Serpent's Walk

CHAPTER TWENTY

Tuesday, March 1, 2044

Cold.

His feet were cold.

He hurt. Bruises. Aches. Limbs locked, stomach cramped, fingers and toes numb, mouth as dry as mummy-dust, a tomb unopened for a thousand, thousand years.

Something constricted him. He struggled weakly and felt the slither of cloth gliding down off his body. A sheet?

Without conscious command his eyes opened. Or tried to. They were crusty and gummed shut. Fingers came up from nowhere to paw at them. Sight returned blurrily to his left eye. The right one didn’t work. It was just as well; the left one showed only fuzzy colors and shifting blobs, with a great, white sun overhead.

Something glittered to his right, another white object to his left, a black oblong before him. Shapes writhed at the limits of his vision, as though he were looking down a tunnel — a tunnel that passed through Hell. He saw things, people, animals, fantastic creatures who danced and jigged and cavorted. Change your partner! Round and round and do-si-do! He heard fiddle music, smelled the mingled stink of heat and candles and beer and sweat, cheap perfume and straw. It wasn’t real; was it a movie?

It must be a movie. He tasted chocolate-mint, smooth and dark upon his tongue, and he heard the crackle of tinfoil. A moist, feminine hand trembled in his, making his lust rise unseen in the popcorn-fragrant dark. He felt shame. Could she tell? Could she see the lump in his pants? Mavis was pretty observant, even while watching Kari Danforth and Robert Wayte emoting on-screen, steamy as a Chinese laundry! He thrust his hand down to hide the pressure between his legs. That only made it worse.

The white sun was bright, a cold, glittering star-fire. It dragged him back to pain and to dust, mummy-wrappings and eyeless skull-faces.

He could not remember. He did not want to remember. He was afraid. He could not remember and remain sane.

His other eye came open, but it was blurrier than the first. Did he have any more eyes, ones that might work better? He willed them to open, but none did. He commanded the rest of his body to respond. Just who and what was he? How many limbs did he have? Was the whole universe just agony and blur? Was he the universe?

Unknown body parts threshed and flailed and pumped. The world pinwheeled. Hardness raked along some far-off appendage, and blazing pain smashed up from an area his memory told him was his left shoulder. Belatedly his ears reported a thump and a sepulchral groan that might have come from him. Breath whooshed out of lungs he had not known he had.

He seemed to have fallen from some place higher to some place lower. Grey pillars loomed above him, and the black oblong in the distance became taller and differently shaped.

Memory reported, “Door. It’s a door. You’re under a table, sir.” Memory was being unnecessarily sarcastic.

Whiteness swaddled him, and he struggled. His arms, when he got them free, were fish-gill pale, marked with purple, green, and yellowish bruises, striations, and blotches. Under other circumstances he might have admired his own colorfulness. What was he? A chameleon? A cloisonne vase? A picture came back to him: a weird thing of planes and angles and raw colors. It was a human being, but wildly distorted.

Memory handed him a word: “Louvre.” He was standing somewhere, looking over a red, velvet rope at the picture. He smelled flowers: the scent of the French girl he was with. Who was she? What was her name? Paris! On leave from Angola?

Blankness came back, as Memory scurried off to hunt for more data.

Somebody within his skull commanded him to rise. Who the hell was in charge, anyway? Involuntarily his hands scrabbled for support, and legs he had not known he had contracted, pushed, and lifted. The stone rolled aside, and Lazarus emerged from the tomb. Nice job, Mr. Jesus! Great coordination there, legs! The globe that was the quintessential he rose above the flat surface, and his field of vision perforce went up with it. Those unsung heroes, his lungs, pumped, and frigid air gushed in to make him cough.

His invisible coordinator issued directives, and somewhere far below, distantly connected to his bubble of vision-ego, legs shuffled, arms windmilled for balance, and a hand caught at the edge of the grey table-surface. The white covering fell completely away. This produced a twinge of shame: he was naked. What would his mother say? He knew damned well what she’d say! And Mavis Larson would be there to peek through the basement window while he got his switching.

The black “door” oblong loomed before him. He slumped against it and felt solidity, slickness, and cold. Something hurt him lower down, in the softness named “stomach.” There was a round, hard globe there. It wasn’t part of him; thus it must belong to the black oblong. The thing was frigid, a ball of ice against his skin. He thrust a hand between it and his belly, and it turned. Something clicked.

The black oblong changed, a thing apparently to be expected in a world of unrealities. The round ball slid away, and the surface against which he leaned went with it, sideways, at a slant and all at once, making him stumble. He lurched forward.

Full speed ahead, Captain! Sailors in blue uniforms staggered to and fro on a pitching deck before shiny, brass housings, rain poured in through an open hatch, and a spotlight slashed the waves in the howling, spume-driven night outside. Another goddamn movie! He was getting better at separating the present from the past, the real from the unreal, the men from the boys. This time it was Beverly Rowntree who popped her gum beside him in the movie house. He rubbed a leg against her thigh, and they rolled towards one another simultaneously, two hearts with a single lust! There ought to have been a crescendo of music and a rush of scarlet passion; instead, her front teeth dug a gash in his lower lip, and she nearly broke her big, bony nose on his cheekbone. So much for romance!

Beyond the door was another world, a place of greys and blacks and muted browns. A row of little suns marched away above him, receding into the distance. One or two were missing, spoiling the symmetry. He didn’t care. Esthetic appreciation was beyond him. To hell with trying to appear worldly wise before his little French girl! Or was it Beverly?

His feet moved, and shadowy, grey walls rolled past. More black oblongs appeared and were left behind on either side. He heard a whishing, scraping sound below him. He tripped, and somebody down there sent an urgent pain message up to the bridge. He would have ignored it, but his left foot — he thought it was that — refused to lift and go forward. Action was required. He lowered his head and looked. Past all the lumps and bulges of empurpled, naked flesh, way down at the bottom, he perceived that his right foot was standing upon a small, yellow square. He tried again to lift his left foot. It refused to rise, and the message of pain was repeated. The square was attached to his left big toe. With all the skill he could muster he raised his right foot. This released the square and freed his left foot.

Off balance, he fell heavily against the wall. Shit! If he stopped to investigate the yellow square he’d probably break his neck! On-ward! He let his limbs take over and found himself up again and continuing. Good job, Captain! Off the reef at last!

There was danger. Hazily, he sensed — remembered? — that much. The black oblong, the door, at the end of the path of little suns was where the danger might be. He halted, shut down his engines, issued orders to all hands, and teetered forward to listen.

Nothing.

Door? Open? Yes, he could manage that. He knew how.

Stairs. Up. Amazing how well Memory helped, and his limbs obeyed Citations for all, yes, sir!

What? Something — someone — lying on the stairs, feel up, head down. The mouth and nose were smeared with black. Some of the blackness was puddled in the eye sockets: pools of ebon darkness. Emily Pietrick used to talk like that; he had dated her for a lustful six months in high school, but she was into witchcraft and demons and horror movies. Too weird for him!

