark’s age, had learned beekeeping at the College of Agriculture in Gainesville. It would never make him rich, he had been warned, and until The Day it hadn’t. Now he was regarded as a fortunate man, rich in highly desirable commodities endlessly produced by tens of thousands of happy and willing slaves. “What are you trading?” he greeted Randy.

“A bottle of Scotch. Are you holding coffee?”

“No. I’ve been trying to trade for coffee myself. Can’t find any. All I hold is honey.” He lifted the lid of the picnic basket. “Lovely stuff, isn’t it?”

It was lovely. Randy thought of Ben Franklin and Peyton, whose need and desire for sweets could not be wholly supplied by the sugar content of citrus. It would be weeks before Two-Tone’s cane crop matured. Randy wondered whether he was being selfish, trading for coffee. It was true that he would share the coffee with the other adults on River Road, but the children didn’t drink it. There were no calories or vitamins in coffee and it was of no use to them. He forced himself to be judicial. When you examined the facts judicially, and asked which would provide the greatest good for the greatest number, there could be only one answer. Coffee would furnish only temporary and personal gratification. He said, “Jim, maybe I could be persuaded to trade for honey.”

“I’m sorry, Randy. We’re Adventists. We don’t drink whiskey or trade in it.”

This contingency Randy had never imagined. Half-aloud he said, “Well, I tried.”

“I suppose you wanted the honey for Mark’s children,” Hickey said.

“Yes. I did.”

Hickey reached into the basket and brought out two square, honey-packed combs. “I wouldn’t like to see Mark’s kids go without,” he said. “Here. I’d give you more except my supply is ’way down. There’s something wrong with my bees this spring. Half my broods are foul, full of dead pupae and larvae. At first I thought it was what we call sacbrood, or queen failure. I’ve been to the library, reading up on it, and now I wonder whether it couldn’t be radiation. We must’ve had fallout on The Day—after all, the whole state is a contaminated zone—and maybe it affected some of my queens and drones. I don’t know what to do about it. It isn’t something they taught us at the University.”

Randy removed the bottle from his paper bag, locked it under his arm, and replaced it with the honeycombs. He was overwhelmed. He knew that Mark and Hickey had been in the same grade in primary school, but they had never been close friends. Hickey was no more than an acquaintance. He lived in a neat, sea-green, five-room concrete block house far out on the road to Pasco Creek. Randy, before The Day, rarely saw him, and then only to wave a greeting. Randy said, “Jim, this is the nicest, most generous thing I can remember. I just hope I can repay you some way, some day.”

“Forget it,” Hickey said. “Children need honey. My kids have it every meal.”

Randy heard the Model-A’s horn, raucous as an angry goose, and saw it pull up to the curb. Walking to the car, he noticed that it was a clear and beautiful spring day, a better day than yesterday. The spores of kindness, as well as faith, survived in this acid soil. Randy climbed into the car and showed the honey to Dan and explained how it had been given to him. “The world changes,” Dan said. “People don’t. I still have one old biddy in the schoolhouse who prunes and trims the camellias, and weeds the beds. They aren’t her camellias and nobody gives a damn about flowers any more, except her. She loves flowers and it doesn’t matter where she is or what happens she’s going to take care of ’em. This same old lady—Mrs. Satterborough, she’s been spending her winters at the Riverside Inn for years—she picks up the telephone in the principal’s office every morning and dials Western Union. She thinks that one day the phone will be working just fine and that she’ll get off a telegram to her daughter. She’s certain of it. Her daughter lives in Indiana.”

“I don’t understand how those old people stay alive,” Randy said. He knew that Dan brought them oranges by the bushel, and Randy sent them fish whenever there was a surplus catch.

