The Long Loud Silence

12

THE LONG sparse sliver of land jutted out into the blue-green waters of the Gulf, tiny swells running up to foam on the baking sandy beach. That alone had not changed. The Florida sun was hot and uncomfortable in midsummer.

Gary pawed through the charred remains of the old fisherman's cabin, seeking some slight clue to the fate of its occupants, something to indicate how long ago they had departed — and in what manner. He wanted desperately to know how long ago the familiar shack had burned to the ground.

He walked along the glaring white shoreline and stared out to sea, remembering how he and Oliver had fished there, how Sally had watched a sail which was quite invisible to them beating across the Gulf. Their old mail truck was gone, vanished completely with no remaining sign of how it had left. The ruins of the cabin still held the cooking stove, a mass of wrecked and useless metal now that was rapidly rusting away; that and some miscellaneous scrap which had not survived the fire in any recognizable form. A part of the wooden causeway to the mainland had been broken up and carried away, or burned on the spot. Other parts of it sagged with rotten, collapsing timbers. The wind, the rain and the water had destroyed all traces of human passage other than his own fresh footprints.

Oliver was gone, Sally gone — the baby gone. Where?

He kicked angrily at the charred wood and realized that the initial advantage of wintering here was no longer an advantage — it had now become a definite, deadly liability. Too many of the survivors were moving down from the North to escape the punishing winters, too many of them had discovered the warm sands and the seas filled with food. He knew that those who still survived this year were the deadliest, the hard core of a savage, steadily dwindling life east of the Mississippi. He stopped his pacing to count and frown. This year was… what?

The fifth year? Five years since the bombs fell? In which of those years, then, had strangers found the tiny cabin, sacked it, burned it?

His bare foot came down on an artificial something which dug into his skin and he bent over to examine it, pry it from the sands which half buried it. The wooden link chain he had carved and given to Sally… for Christmas, one of those years ago.

Abruptly, Gary quit the island, conscious of his exposed position.