Shaking his head cleared away some of the fuzz. He squinted at the body on the stairs. It might have been one of his guards. What was a “guard?” Why had there been “guards?” He wasn’t sure. He twisted his head upside down to see, but the black stuff hid the man’s features. The guy had been dead awhile.

Memory pounded up onto the bridge and announced: “Death stinks, sir! Don’t you smell it?” He sniffed. Nothing. “Out of order, sailor! Report to damage control!” “Aye-aye, sir!” Memory saluted smartly and left again. By God, he ran a tight ship! Geoffrey Archer, who had played the captain in the movie, had nothing on him!

Beverly Rowntree was once more beside him in the theater, she grabbed his hand and stuffed it greedily down inside her blouse. Her nipple thrust up hard against his fingers, and he fell the silky curve of her breast Where could they go? He had to have her. Urgently!

The room at the top of the stairs held two more bodies. These were dressed in khaki uniforms with brown, leather belts and holsters. Their brass buttons gleamed bright in the sunlight slanting in through the windows. The one who lay on his back on the carpet (what a mess: the cleaning bill!) had the shiniest shoes he had ever seen. The other man knelt on his hands and knees, like a Muslim praying. But he couldn’t be a Muslim; his pants were dark with the dried excreta of his dying. A Muslim had to be clean to pray, and this man was not. He wore a mask of blackish jelly, anyhow. Probably a scuba-diver; frogmen were what the ship needed now! He recalled the scene well: the captain giving them all a pep-talk, the line of black-clad figures at the rail, the scudding, grey clouds above the steely sea.

The kneeling man was the bigger of his two guards. He still couldn’t think why there had been guards. Memory refused to answer — probably having a quick snort with the guys down in damage control. The other corpse was unrecognizable. He didn’t think it was Sonny — whoever the hell Sonny was; he couldn’t remember.

He meandered on, into another, larger chamber, one in which rays of sunlight lay like golden bars across piles of papers, files, and miscellany on a big desk in the center of the room. The clean-up detail on this ship needed a butt-kicking! He stumbled over a gilded golf trophy and almost went crashing down into the mess. This room was familiar; it seemed like home. Yet he didn’t remember winning any trophies. No, this couldn’t be his place.

A door opened onto a corridor, along here somewhere was a stairwell. Up there was another room he knew. Why did he feel terror when he thought about it? He pushed at the stairway door. It was locked. Memory whispered that this was just as well.

He let his feet carry him away. They were good feet, really learning their job! They bore him along other passages, past waiting rooms filled with silent, unmoving customers, into a big foyer full of desks and counters and computers and office machines.

And bodies.

All kinds of bodies: men, women, children; young and old; thin and fat; everybody rotting cheerily together in corrupt camaraderie. By the central desk an Arab in a bumoose slumped beside an Israeli officer in undress uniform, together in death as they could never be in life (great line! from some movie poster?). Next to them a bronzed American woman in a yellow sun-dress and harlequin glasses sat on the floor like a forgotten doll. At first he thought she was alive, but when he got closer he knew he didn’t want to pull off those glasses and look into the eyes beneath.

He staggered, stepped, and waltzed across the litter-strewn floor. Memory warned him that he needed fresh air, but he couldn’t smell a thing.

The street outside was full of drifting haze. Mist? Fog? No, smoke. Somebody was barbecuing rotten meat. Somehow he did smell that. It was close to sunset — or sunrise? — and the sun’s red ball peered into the world like the eye of the Bloody Beast of Armageddon. A dull-orange glow lined the purple horizon, and fingers of greasy, black smoke clawed up at the sky.

The city was on fire.

It was just what was needed: Keep Your City Clean! Be a Good Citizen! No Littering! Pick Up Your Trash! Bum, baby, bum!

He was tired, and he hurt. Best to rest here, at the top of the shallow steps leading down to the street. He slumped against the

stone balustrade and gazed out over a hellscape of abandoned cars, trucks, motorbikes, and bicycles. A heap of fruit from an upended produce van blocked the view to his left, but the fires behind it were lurid enough for a big-budget disaster movie. They didn’t have the best seats in the house, but these were okay! They could see. Let Beverly bitch all she wanted!

He was saddened more by the abandoned suitcases and the cars jammed with household goods nobody would ever use again than he was by the bodies. The voiceless, faceless, inoffensive dead: these were not bloated and horrid, like those back in his building; these were decent folk, already drying out, grey with drifting ash and dust, food for the wheeling, screeching birds and the clouds of blue-black flies. These corpses were working hard at blending into their environment. Good citizens all!

He dozed. The westering sunlight soothed his aching limbs.

He awoke. Something had moved out there.

Panic poured up into his throat. It was night, a shadow-ridden, red-black darkness punctuated with bursts of orange sparks and the boom of explosions behind the distant buildings. Beside him, Beverly Rowntree squeezed his arm and giggled. He hated that stupid giggle.

He heard footsteps: a slip-slap of sandals near a blue sedan jammed at an angle against the curb below him. In the middle blackness, amidst the welter of cars and trucks and bodies out in the street, he caught a stealthy crunch of boots.

A woman’s voice sounded tremulously from behind the car. “He’s alive, Sol! But he’s… he’s buck naked!”

The man called Sol emerged from behind an army truck some twenty feet away: a balding, stout, middle-aged, brawny individual with a jaw like Mussolini. He was dressed in a stained, white undershirt and shapeless, filthy slacks. He looked like a garage mechanic after a wallow in the grease pit. He shouted, “Shoot the gubber, Natalie! Watch out for an ambush!”

Sol had a gruff but pleasant voice; it reminded him of his own father. He stood up. Now was the time to speak up, say hello, sing out a cheery “Hi-i-i, there, everybody!” just like Junius Greenwald on TV. He struggled with lips of baked clay and a tongue of carved stone. No sound came out. He extended his hands, palms up.

“Shoot him!” Sol snarled. “Shoot the foozy!”

Natalie’s head appeared over the ash-dusted roof of the sedan. She had a skinny, bony face with eyes that were blank circles of orange light. A tide of terror swept over him: the hollow-eyed bogeyman of his childhood nightmares! Memory suggested, a trifle sarcastically, that the woman might just be wearing glasses.

“He don’t have no gun, Sol. Nobody up there with him.” She sounded as scared as his mother when his dad had gone in after a burglar in their pet shop. He held out his hands and strove to smile. In return Natalie waved her pistol at him. She edged to the side, around the sedan. He saw that she wore a smudged, short-sleeved, yellow blouse and white shorts with little happy-faces stitched on the pocket-flaps. She needed make-up and a decent hairdo. Now she looked too much like his mother.

Another, lighter voice came from farther up the street, “Come on, get on with it!” This speaker sounded forthright and efficient; he couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman.

The bald man looked as though he were sucking courage from the gleaming Israeli automatic rifle he clutched in both hands. He shuffled forward. “Okay, Riva, I don’t see nobody either. This gubber looks like he’s pog-dinkin’ gazoo! Shell-shocked, like. Dinkin’ naked already!”

