Time Storm

10

I had rigged a backpack-style tent for the girl and myself from some of the canvas in the boatdock before we left the deserted lakeshore house. I set this up at the edge of the trees, upwind of the dogs. Sunday had already begun ignoring the dog pack; and Marie rode herd on them through the afternoon, commanding them to be quiet any time they started to get worked up about Sunday or the rest of us. Once the camp was made, I left the girl with Sunday and went to the house alone.

Marie took me around and introduced me individually to each of the dogs. I spoke to each and petted each one briefly while Marie stood sternly over them to make sure that they behaved. Occasionally I got a brief tail movement by the way of acknowledgment but most of them merely rolled their eyes up at me and only endured both my touch and my voice. I guessed that I smelled too much-of cat for any of them to be really comfortable; and I mentioned this to Marie. But she shrugged it off.

“They’ll get used to you,” she said. The tone of her voice indicated that they had better.

She left me then, to get dinner ready. I spent a little time trying to make friends with her daughter. But Wendy was a quiet, shy child who—like the dogs—evidently found me too strange and potentially frightening to warm up to, on short acquaintance. She was obviously relieved when I left her at last and went back to camp.

Sunday was there, tied to the trunk of a large tree with a length of our heaviest rope, ending in a loop around his neck. He was lying down and, to my surprise, did not seem to mind being restricted this way. Since he was not objecting and it was convenient to have him anchored so, I left him the way he was. The girl must have tied him up so that she could wander off by herself, because she was nowhere to be seen.

She had not returned by the time Marie stuck her head out her door to call us to dinner. I waited a little while, but she still had not come back when Marie called a second time; and I decided not to worry about her. There was no counting on her, anyway. Sunday was still not objecting to being tied up—which was ideal from my point of view. He had dozed off kittenishly lying on his back with his paws in the air, as if there was no dog within a thousand miles. I got up and left; and all he did was open his eyes sleepily to look after me.

The good smell of cooking reached me before I opened the door and surrounded me as soon as I came in. Marie had produced a ham—it had to have been a canned one—heated and glazed it, and filled out the meal with what must have been home-grown tomatoes, potatoes and a salad made with some greens I didn’t identify, but which, with a cheese dressing, tasted magnificent.

“She didn’t come with you?” Marie asked, as she sat down at the table with Wendy and me.

“She’s gone off somewhere. Sunday’s tied up,” I said.

She nodded, evidently reassured. She did not know that Sunday was capable of chewing through any rope that tied him in no seconds flat, if the notion occurred to him. But he was not likely to wander off; and he had sense enough not to start trouble with the dogs, but to pick his way among them, if he got the urge to free himself and join me in the house.

It was a marvelous dinner. Marie had gotten rid of the slacks and shirt. She was wearing a soft, yellow dress that went well with the color of her blond hair, which—while still short—was smoothed out somehow and looked less as if it had undergone home barbering. She had used a touch of lipstick too, and possibly a hint of other makeup. The total result was enough to bring back the past in a way that the scotch and sodas I had made in the lake-front home never had.

I had been regretting all afternoon that I had not had the sense to bring at least one bottle from the liquor stock of the lakeshore home. But as it turned out, Marie had her own supply. She had not produced any wine with the meal; but afterwards she came up with a bottle of rum, after everything was over and Wendy had gone off to bed. It was not great rum, but it went well with the coffee.

We sat on the couch in her living room and talked, about our situations—and a lot else. Under the influence of the rum, I remember telling her more about myself than I had intended to ever tell anyone. But in the warmth and privacy of the living room, I was lulled into a sense of security. I knew very well that Marie was only out after her own advantage. I knew what was going on with both of us; but I did not give a damn. In fact, I remember thinking that I deserved something like this, after wet-nursing an insane leopard and a wild girl all these weeks. Somewhere along there with the rum and the coffee, I put my arm around Marie; and only a little later we turned the lights out.

I don’t know how late it was. It was certainly sometime after midnight when I left the house. Marie followed me naked to the door in the darkness to put her head out and hiss the dogs into silence when they roused on seeing me. I gave her a last kiss and went across the dark ground under a young moon to the camp.

Sunday was curled up under the tree to which he had been tied; and there was a lump on the ground beside him that was the girl, come back. The groundsheet out of our tent was a black pool under them on the semi-moonlighted ground; and some of our blankets were spread over both of them.