“Most of them didn’t. Death can be merciful, especially for the old and sick. I was about to say old, sick, and broke, but it doesn’t matter any longer whether you’re broke. Only five alive out of the Riverside Inn now. Maybe three will get through the summer. I don’t think any will get through next winter.” Driving north on Yulee, the business district, while deserted, seemed no more battered than it had the month before, or the month before that. A few optimistic storekeepers had prudently boarded windows, split by blast on The Day or broken by looters afterwards, against water and wind. On the two principal business blocks glass had been swept from the sidewalks. Abandoned cars, stripped of wheels, batteries, radios, and spark plugs, rusted in gutters like the unburied carcasses of giant beetles.

They turned off Yulee into Augustine Road, with its broken macadam and respectable but decaying residences. They bounced along for a block and then Randy smelled Pistolville. Another block and they were in it.

There had been no garbage collections since The Day. In Pistolville each but or house squatted in a mound of its own excretion-crushed crates and cartons, rusting tin cans, broken bottles, rotting piles of citrus rusks and pecan shells, the bones of fowl, fish, and small animals. A tallow-faced, six-year-old girl, clad in a man’s castoff, riddled T-shirt, crouched on the curb, emptying her bowels in the dust. She cried out shrilly and waved as the Model-A bounced past. A bearded, long-haired man burst out of a doorway and jogged down the street on bandy legs, peeling and eating a banana, turning his head as if he expected to be followed. At the corner a scrawny boy of eighteen urinated against a lamp post, not bothering to raise his eyes at the sound of the car. Buzzards, grown arrogant, roosted in the oaks and foraged in the refuse. Of mongrel dogs, cats, partihued pigs, chickens, and pigeons—all normal impediments to navigation on the streets of Pistolville—no trace remained.

Once before in his life, in Suwon, immediately after its recapture and before the Military Government people had begun to clean up, Randy had seen degradation such as this. But this was America. It was his town, settled by his forebears. He said, “We’ve got to do something about this.”

“Yes?” Dan said. “What?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

“Torches and gasoline,” Dan said, “except there isn’t enough gasoline. Anyway, these poor devils are as well off in their own houses as they would be in the woods, or in caves. No better off, mind you. But they have shelter.”

“In four months,” Randy said, “we’ve regressed four thousand years. More, maybe. Four thousand years ago the Egyptians and Chinese were more civilized than Pistolville is right now. Not only Pistolville. Think what must be going on in those parts of the country where they don’t even have fruit and pecans and catfish.”

As they approached the end of Augustine Road the houses were newer and larger, constructed of concrete block or brick instead of pitch-sweating pine clapboard. Between these houses grass grew shin-high, fighting the exultant weeds for sunlight and root space. There was less filth, or at least it was concealed by greenery, and the smell was bearable. In this airier atmosphere lived the upper crust of Pistolville, including Pete and Rita Hernandez and Timucuan County’s Representative in the state legislature, Porky Logan.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen Rita?” Dan asked.

“Not since before The Day—quite a while before.”

“Does Lib know about her?”

“She knows all about it. She says Rita doesn’t bother her, because Rita is part of the past, like Mayoschi’s in Tokyo. You know who worries Lib? Helen. Imagine that.”

They were at the Hernandez house. Dan stopped the car. He said, “I can imagine it. Lib is an extremely sensitive, perceptive woman. About some things, she has more sense than you have, Randy. And all rules are off, now.”

Randy wasn’t listening. Rita had stepped out of the doorway. In Hawaii Randy had seen girls of mixed Caucasian, Polynesian, and Chinese blood, hips moving as if to the pulse of island rhythm even when only crossing the street, who reminded him of Rita. She was not like a girl of Fort Repose. She was a child of the Mediterranean and Carribean, seeming alien; and yet certainly American. Her ancestors included a Spanish soldier whose caravel beached in Matanzas Inlet before the Pilgrims found their rock, and Carib Indian women, and the Minorcans who spread inland from New Smyrna in the eighteenth century. She had not gone to college but she was intelligent and quick. She had an annulled high school marriage and an abortion behind her. She no longer made such foolish errors. Her hobby was men. She sampled and enjoyed men as other women collected and enjoyed African violets, Limoges teacups, or sterling souvenir teaspoons. She was professional in her avocation, never letting a man go without some profit, not necessarily material, and never trading one man for another unless she thought she was bettering her collection.