The third person, the one named Riva, appeared from behind a mound of baggage and bedrolls fallen from a pickup truck. She was definitely female. Her wet-looking, black-leather pants and sun-top of fire-engine red were a statement: she was a macha, one of the militant feminists of the Banger movement. Her dark hair was as short as a boy’s, almost a crewcut, but she lacked the deliberate facial scars many machos wore. Under a glaze of sweat, smoke, and dirt, she had the appearance of a model: tall and willowy, flat-chested, with legs long enough to straddle an elephant. Crossbelts at her waist held a pair of automatic pistols, and she carried her stubby submachine gun as if she knew how to use it.

“Leave the dinker be!” Sol demanded. “We got to get to the airport. Come on!”

Natalie craned forward. “God, Sol, he looks like rotten meat!” She pointed. “What’s the matter with him? ‘N’ what’s that on his foot?”

The bald man scratched his chest. “Cover the foozy! Lemme look.” He stuck out a brawny hand. “Hey, you. C’mere.”

He smiled and obeyed. He had nothing to hide; he had buried the stash of pot Emily Pictrick had given him in the garden outside the high school. Let the principal search all he wanted.

“It’s a fuckin’ card. A card, like… tied to his fuckin’ toe!” Sol resembled a butcher trying to read his scale upside down. “It’s in Hebrew. Hey, Riva!”

“I heard. I ‘m here. ” The mocha’s accent identified her as a native Israeli. She came and bent down to squint.

“What?” Natalie jittered. “What is it?”

“It’s a… a tag. An identification tag from the police morgue.” She clicked her tongue in puzzlement. “It says this man is… dead.”

Somewhere far away a flower of yellow light bloomed upon the horizon. The thud-boom of an explosion bounded up the street toward them.

“He’s dead!” Natalie’s empty, glass eyes glittered red with fear-light.

“That’s what I think it means “

“Dead. I told you… they all said… like they was talkin’ back in the hotel! Everybody’s dead… dead… but they’re comin’ back’. They’re not really dead, Sol!” Natalie began to blubber.

“God damn it, you and your poggin’ zombies! Ever since you read that article in the paper!” The man sighted his weapon. “I’m gonna let some light through this foozy! Then we’ll see about your dead people!”

Riva snapped, “No. No shooting! He is not dead! You can see that. It must have been the plague… Pacov. The police must have made a mistake. Anyway, he’s harmless!”

“If he’s alive then why is his face like that?” Natalie skittered back from the curb. “All grey… tongue hangin’ out… his eyes…?”

“He’s injured, brain-damaged. Maybe Pacov got him but didn’t kill him. An immune… like us…”

“He’s dead!” Natalie shrilled from out in the street by the produce van. “He’s a zombie, I tell you!” Her leather sandals creaked as she backed away into the red-lit darkness.

Sol uttered a cross between a snort and a sigh. “Now look what you done, Riva! Why’d you have to read it to her?”

The moc/zagave him a cool look. “You asked me to. If your wife can’t handle it, that’s her… and your… problem.”

“Nice! Nice! She ain’t my poggin’ wife. She’s just another jizmo tourist on our tour. Hell, what’s it matter anyhow? We got to fuckin’ stick together “

“So stick! Stick yourself! Stick her, if you’ve got anything to stick her with! This man isn’t dead, and he isn’t going to hurt us.”

The bald man grinned. “Hey, hey now, come on! We go together’ That way we live.” He gestured. “So he’s alive. So what good is he to us? He’s gone-o, red light, dunked, kungled, thumbed! Come on let’s grease!”

Riva bent down again and pulled the tag off. Unbalanced, he sat down hard on his rump on the concrete. This made him laugh.

She looked into his eyes. “You understand me? You speak English?” She repeated herself in Hebrew.

He grinned. It was all he could do. He liked being naked and being stared at by a girl. Emily Pietrick used to admire him like that. Once she had painted his body with magic symbols with acrylics from her art class. Then she had done some really kinky things.

“For God’s sake, Riva!” Sol sounded desperate. “Natalie’s leavin,’ and I’m goin’ after her.”

“This man… anybody alive… may be useful!”

“Dink my pog, Riva! You know he’s brain-dead! What’s he good for? Or maybe you get juiced by gubbin’ zombies?”

Riva gave his nakedness a dark, appraising look. “You alive, man? You sick? You need help?” She asked again in Hebrew.

He struggled to smile. His hands came up, and she exclaimed at the scars circling his wrists. “Prisoner? The police? But you are not Arab, I think. Not Israeli. You look American. English? German? No? Who?”

“Let’s grease out, Riva!” Sol yelled. He and Natalie were shadows in the smoke-drifting dark. “Last call!”

“Just a damned minute! What’s your hurry?”

“Speed! We grab a car, we’re out. Hit Kahane Airport… double around if we got to, over to Ben Gurion Airport. Find a plane… I grabbed all the money we’ll ever need back at the bank. Shoot our way on if need be.”

“You are stupid! We try to leave Israel, the sanitation teams will thumb us! No one wants Pacov victims in his country! We take a plane, they shoot us down! We’re infected’.” She swore dispiritedly in Hebrew. “A car is better. We drive north through Syria, to our Israeli settlements in Russia. We get in, somehow, some way.” She gulped hot, barbecue-stinking air and spat.

“We got fuckin’ rights’.” Sol declared righteously. “Me ‘n’ Natalie’re poggin’ American citizens! They got to take us in, give us medical care! Stick with us, Riva! We’ll get you in, too!”

“They shoot diseased cattle, don’t they?” She looked down at him, then at the tag she had taken off his toe. She muttered, “And I think Sol and Natalie will desert me the first chance they get.”

He wasn’t listening. He watched his father inject a sad, old dog with euthanine, and he wept as it died in his arms. The canine stink of the pet shop made him ill. Sol’s voice came from very far away, perhaps out in the back lot, beyond the kennels: “Last chance, you lez jizmo! Stay ‘n’ screw your zombie! Maybe you like suckin’ corpse cock!”

“Get gubbed!”

There was no reply. Sol and Natalie were gone.

Riva turned back to him. “You! The morgue tag says your name is Alan Lessing. Is that right?”

He nodded. It was all he could do. He was watching a movie again, this time with Emily Pietrick. She had her hand inside his pants. Then she bent her head so that her long, black tresses spilled out over his lap. He gasped with ecstasy as her lips and tongue found him.

Riva’s fury brought him back. “You got an erection? You look at me and got an erection”! You corpse! You dead meat!”

He was ashamed. An apology was in order, but he couldn’t say it He opened his mouth. “Ah! Ah?”

“Ah? Oh… I see. You have no control. You cannot speak.” She grimaced. “Sol is wrong. I am no lez… lesbian. It is just that I hate pigs like him! You are a man, but you have not the wit to be a pig, eh? Not now, not any more.” She pointed to the blue sedan. “See this automobile here? The driver is… how do you say?… dead. Yet I think the car works. The key is there, on the floor by the brake pedal. You get the driver out, and I drive. Green light?”