I shrugged, drunkenly. If the girl wanted to lie out there and get soaked through with the morning dew, that was up to her. I crawled into the tent and wrapped myself as well as I could in the remaining blankets. I was either not quite asleep and hallucinating, or else I was already asleep and dreamed the whole thing; but it seemed to me that just before I dropped into a deep well of unconsciousness, Sunday raised his head and looked me right in the eye, speaking to me.

“You stink!” he said distinctly, in the girl’s voice.—And that was the last I remember.

When I woke, someone was standing over me. But it was neither Sunday nor the girl. It was Marie; and she handed me a cup of hot coffee.

“Sorry to wake you,” she said. “But I can use your help if we’re going to get off today.”

“Get off today?” I echoed stupidly. She stood there, looking down at me for a long second.

“That’s what we talked about last night, wasn’t it?” she said. “Do you remember?”

I started to say I didn’t. But then it came back to me. She was right, of course. That was, indeed, one of the things we had talked about last night. We had made plans to leave today—all of us, together.

“Yes,” I said. I lay looking at her, part of me hating myself and filled with self-contempt at letting myself be bought so easily; and part of me remembering last night and looking forward to tonight. “I’ll be along in a bit.”

“Good,” she said.

She went off. I got up and dressed. The girl and Sunday were not to be seen. During the period on the lizard raft, with no way to do anything about it, my beard had grown to a respectable length. But I had always liked the feel of being clean-shaven, and as soon as we found the lakeshore home, I had been happy to discover a razor and go back to being naked-faced once more. Normally, I liked shaving. It was part of the familiar ritual of coming awake in the morning—and I did not come awake in the morning easily. But this morning the habitual scraping actions did not clean off a layer of guilt left on me by the night before. In a sense, I had sold Sunday and the girl down the river for the selfish satisfaction of my own desires.

Sunday, of course, did not know what was going on. But he was not going to have the old freedom he was accustomed to, living with the dog-pack alongside him, whether he knew it or not. Also, he was going to have to share me with a couple of extra humans— and that was not going to make him happy, either. He had adjusted to the girl; but the girl loved him—Marie and Wendy did not, and there was no guarantee that they ever would. As for the girl, she had already made it plain how she felt about the situation.

I washed the last of the soap off my face and began to pump myself up with counter-arguments. We had been bound eventually to bump into other people with whom we would want and need to associate. Sunday had been destined to have to learn to share me with other people, finally. The girl, likewise. The three of us could not go on forever being exclusively insane together, as we had been until I faced the freshwater sea and the fact that Swannee was gone for good.

It was not going to be easy adapting, for me either, I told myself. But I was going to have to do it. So were the girl and Sunday. That was life—you could not always have what you wanted.

By the time I went over to get some breakfast from Marie and help her prepare to move out, I had the top layer of my mind—if nothing beyond that—thoroughly convinced that I was not only doing the best thing for all concerned, but being considerably self-sacrificing to boot.

It took us most of the day to get ready. Marie had two carts fitted with bicycle wheels, which she had trained certain of her dogs to pull. The carts themselves were obviously homemade, but remarkably well put together. Marie, apparently, had a definite mechanical talent. They were light and rolled easily. But they had one real drawback—no springs except the bicycle parts that supported the wheels. They would be all right on road surfaces, but I could not see them lasting more than a few days loaded and going cross-country, as we were going to be doing sooner or later. However, since we had nothing in the way of materials and tools around to provide them with springs, I decided not to say anything. There was no point in borrowing trouble.

We started out shortly after noon. The girl—she had showed up in time for breakfast, after all—Sunday, and I made up the advance guard, about fifty yards ahead of the rest. Behind us came Marie, walking, and the two carts, with Wendy riding one and the other loaded with food, water and gear for all of us, plus the .22, which I had given to Marie. Three dogs pulled each cart; and all the rest moved in a tight and disciplined patrol around the carts and Marie.

The others travelled at a fair walking speed for cross-country; but they did not make as good time as Sunday, the girl and I would have by ourselves, because they stopped more often for one reason or another—and often, the reason was Wendy. The original three of us, up in front of them all, however, could pretty well ignore the problems of these others. It was almost like being off on our own again. Sunday, of course, did not mind the slower pace at all. It gave him that much more time to explore things. He and the dogs, I noticed, had already solved the problem of coexistence in typical animal fashion—by ignoring each other. Once, when Sunday lagged behind, one of the forward dogs trotted past him at a distance of less than ten feet, and neither one so much as glanced at the other.

