He drove slowly, though not from fear. When he wished, he stopped to look at something. At every halt he made it a game to discover what he could hear. Often, after he had turned off the engine, he heard nothing at all, even in a town. Sometimes there was the chirp of a bird or the faint humming of an insect; sometimes the wind made a little rustling. Once he heard with a sense of relief the muffled pounding of a far-off thunderstorm.
By that time it was afternoon, and he had come into a higher country of tall pines with a snow-capped peak looming up to the north. At Williams a shiny streamlined train stood in the stationyard, just as the engineer had left it; he saw no one. At Flagstaff, much of the town had been burned; he saw no one.
Just beyond Flagstaff he came around a bend of the road and some distance ahead saw two crows leave something in the road and flap heavily away. He feared a little to come up and see what they had been eating, but it was only a sheep. The body lay tight upon the concrete of the highway, a red smear of blood showing from the torn throat. When he looked around, he saw that there were other bodies of sheep lying close to the road, and on both sides he could see still more. He walked a little way off the road, and counted twenty-six.
Dogs or coyotes? He could not tell, but he could easily reconstruct the scene—the harried sheep driven across the meadow, those on the outside pulled down or separated from those who clung closely toward the center of the flock.
Soon afterwards, out of whim, he turned in at the little road which led toward Walnut Canyon National Monument. He came to the neatly built Superintendent's house which looked down into the deep canyon with its ruined houses of the Cliff Dwellers. There was an hour's daylight left, and he found a grim amusement in walking around the narrow path, looking at what was left of those houses of that old people. He came back, and slept the night in the house at the lip of the canyon. Already there had been a summer thunderstorm, and a little water had run under the door. Since no one had cleaned it up, it had lain in a pool there and damaged the floor. Other rains would come; year by year, their effect would increase until after a while the neat house at the lip of the canyon would fall into ruins, and be not much different from those old houses sheltering along the cliffs. Here the ruin of one civilization would pile up on the ruin of another.
For a while the flocks, too, will remain. Even though the killers kill merely in the rage of the blood-lust, nevertheless millions of sheep are not to be wiped out in a day, or in a month, and thousands of new-born lambs will be dropped. What are fifty or one hundred slain out of millions? Yet not without reason, as symbol of a perishing people, men have said "sheep without a shepherd." In the end they will vanish....
They wander helplessly in the blizzards of the winter, and in the summer they stray far from water and are too stupid to find their way back; they are caught in the spring floods, and the bodies wash down by the hundreds; they stampede stupidly over cliffs, and lie in corrupting masses in the depths of the ravines; and always there are more of the killers—the dogs run wild, the wolves and coyotes, the mountain-lions, the bears. After a while, the great flocks are broken into a few frightened scurrying fragments; in the end, there will be no more sheep.
Thousands of years ago they accepted the protection of the shepherd and lost their agility and sense of independence. Now, when the shepherd has gone, they too must go.
On the next day he was crossing the wide high plains of the continental divide. This was rich sheep country, and again he saw more bodies where coyotes had harried the flocks. Once, on a far-off hillside, he saw what seemed to be scattered sheep running wildly, but he could not be sure.
Again, however, he saw an even stranger sight; in the rich meadow along a stream, he saw a flock of sheep grazing peacefully. He looked around, half expecting to see the wagon and the sheepherder himself; but instead, he saw only two dogs. The shepherd was gone, but by long habit the dogs were continuing their task, keeping the sheep together, maintaining them in the good pasture along the water of the stream, doubtless fighting off the marauders that came sniffing in the night. He stopped the car and watched, keeping Princess beside him on the seat, so that she would not disturb the situation. The two sheep-dogs grew excited when they noticed the car; they barked excitedly, and rounded up a few stragglers. They kept their distance, a quarter-mile away, and seemed hostile. Just as in the cities the electric power was still pulsating through the wires after man had passed, so here upon the far stretches of the grass lands, the dogs watched the sheep for a little while. But, he thought, it could not be for long.
The road led on across the wide spaces; U.S. 66 read the signs beside the pavement. It had been a great highway, he remembered, in the old days, the road of the Okies to California; there had been a popular song about it; now, it lay empty. No bus roared by with Los Angeles imprinted on its front; no truck came from east or west, no jalopy piled high with the household goods of some migrating fruitpicker, no sleek car of tourists going to the Indian dances, not even a Navaho wagon with a bony horse pulling it by the side of the pavement.
He dropped into the valley of the Rio Grande, crossed the bridge, and went up the long street of Albuquerque. This was the largest town he had seen since leaving California; he honked his horn as he went, and waited for a response. He heard nothing, and he did not wait long.