He liked her stilted, funny, Israeli accent and the smoky, sweaty look of her. He wondered why she averted her face and held her nose. He smelled nothing. The driver’s flesh was puffed and blackish, but he got hold of the man’s lime-green pants and slid him out, with hardly any pieces left behind. Then, at her direction, he pulled off the seat covers and threw them away.

His hands were becoming very dextrous; he would see that they were cited for agility beyond the call of duty the next time the admiral was piped aboard.

“Clothes,” Riva’s dark-honey voice purred in his ear. “Our driver was going on a trip, eh? Shoes… too small.” A tiny pocket knife flashed, and he heard ripping noises. “Eh, so. Put them on now. Good. Trousers? Underwear? Here, this suitcase: a shirt, a belt! Good. And what is this? A pistol! Very good! Our driver must have been a policeman!”

She turned the car around and drove. Sometimes he got down and lifted things; sometimes she bumped and banged over them. The streets were dark, but there was light from the fires. A few places had electricity, and twice Riva stopped to loot food from deserted shops. If it hadn’t been for the corpses, this could have been any American city after midnight. She found him a six-pack of cherry pop, and he guzzled it gratefully, all of it. Then he was sick. Afterward they were off again: where, he neither knew nor cared. He was content to let her wrestle the sturdy little car through the clogged streets. Eventually he fell asleep.

Memory awoke him promptly at 0500 hours. “Captain, Captain, there’s news! Terrible news!” He asked what it was, and Memory told him. It was so bad he didn’t dare remember it. He found his cheeks wet with tears, his chin sticky with dried vomit, and his mouth tasting like a mouse had died in it — not too recently.

The world outside the car window was yellow, brown, and dusty white: houses of crumbling stone, shacks, signs in Hebrew and Arabic, garbage, and, yes, a body there behind a shed of corrugated iron. A second corpse, an old woman, lay sprawled face down in front of her door nearby. Pacov was master here.

He rolled to his left and discovered pain. Everything ached. His legs were cramped under the dashboard, and it was all he could do to get the door open and drag himself out. As he did so he caught a glimpse of the Israeli woman — what was her name? — asleep in the back seat. She was older than he had thought. Tiny wrinkles webbed the comers of her eyes, and lines drew down beside her broad mouth. In sleep she looked hard and used and leathery.

The shin and pants she had found for him were too small, and the shoes hurt his feet. His toes peeped out of the holes she had cut like hot dogs out of a bun. He left her in the car and stumbled into the nearest house. He avoided two children curled up on the front room floor; they were sound asleep! Wasn’t it time they were off to school? Were they Beverly Rowntree’s younger brothers? He drifted on into a bedroom. Here women’s clothing hung on pegs, and dolls and toys lay scattered upon the linoleum. In a closet he encountered men’s work pants and several pairs of shoes. These fit, more or less, but his Fingers were too clumsy to fasten the belt and zipper, much less tie the shoelaces. His mother would be furious. He sat down and struggled.

The woman in the doorway didn’t look like Beverly at all. He couldn’t recall who she was: a tall, slinky, crewcut, teat-less wonder in shiny, black stuff that was so tight it looked like it was painted on. What homeroom was she from, anyhow? Was she in any of his classes? Beverly would be jealous.

“You are very dirty,” she said. “Maybe Natalie was right! You do look dead. There’s a shower that still works, back behind the kitchen.”

The strange woman helped him undress, took him into a small, white-tiled cubicle, soaped him, and ran cold water over his bruised limbs. Then she took off her own garments and joined him in the shower. When she pressed herself against him and tried to give him pleasure, he cooperated. She rubbed, pressed, kissed, and squeezed, but nothing worked.

He sensed her frustration. He ought to apologize, but Memory kept interrupting with inane remarks about Beverly and Emily and Mavis and other people. Finally, in tight-lipped silence, she stopped, shut off the water, dried him, and helped him dress.

She found eggs and dry bread and a jar of yellow jam in the kitchen, and they ate. At last she asked, “Who are you, Alan Lessing?”

Dumb question! His homeroom teacher must have his registration card. He hoped he wasn’t in the wrong class. That had happened once, and the embarrassment still rankled.

“You can’t speak any better than you can fuck, eh? How did you get… this… this way? Pacov? The police?”

Memory tried to say something, but he couldn’t hear it.

The woman said, “Look, I’m Riva. Riva Ayalon. Eh? You’re Alan Lessing.”

He essayed another smile. His face worked better this morning.

“We have to go north, to the Israeli bases in Russia. You understand me? Can you drive? Handle a gun?” He blinked at her, and she hissed, almost like a cat. Memory handed him a picture of Buttons, his cat when he was ten years old. It made him want to cry.

She said, “Are you so useless? I know you can do some things… your build, your muscles, the calluses on your hands all prove this! Whatever Pacov… the police… the Arabs… whoever… did to you, still you are not mindless. You must remember! Try!”

Memory asked permission to speak, but the captain refused. Too much, too bad. No, worse than bad. Unthinkable. Unbearable.

The woman ran brown fingers through her short, black hair. “Well, damn it, finish breakfast. We go now… before the sanitation teams come to ‘purify’ us survivors, eh? We take another pair of boots for you, some underwear, some clothes for me, some blankets.”

She went on muttering to herself while he returned to the stuffy darkness of the movie house, munched stale popcorn, and nuzzled Beverly Rowntree’s ample breast. It was a sad movie, all about a boy whose cat was killed by a car. He cried, and she wept, too. “It’s a sad world,” Memory piped up from the seat behind them. Was there no privacy?

After breakfast Riva ransacked the house but found nothing more of use. As they left he tried his rediscovered ability to smile on the two children in the front room, but they were still asleep and didn’t wake up. They must have been eating blackberry jam, because their mouths and cheeks were smeared with dark, reddish jelly. He couldn’t recall where he’d seen that before.

They drove all morning. Bright sunlight and the cloudless, azure bowl overhead reminded him of how his father used to sing “Blue Skies” while driving — until his mother nagged the old man into silence. The road was crowded, full of stalled cars, trucks, personnel carriers, even tanks. Was everybody off to the beach, then? The traffic jam was so bad that people had shut off their engines and were just sitting there waiting. Still, they all were surprisingly patient in spite of the morning’s heat. No one complained or honked, and those who had left their vehicles appeared content to sprawl quietly beside them beneath the blistering sun.

He awoke when the woman — what was her name? — pulled the car over onto the rocky shoulder. “Blocked ahead,” she said tersely. “Change automobiles. Find another one.”

He smiled at her, helped with the luggage, and clambered over the twisted cars and wreckage that filled the road Had there been a terrible accident, then?

His mother had a pat speech for such occasions: drunks, pot-heads, Bangers, and other similar ilk were the offspring of Satan, and reckless disregard for others’ rights — and for her rights in particular — was the downfall of civilization! Downfall? Something about that word disturbed him, but Memory snatched the thought away. It was like trying to think while standing under a waterfall.

