Choices
BY GLEN VASEY
[1]
Provisional Center for Disease Control
Puerto Nuevo, Florida
Interoffice Memorandum #57-608
From: Kenneth J. Howell, Acting Director
To: Malcolm Foley, Director of Research
Malcolm,
This just came into my hands today. Rather than take the time to edit it, and risk omitting something you might find useful, I had Marcie type it just as I received it. I added only one note, near the end where the writing changes hands. I still have the original. It is in a travel-worn spiral notebook, the kind you used to be able to pick up new at any five-and-dime. If you think it could help in any way, send word and I'll see it gets to you. It is, by all appearances, authentic.
The primary point of interest is the final dozen pages or so.
I have included a map of the general location where it was picked up. You may want to have your people investigate, if that is possible. Maybe even bring some of these people in for examinations or something. If I can be of any assistance, just holler.
I don't know if this will be a help to you, or simply another distraction. I know how understaffed and overworked you are, but I figured that a shot in the dark is better than holding your fire at times like these. My shot in the dark is sending this your way, relatively risk free. Yours will be deciding what, if anything, to do with it now. Not so easy a choice, either way.
I don't suppose it helps much for me to say that I don't envy your position, but I'll say it anyway. This is probably the second time in history that it has been less harrowing to be a bureaucrat than a scientist. The first was during the Spanish Inquisition.
Oh, for the good old days!
Keep the faith,
Ken
For a moment Ken Howell almost smiles at the brief witticism with which he has concluded the memo. Then he nearly weeps.
Earlier in the day he had found his secretary weeping. He had tried to comfort her. Had offered her a few lame words of solace. In so doing he had discovered one of life's weary truths: there are no words of solace that do not point out and accentuate the very cause of our need for solace.
She had continued crying, so he'd left her office for his own. He did not want her tears to weaken him. There was no percentage in that.
I AM NOT CRYING
He is in a position of responsibility. One that requires him to display strength and unclouded judgment. He cannot let the others come to doubt him. He cannot allow himself the luxury of doubt.
I AM NOT CRYING
No. He will not weep. Not now. Not even here, alone.
I AM NOT CRYING ALONE
A disembodied voice echoing through the corridors of his brain. Nostalgic. Memorial. Elegiac. Foreign and forever unknowable.
I AM NOT ALONE!!
He hears Marcie moving restlessly in the adjoining office. He knows that she is ready to leave.
Soon he will go to her.
Soon they will leave the building together and walk across the compound to their living quarters, as they always do.
Just as soon as he can find the strength to cease his weeping.
[2]
The silence of the June dusk was underscored, rather than interrupted, by the fluttering thrash of the spiral notebook as it flew through the air toward the highway. Branches rustled softly as they parted for it. Pages fanned and rippled in the breeze of its passage. There was a muffled thump as it landed at the base of some thorny-looking scrub brush, not twenty feet from the deserted road.
That was all. Brief. Temporal. Quickly past. Then silence reigned again, all the more tyrannically for having been thus emphasized.
Dawson drew his legs up so that his chin was resting upon his knees. He wrapped his arms around his shins and pulled inward. Pulled harder still.
I AM NOT CRYING
Pulled until his thighs pressed into his chest so vigorously that every muscle in his body bloomed with pain.
I AM NOT CRYING
Pulled harder still. Back, ribs, neck, jaw, arms, legs, buttocks. Every muscle clenched willfully.
I AM NOT CRYING ALONE
His will: to become a well of pain. Physical pain. Ephemeral pain. Consciousness-distorting pain. Pain he could control. He had only to relax and it would abate.
I AM NOT ALONE!!
Unlike the pain of his ineptitude. The pain of loss, despair, loneliness and fear. Unlike the pain of words.
Earlier his head had been filled with words. Somehow he had thought that they were dying to get out. Somehow he had believed that he might be able to use them to escape his other pains, to make some sense out of his utterly senseless situation. But when he had tried to use them, the words had fled. Only the primal scream had remained, and that had been but little help. Having vented that scream in a scrawl that had covered one single page, he had thrown the book away into the dusk.