Several times I took advantage of being alone with the girl to try getting her to talk some more. But she was not in the mood, evidently. Nor would she look at me.

“All right,” I told her, at last. “You work it out by yourself, then.”

I stepped out ahead, putting her from my mind and concentrating on scouting for our whole group. A few hours after we had left Marie’s place, I ran across something like a logging road, or a farmer’s tractor path among the trees, and followed it up until I could see through a thinning screen of forest to what was obviously a small town, down in a small cup-shaped valley area surrounded by open fields. It was about three hundred yards from the edge of the forest to the nearest buildings.

I turned about and headed back to contact Marie. Just in case there was anyone in that town, I did not want us to come strolling in followed by a leopard and a pack of dogs. Some nervous citizen was liable to take a shot—at Sunday, in particular. The rest were a fair distance behind me. Evidently, I had gained on them more than I had thought. At any rate, we got together once more and together came up to the edge of the woods to take a look at the town through some binoculars Marie had brought.

Through the binoculars, the town seemed deserted. There was no sign of movement, human or animal. I handed the binoculars to Marie, who was beside me.

“Take a look,” I said.

She did.

“That’s Gregory, I take it?” I said, when she put the binoculars down.

“Yes,” she said. But she was frowning. After a short pause she added, but slowly and still frowning, “It’s got to be.”

“Got to be?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean it is Gregory—I recognize it,” she said. “But I don’t know... there’s something different about it.”

“Nobody in sight,” I suggested.

“That, too,” she said. “But something else. It looks changed, somehow. Only I can’t say how.”

I took the binoculars back from her and studied the buildings I could see. Aside from their stillness in the late afternoon sun, there was nothing that struck me immediately as unusual about the town. Then I noticed a house with the blinds down on all of its windows.

I looked at the other houses. Those nearby did not have their blinds drawn. If all had, of course, it could simply have meant that a time change had come through the area at night and caught the inhabitants after they had settled to sleep. But the houses close to the one with the blinds drawn had theirs up—then, moving the glasses about, I found first one, and then four more houses where all the shades seemed to be down.

It could mean nothing, of course.

“Do they know you in Gregory?” I asked Marie.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “We did all our shopping here.”

I turned to the girl.

“Hang on to Sunday. Keep him with you,” I said. “Marie, you and I can take a walk in with a couple of the dogs—just a couple— and see if there’s anyone there.”

I left my rifle behind, and made Marie leave hers. We stepped out into the sunlight and walked toward the buildings. It was all so ordinary that I felt a little ridiculous; and then, when we were about fifty feet out in the open, a figure came shambling around the corner of the house with the blinds down and faced us.

I did not get a good look at it. It was very big, either an unusually large man or woman all bundled up in loose furs, or something else. Even its face was furry, or hidden by a beard. But it came around the corner of the building and lifted one arm. There was a wink of light from the end of the arm; and the dog furthest in front of us—leading the rest of us by perhaps fifteen feet —leaped into the air with a howl that broke off abruptly as it fell back on its side in the grass, to lie there still.

I dove to the ground, pulling Marie down with me; and something sizzled over our heads as we lay there. A second later, there were sounds like rifle shots from the town and the singing of bullets over our heads.

“Back!” I said to Marie. “Crawl! Back to the woods!”

We turned and went on our bellies. The shots continued, and once or twice I heard the sizzle overhead again; but nothing touched us. It seemed a long, long crawl. We were almost back when we came across the second dog we had taken with us, a lean German shepherd-type that had been named Buster, lying dead. In his case, it was a bullet from behind that had gone in at the back of his head and taken off half of his lower jaw when it came out. Flies were already buzzing around the corpse.

We crawled on, Marie and I, until the shadows of the trees were about us. Even then, we continued on hands and knees a little further before we risked standing up. Then we turned and went back to join the girl and Wendy for a look at the town.

But there was nothing to see. The fur-covered figure was no longer in sight; and the shooting had stopped.

“What was it?” said Marie. She was shaking and her voice was tight.

“I don’t know,” I said. I turned to the girl. “Did you get a look at it through the binoculars?”

The girl nodded.

“Was it a man or a woman?”

The girl shook her head.

“Why won’t you talk?” Marie suddenly screamed at her.

“Easy,” I said to Marie. “Easy.” I spoke to the girl again. “Not a man or a woman either? You mean you couldn’t tell?”

