Time Storm

3

It came from somewhere up ahead, beyond the point where the straight white concrete highway vanished into the unmoving haze of the mistwall—a small buzzing sound. Like the sound of a fly in an enclosed box on a hot July day such as this one was.

“Get down,” said the man with the rocket launcher.

I pulled my head below the top line of the makeshift barricade-furniture, rolls of carpeting, cans of paint—that barred the empty street between the gritty sidewalks and the unbroken store windows in the red brick sides of the Main Street building. Driving in from the northwest, I had thought at first that this small town was still living. Then, when I got closer, I guessed it was one of those places, untouched but abandoned, such as I had run into further north. And so it was, in fact; except for the man, his homemade barricade, and the rocket launcher.

The buzzing grew louder. I looked behind me, back down Main Street. I could just make out the brown, left front fender of the panel truck showing at the mouth of the alley into which I had backed it. There was no sound or movement from inside it. The two of them in there would be obeying my orders, lying still on the blankets in the van section, the leopard probably purring a little in its rough, throaty way and cleaning the fur of a forepaw with its tongue, while the girl held to the animal for comfort and companionship, in spite of the heat.

When I looked back through a chink in the barricade, there was something already visible in the road. It had evidently just appeared out of the haze, for it was coming very fast. Its sound was the buzzing sound I had heard earlier, now growing rapidly louder as the object raced toward us, seeming to swell in size, like a balloon being inflated against the white backdrop of the haze, as it came.

It came so fast that there was only, time to get a glimpse of it. It was yellow and black in color, like a wasp; a small gadget with an amazing resemblance to a late-model compact car, but half the size of such a car, charging at us down the ruler-straight section of highway like some outsize wind-up toy.

I jerked up my rifle; but at the same time the rocket launcher went off beside me with a flat clap of sound. The rocket was slow enough so that we could see it like a black speck, curving through the air to meet the gadget coming at us. They met and there was an explosion. The gadget hopped up off the road shedding parts which flew toward us, whacking into the far side of the barricade like shrapnel. For a full minute after it quit moving, there was no sound to be heard. Then the whistling of birds and the trilling of crickets took up again.

I looked over at the rocket launcher.

“Good,” I said to the man. “Where did you get that launcher, anyway?”

“Somebody must have stolen it from a National Guard outfit,” he said. “Or brought it back from overseas. I found it with a bunch of knives and guns and other things, in a storeroom behind the town police office.”

He was as tall as I was, a tight-shouldered, narrow-bodied man with a deep tan on his forearms, and on his quiet, bony face. Maybe a little older than I; possibly in his late thirties. I studied him, trying to estimate how hard it would be to kill him if I had to. I could see him watching, doubtless with the same thought in mind.

It was the way things were, now. There was no shortage of food or drink, or anything material you could want. But neither was there any law, anymore—at least, none I’d been able to find in the last three weeks.