He had risked his life for that book.
Had risked his life, and feared he yet might lose it, on the chance that words might help him stay alive.
To escape such thoughts he pulled harder on his legs, then relaxed himself completely and luxuriated in the brief pleasure that washed through his body. Then he sighed and gently pulled his shirt away from his left shoulder to examine the deep red scratch there.
He thought about infections. About the virus, germ, bacteria, fungus - whatever the hell it was - that had changed the world so drastically.
Shivering and sweating simultaneously, he found himself hoping that they were both symptoms of fear rather than fever. Even psychosis would be preferred.
Had that been a sound, or the thought of a sound? He sat frozen with immediate alertness, words and chills and sweats forgotten. Listening.
I WILL SURVIVE!
Not wanting them to find him. Not wanting to die.
I WILL TO SURVIVE!
Not wanting to die like that.
It wasn't precisely a will to live, but it was something.
Though I don't know why.
And it was all that he had left.
The night's darkness had become complete before Dawson was able to convince himself to move again. Whether the sound had been real, or made of mind, he knew then that it presented no immediate threat. It had not been repeated. It was not advancing on him.
He knew, too, that though he was far too weary to continue traveling, he could not permit himself the luxury of sleep. To sleep would be to invite them to approach as closely and incautiously as they wished.
He rose and scrambled down the wooded slope toward the highway. On his knees he thrust his hands into the thorny brambles and groped until he found his prize. When he withdrew the notebook, his hands were bleeding from a dozen minor cuts. He didn't notice them. His eyes were blurred with fresh tears.
Again he heard a sound. This time he was certain of it. Worst of all he could even place the direction from which it had come. It had come from up the slope. From somewhere near the spot that he had left his backpack leaning up against a tree.
He cursed himself for seven kinds of fool and peered through the darkness, searching for movement. He saw nothing.
He waited, listening again. Again he heard nothing further. He wondered if this new silence were a ploy, an attempt to catch him off his guard. An attempt to lure him back to the tree. Back to the backpack that he could not leave without.
He told himself that the dead were not so canny, then immediately reminded himself that there were others.
He waited what seemed a very long time, clutching the notebook to his chest, before he finally made his way, slowly and cautiously, back up the slope. He was standing beside his backpack, just beginning to breathe again, when his heart was stopped by the sound of an owl in a nearby tree.
Then there was silence.
Darkness had made his previous words invisible to him. He was grateful for that kindness. He knew them by heart and had neither the need nor the desire to be reminded of them.
I AM NOT CRYING
He didn't need light. He knew that he could write by feel. If only words would come to him. Something other than the primal scream. Something to retain his interest and attention. Something to keep him awake.
He set the notebook and pen aside and got his first-aid kit out of his backpack. He wet a piece of cotton with some alcohol, then pulled his shirt away to clean the scratch on his shoulder. He rubbed hard, causing a warm, raw, stinging sensation to spring up. The scratch did not seem to be infected.
"Does not seemto be," he murmured.
"Not yet."
He rubbed harder, moving his lips in silent prayer, uncertain to whom the prayer was addressed. His mind drifted back then. Re-envisioned the scene. The origin of this particular concern.
* * *
The early afternoon had been hot and humid. Brilliant. Satanically sunny. His head had throbbed, pounded, screeched, and screamed with a headache whose magnitude he would have deemed neither possible nor survivable even a day earlier. He was staggering along the shoulder of a highway weakened by hunger, thirst, weariness and pain. He was wishing that his backpack really was as heavy as it felt, that it held more than it did of both food and water.
On the back of his pack hung a cardboard sign, with letters ten inches high. The sign proclaimed no destination, but rather a state of being.
ALIVE, was all it said. He hoped that it would give passing motorists pause. Particularly those with guns. It had seemed a good idea when he had first conceived it two weeks before, but on this golden afternoon he was no longer certain of the sign's veracity. His headache was distorting everything: sight, sound, thought and feeling.
