Alas, Babylon

“Perhaps you’re right. Not that it matters to us. I’ve heard them up there on still nights, but they never come low enough to see. The Admiral hears them talk on the radio but they never have a word for us. Maybe they’ve forgotten us. Maybe they’ve forgotten all the contaminated zones. We’re unclean. It makes me feel lonely and, well, unwanted. Isn’t that silly? Does it make you feel like that?”

“They’ll come back,” he said. “They have to. We’re still a part of the United States, aren’t we?”

They came to the path that led though their grove from house to dock. “Let’s go out on the dock,” Lib said. “I like it out there. No sound, not even the crickets. Just the river whispering around the pilings.”

“All right.”

They turned left instead of right. As their feet touched the planking the ship’s bell spoke. It clanged three times rapidly, then twice more. It kept on ringing. “Oh, damn it to hell!” Randy grabbed her hand and they started the run for the house, an uphill quarter mile in sand and darkness. After a hundred yards she released his hand and fell behind.

By the time he reached the back steps Randy couldn’t climb them. He was wobbling and his knees had jellied, but before The Day he could not have run the distance at all. He paused, sobbing, and waited for Lib. The Model-A wasn’t in the driveway or the garage. He concluded that Dan hadn’t returned and something frightful had happened to Helen, Peyton, or Bill McGovern.

He was wrong. It had happened to Dan. Dan was in the dining room, a ruined hulk of man overflowing the captain’s chair, arms hanging loose, legs outstretched, shirt blood-soaked, beard blood-matted. Where his right eye should have been, bulged a blue-black lump large as half an apple. His nose was twisted and enlarged, his left eye only a slit in swollen, discolored flesh. He’s wrecked the car, Randy thought. He went through the windshield and his face took along the steering wheel.

Helen laid a wet dish towel over Dan’s eyes. Peyton, face white and pinched, stood behind her mother with another towel. It dripped. Except for Dan’s choked breathing, the dripping was for a moment the only sound in the room.

Dan spoke. The words came out slowly and thickly, each an effort of will. “Was that you, Randy, who came in?”

“It’s me, Dan. Don’t try to talk yet.” Shock, Randy thought, and probably concussion. He turned to Helen. “We should get him into bed. We have to get him upstairs.”

“I don’t know if he can make it,” Helen said. “We could hardly get him this far.” Helen’s dress and Bill McGovern’s arms were blood stained.

“Bill, with your help I can get him up all right.”

So, with all his weight on their shoulders, they got Dan upstairs and stretched out on the sleigh bed. Bill said, “I’m going to be sick.” He left them. Helen brought clean, wet towels. Dan’s body shook and quivered. His skin grew clammy. He was having a chill. Randy lifted his thick wrist and after a time located the pulse. It was faint, uneven, and rapid. This was shock, all right, and dangerous. Randy said, “Whiskey!”

Helen said, “I’ll handle this, Randy. No whiskey. Blankets.” He respected Helen’s judgment. In an emergency such as this, Helen functioned. This was what she was made for. He found extra blankets in the closet. She covered Dan and disappeared. She returned with a glass of fluid, held it to Dan’s lips, and said, “Drink this. Drink all you can.”

“What are you giving him?” Randy asked.

“Water with salt and soda. Much better than whiskey for shock.”

Dan drank, gagged, and drank more. “Keep pouring this into him,” Helen ordered. “I’m going to see what’s in the medicine cabinet.”

“Almost nothing,” Randy said. “Where’s his bag? Everything’s in there.”

“They took it; and the car.” “Who took it?”

`The highwaymen.”

He should have guessed that it hadn’t been an accident. Dan was a careful driver and rarely were two cars on the same road. Traffic was no longer a problem. In his concern for Dan, he did not immediately think of what this loss meant to all of them.

Helen found peroxide and bandages. This, with aspirin, was almost all that remained of their reserve medical supply. She worked on Dan’s face swiftly and efficiently as a professional nurse.

Randy felt nauseated, not at the sight of Dan’s injuries-he had seen worse-but in disgust at the beasts who in callous cruelty had dragged down and maimed and destroyed the human dignity of this selfless man. Yet it was nothing new. It had been like this at some point in every civilization and on every continent. There were human jackals for every human disaster. He flexed his fingers, wanting a throat in them. He walked into the other room.

Lib’s head lay across her arms on the bar. She was crying. When she raised her face it was oddly twisted as when a child’s face loses form in panic or unexpected pain. She said, “What are you going to do about it, Randy?”

His rage was a hard cold ball in his stomach now. When he spoke it was in a monotone, the voice of someone else. “I’m going to execute them.”