The Genocides

EIGHT The Way Down

Maybe we’ll die, Maryann thought, when they had at last stopped running and she could think. But that was impossible. It was so cold! She wished to heaven she could understand what Anderson was talking about. He’d just said: “We’ll have to take inventory.” They were all standing around in the snow. It was so cold, and when she’d fallen down she’d gotten snow inside her coat, under her collar. The snow was still coming down in the dark. She’d catch a cold and then what would she do? Where would she live? And her baby—what about him?

“Maryann?” Anderson asked. “She’s here, isn’t she?”

“Maryann!” Buddy barked impatiently.

“I’m here,” she said, snuffling the wet that trickled from her nose.

“Well—what did you bring with you?”

Each of her numb hands (she’d forgotten mittens too) was holding something, but she didn’t know what. She held up her hands so she could see what was in them. “Lamps,” she said. “The lamps from the kitchen, but one of them is broken. The chimney’s smashed.” It was only then that she remembered falling on it and cutting her knee.

“Who’s got matches?” Orville asked.

Clay Kestner had matches. He lit the good lamp. By its light Anderson took a headcount: “Thirty-one.” There was a long silence while each survivor examined the thirty other faces and tallied his own losses. There were eighteen men, eleven women and two children.

Mae Stromberg began to cry. She’d lost a husband and a daughter, though her son was with her. In the panic Denny had not been able to find the shoe for his left foot, and Mae had pulled him the three miles from the conflagration on one of the children’s sleds. Anderson, having concluded the inventory, told Mae to be quiet.

“Maybe there’ll be more food back there,” Buddy was saying to his father. “Maybe it won’t be burnt up so bad we can’t still eat it.”

“I doubt it,” Orville said. “Those damn flamethrowers are pretty thorough.”

“How long will what we’ve got last if we ration it?” Buddy asked.

“Till Christmas,” Anderson replied curtly.

“If we last till Christmas,” Orville said. “Those machines are probably scouting the woods now, picking off anyone who got out of the fire. There’s also a matter of where we’ll spend the night. Nobody thought to bring along tents.”

“We’ll go back to the old town,” Anderson said. “We can stay in the church and tear off the siding for firewood. Does anyone know where we are now? Every goddam Plant in this forest looks like every other goddam Plant.”

“I’ve got a compass,” Neil volunteered. “I’ll get us there. You just follow me.” Off in the distance, there was a scream, a very brief scream. “I think it’s that way,” Neil said, moving toward the scream.

They formed a broad phalanx with Neil at the head and moved on through the snowy might. Orville pulled Greta along on the sled, and Buddy carried Denny Stromberg on his back.

“Can I hold your hand?” Maryann asked him. “Mine are just numb.”

Buddy let her put her hand in his, and they walked along together for a half hour in perfect silence. Then he said, “I’m glad you’re safe.”

“Oh!” It was all she could say. Her nose was dripping like a leaky faucet, and she began to cry too. The tears froze on her cold cheeks. Oh, she was so happy!

They almost walked through the village without realizing it. An inch of snow had blanketed the cold, leveled ashes.

Denny Stromberg was the first to speak. “Where will we go now, Buddy? Where will we sleep?” Buddy didn’t answer. Thirty people waited in silence for Anderson, who was kicking the ashes with the toe of his boot, to lead them through this Red Sea.

“We must kneel and pray,” he said. “Here, in this church, we must kneel and ask forgiveness for our sins.” Anderson knelt in the snow and ashes. “Almighty and merciful God…”

A figure came out of the woods, running, stumbling, breathless—a woman in bedclothes with a blanket wrapped shawl-like about her. Falling to her knees in the middle of the group, she could not draw breath to speak. Anderson ceased praying. In the direction from which she had come, the forest glowed faintly, as though, at a distance, a candle were burning in a farmhouse window.

“It’s Mrs. Wilks,” Alice Nemerov announced, and at the same moment Orville said, “We’d better pray somewhere else. That looks like a new fire over there.”

“There is nowhere else,” Anderson said.

“There must be,” Orville insisted. Under the pressure of hours of crisis, he had lost track of his original motive—to save the Andersons for his personal revenge, for slower agonies. His desire was more primary—self-preservation. “If there are no houses left, there must still be someplace to hide: a burrow, a cave, a culvert…” Something he bad said touched the chord of memory. A burrow? A cave?