"Do they know that they are dead?" he had wondered.
"How do they know?"
He stumbled and shambled gracelessly along the shoulder of the road thinking, "I have seen enough to know that this is how they move. Is this how they feel? How they perceive things?"
His eyes were rigid, his face contorted in an agonized squint. He was blinded by sunlight and by pain. Dizzy and weak, all of his senses were drowned by the excruciating immediacy violating his temples, his scalp, his retinas and the base of his skull.
A sign loomed before him. He stopped walking and tried to focus on it. Tried to attempt to divine its meaning.
It bore a name. The name of a town, he was certain, though he could not place it.
He felt, vaguely, that this should mean something to him and sat down abruptly upon the gravel of the shoulder, determined to wait out enlightenment. He knew immediately that he should have left the road. Should have accepted the modest concealment that the weeds and wildflowers would have offered him. But he could not bring himself to rise.
"A town," he thought, "probably small, but a town nonetheless.
"There will be a concentration of them. That's it! That's the meaning. A concentration of them. I have to skirt the town. Don't draw too close. Don't let them sense me."
But he had continued to feel that some part of the sign's message was still lost to him, that there was something yet he should be thinking about. So he remained seated, continued swimming in place through his pain.
Suddenly a car sped by, racing toward the town. At first it had merely startled him, but a moment later the incident disturbed him far more profoundly. The car had approached from behind him. Despite its considerable noise he had been wholly unaware of it until it had been virtually on top of him. His headache had completely obliterated his senses.
"That's the message," he staggered to his feet.
"Need something to stop it, bring me back. Can't skirt the town, gotta go in."
He knew that the townies would sense him. Would converge on him as soon as they did. Would devour him and turn him into one of them, if they got the chance. But walking the highway half-blind, half-deaf and three-quarters senseless was not a viable option.
Once in town a sense of exultation began to filter through the mass of pain he had become. Finally engaged in a definite activity with an immediately foreseeable conclusion, adrenalin had kicked into his blood, juicing him high. When he had marked the first of his slow and clumsy pursuers, it was a thrill of confidence in competition that raced through him, rather than a sense of deadly fear.
"I knowI am not one of them," he had shouted, "They do not feel like this!"
Though his pain had not diminished, his mind and senses had grown more acute, his limbs incredibly agile. He found it easy to outsmart and outdistance the townies.
When he spotted the drug store's smashed plate-glass door, he darted through it without breaking stride. Inside, he moved rapidly up one aisle and down the next, his head pivoting, his eyes searching. His hand was reaching for the box of analgesics within the same second that his eyes had found them. In the space of another second he had turned to retrace his steps and make his exit.
Then he heard the sound of something shuffling through the broken glass at the front of the store.
"Don't panic," he told himself quickly.
"Get that thing away from the door first."
He moved to the center aisle to gain an unobstructed view of the entrance.
The thing he saw shambling toward him had once been a slender, elderly man. Now its face was a bloated blue-green mask, as soft and swollen as the face of a drowning victim. Even at a distance its stench was stultifying to Dawson's adrenalin-enhanced sense of smell. It wore a fishing vest, dark green trousers, and hiking boots, all of which were caked with dried gore. As was its mouth, its cheeks, chin and neck.
Dawson thought that he could beat the ghoul to the door by simply moving swiftly to one of the vacant aisles and making a run for it. But he wanted to be certain, and he knew that his chances would improve if he held his own ground just a little longer, letting the thing draw nearer to him.
He looked around quickly for something to use as a weapon. Instead his eye was caught by a stack of brightly colored spiral notebooks. On an impulse wholly un-governed by thought he stooped and picked one up.
When he stood again, he saw that the broken door framed yet another of the ghouls, this one a portly woman in a once-white waitress uniform.
Now his panic rose. How many would there be? Enough to trap him in the store? Enough to track him in the aisles?