Under any circumstances Rita was an arresting woman. Her hair was cut in straight bangs to form an ebony frame for features carved like a Malayan mask in antique ivory. She could look, and behave, like an Egyptian queen of the Eighteenth Dynasty or a Creole whore out of New Orleans. On this morning she wore aquamarine shorts and halter. Cradled easily under her right arm was a light repeating shotgun. She was smoking a cigarette and even from the road Randy could see that it was a real, manufactured filtertip and not a stubby homemade, hand-rolled with toilet paper. She called, “Hello Doctor Gunn. Come on in.” Then she recognized the passenger and yelled, “Hey! Randy!”

Dan put the car keys in his pocket and said, “Better bring the whiskey and honey, Randy. I never leave stuff in the car when I make a call in Pistolville.”

As he walked to the house, Randy noticed the Atlas grocery truck and a big new sedan in the Hernandez carport and a Jaguar XK-150 sports car in the driveway. A latrine had been dug behind the carport and partly shielded from the road by a crude board fence.

Rita swung open the screen door. “You’ll pardon the artillery,” she said. “The goons down the street are envious. When I hear a car or anything I grab a gun. They killed my dog. She was a black poodle, Randy. Her name was Poupee Vivant. That means Livin’ Doll in French. Cracked her skull with an ax handle while Peter was lying sick and I was off fetching water. I found the ax handle but not the body. The goddamn cracker scum! Ate her, I guess.”

Randy thought how he would feel if someone killed and ate Graf. He was revolted. And yet, it was a matter of manners and mores. In China men for centuries had been eating dogs stuffed with rice. It happened in other meat-starved Asian countries. The Army had put him through a survival course, once, and taught him that in an emergency he could safely eat pulpy white grubs found under bark. It could happen here. If a man could eat grubs he could eat dogs. Pistolville was meat starved and, as Dan had said, the rules were off. All Randy said was, “I’m sorry, Rita.”

Randy walked through the door and stopped, astonished. The two front rooms of the Hernandez place looked like show windows in a Miami auction house. He counted three silver tea services, two chests of flat silver, three television sets, and was bewildered by a display of statuary, silver candelabra, expensive leather cases, empty crystal decanters, table lighters, chinaware. Gold-framed oils and watercolors, some fairly good, plastered one wall. Table clocks and wall clocks raised their hands and swore to different times. “Great God!” Randy said. “Have you people gone into the junk business?”

Rita laughed. “It’s not junk. It’s my investment.” Dan said, “How’s Pete, Rita?”

“I think he’s a little better. He’s not losing any more hair but he’s still weak.”

Dan was carrying his black bag. It held little except instruments now. He said, “I’ll go back and see him.”

Dan walked down the hall and Randy was alone with her. She offered him a cigarette. Her perfume opened the gates of memory—the movies in Orlando, the dinners and dancing at the hotel in Winter Park, the isolated motel south of Canaveral, the morning they found a secluded pocket behind the dunes and were buzzed by a light plane and how the pilot almost side slipped into the sea banking around for a second look, and most of all, his apartment. It seemed so long ago, as if it had happened while he was in college, before Korea, but it was not so long, a year only. He said, “Thanks, Rita. First real cigarette I’ve had in a long, long time. You must be getting along all right.”

She looked at the bottle. “You didn’t bring me a present, did you, Randy?” The corners of her mouth quivered, but she did not quite smile.

He remembered the evenings he had come to this house, a bottle beside him on the seat, and they had gone tooting off together; and the evenings he had brought bottles in gift pack ages, discreet gratuities for her brother; and the nights in the apartment, sharing a decanter drink for drink because she loved her liquor. He realized that this is what she intended he remember. She was expert at making him feel uncomfortable. He said, “No, Rita. Trade goods. I’ve been in Marines Park, trying to trade for coffee.”