They found a bigger and better car, an armored personnel carrier. The crew lay together in the shade beside it, eating blackberry jam in comradely silence. He grinned at them, but no one replied. Stuck up bastards! Always the way with tankers and APC crewmen! They didn’t object, though, when Riva took their vehicle. Shouldn’t even offer to pay for it.

After that they made good time, rolling right over smaller obstacles or knocking them aside and going around the bigger ones in a plume of tallow-hued dust. They rumbled through Nablus and then Nazareth — something important had happened there, long ago, but he couldn’t remember what — and in the evening the woman pulled up near a town she named Safad. Smouldering oil tanks and supply dumps lined the highway ahead, and the horizon was lit with flames, much like that place where he had been before. Already he had forgotten its name.

“I think they are all dead in the town,” she muttered. Mostly she talked to herself rather than to him. “How far does this Pacov extend?” Her features were fox-like, long nosed, with narrow, slightly slanted eyes, in the glow of the blue military flashlight she had found in the driver’s door-rack. She was peering at a map. He wanted to help, but he couldn’t understand the letters. This worried him; he recalled once being able to read, but not any more.

He essayed a puzzled “Ah?”

“What? No, no way. We can’t go in. There may be sanitation teams already there. They’d thumb us for sure.” She traced a red line with her finger. “Here, and here… over to Damascus, then up to Aleppo, and on to Russia. Pacov there, in Kharkov, Donetsk… the old Pacov, the first strike. Some Israelis there, but there’ll be more farther north, near Sverdlovsk, away from the European enclaves in Moscow and Leningrad. We have to get through their lines somehow, steal I.D., prove we came in with their original expedition, and get them to let us stay. It’s our only chance… that life or no life at all.”

He bent to gawk at the map. Her proximity aroused him, and she drew him close. “Want to try sex again, eh?” she asked. He did.

The hot-oil-smelling coziness of the cab took him back to Emily Pietrick, all fingers and tongue and teeth and straining limbs in the back seat of Larry Helger’s fancy convertible.

He had never had any trouble getting it up for Emily. With this woman it was different; he tried hard, but it was no good.

As Johnny Kenow — an unexpected gift from Memory! — used to say, “Can’t salute if ya ain’t got no pole to hang yer flag on!”

Later, as they huddled together in the cab for warmth, he awoke to the distant racket of machinegun fire. Riva was up instantly. Their personnel carrier contained a variety of weapons, and she pushed an automatic rifle into his hands. She seemed pleased when Memory showed him how to use it. Then they slipped out to watch side by side in the underbrush next to their vehicle.

Footsteps brought him back from a timeless, dreamless doze. Black figures were trotting along the road toward them from the direction of the town. Riva’s gun made a soft, snicking sound as she cocked it. He laid a hand on her arm.

A man in Israeli military fatigues staggered past them, his features contorted by exhaustion and terror. Then came two more, a woman and a girl, shapeless beneath dark shawls. A short, heavy-set, jowly man brought up the rear. He was panting and visibly near collapse. What was frightening these people?

Spotlight beams picked their way up the road toward them like diamond-brilliant, long-legged insects, and he caught the deep-throated rumble of an engine. Headlights blazed out suddenly amidst the ruddy light of the oil-tank fires. A voice, amplified to unintelligibility by a bullhorn, yammered something. The fat man stopped, his mouth twisted into an oval of despair. The woman faltered, turned, and went back to him. The child would have joined her, but she pushed the girl roughly toward the dark bushes off to the side of the road.

The vehicle came bounding up over a rise, and he saw that it was an open, jeep-style scout car. It held six Klansmen: men in white hoods and robes, just like Nate Reese’s movie, “One Angry Afternoon.” Beverly Rowntree had hated that one: too violent, she said, and she had never gone in for Black heroes. He told her to shut up so he could concentrate.

The Klansman beside the driver stood up and hollered something over his bullhorn. The fat man knelt in the middle of the road, as if he were praying, and the woman stood squarely behind him. Good scene! Great lighting!

One ghostly figure stayed in the vehicle to man the mounted machinegun, while the rest got down. They wore identical, complete-coverage, white suits that included gloves, boots, and bulky back-tanks, and their faces were concealed by silvery, mirror-bright masks.

What kind of Klan costumes were these? He didn’t like it when the movies screwed around with authenticity! Their car, too, had graffiti spray-painted on it: a big, wavering, white “UN” over an oblong flag-decal that consisted of a red background and a white crescent.

“Turks,” Riva whispered. “Sanitation team.”

One of the Klansmen sported different insignia: a blue flag with a yellow cross on his helmet. He appeared to be arguing with his comrades, but they ignored him.

The one in the lead went right up to the kneeling man and the woman, raised the stitch-gun he was carrying, and spat out a burst at point-blank range. The explosive needles went bangedy-bang like a string of firecrackers, and both targets jittered and danced and erupted in a shower of blood. Then they fell down. In the ringing silence that followed they heard the child keening wordlessly somewhere in the rocks off to the side of the road. There was no sign of the first man, the one in fatigues.

Two of the Klansmen stooped to inspect their work. Three advanced to peer into the darkness after the child. One pointed at Riva’s APC, half-concealed in the undergrowth beside the road. The machine-gunner swivelled his weapon to cover, but when the APC proved to be empty he went back to contemplating the highway to the south, away from the town.

It took him a second to realize that Riva had opened fire; then his gun joined in, seemingly of its own accord. The Klansmen in the road yelped, staggered, and collapsed. The machine-gunner never had a chance to turn around: he threw up his arms and plunged prettily off onto the stony roadbed. Nice shot! Give that stunt man a bonus!

The Klansmen all lay still. That was how Nate Reese had done it! Shoot the White bastards! That was the message of a lot of his movies.

Riva called something in Hebrew, then in English, then, haltingly, in Arabic. A whimper answered her from the darkness.

Eventually the girl emerged. It was hard to say whether she was an Arab, a Jew, or what. She looked about twelve years old, thin, dark-faced, with lanky, stringy hair. Grime concealed the color of her baggy pants and long-sleeved, tunic-like blouse, and her shawl was little more than a black rag. She did not speak but continued to cry, soundlessly and with no tears. Riva made a face but held her and patted her awkwardly until the worst spasms were finished.

The movie was over. Beverly had to be home by midnight, otherwise her old man would have a shit-fit. He helped the woman collect the weapons, drag the Klansmen into the undergrowth — they sure were good actors!— and run their vehicle off the road. The child climbed into their APC without protest, and he managed a couple of hours of precious sleep. By dawn they were on their way again.

Jerusalem and Damascus are not far apart, as measured in kilometers instead of cultures and history. He recalled another occasion when he had driven this road. There had been men with him then: grim, tough soldiers in Israeli-issue helmets and uniforms. He didn’t want to think about it and was grateful when the waterfall came back to drown everything out.