He permitted the first to draw closer than he had originally intended, to insure that the second, too, would pursue him down the center aisle.
When he thought that she was far enough from the door, he made his move. He spun to his right, took two strides, hooked a quick left, and went racing down the far aisle.
In spite of his haste his eyes managed to register, and his brain to comprehend, the existence of a display of writing instruments hanging on the wall to his right. It shouldn't have made any difference to him, but before he could stop it, his right hand was reaching out, making a quick stab at a package of pens.
The package caught on its metal hanger and would not come free. So he committed the most foolish act of his life. He skidded to a halt and made a second lunge for the pens. They remained just out of reach.
"Idiot!" he screamed. But he took one more step back and freed them from the rack.
His mind was a chaos of imprecations and death visions, but when he made it to the end of the aisle, he saw nothing in the doorway and bolted through it.
The hand that clamped down on his shoulder and arrested his movement was the vise of death itself.
The face that the hand belonged to had, not long since, been that of a teenager. Now it was blistered by acne turned to rot. It was the face of leprosy, far advanced. The neck of the thing was half eaten away. Maggots writhed in that hellish wound.
Dawson screamed and drove his feet against the ground with bruising force. His shirt tore, and he felt a burning streak of pain trace a line across his shoulder.
He had freed himself, in spite of his idiocy.
[3]
I am well concealed. The night is quiet. I am safe for the moment.
Safe?
For the moment. They are incapable of stealth. I think.
The others, the random violent gangs of those yet living, seem to refuse stealth. They are always making noise. Perhaps it is obsessional. An attempt to scare off death. To scare off their awareness of what has happened to this world. A way of converting everything into one big perpetual Saturday-night bar brawl.
Am I any different? Trying to write as if the world knew, or cared, that I was still going on? As if it might ever be read by anyone? Am I really trying to confront this, sort it out? Or am I merely trying to avoid the issue in my own way? Making my own kind of noise? My own banging of pots and pans against the eclipse?
Does it really matter?
He sighed then and leaned his head back against the rough bark of the tree. He closed his eyes and heaved a deep, shuddering breath.
He had forced his hand to write, his mind to concentrate upon the act, to avoid remembering the afternoon and, in some way, to justify the awful risks he had taken. But the writing was a failure. Instead of stifling thought it had brought the questions back to haunt him again. The same questions that had run through his mind repeatedly and incessantly over the course of the past two weeks.
Where am I now?
How far have I to go?
How long have I to live?
What are my chances?
What are my options?
Will the living ever have the world again?
Does it really matter?
Any of it?
Questions that were so familiar that their presence had very little power to irritate him any further. He had long since lost faith in the existence of answers, and that had rendered the questions impotent. They were not enough, even, to keep him awake.
He came awake abruptly, feeling hands upon his arms and legs. Hands upon his shoulders and his chest. Hands pulling him in all directions at once.
He screamed and hands came up to cover his mouth, stifling the sound. He bit these hands and was shocked as the pain raced up his arm and spine to electrify his brain.
The hands on his mouth were his own. They were real. The others had been phantoms. Creatures invented by his own stress and incaution.
He shuddered as he sat up. His eyes darted rapidly about, trying to pierce the surrounding darkness.
There were no further sounds.
He was alone.
I AM NOT ALONE!!
Blessedly alone.
I have a goal.
In the past keeping a journal had helped Dawson to sort things out. Had helped him to get through trying times with some portion of his sanity intact. Had provided him with a constructive escape from the immediacy of his various dilemmas. Had helped him to cope. Now those times were long ago and a world away. Coping had become a new thing. He was no longer balancing an awkward relationship, a career decision, financial concerns or the unexpected death of a close friend. Now writing was a way to avoid sleep. Avoiding sleep was a way to avoid death. A way to avoid the hands that would, the next time certainly, find him vulnerable.
The line that he had just scrawled at the top of the new page had seemed a good beginning, but he had no idea what should follow it.