“A cave! Blossom, a long time ago, when I was sick, you told me you’d been in a cave. You’d never seen a mine, but you’d been in a cave. Was that near here?”

“It’s by the lake shore—the old lake shore. Near Stromberg’s Resort. It’s not far, but I haven’t been in it since I was a little girl. I don’t know if it’s still there.”

“How big a cave is it?”

“Very big. At least, I thought so then.”

“Could you take us there?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard enough in the summertime to find your way around through the Plants. All the old landmarks are gone, and with the snow besides…”

“Take us there, girl! Now!” Anderson rasped. He was himself again, more or less.

They left the half-naked woman behind them lying in the snow. Not through cruelty: it was simply forgetfulness. When they had gone, the woman looked up and said, “Please.” But the people whom she had thought to address were not there. Perhaps they had never been there. She got to her feet and dropped her blanket.

It was very cold. She heard the humming sound again and ran blindly back into the woods, heading in the opposite direction from that which Blossom had taken.

The three incendiary spheres glided to the spot where the woman had lain, quickly converted the blanket there to ash, and moved on after Mrs. Wilks, following the spoor of blood.

Much of the old lake shore was still recognizable under the mantle of snow: the conformation of the rocks, the stairways going down to the water—they even found a post that had once been part of the resort’s pier. From the pier Blossom estimated it would be a hundred yards to the cave entrance. She went along the rockface that rose ten feet above the old beach and played the lamplight into likely crevasses. Wherever she directed him, Buddy cleared the snow with a shovel, which, along with an axe, he had rescued from the commonroom. The other searchers scraped off the snow (which had drifted more than a yard deep among the boulders) with their hands, mittened or bare, as luck would have it.

The work went slowly, for Blossom remembered the entrance to the cave as being halfway up the rockface, so that one had to clamber over snowy rocks to be able to dig. Despite the hazard this involved, they did not have time to be careful. Behind the clouds, from which the snow sifted steadily down, there was no moon; the digging went on in near-total darkness. At regular intervals one of them would call a sudden halt to the work and they would stand there straining to hear the telltale bum of their pursuers that someone had thought he’d heard.

Blossom, under the unaccustomed weight of responsibility, became erratic, running from rock to rock. “Here!” she would say, and then, running: “Or here?” She was a good two hundred yards from the old pier, and Buddy began to doubt that there was a cave.

If there were not, then surely they had come to an end.

The prospect of death disturbed him most in that he could not grasp the purpose of these burnings. If this were an invasion (and even his father could not doubt that now; the Good Lord did not need to build machines to wreak his vengeance), what did the invaders want? Were the Plants themselves the invaders? No, no—they were only Plants. One had to suppose that the real invaders—the ones inside the incendiary globes (or whoever had built them and put them to work)—wanted the Earth for no other reason than to grow their damn Plants. Was Earth, then, their farm? If so, why had there been no harvest?

It wounded his pride to think that his race, his species, his world was being defeated with such apparent ease. What was worse, what he could not endure was the suspicion that it all meant nothing, that the process of their annihilation was something quite mechanical: that mankind’s destroyers were not, in other words, fighting a war but merely spraying the garden.

The opening to the cave was discovered inadvertently—Denny Stromberg fell through it. Without that happy chance, they might well have gone the whole night without finding it, for everyone in their party had passed it by.

The cave went farther back than the lamplight would reach from the entrance, but before the full depth was explored, everyone was inside. All the adults except Anderson, Buddy, and Maryann (all three under five feet six) had to bend over double or even crawl to keep from hitting their beads against the crumbling ceiling. Anderson declared that the moment for silent prayer was at hand, for which Orville was grateful. Huddled next to each other for warmth, their backs against the sloping wall of the cave, they tried to recover their sense of identity, of purpose, of touch—whatever senses they had lost in the hours-long stampede through the snow. The lamp was left burning, since Anderson judged that matches were more precious than oil.

After five minutes given over to prayers, Anderson, Buddy, Neil and Orville (though not of the family hierarchy, he had been the one to think of the cave—and of more things besides than Anderson cared to reckon) explored the back of the cave. It was big but not so big as they’d hoped, extending some twenty feet to the rear, narrowing continually. At its far end, there was a small el filled with bones.

“Wolves!” Neil declared.

Closer inspection confirmed this with some definiteness, for the skeletons of the wolves themselves were discovered, stripped as clean as the others, topmost on the pile.