They camped that night under a moon as big and ornately scrolled as one of those silver trays the Arab artisans peddled to the tourists. Riva refused to enter the city for fear both of contagion and also of whom or what else might be wandering there. He lay with her on a looted mattress in the sand next to their vehicle and listened to the child whimper. The little girl still had not spoken. Memory handed him the name “Liese,” but he had no idea who that was.

Memory crawled up to report, very quietly so as not to wake the woman.

“God damn it,” he growled. “Don’t do that!”

“Sorry, sir,” Memory replied. “Thought you’d like to know, sir.”

“I don’t remember any Liese. Who is she?”

“Never mind.” Memory was contrite. “Go to sleep, sir.”

“How can I? The kid’s whining keeps me awake.”

A new voice broke in, a woman, a stranger speaking funny, stilted English. “What are you mumbling? Dink you, you piece of dead meat!”

He opened an eye to see an angular shadow against the moonlit armored flank of their personnel carrier: a kid pimping for his sister — or offering himself for a little quick rental.

He made a shooing gesture. Words still baffled him, but a good, deep, vicious growl ought to get the message across.

“What?” the person asked in startled tones. “What… what ‘s the matter?”

He pointed and pantomimed “no teats”: boys were not his style. He rolled over to go back to sleep.

A fist smacked him at the nape of the neck. He twisted around and fended off flailing arms tipped with cat-claws, jerked up a leg to protect his groin, and dodged snapping, white teeth.

His attacker was a woman, not his type but passable if one ignored the lack of breastworks. He snorted in chagrin, but she took it as a laugh and joined in. Next they were tugging at each other’s clothes; then they were intertwined, as tight as two snakes in a drainpipe, as his father used to say.

It still wasn’t any good: he couldn’t finish it.

“Pog you, corpse!” she panted. “Gel me off! Get me off!”

Memory was astutely absent. She pulled his fingers down between her legs, then savagely pushed his head in that direction as well. Emily Pietrick used to like that, he recalled. He nuzzled the soft, fragrant flesh of her abdomen, then moved lower.

He raised his eyes to see the little girl watching them, wide-eyed and openmouthed.

He was no kink, no perverter of children. He wrenched himself free and grabbed the blanket.

“God damn you!” the woman gasped. “God damn you to hell!” She followed his gaze. “Who cares? The world has ended! It’s over! Yet you, you chunk of dog-meat, you care about that. About bourgeois morality?” She rapped out a command in Hebrew and made an angry gesture. The child ignored her.

The waterfall cut off her words and also his view of her furious, contorted features.

He awoke to the rumble of the engine and the clatter of treads chewing on a rutted roadbed. He had no recollection of where he was or how he had come there. His chest was spattered with black oil.

He must have been half asleep while helping one of Major Berger’s tankers refuel! The Izzies said the Baalbek War would soon be over; then maybe he could lie down. They had taken Damascus in a storm of blood and fire, and the Syrians were in full retreat north toward Aleppo. Berger told Copley that they’d take that, too, by the end of the week. Then they’d go see about Iraq and Iran and some other places that had been thorns in the Jewish state’s iron-plated sides. The Izzies had had a century of Arabs; now they were determined to end the problem for all time: the “Final Solution.”

He was surprised to find that his Israeli driver wore no uniform — and very little else. Her attire consisted of a skimpy bra, panties, and boots, although a sweat-stained, red top and black, leather pants were draped over the seal beside her. She was skinny, sharp-faced, and dark, and her hair was cut as short as a boy’s. God, Izzie women were tough!

“Awake?” She shoved a chunk of dry bread at him, and the kid passed him a can of something lemony and sweet from the rear compartment. The woman — he kept forgetting her name — said, “You’re pogging fungled, as Sol would say! Look, we’re coming up on some suburbs. Gel back and handle that mounted machinegun we picked up last night.”

He didn’t remember any such weapon and was bemused to find a shiny-bright Hiram bolted in the brackets made for it above the driver’s cab. God, he must really have been asleep! Memory would answer for this!

The blue-and-white Israeli flag still flew over Aleppo’s medieval citadel, but the sun-scoured streets outside were silent. Riva — that was his driver’s name — thought she heard engines and possibly gunfire inside the city and refused to go in. She kept to the back roads. After staying lost for most of the day, they found their way around to the highway that led north to the Turkish border.

He studied the blank-faced buildings through binoculars but saw only death and emptiness. As before, the roads were packed with stalled trucks, cars, carts, and even baby buggies. Horses, camels, and mules lay sprawled amidst human corpses and litter. He shook his head and summoned the waterfall again to drown any recognition of sorrow.

“But why?” the driver-lady asked. “Why? Who did this? Who has committed this crime… this horror?” Warm tears spattered onto the back of his hand, and he looked around to find the native child behind him. He knew neither Hebrew nor Arabic and could only offer a comforting smile. She misunderstood and drew back apprehensively.

“Bastards!” his driver went on. “Monsters! They have killed half the world! They deserve to die! They are criminals… worse even than the Nazis!”

That struck a chord. What? Why? Memory must be having a drink with the off-duty watch, and did not answer his call. He would have to court-martial the sonuvabitch if this kept up!

He forced himself out of the waterfall, sucked in air, and tried to think. Who had employed Pacov? And why? Why? What did they— whoever “they” were — gain?

Memory came hustling up onto the bridge, late as usual, and panted, “Loot, sir, loot! Land, resources, factories, industries, farms, the wealth of hundreds of millions of slaughtered people… all empty, ready for the taking!” Memory sounded smug. “Pacov is neat, tidy, and almost impossible to stop. It’s the perfect weapon.”

The Russians had responded with their Starak too late to save themselves. At least Starak must have put a crimp in the plans of those who had expected a clean sweep from Pacov!

Memory produced a tinny, static-filled recording: a man’s voice saying, “It must’ve been the Izzies who started this Pacov thing. They’ve always been terrified of the Soviet Union, and America’s grown too weak to help them any more. A quick, surgical strike.” He asked for a face to go with that voice, and Memory obediently produced a faded photograph of a bald, elderly man, who looked like a petulant baby. Mueller? Molders? Something like that.

He tried to tell the woman that it wasn’t the Nazis who had slain her country — that it was probably the Israelis. Words were still beyond him, however. Just as well: he never liked discussing politics with Major Berger either, the Izzies were so sensitive!

He dozed again. Beverly Rowntrce certainly did have magnificently bovine udders! Adrift amongst white billows, the great, American wet dream!

They halted that night well away from Aleppo. His woman driver showed him her maps and said that they must take the new Izzie military highway cast to al-Mawsil in what had once been Iraq. From there another recent road led up to Yerevan in the Soviet Union. Somebody had given Tbilisi a dose of cleansing, prophylactic Pacov, and now much of the southwestern Soviet Union, eastern Turkey, northern Iran, and Iraq were a big, empty playground for the Izzie “relief” forces. The Turks, the driver-lady said, were only just beginning to push east again to recover their lost property. With Israel a graveyard, the Turks could now drive south, too, and re-establish the Ottoman Empire! What fun!