“Don’t your new women like Scotch, Randy? I hear you’ve got two women in your house now. Which one are you sleeping with, Randy?”

Suddenly she was a stranger, and he looked upon her as such.

Examined thus, with detachment, she looked ridiculous, wearing high heels and costume jewelry with shorts and halter at this hour of the morning and in this time of troubles. Her darkling ivory skin, once so satiny, appeared dry and mottled. Her hair was dull and the luster in her eyes reflected only spiteful anger. She looked used and tired. He said, calmly, “You can take your claws out now. I don’t feel them. My skin’s tougher.”

She licked her lips. They were puffed and brown. “You’re tougher. You’re not the same Randy. I guess you’re growing up.”

He changed the subject. “Where did you get all this stuff?” He looked around the room.

“Trading.”

“I never see you in Marines Park.”

“We don’t go there. They come to us. They know we still hold food. Even coffee.”

He knew she wanted the bottle. He knew she would trade coffee, but he would never again trade with her, for anything. He said:

“You said this was your investment. Do you think three television sets is a good investment when there isn’t any electricity?”

“I’m looking ahead, Randy. This war isn’t going to last forever and when it’s over I’m going to have everything I never had before and plenty besides, maybe to sell. I was only a kid after the last big war but I remember how my dad had to pay through the nose for an old jalopy. Do you know what that Jag cost me?” She laughed. “A case of beans, three bottles of ketchup, and six cans of deviled ham. For a Jag! Say, as soon as things get back to normal those three TV sets will be worth their weight in gold.”

“Do you really think things are going to get back to normal?”

“Sure! They always have, haven’t they? It may be a year, even two. I can wait. You look at those big new houses out on River Road. What built half of them? Wars. Profits out of wars. This time I’m going to get mine.”

He saw that she believed it and it was pointless to argue with her. Still, he was intrigued. “Don’t you realize that this war is different?”

She held out her left hand so that the sunlight glinted on the ring on her second finger. “It certainly is different! Look at this!” He looked at the big stone, and into it, and a thousand blue and red lights attested to its worth and purity.

It wasn’t costume jewelry, as he had surmised. It wasn’t glass surrounded by green paste. It was a diamond set in emeralds. “Where did you get it?” he asked, awed, an then he looked at her crescent ear clips and saw that they too, beyond a doubt, were diamonds.

Rita held the ring out, turning her wrist. She did not answer at once. She was enjoying their reaction. “Six carats,” she said. “Perfect.” She slipped it from her finger and handed it to Randy.

He took it automatically but he wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at her finger. Her finger was marred by a dark, almost black circle, as if the ring were tarnished brass, or its inside sooty. But the ring was clean bright white gold.

Dan came into the room, pawing in his bag and frowning. “I don’t know exactly—” he began, looked at Randy’s face, and failed to finish the sentence.

Frowning, Rita inspected the dark band. “It itches,” she said, and scratched. A bit of blackened skin flaked away, leaving raw flesh beneath.

“I asked you where you got this, Rita,” Randy said, a command.

Before she opened her mouth he guessed the answer. She said, “Porky Logan.”

The ring dropped to the floor, bounced, tinkled, and came to rest on the corner of a blue silk Chinese rug.

“Say, what’s the matter?” she said. “You act like it was hot!”

“I think it is hot,” Randy said.

“Well, if you think Porky stole it, you’re wrong. It was abandoned property. Anybody would take it.”

Dan took her hand and adjusted his bifocals so he could examine the finger closely. He spoke, his voice deep, enforcing calm. “Hold still, Rita, I just want to see that finger. I think what Randy meant was that the ring has been exposed to radioactivity and is now radioactive itself. I’m afraid he’s right. This looks like a burn—a radium burn. How long have you been wearing that ring?”

“Off and on, for a month I guess. I never wear it outside, only in the house.” She hesitated. “But this last week, I’ve had it on all the time. I never noticed—”

They looked down at it, its facets blinking at them from the soft blue silk as if it were in a display window. It looked beautiful. “Where did Porky get it, Rita?” Dan asked.