He slept that night at a tourist-court on the eastern edge of Albuquerque, from which he could look back down the long slope toward the town. It was all in darkness; here the power had failed already.
In the morning he went on through the mountains, and came out on the other side into a country of scattered buttes with broad plains between. A frenzy of speed came upon him again, and he drove the car at its limit on the straight roads. The buttes fell away behind; he crossed the state line, and was in Texas, in the flat country of the Panhandle. The day was suddenly blazing hot, and around him lay endless stubble fields from which the wheat had already been cut before the death fell upon the harvesters. That night he slept on the outskirts of Oklahoma City.
In the morning he skirted the city by a by-pass, and went on. He followed 66 toward Chicago, but after a few miles a tree across the road blocked him. He got out to consider the situation. There had obviously been one of those sudden wind storms which sweep the plains country. A tall poplar standing before a farm house had tipped and gone over, hiding the whole highway in a clutter of leaves and branches. It would be a labor of a half a day to chop any kind of passage through the tangle. Then suddenly he realized that here was a significant scene in that great drama which he had set himself to watch. Highway 66, that famous road! Here it was, blocked by the chance falling of a tree! A man might cut his way through this obstruction, but there were, or would soon be, others. In the thunderstorms, mud would wash across the road and earth slide from the cuts; a bridge would go in the surnmer freshet; in a few years, to take a car from Chicago to Los Angeles on Highway 66 would be a task for a pioneer in a covered wagon.
He thought of detouring through the fields, but the sod was soft and mucky from recent rains. Consulting his road-map, he saw that he could go south ten miles and strike another paved road, which would bring him back to the highway. He turned the station-wagon around, and started back.
But when he reached the other road, he saw no real reason why he should return to 66. The secondary highway led on directly toward the east, and so far as he could tell, that direction was just as good as another. "Perhaps," he thought, "that fallen tree has changed the whole future course of human history. I might have gone on toward Chicago, and something might have happened there. Now something different will happen."
So he went eastward through Oklahoma, the country empty everywhere. On the rolling hills the scrubby oak-growth looked just as it must have looked before. On the level cultivated stretches, corn and cotton were growing. The corn stood high, head above the weeds; it would bear a fairly good crop. But the cotton was rapidly being choked out.
The full heat of surnmer was upon him now, and was breaking down more of his remnants of civilization. He still shaved daily, more because he felt comfortable that way than for any sense of his appearance, but he had not had his hair cut, and it hung shaggily about him. He hacked at it with a pair of scissors. He had reverted merely to a pair of blue jeans and an open-necked shirt. He threw the shirt away every morning, and put on a clean one. Somewhere he had forgotten his gray fedora, and from an Oklahoma general store he picked up a cheap straw hat, the kind that any tenant farmer might wear in the summer.
That afternoon he crossed into Arkansas, and though he knew that state lines were only imaginary, he suddenly became conscious of another change. Here all the dryness of the plains country was left far behind, and the weather was hot and humid. As a result the growth was everywhere pushing in upon the roads and buildings. Runners from vines and climbing roses already dangled across windows and hung swinging from eaves and porch roofs. The smaller houses looked as if they were shrinking back shyly and beginning to hide in the woods. Fences also were being obscured. There was no longer a sharp line between the road and the surrounding country. Grass and weeds were showing green at every little crack in the concrete; blackberry shoots were pushing in from the shoulders, breaking the clean white line. In one place the long runners of some vine reached clear to the white line in the middle of the pavement, and met others advancing from the other side.
Peaches were ripe, and he varied his diet of canned food by raiding an orchard. His entry scared off a few hogs which had been eating the fallen fruit. That night he slept at North Little Rock.
The prize boars will die in their well-kept pens, and the fat brood sows will wander about, squealing for their mash, but on many a farm, the shoats will run wild without restraint of fences. They need nothing from man. In the heat they seek the swamps by the river, and root there, and lie in the mud, grunting happily. When the air grows cool, they wander the oak woods and feed on the acorns. After a few generations, they grow slimmer of leg and thinner of body and longer of tusk. Before the fury of their boars, even the wolf and the bear hurry aside. Like man, they eat flesh or fowl or tuber or nut or fruit. They will live.
An hour on the road next morning, at the edge of a small town, he started, as his eyes fell upon the unaccustomed sight of a well-weeded and tended garden. He stopped, went to investigate, and found for the first time what might, by generous interpretation, be called a social group. They were Negroes—a man, a middle-aged woman, a young boy. By the obvious look of the woman, there would soon be a fourth member.