They travelled on in the morning. The landscape became a blur of sere, yellow-brown mountains and grey-green vegetation. There were people at first, mostly lying down or slumped against the stained, dun-hued walls. Memory declared disdainfully that most of these Third-Worlders were lazy poggers, but scattered here and there amongst them were the still forms of Israeli soldiers. The Izzies had a reputation for industriousness. What were they doing here?

Some lime later — days? months? — the people disappeared and were replaced by white skeletons in dark-stained rags. He wasn’t sure when this happened, but he liked the skeletons better.

Each night he slept next to his driver-lady, often with the little girl curled against his back for warmth, as sexless as three baby angels in Heaven. This was how it ought to be, his mother’s voice told him, not the wicked harlot’s way of Emily Pietrick, nor even a nice, marriage-minded girl like Beverly Rowntree! His mother didn’t know sweet Beverly the way he did. Sweet? Yes, and also hypocritical, greedy, marry-a-prick-and-a-pocketbook, and other endearing qualities. His father understood, but then he never said anything to anybody. Too bad Mavis Larson had moved away before they had entered high school and pubescence! She was a bitch, too, and mean as a rattler’s grin. But she did have the sleekest bod of the lot of them!

Once they spotted an armored column heading east, the red banner of Turkey snapping on the lead halftrack’s radio mast. Later they were almost thumbed by a similar force travelling west; this one displayed a green flag with a white sidebar and a white crescent and star: Pakistan, the driver-lady said. With the Soviets out of commission, it now behooved Pakistan’s Red Mullah to don Islamic green and embark upon a jihad against the unbelievers of the lands to Pakistan’s northwest. (No matter that said unbelievers were Muslims too— and mostly deceased. “Dead-y or not, here we come!”) India, the woman said, was no longer a problem: it had dissolved into a hornets’ nest of warring statelets, but lately wily, old Ramanujan had got his act together, and the Indians were now advancing eastward through Burma and Thailand to offer “aid” to the stricken Chinese. Why fight Pakistan, plus what was left of Free Iran, Afghanistan, and Soviet Central Asia, when all of lush Southeast Asia was open for the taking? You go east and we’ll go west, and never the twain shall meet… or some such half-remembered quotation.

He recalled a personal connection with India, although Memory couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him what it was. It was connected with occasional dreams of a lovely, oval-faced princess, who dressed in blue ice and smelled of sandalwood and spices. At times he was happy with her, but more often he felt an ominous sorrow, a deep foreboding, like the thundcrheads that warned of rain. As Emily said, next to him in the theater, “It’s like when you hear the spooky music go up just before the murderer pops out with a knife.” She rubbed him furiously, trying to make him come in his pants and mess up his clothes. What a kink she was! As weird as any of the imaginary devils she professed to worship! His mother called her a witch and lectured him fiercely about “bad seed.”

“Khoi,” the driver-lady pointed. “Northeast from there to Nakhichevan, then on to Yerevan in Armenia. That’s where my ancestors came from, you know.”

He didn’t know.

“We’re Armenians… Jews, but Armenians. You are Jewish, aren’t you? I know you’re circumcised.” She gave him what was meant as a roguish grin.

He ought to respond; that would be polite. But he couldn’t. He smiled at her instead. He still had trouble recalling her name, and Memory wasn’t much help.

“Armenian Jews. Not blonde and Germanic-looking like you, you pogging zombie, as glow-in-the-dark white as any ‘Aryan’ ever spawned! As for me, I’m not German, not Polish, not Russian… and so not of our Israeli elite, our ruling class, our gubbing ‘master race!’” She spat white dust out the cab window. “So what if you’re not Jewish? You’ve probably got as much ‘pure Semitic blood’ in your corpse-veins as I do… and more than a lot of our leaders. Most of them are European Jews descended from Slavic tribes converted during the Middle Ages! The rest of us go back to the poor dinkers the Romans scattered all over their pogging empire after they thumbed Jerusalem.” She wrinkled her nose derisively. “We trace our ancestry back to Moses and Abraham and ancient Israel, but that’s propaganda. It unites our people and gives us a claim to a homeland in Palestine that the world can’t deny! But what does it matter now?”

He didn’t know or care. The ship was rolling queasily m the clutches of the storm, steel plates squealing, engines hammering over the din of wind and water.

“So what if you’re not Jewish?” the driver-lady insisted. It seemed to bother her. She rubbed dirty fingers across dust-powdered lips. “Who gives a pog now? Am I so Jewish? I’m neither religious nor a Zionist nationalist. I don’t give a shit about either a kosher kitchen or an empire of miserable Arab slaves! Oh, I’m Jewish by descent and by culture, but I don’t care about the two things our leaders say really make a Jew! All I want is to run my boutique in Haifa, sell fashions, maybe break into the American market, and have things peaceful… the way people ought to live. And now this! Now this!” She waved out the window.

He motioned that it was all right. He was getting good at sign language. Too bad Memory couldn’t find the crewman who knew Morse code or the other sailor with the signal flags. Just wait till he made his report to the admiral!

She said, “I’m glad you can’t talk. That was one thing about my male-chauvinist pogger boy friends! Talk, talk, talk… Mr. Macho Man! Gub them all!” She grinned over at him, then caught her lower lip between her teeth. “I don’t feel well.” “Uh?” he inquired.

She didn’t reply but squeezed her eyes shut. He slid across the seat toward her.

“God…!” She doubled over, forehead down against the steering wheel.

“Uh! Unh!” He grabbed the wheel, kicked her foot away, found the brake pedal, and brought the ponderous APC to a stop. Beverly Rowntree looked annoyed.

“Sick…,” the driver-lady whispered.

What had she told him? What had Memory said about some horrid epidemic sweeping their ship?

She fumbled the door open, rolled down into the road, knelt, and vomited. Before he could reach her she went into a paroxysm of cramps, diarrhea, and retching. The child handed him the canteen, and he held it out to the woman wordlessly.

The driver-lady recovered enough to take it. Her cheeks were sallow, her lips dry and cracked-looking, her forehead flecked with sweat. She husked, “I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”

He wanted to tell her that she needn’t be. He helped her clean up, then scanned the mountainous horizon for some place to take her. All that met his eyes were sullen whitecaps on a silver sea: no land in sight! Didn’t they have a sick bay on this ship? Where was the doctor? He yelled for Memory, but only the child was there. She helped him wrestle the driver-lady back up onto the bridge.

He drove. The driver-lady, whose name he had somehow lost completely, hunched in the passenger seat beside him. She looked awful.

Khoi, when they reached it, was unexpected: a pretty town of broad streets, willow-fringed streamlets, and gardens. The only dirt was what had drifted in from the fertile fields outside. Amidst the rubbish he saw more of the white-boned inhabitants, their mouths agape and choked with dust. He wondered how they ate.

