The Wanderer

“It got awful quiet. The road ahead was all blocked, dirt piled against the bumper. I don’t know if we could have climbed the fall, but we were going to try, because we didn’t know if the microbus got buried, or got away, or what. Just then an after-slide came. A boulder as big as a lion missed me by that. Another just exploded. Bill made me get back in the car, while he walked through the new falls, telling me how to cut the wheels as I backed it around rocks and over ridges and angles. In between, he was coughing and cursing that new planet.

“Someone was screaming curses too — at us. It was Ray. We’d forgot him. His leg was broken above the knee, but we got him in the back on a canvas. I stayed beside him. Bill could turn the car now, and we headed back.

“The little slides were bigger but we got around them. We wanted to meet cars now, but there still weren’t any. Bill stopped at a roadside phone, but it was dead, and the light in the booth died while he was trying to get a dial tone. The radio was nothing but static now. The only word that ever seemed to get through was fire! Ray and I kept yelling at Bill to go slower and faster.

“We passed the turnoff here, but after a quarter of a mile the road was blocked by another slide — not a soul in sight, not a light — except that godawful thing up there. We came back here. There wasn’t anywhere else.”

She breathed deeply. Doc asked: “What about the little roads back across the Santa Monica mountains? Specifically, what about Monica Mountainway?”

“Little roads?” Mrs. Hixon looked up at him wonderingly, then started to laugh and sob together. “You goddamn fool idiot, those mountains have been stirred like stew!” Her laughter went out of control. Doc clapped his hand over her mouth. She struggled wildly for a moment, then let her head slump. Wanda and the thin woman took over for Doc, walking her away down the platform. Rama Joan followed them, after asking Margo to take her place as a pillow for Ann, who was watchful as a mouse.

Paul said to Doc: “I wonder why there weren’t any other cars trapped in that stretch of the highway? Seems unnatural.”

“They probably got out past the first, smaller slides,” Doc opined. “The same slides would have turned back any cars trying to come into that stretch. And still, despite all she says, I think some may have escaped over Monica Mountainway.”

Hunter called up: “Come on down, the rest of you guys, and bring the cot. We’ve got to get Ray out of the truck, so some of us can go back in it to our cars.”

Trembling and breathless and a little teeter-gaited from their wild run past the mausoleum-like General Grant Houses, Arab and Pepe and High started east along 125th Street with an initial feeling of reassurance at having entered the hallway to their friendly, familiar Afro-Latin home.

But the sidewalks, packed two hours ago, were empty now. Only a scattering of crushed paper cups and bags, empty pop bottles, and half-pint flasks testified to the vanished multitude. No cars moved along the street, though here and there were empty ones parked higgledy-piggledy, two with their motors’ exhaust streaming blue from their tail pipes.

The weed-brothers had to squint against the sun when they scanned east, but as far as they could tell the same desertion prevailed all along the crosstown street that led through the heart of Harlem.

The only sounds, at first, besides their own footsteps and the motor chugging, were the sepulchral mouthings of unseen radios, sounding horribly important, by their tone; but the words were uncatchable by reason of static and distance — and drowned out by the excited, equally unintelligible calling to each other of distant sirens and horns.

“Where’s everybody?” High whispered.

“Atomic attack,” Pepe affirmed. “Russia’s sent the super-doops. Everybody crouchin’ down below in the basements. We gotta get to ours.” Then, a ghost of the wolf-wail returning to his voice: “Fireball risin’ from the river!”

“No!” Arab contradicted, softly. “While we at the river, Resurrection come and go. Old Preacher-dads right after all. Everybody snatched — no time to turn off their cars or their radios. We the only ones left”

They took hold of each other and tiptoed, to kill the sound of their footsteps as they went fearfully on.

Sally Harris and Jake Lesher tiptoed out of the tiny aluminum-lined box that had lifted them the last three stories. Before their eyes was dimness, with gleams highlighting a grand piano. Under their feet was thick carpet, sponge-based.

Sally yoohooed softly. With a whispered sigh the door behind them slid sideways, but Sally caught it and blocked it with a tiny table holding a silver tray.

“What are you trying to do?” Jake asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll hear the buzzer if anybody else wants in. Come on.”

“Wait a minute,” Jake said. “You’re sure Hasseltine’s not home?”

Sally shrugged. “I’ll have a look while you raid the icebox. Just leave the sterling alone. Come on, haven’t you a bagel-size hole in your gut?”