They were timid. The boy kept in the background, curious but frightened, scratching at his head in a way that suggested lice. The woman stood, stolidly silent except to direct question. The man took off his straw hat and stood fingering its broken rim nervously; beads of sweat, from nervousness or the heat of the morning sun, ran down his shiny black forehead.
Ish could hardly understand the thick dialect, rendered more unintelligible by embarrassment. He made out, however, that they knew of no one else in the neighborhood, and in fact knew very little of anything, not having been beyond walking distance from the spot since the disaster. They were not a family group, but merely a chance association of survivors—three, against the law of chance, having survived in one small town.
Ish soon realized they were suffering not only from the shock of the catastrophe but also from the taboos carried over from before it. They talked with diffidence in the presence of a strange white man, dropping their eyes.
In spite of their obvious reluctance, Ish looked around their place. Although all the houses of the town must have been open to them, they still lived in the crude cabin where the woman had lived before the disaster. Ish did not go in, but through the open door he saw the rickety bed and chairs and the sheet-iron stove, and the oil-cloth-draped table with the flies buzzing about the uncovered food. The outside looked better. They had a luxuriant garden and a good corn-patch, and were actually tending a small field of cotton, although what in the world they expected to do with the cotton was more than Ish could figure out. Apparently they had merely carried on, doing the things that people in their world were supposed to do, and thus gaining a sense of security.
They had chickens in a pen, and some pigs. Their painfully naive embarrassment when Ish saw the pigs was only too plain advertisement that they had appropriated them from some farmer's pen and now felt that the white man would hold them accountable.
Ish asked for some fresh eggs, and for a dozen gave them one of his dollar bills. They seemed to be delighted with the exchange. After a quarter of an hour, having exhausted all the possibilities of the situation, Ish got into the car, much to the relief of the reluctant hosts.
He sat in the front seat for a moment, thinking to himself, "Here," he reflected, "I might be a king in a little way, if I remained. They would not like it, but from long habit they would, I think, accept the situation—they would raise vegetables and chickens and pigs for me, and I could soon have a cow or two. They would do all the work that I needed to have done. I could be a king, at least, in a little way."
But the idea was only fleeting, and as he drove on, he began to think that the Negroes had really solved the situation better than he. He was living as a scavenger upon what was left of civilization; they, at least, were still living creatively, close to the land and in a stable situation, still raising most of what they needed.
Of half a million species of insects only a few dozen were appreciably affected by the demise of man, and the only ones actually threatened with extinction were the three species of the human louse. So ancient, if not honorable, was this association that it had even been used as an argument for the single origin of man, anthropologists noting that all isolated tribes scratched and picked at the same parasites and therefore inferring that the original ape-men must have carried the original insect-ancestors outward with them from their point of dispersal.
Since that first departure, throughout hundreds of millennia, the lice had adjusted their life nicely to their world, which was the body of man. They existed as three tribes, taking as their domains, respectively, the head, the clothing, and the private parts. Thus, in spite of racial differences, they amicably maintained a tripartite balance of power, setting for their host an example which he might well have followed. At the same time, becoming so exactly adapted to man, they lost the capacity of existing upon any other host.
The overthrow of man was therefore their overthrow. Feeling their world growing cold, they crawled off in search of some new warm world to inhabit, found none, and died. Billions perished most miserably.
At the funeral of Homo sapiens there will be few mourners. Canis familiaris as an individual will perhaps send up a few howls, but as a species, remembering all the kicks and curses, he will soon be comforted and run off to join his wild fellows. Homo sapiens, however, may take comfort from the thought that at his funeral there will be three wholly sincere mourners.
He came to the long bridge across the great brown rolling river, and a truck was stalled, blocking the narrow single lane which led across to Memphis.
Feeling like a bad boy, who is doing something forbidden and will be punished for it, he went against all the traffic signs, took the narrow single lane on the lefthand side of the railroad tracks, and headed across toward Tennessee on the road which should lead to Arkansas.
But he met no one, and before long he came to the Tennessee side, and drove out (still in the wrong direction) through the bridge approach. Memphis was as empty as other cities had been, but a south wind was blowing, and it brought a fetid reek from what had been the teeming districts around Beale Street. If this was any indication of what Southern cities would be like, Ish wanted no more of them. He headed fast toward the country again.