“Well, I only know what he told me. He was fishing in the Keys on The Day and of course he started right back. He’s smart, Porky is. He made a big detour around Miami. Well, he was passing through Hollywood or Boca Raton or one of those Gold Coast places and it was empty and right off the main drag he saw one of those swanky little jewelry shops, you know, a branch of some Fifth Avenue store and its windows were blown out. He said stuff was lying all over, rings and pins and watches and bracelets, like popcorn out of a busted bag. So he gathered it up. Then he dumped the hooks and plugs and junk out of his fishbox and went inside and filled it up. Porky said right then he was thinking of the future. He figured that money wouldn’t be worth anything but diamonds and gold were different. They never lost value no matter what happened.”

“Impregnated with fallout,” Dan murmured. “Suicide.” Rita’s hands crept upward to her neck and Randy noticed an oval mark in the hollow her throat, as if the skin were painted darker there. Then her hands flew to her ears. The diamond ear clips fell to the rug beside the ring. She moaned, “Oh, God!”

“What did you have to give Porky for those diamonds?” Randy asked softly.

“For the ring, hardly anything at all. For the rest of it we gave him canned meat and cigarettes and coffee and chocolate

“Is that all?” Dan asked.

“No, those are just the watches,” Rita said. “Pete’s been amusing himself, admiring them and winding them every day. There’s more stuff in my room—a couple of necklaces and a ruby and diamond brooch and—well, all sorts of junk.”

“Pete,” Dan said, “throw that kit in the corner, there. Rita, don’t touch anything you may have in your bedroom. There’s no point in your absorbing even another fraction of a roentgen. We’ve got to figure out a way to get the stuff out of here and get rid of it without damaging ourselves. We’ll be back.”

Rita followed them to the door, whimpering. She snatched at Dan’s sleeve. “What’s going to happen? Am I going to die? Is my hair going to fall out?”

“You haven’t absorbed nearly as much radiation as your brother,” Dan said. “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen because radiation sickness is so tricky.”

“What about Pete? What’ll I do if Pete—”

“I’m afraid,” Dan said, “that Pete is slipping into leukemia.”

“Blood cancer?”

“Yes. I’m afraid you’d better prepare yourself.”

Rita’s hands fell from Dan’s arm. Randy watched her diminish, all allure, all bravado falling away, leaving her smaller and like a child. He said, quietly, “Rita, you’d better keep this, here. You’ll need it.” He gave her the bottle of Scotch.

As he pressed the starter Dan said, “Why did you give her the whiskey?”

“I feel sorry for her.” That wasn’t the only reason. If he had owed her anything before, he did no longer. They were quits. They were square. “Is she going to be all right?” he asked.

“I think so, unless a malignancy develops from the burn on her finger. Improbable but possible. Yes, she should be all right so far as radiation goes. The dose she absorbed was localized. But after her brother dies she’ll be alone. Then she won’t be all right.”

“She’ll find a man,” Randy said. “She always has.”

Porky Logan’s house stood at the end of Augustine Road, in a grove that rose up a hillside at the back of the house. It was a two-story brick, the largest house in Pistolville, so it was said. Porky’s sister and niece had been caring for him, but he lived alone. His wife and two children had departed Pistolville ten years before.

They found Porky on the second floor. He was sitting up in bed, unshaven chin resting upon blotched bare chest. Between his knees was a beer case filled with jewelry. His hands were buried to the forearm in this treasure. Dan said, “Porky!”

Porky didn’t raise his head. Porky was dead.

Dan stepped to the bed, pushed Porky’s body back against the pillows, and pried an eyelid open. Dan said, “Let’s get him out of here. That’s a furnace he’s got in his lap.”

Randy tried not to breathe going down the steps. It was not only the smell of Porky’s room that hurried him.

Dan said, “We’ve got to keep people out of this house until we can get Porky and that hot stuff underground. How do we do it?”

“What about a sign? We could paint a sign.”