Finally he decided to trace it back. To try to go back to the moments at which he had made his decision, had chosen his goal. Back to the time when the idea of the goal seemed one of hope, rather than desperation.
Time was, when I - and I was not alone in this - took for granted that the cataclysm, the great world crash course in catastrophe and death, would be nuclear annihilation. That it would be unannounced and just sudden enough to eliminate any possible thought of escape. That there would, really, be no time in which to make choices. Or, perhaps, that two choices would remain for those lucky souls who had survived the initial blast:
1) Grab your ass and run, until you can run no further.
2) Hunker down on that selfsame ass and pretend at bravery, pretend at some last vestige of defiance by making it clear that they no longer had the power to make you run.
Of course neither choice would make much difference. At best it is the choice of the Christian facing the lion: flee, only to be chased, caught, and eaten; or refuse to flee, robbing the spectators only of the chase. A question more of stance and personality than of principle or wisdom. The bloody outcome the same, in either case.
Not a good situation, surely, but at least that much would have been clear from the start. There would be no room for self-delusion. There is something reassuring about a situation in which all choices are equal, even if they are all equally bad. One is absolved of any personal responsibility.
Then God, in his infinite mercy and wisdom, pulls the big switch on us. Throws us a curveball - no, a knuckler - when we were all geared up for the heat, and no doubt busts a gut laughing as we tie ourselves in knots trying to hit it.
Oh, yes! He left us lucky survivors with a veritable plethora of choices. And, lo! they do not all lead unto death! No, not by a long road. In fact, the great majority of them lead to something considerably worse - though only after a long and painful march, of course. I assume that it's all very purgative.
So his sacred prerogative of free will remains intact, as ever, propelled by fear and buoyed by false hope.
Dawson paused to wipe sweat from his forehead, but his mind never left the stream of his composition. He was wholly unaware that he had achieved the level of escape and absorption that he had once dared to hope for. He was writing with the intense concentration that he had known in his midteens, when he had wanted to be the new Thoreau. With the lack of self-consciousness he had achieved somewhat later, when he was keen on being the second coming of Kerouac. With the lack of constraint he knew only in his late twenties and early thirties, when he had long since given up any thoughts of literary fame and kept a journal simply for the therapy and joy that it provided.
Escape, immersion, involvement achieved, he became very much awake.
For the hope that he has offered us is not "the thing with feathers" that Emily Dickinson once knew.
No!
His hope is the thing with teeth. It is the hope of survival. The hope that one might prolong one's personal experience of horror and deprivation. The foolish but stubborn hope that somehow, after day upon day of terror and pain, he might smile down upon whoever remains and lift his awful curse.
We are all drowning. A drowning man cannot easily discern the difference between a timber and a straw. A desperate man cannot distinguish between a hope that is never likely to pan out, and one thatcannotunder any circumstances.
Yet these are the choices we must make.
These are the hopes he has left us.
I have a goal.
Straw or timber?
A desperate man grasps at what he can.
Dawson paused, breathing deeply. He cast his head back to look up through the tangle of branches and noticed that the sky was beginning to dismiss its darkness.
He listened. There were no disturbing sounds. Only birds, making virtually the same noises that birds have made through all the ages of mankind.
[4]
A godsend.
I hope.
Godsend or self-activated trap, it hardly matters. I cannot survive forever without sleep. Real sleep. I will stay the night. I have chosen the likely death of staying in one place and submitting to unconsciousness, over the certain death of attempting to continue on through my exhaustion.
I am hoping that I am not too grossly underestimating their abilities to sense and to seek. Never before have I felt so claustrophobic. Never before have I had so excellent a reason to.
The small, boxlike house was neither wide nor long, though it stood two stories. It had given Dawson the impression of a retreat, a hunting or fishing camp where an urbanite might escape his lot for a couple of weeks and a half-dozen weekends each year. It was almost out of sight from the road, and Dawson felt that if he hadn't been moving slowly, and on foot, he would have missed it altogether. He found that thought to be a friendly one.