“Rats,” Neil decided. “Just rats.”

To reach the far depth of the cave they had had to squeeze past the gigantic root of a Plant that had broken through the cave wall. Returning from the pile of bones the men examined this, the only other exceptional feature of the cave, with some care. The Plant’s root at this level was very little distinguishable from its trunk. To judge from the curvature of the portion exposed in the cave, it was, like the bole of the Plant, some fourteen or fifteen feet in diameter. Near the floor of the cave, the smooth surface of the root was abraded, just as the smooth green trunks were often chewed by hungry rabbits. Here, however, there appeared to be more than a nibble taken out.

Orville stooped to examine it. “Rabbits didn’t do this. It’s gone right to the heart of the wood.” He reached his hand into the dark hole. The outermost layer of wood extended no more than a foot, beyond which his fingers encountered what seemed a tangle of vines—and beyond this (his whole shoulder pressing against the hole), nothing; emptiness; air. “This thing is hollow!”

“Nonsense,” Anderson said. He got down beside Orville and thrust his own arm into the hole. “It can’t be,” he said, feeling that it could be and was.

“Rabbits certainly didn’t make that hole,” Orville insisted.

“Rats,” Neil repeated, more than ever confirmed in his judgment. But, as usual, no one paid him any attention.

“It grows that way. Like the stem of a dandelion—it’s hollow.”

“It’s dead. Termites must have gotten to it.”

“The only dead Plants I’ve seen, Mr. Anderson, are the ones we’ve killed. If you don’t object, I’d like to see what’s down there.”

“I don’t see what good that could do. You have an unhealthy curiosity about these Plants, young man. I sometimes have the impression that you’re more on their side than on ours.”

“The good it could do,” Orville said, half-truthfully (for he dared not yet express his real hope), “is that it may provide a back door to the cave—an escape hatch to the surface in the event that we’re followed here.”

“He’s right about that, you know,” Buddy volunteered.

“I don’t need your help to make up my mind. Either of you,” Anderson added when he saw that Neil had begun to smile at this. “You are right again, Jeremiah…”

“Just call me Orville, sir. Everyone else does.”

Anderson smiled acidly. “Yes. Well. Shall we start to work now? As I recall, one of the men managed to bring a hatchet. Oh, it was you, Buddy? Bring it here. Meanwhile, you—” (designating Orville) “—will see that everyone moves to the back of the cave, where they’ll be warmer. And safer perhaps. Also, find some way to block up the entrance, so the snow will cover it over again. Use your coat if necessary.”

When the opening to the root had been sufficiently enlarged, Anderson thrust the lamp in and squeezed his bony torso through. The cavity narrowed rapidly overhead, becoming no more than a tangle of vines; there was little possibility of an exit—at least not without much hard work. But below was an abyss that stretched quite beyond the weak shaft of light from the lamp. The lamp’s effectiveness was further diminished by what seemed to be a network of gauze or cobweb that filled the hollow of the root. The light passing through this airy stuff was diffused and softened so that beyond a depth of fifteen feet one could discern only a formless, pinkish glow.

Anderson swiped at these strands of gauze, and they broke unresistingly. His calloused hand could not even feel them giving away.

Anderson squirmed back out of the narrow hole and into the cave proper. “Well, it won’t be any use to escape by. It’s solid up above. It goes down, though—farther than I can see. Look for yourself if you want.”

Orville wormed into the hole. He stayed there so long, Anderson became annoyed. When he reappeared he was almost grinning. “That’s where we’ll go, Mr. Anderson. Why, it’s perfect!”

“You’re crazy,” Anderson said matter-of-factly. “We’re bad enough off where we are.”

“But the point is—” (And this had been his original, unexpressed hope.) “—that it will be warm down there. Once you get fifty feet below the surface, it’s always a comfortable fifty degrees Fahrenheit. There’s no winter and no summer that deep in the ground. If you prefer it warmer than that just go down deeper. It warms up one degree for every sixty feet.”

“Ah, what are you talking about?” Neil jeered. “That sounds like a lot of hooey.” He didn’t like the way Orville—a stranger—was telling them what to do all the time. He had no right!

“It’s one thing I should know about, being a mining engineer. Isn’t that why I’m alive, after all?” He let that sink in, then continued calmly: “One of the biggest problems in working deep mines is keeping them at a bearable temperature. The least we can do is see how far down it does go. It must be fifty feet at least—that would be only a tenth of its height.”