They found an unopened can of yellow paint and a brush in Porky’s garage. Dan used the brush on the front door. In block letters he wrote:

“You’d better put something else on there,” Randy said. “There are a lot of people around here who still don’t know what radiation means.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I’m positive of it. They’ve never seen it, or felt it. They hear about it, but I don’t think they believe it. They didn’t believe it could kill them before The Day—if they thought of it at all—and I don’t think they believe it now. You’d better add something they understand, like Poison.”

So under “RADIATION,” Dan printed “POISON.” He said, “One other. Bill Cullen.”

Bigmouth Bill was as they had left him, except that he held a bottle of cheap rum in his misshapen hands, and had been hitting it. Randy hovered at the door, so he could listen but not be submerged in the odors.

Dan said, “Bill, we’ve found out what’s making you sick. You’re absorbing radiation from the jewelry Porky traded for the whiskey. Porky’s jewelry is hot. It’s radioactive. Where is it?”

Bill laughed wildly. He began to curse, methodically and without imagination, as Randy had heard troops curse in the MLR in Korea. The pace of his obscenities quickened, he choked, frothed, and pulled at the rum bottle. “Jewelry!” he yelled, his yellow eyeballs rolling. “Jewelry! Diamonds, emeralds, pearls, tinkly little bracelets, all hot, all radioactive. ’That’s rich!”

“Where is it, Bill?” Dan’s voice was sharper.

“Ask her. Ask the dough-faced bitch! She has ’em, has the whole bootful.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been hiding the stuff, figuring that if she got her hands on it she’d swap it all for a bottle of vireo. The jewels in one boot, the rum in the other. Believe it or not, this is the last of my stock.” He sucked at the bottle.

“Go on,” Dan said.

“I kept the boots, these boots here”—he gestured at a pair of hunting boots—“hid under the bed. It was safe, okay. You see, my woman she never cleaned anything, especially she never cleaned under the bed. Well, when she went out for a while I thought I’d take a look at the loot. You know, it was nice to hold it in your hands and dream about what you were going to do with it when things got back to normal. But she was watching through the window. She’s been trying to catch me and just a while ago she did. She walked in, grinning. I thought she was going to tell me the war was over or something. She walked in and reached under the bed and snatched the boot. All she said as she went through the door was, ‘I hope you croak, you sneaky bastard. I’m going back to Apalachicola’.”

Fascinated, Randy asked, “How does she expect to get to Apalachicola?”

“I keep—kept the Plymouth in the shed. It was nearly full with gas, what was in the drum I had to service the outboards. I hope she wrecks.”

Dan picked up his bag. His huge shoulders sagged. His face was unhappy behind the red beard. “Do you still have that ointment I gave you?”

“Yes.” Bill turned his head toward the table.

“Keep using it on your hands. It may give you relief.”

“It may, but this will.” Bill tilted the rum bottle and drank until he gagged.

Riding back on River Road, Randy said, “Will Cullen live?”

“I doubt it. I don’t have the drugs or antibiotics or blood transfusions for him.” He reached down and patted his bag. “Not much left in here, Randy. I have to make decisions, now. I have drugs only for those worth saving.”

“What about the woman?”

“I don’t think she’ll die of radiation sickness. I don’t think she’ll keep that hot gold and silver and platinum long enough. She’ll either swap for booze or, being stupid, try one of the main highways.”

“I think the highwaymen will get her if she’s headed for Apalachicola,” Randy said.

It was strange that the term highwaymen had revived in its true and literal sense. These were not the romantic and reputedly chivalrous highwaymen of Britain’s post roads in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These new highwaymen were ruthless and evil men who lately had been choking the thin trickle of communications and trade between towns and villages. Mostly, according to word that filtered into Fort Repose, they operated on the main highways like the Turnpike and Routes 1, 441, 17, and 50. So they were called highwaymen.

They passed the empty McGovern place. It was already lushly overgrown. “You know,” Dan said, “in a few more months the jungle will take over.”