Before he had gone far, however, the south wind brought steady rain. Since driving became dull and wearisome, and since he was certainly in no hurry to get anywhere, he holed up in a tourist-court at the edge of a small town, the name of which he did not even bother to ascertain. The gas pressure was still working at the stove in the kitchenette, and he made the fresh eggs his chief dish for dinner. They were a real treat, and yet he ended by being in some way still unsatisfied. "I wonder," he thought, "if I'm getting all the things I should to eat." Perhaps he should raid a drug store for some vitamin tablets. Later, he let Princess out for a run, and she suddenly vanished into the rain with a long yapping which ended in a bay as she struck on the trail of some animal. He was disgusted, since he knew that he might have to wait up an hour for her pleasure to return. She was back sooner, however, smelling woefully of a skunk. He shut her in the garage, and she complained bitterly with her yapping, at the disgraceful way she was being treated.
Ish went to bed, still with the unsatisfied feeling. "Must be suffering from shock more than I realize consciously," he thought. "Or else the loneliness is getting me, or maybe good old sex is raising its ugly head."
Shock could do strange things, he knew. He remembered hearing the story of a man who had seen his wife killed before his eyes in an accident and who had felt no desire for months.
He thought of the Negroes whom he had seen that day. The woman—middle-aged, far gone in pregnancy, no beauty at any time—could scarcely have thus disturbed him. When he thought of the incident, his memories turned chiefly to the way in which they had found a kind of security by keeping close to the soil. Then Princess bayed from the garage, and he cursed her, and went to sleep.
In the morning he still felt unsatisfied and restless. The storm was not yet over, but at the moment no rain was falling. He decided not to leave, but to take a walk down the road. Before going he looked into the station-wagon, and saw the rifle lying on the middle seat. He had hardly touched it since leaving California; now, without any definite thought, he took it, tucked it under his arm, and walked down the road.
Princess followed him a few yards, then discovered a new trail, and in spite of the last night's experience was off upon it, vanishing over the hill in a series of delighted yelps and bays. "Better luck this time!" he called after her.
Ish himself walked along with no more definite idea than to stretch his legs a little or perhaps find a tree with ripe fruit. He was scarcely thinking of anything when he saw a cow and a calf in a field. There was nothing remarkable in that; he could see a cow and a calf in nearly any field in Tennessee. The remarkable fact was that now the loaded rifle was under his arm, and suddenly he knew what must somewhere have been in his mind.
Carefully resting the rifle on a fence-post he saw the sights come clearly into line with the redness of the calf's shoulder. The range was butcher's distance. He squeezed the trigger, and the rifle spoke and kicked back against him. As the sound died, he heard the calf give a long choking wheeze; it stood with legs braced but shaky, a thin stream of blood bursting from the nostrils. Then it collapsed and fell.
The cow had run a few yards after the shot, and now she stood and turned uncertainly. Ish did not know what she might do in the defense of her calf. Taking good aim again, he put a bullet just behind her shoulder. He fired twice more, for mercy, as she toppled.
He had to walk back to the cabin for the hunting-knife. When he returned, he carried the reloaded rifle. He felt his own reaction as curious. Before this time he had never thought much about weapons, but now it was as if he had declared war upon creation and should look for retaliation upon himself. Yet, when he came to where the cow and the calf were lying, and climbed over the fence, he met no resistance or opposition. The calf, to his dismay, was still breathing. Not liking the job, he cut its throat. He had never been a hunter, and had never butchered an animal; so he made a bad haggling job of it. Getting himself well bloodied in the process, he managed to hack out the liver, when he had got it, he realized that he had no way to carry it, except in his hand. He had to lay the bloody mass back among the entrails of the calf, and go back again to the cabin to get a pan. When he returned to the calf, a crow was already at work upon the eyes.
When he finally had the liver safely at the cabin, he was so covered with blood and dirt that he had lost all desire to eat it. He washed as well as he could at the cabin, and waited around listlessly, since the rain had again begun to fall. Princess returned, and demanded entrance. Since she had, by this time, lost most of the skunk's smell, he admitted her. She was wet and scratched with briers, dirty and foot-sore. She lay on the floor putting herself into shape with her tongue; he himself lay on the bed as if spent by emotion, yet in some way satisfied at last. Outside, the rain fell steadily, and after an hour, for the first time since it all happened, Ish realized that he had a new sensation—he was merely bored.
He looked around at the cabin, and found a six-months-old magazine; he settled down to read a story which dealt with the old boy-meets-girl theme, taking its particular slant from the problems which arose to hinder true love as the result of a housing shortage. It was all as far away, Ish concluded, from his present situation, as if it had been a story about building the Pyramids. In the course of the morning, he read three stories, but he found the advertisements much more fascinating. Not one in ten of them seemed to have any relation to his present situation, because they were not aimed at man, the individual, so much as at man, the member of a group—for instance, you should avoid bad breath, not because it might be a symptom of approaching toothache or digestive discomfort, but because if you had bad breath the girls would not like to dance with you or your boy-friend would not propose.