“There’s no soil fifty feet down,” Anderson objected. “Nothing but rock. Nothing grows in rock.”

“Tell that to the Plant. I don’t know if it does go that deep, but again I say we should explore. We’ve a length of rope, and even if we didn’t, those vines would support any of us. I tested them.” He paused before he returned to the clinching argument: “If nothing else, it’s a place to hide if those things find their way to us.”

His last argument turned out as valid as it had been effective. Buddy had only just gone down by the rope to the first branching off of the secondary roots from the vertical primary root (Buddy had been chosen because he was the lightest of the men), when there was a grating sound at the entrance of the cave, as when children try to fill a glass bottle with sand. One of the spheres, having tracked them to the cave, was now trying to bulldoze its way through the narrow entrance.

“Shoot!” Neil yelled at his father. “Shoot it!” He started to grab for the Python in his father’s side holster.

“I don’t intend to waste good ammunition on armor plate. Now, get your hands off me and let’s start pushing people down that hole.”

Orville did not have to prompt any further. There was nothing left for them to do. Not a thing. They were the puppets of necessity now. He stood back from the melee and listened as the sphere tried to shove its way into the cave by main force. In some ways, he thought, those spheres were no smarter than a chicken trying to scratch its way through a wire fence that it could walk around. Why not just shoot? Perhaps the three spheres had to be grouped about their target before they could go zap. They were, almost surely, automatons. They directed their own destinies no more than did the animals they were programmed to track down. Orville had no sympathy for the dumb machines and none for their prey. He rather fancied himself at that moment as the puppeteer, until the real puppeteer, necessity, twitched a finger, and Orville went running after his fellow men.

The descent into the root was swift and efficient. The size of the hole insured that no more than one person passed through at a time, but fear insured that that person got through as fast as he could. The unseen (the lamp was below with Buddy) presence of the metal sphere grinding at the ceiling and walls of the cave was a strong motivation to speed.

Anderson made each person strip off his bulky outer clothing and push it through the hole ahead of him. At last only Anderson, Orville, Clay Kestner, Neil and Maryann were left. It was evident that for Clay and Neil (the largest men of the village) and for Maryann, now in her eighth month, the hole would have to be enlarged. Neil chopped at the pulpy wood with frantic haste and much wasted effort. Maryann was eased first through the expanded opening. When she reached her husband, who was astraddle the inverse v formed by the divergence of the branch root from the greater taproot, her hands were raw from having slipped down the rope too quickly. As soon as he laid hold of her, all her strength seemed to leave her body. She could not go on. Neil was the next to descend, then Clay Kestner. Together they carried Maryann on into the secondary root.

Anderson called out, “Watch out below!” and a steady rain of objects—foodstuffs, baskets, pots, clothing, the sled, whatever the people had brought with them from the fire—fell into the abyss, shattering the delicate traceries. Buddy tried to count the seconds between the time they were released and the moment they hit bottom, but after a certain point he could not distinguish between the sounds of the objects ricocheting off the walls of the root and their striking bottom, if any. Anderson descended the rope after the last of the provisions had been dropped down the root.

“How is Orville coming down?” Buddy asked. “Who’ll hold the rope for him?”

“I didn’t bother to ask. Where is everyone else?”

“Down there…” Buddy gestured vaguely into the blackness of the secondary root. The lamp was lighting the main shaft, where the descent was more dangerous. The secondary root diverged at a forty-five degree angle from its parent. The ceiling (for here there could be said to be floor and ceiling) rose to a height of seven feet. The entire surface of the root was a tangle of vines, so that the slope was easy to negotiate. The interior space had been webbed with the same fragile lace, though those who had preceded Anderson into the root had broken most of it away.

Orville clambered down on the vines, the end of the rope knotted about his waist in the manner of a mountain climber. An unnecessary precaution, as it proved: the vines—or whatever they were—held firm. They were almost rigid, in fact, from being so closely knit together.

“Well,” said Orville, in a voice grotesque with good cheer, “here’s everybody, safe and sound. Shall we go down to the basement, where the groceries are?”

At that moment he felt an almost godlike elation, for he had held Anderson’s life in his hands—literally, by a string—and it had been his to decide whether the old man should die just then or suffer yet a little longer. It had not been a difficult choice, but, ah, it had been his!