The girl nodded.

“You could tell?”

She nodded again.

“You could tell if it wasn’t a man or a woman?” I said. “What was it then?”

“I don’t know,” said the girl, unexpectedly. “A thing.”

She turned and walked off. I went after her, but she would not even stand still to be questioned, let alone answer, after that. Defeated, I went back to Marie.

“Maybe something out of the future that wandered through its own mistwall into Gregory, here,” I said to her. “Anyway, whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to want to come after us—just seems to want us to leave it alone. I think we’d better go around this town. What’s the next one up the line called? And how far is it?”

“Elton,” said Marie. “And it’s about five miles.”

“That’s where we’ll head, then,” I told her.

We stayed within the cover of the woods and made a circuit of Gregory. By the time we were around the town, the afternoon was fairly well advanced; but we pushed on, hoping to reach Elton. We never did, though. After nearly three more hours of travelling without a sight of a road or a town, we came to bluffs overlooking a river. A big river; easily a quarter of a mile across.

There was obviously no going farther that day. We set up camp on the bluff, and in the morning I went down to the river’s edge to take a look at the situation.

The water was fresh and cold. The edge where I stood was overgrown with willows and seemed to drop off deeply; but a little farther downstream the river made a bend, and there was a sandy beach and shallow water. I explored that far, accompanied by Sunday and the girl. The current of the water seemed to slow, going around the curve, and there was plenty of driftwood on the beach to make into a raft. I went back to Marie on the bluff. She was making coffee and she gave me a cup.

“So you want to cross the river,” she said; after I had told her what it was like, there.

I shrugged.

“We don’t have to,” I answered. “We can go upriver, or downriver, and we may even run into a bridge, somewhere, crossing it. But summer isn’t going to last forever; and the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that we ought to keep heading due east. It’s our best chance to find some large civilized group that’s survived the time storms.”

So it was settled—more or less. I did some planning, out loud, with Marie and the girl listening. The dogs could swim, of course. So could Sunday and we adults—or, rather, we two adults and the one near-adult, who was the girl. Wendy, the equipment and the supplies could be rafted over. Reducing the raft load to Wendy and our possessions meant we would need only a relatively small raft. Luckily we had a hammer and even some nails along, although, actually, I had decided to save the nails and chain the logs of the raft together with the dog chains, for maximum safety.

As I mentioned earlier, I had been looking forward to the evening—and Marie. However, it developed that Wendy was either coming down sick with something, or upset by the travel; Marie gave me to understand that, as far as that night went, she would be tied up with family matters. So as not to waste time, I took advantage of the long twilight to go down on the beach and make a start gathering the logs for the raft, then chopping them to length with Marie’s axe.

Sunday and the girl went down there with me; and as things turned out, I built a fire and went on working by that, even after the sunset left us; so that we ended up making a separate camp down there. Just before I turned in for the night, something occurred to me.

“You know,” I said to the girl, looking across the fire to where she sat with Sunday, “we left that raft of the lizards in one hell of a hurry, that night. I remember pulling you through the water; but I don’t really remember how well you can swim—or even if you can really swim. Can you? Do you think you can make it across the river?”

I expected a nod or a shake of the head at the most. But to my surprise, she answered in words.

“I’m not going.”

I stared at her.

“What do you mean-you’re not going?” I exploded. “Do you think you can stay here on this side of the river, alone? Get that thought out of your mind. You’re going.”

She shook her head, looking not at me, but at the fire.

I sat, staring at her, too angry for words. Then I took hold of my anger with both hands, figuratively speaking, and tried to talk calmly.

“Look,” I said, as reasonably as I knew how. “We’ve been together for some time, you and I and Sunday. But nothing lasts forever. You must have known that sooner or later we were going to be meeting other people and joining them, or they’d be joining us....

I went on talking, calmly and persuasively, using all the arguments I had used to myself the day before, and doing, I thought, a good job of it. It was only common sense I was telling her; and I pointed this out to the girl. Aside from her youth and sex, any single person stood a much reduced chance of survival. What would she do with herself? Practical matters aside, Sunday would miss her. For that matter I would miss her, myself....

I was talking away quite earnestly, and even beginning to think that I was getting through to her, when she got up suddenly and walked away out of the circle of firelight, leaving me in mid-sentence.

I stared after her into the darkness. Something cold came in out of the night and sat down on my chest. For the first time, it occurred to me that she could actually be meaning to do what she had just said she would.