Yet the magazine had the good effect, at least, of taking him out from himself again. By noon, he was hungry, and when he looked at the liver now lying peacefully in a pan, he found that the memory of the bloody and dying calf had passed out of his mind. He fried a fine succulent piece of it for his lunch, and enjoyed it greatly. A bit of fresh meat, he concluded, was what he had been wanting. He gave a piece to Princess, also.
As he sat quietly after lunch, he had a new feeling of satisfaction and release. To shoot a calf was certainly no feat of sportsmanship, and it was not getting very close toward the production of one's own food. Yet it was a little closer to reality than the opening of a can. He seemed to have moved one step away from a mere scavenging existence, and to be getting a little closer to the state in which the three Negroes were living. To put it that an act of destruction had been an act of creation might seem a paradox, but he felt of it as something of that sort.
A fence was a fact, and a fence was also a symbol. Between the herds and the crops, the fence stood as a fact, but between the rye and the oats, it was only a symbol, for the rye and the oats did not mingle of themselves. Because of fences the land was cut into chunks and blocks. The pasture changed to the plowed land sharply at the fence, and on the other side of the plowed land, at the line of the fence, went the highway, and beyond the highway was the orchard, and then another fence with the lawns and the house beyond it, and again at a fence, the barnyard. Once the fences are broken both in fact and in symbol, then there are no more blocks and chunks of land and sharp changes, but all is hazy and wavy, and fades from one into the other, as it was in the beginning.
After that, he lost track of the time still more. He did not travel far in any day because there was much rain, and the roads were not as smooth and straight as they had been in the West. Moreover he had lost his sense of hurry. He worked northeastward through the hills of Kentucky, then struck the Ohio River bottomland, and went on into Pennsylvania.
He foraged more for himself. He gathered green corn from the weed-grown corn-patches. There were ripe berries and fruit. Now and then in a garden he found a head or two of lettuce which had not been ruined by worms. Frequently, he pulled up carrots, and ate them raw, since he was very fond of raw carrots. He shot a young pig. He used the shotgun to bag two partridges. Again, with Princess shut in the car and protesting loudly, he spent a happy two hours slowly stalking a flock of turkeys which always scurried off just before he was within range. At last, however, he managed to get close enough to knock over a gobbler. Some weeks ago it must have been a tame turkey, but now it had gone wild, and from constant necessity of dodging foxes and wild cats had become almost as wary as if it had lived all its life in the woods.
Between rains the weather was warm, and when he felt like it, he stripped and swam in some likely looking stream. Since the water from faucets began to seem stale, he drank from springs and wells although by now, he judged, even the larger rivers should be free of sewage and factory refuse.
He became used to the look of the towns, and could generally tell whether they were entirely empty or whether by searching he might somewhere find a survivor or two. The liquor-stores were often looted. The other buildings usually undisturbed, although occasionally there had been tampering with the banks—people apparently still putting trust in money. In the streets there would be an occasional pig or dog, less often, a cat.
Even in this once more thickly inhabited part of the country he saw comparatively few bodies, and there was less stench of death than he had feared. Most of the farms and many of the smaller towns apparently had been left deserted when their last inhabitants withdrew to larger centers for medical care or else fled into the hills, hoping to escape infection. On the outskirts of every larger town he saw the piled-up dirt where the bulldozers had worked even in the last days. At the end, necessarily, many bodies must have been left unburied, but these were usually in the areas around hospitals which had been concentration-points. At the warning of his nose he avoided such spots or drove rapidly past them.
The surviving people, he found, were generally singles, occasionally couples. They were anchored firmly in their own places. Sometimes they seemed to wish that he would stay there with them, but they never wished to accompany him. He still did not find any of them with whom he wished to share the future. If necessary, he thought, he could return.
The country in some ways showed more change than the towns, although one would hardly have imagined so to begin with. But in the country the crops were growing up rankly with weeds. In this part, the wheat had not been cut at the time of the disaster, and now it was heavy in the head and the grains in some places had started to fall. The cattle and horses wandered about, and fences were obviously starting to go. Here and there a field of corn would remain undisturbed when the fence was tight, but more often the animals had forced an entrance.
Then, one morning, he crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey, and realized that he could reach New York by early afternoon.