Memory chose the tallest building in sight as a reference point, and he drove around and around until he reached it: a tall minaret on a mosque that faced a brick-built bazaar and a square. There were more skeletons here; they congregated in the side streets, gathered chummily under the arcades, and made friendly, crackling noises beneath the treads of his vehicle. Many of these silent citizens were stacked tidily like cordwood against the mosque’s wall, but they were outnumbered by the unruly ones who lay sprawled everywhere else. No discipline, as the Israelis said of these Eastern peoples.

“Where…?” The voice of the driver-lady reminded him that he ought to do something for her. He wasn’t sure what.

There were Israeli army trucks in the square, a whole row of them. On inspection he discovered that many of the skeletons wore rags and tatters of khaki, and he saw Izzie helmets, guns, and buckles. These skeletons, too, were lying down and lazing about. How unlike the industrious Israelis! So the Jews had gone soft! Major Berger said this was inevitable: live with lazy people in an easy place, and you go all mushy yourself. Next thing you know you’re the same as your conquered subjects. Then some new barbarian comes along and stomps you into history.

Memory sniggeringly interrupted to say that this looked like a real gong-bong, green light party, as much fun as theover-and-under Banger orgies Emily Pietrick popped so much! Look how those white bone-people were intertwined!

“It’s not Pacov,” the woman muttered. “Dysentery, I think. The waterin that last village. You didn’t drink from that well, remember? Nor the girl. Cholera?”

He was puzzled. The water in Sioux City movie-house fountains was pretty good. What was she complaining about? Why didn’t she go get a cola from the stand in the lobby? He could loan her a couple of bucks if she didn’t have the money.

The child whimpered and pointed. One of the Israeli trucks had a big, red cross painted on its flapping, rotting, canvas side. He brought their APC to a stop beside it.

The driver-lady climbed halfway out, then fell the rest of the way down onto the paving. She was sick again, grovelling and retching amongst their hosts’ scattered bones.

The girl seized his hand and drew him away, toward the truck. What was she so urgent about? The ship’s doctor would be here any second. He let her pull him, though, and climbed up inside.

Here were more bones attired in ragged khaki; boxes and canisters; machines and equipment; autoclaves, syringes, and stethoscopes, all dust-caked and fading. He prowled around, looking for something he recognized. Outside, he could hear the driver-lady pleading, calling words he couldn’t make out.

He opened a case at random. The labels were in Hebrew, Arabic, and English; he knew that much.

He couldn’t read any of those languages.

He grunted, and the girl scrambled out to bring the driver-lady up to sec for herself. She was too weak to walk, and he and the child had to lift her and carry her inside. They laid her on the truck floor, taking care to avoid the broken glass bottles and vials spilled from cartons.

“Unh?” He held up a box, then another. “Unh?”

“Can’t see…,” she murmured. Her eyes were already ringed and sunken, her sharp cheekbones highlighted by grease, dirt, and sweat. He brought the box close to her face. “No, not that. Find an antibiotic, the strongest, ccotromycin, maybe… the new drug they developed for our soldiers “

He didn’t know ccotromycin from sarsaparilla, but he couldn’t tell her that. Where the hell was that bastard Memory when he needed him?

“That one… no, the other beside it. No. The metal case.” She grabbed her belly as the cramps caught her again.

He looked to the child for help. She could probably read, but the medical names on the labels would be beyond her.

The driver-lady gagged and crouched low, on her hands and knees in the middle of the cargo compartment. The ship’s doctor was going to crap his jeans when he saw this mess!

“Please,” she choked. “Hurry.”

He obliged, tossing packages and ampoules and vials and canisters and all manner of enigmatic devices down before her for identification. Memory put in an appearance to say that he knew what to look for, provided he could spot it in the chaos. Memory had experience, he said, of Delhi Belly, the Sultan’s Revenge, typhus, and a lot of others. The driver-lady looked like she had bacillic dysentery, perhaps made more virulent by mutation and the combining of strains, just as gonorrhea and AIDS had become worse and worse as they ravaged the world. Pestilence, the fourth of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, was one son of a bitch! Knock him down, and he sprang up in a hundred new forms to fight you again! Wasn’t there some monster in Greek mythology who could do that? He’d seen that movie, too.

The child was laving the driver-lady’s face with water from the canteen— probably the same water that had infected her. He begged Memory for a name, a picture, a hint of the medicine that had cured him out in — wherever it was. Angola? Syria? Or was it India? Names and places were coming back. He snarled at Beverly to get out of the way. Let the medics through! Get the lady to a hospital!

The woman scrabbled among the wrack of dressings and bottles and surgical gear. The truck was only medical transport, not an ambulance. If they looked, they might find the Izzies’ field hospital van parked nearby, she said. Then, again, they might not.

There was no time. The driver-lady opened her eyes wide, retched, and curled up, face down, in her own awful mess. Her fingers kept flexing and clutching, but he guessed that she was losing consciousness. The child poured water into her slack mouth, but it sloshed back out again. Just as well; it looked brown and smelled bad.

“Unh!” he cried. “Unh!”

The girl turned to stare at him, the obelisk look of one who has seen death too often.

He fumbled with another metal canister. It came open, and tiny, white tablets showered over his palms. Were these the ones? Would they help? Or were they poison for her now?

He began to weep. The seas rose and obscured the helmsman’s view. He wiped at the porthole and cursed. Nothing helped. What a terrible storm! Worse, even, than he remembered from the first time he had seen this movie.

He sat there a long time.

Later that afternoon he woke to find Beverly shaking him. Had she seen him with Emily, then? God, if she had, the fit would hit the shan! When he got his wits back, he discovered it wasn’t either of them: an unfamiliar face looked down at him, a big-nosed, round-eyed, gamin-looking foreign kid. She tugged at his arm. She was crying too. Saddest goddamned movie he’d ever seen!

He touched the driver-lady’s bare shoulder. She didn’t move. Then she twisted and slowly toppled sideways, to sprawl against a heap of boxes. He knew she was dead.

He wept, and the child wept with him. He held the gaunt, little girl to him and let the tears flow. He didn’t remember exactly why they were crying, but it felt good. Something was radically wrong with the world, and this was the only way they could share their misery.

After a while he found that another movie had started, one he remembered seeing on Saturday Film Classics, before his father had splurged for the big holo-video his mother hated so much. This movie ended with Death himself towing a string of newly-dead plague victims across a blasted, barren heath, dancing, skipping, leaping, and whirling them all away to darkness and the eternity of the grave.

He hadn’t liked that movie. It scared the bejesus out of him.

But it was real. It was what was happening.

He rose, lifted the terribly light, dehydrated body of the driver-lady, cradled her in his arms, and clambered down out of the truck. The little girl followed. The setting sun turned the town and its mute inhabitants to blood and shadows.

He began to dance, while the skeletons made eldritch music and kept time. They sounded pretty good. Wondering, the child trudged after him.

“Where it stops, nobody knows!” His father quoted sententiously from some place. He and Beverly and Emily and Mavis and his parents and the child and all the people of his life joined hands with Death in Yellow and did an amateurish but enthusiastic saraband through the empty city of Khoi.

He never remembered when or where — or if — the music stopped.