It hadn't been the thought of sanctuary that had given him the necessary courage to investigate, it had been the hope of finding food. Any food to supplement his godweary and diminishing rations of dried fruit and nuts.
Once he had assured himself that the place was truly deserted, he lost no time in reaching his decision. He quickly set about constructing makeshift barricades for the door and windows on the first floor. He knew that the simple restraints that he was building would not keep them out for long, if indeed they should discover him, but he hoped that they would prove substantial enough to give the ghouls some difficulty. If they were enough to delay the beasts, and to increase the amount of noise that any entry would create, they would have served the purpose they were built for.
Only later did he search for food.
The pantry turned out to be a pleasanter surprise than he'd have dared to hope: canned ham, tuna, stew and a variety of canned vegetables, all in great quantity. There were two full five-gallon plastic water bottles and, prize of prizes, an unopened bottle of whiskey and one of rum. These final items presented him with a dilemma that he knew he'd have to work out later, but he could not deny the pleasure that their presence had inspired in him.
He filled his arms and made his way upstairs, to the larger of the two small bedrooms.
I know that drinking in this situation is foolish. I must remain alert. But to take advantage of the positive aspects of my circumstance, it is imperative that I sleep. To sleep I must curb my anxieties, my sense of being trapped. No other method seems to be forthcoming, so I will drink. Only in moderation, of course. Just enough to help me sleep.
Later, in a sloppier hand, he wrote:
I cannot stop wondering how long I have. How keen, how far-reaching are their senses? How near are they now? Will I waken in the middle of the night to find them hammering on the door? Worse? Will I waken with their godawful hands and teeth
STOP!
I know I may be drinking my death in this godforsaken trap
ENOUGH!
Does it matter? Does any of it matter? Why pretend? Ultimately there is no escape, just stays of execution. I die tonight, tomorrow, some other day or night.
I die.
That is what it all boils down to. Why pretend otherwise? The world is theirs now. We are all doomed. No escapes remain, only choices.
I have chosen to die drunk in this bed, trapped inside this house. If I wake tomorrow, I may choose another way to die.
These are the only choices that remain to me. This is how I am permitted to utilize God's sacred prerogative.
[5]
Long rays of late-morning sunshine suffused everything in the room into a single golden haze. Dawson closed his eyes against the gentle glow and stretched.
"Bear of a hangover," he muttered.
He glanced over toward the nightstand to check the time.
No nightstand.
No time.
It all came back very suddenly.
They have not found me.
Yet.
But I do not feel capable of traveling now. The drink was a stupid mistake. Letting it get so out of hand. Like on a fucking holiday.
Perhaps that's what I needed, though. Release. Oblivion. If the delay it has caused doesn't kill me, I think I will consider the episode less harshly.
I will try to spend another night here. I prefer to travel by daylight and have already missed much of today's. I will not drink tonight.
I am hoping that their absence now indicates that they are all too far away to sense me. Straw or timber?
I will spend the time I have here writing. It is the only safe peace upon which I can draw.
Three weeks earlier Dawson had been fooling around in the kitchen of his suburban bachelor flat, drinking beer and putting the finishing touches on a mammoth pizza, preparatory to sliding it in the oven. Mike, who had been his closest friend for better than fifteen years, was in the kitchen with him, keeping him company and offering expert advice on pepperoni placement. Scott, a new acquaintance more Mike's friend than Dawson's, was in the living room watching the Dodgers and Mets play the Saturday afternoon Game of the Week.
That evening the three of them intended to catch the local heroes in person. "A real game," both Mike and Dawson had chided Scott, "an American League game."
It had been a beautiful day. Their moods were excellent.
"Mike, Daws - get in here! Quick!!"
Scott's voice accosted them with such ridiculous urgency that Dawson had rolled his eyes while Mike scrinched up his face and answered, in a lilting falsetto, "Coming, dear."
"Hurry dammit!"
Dawson picked up the pizza.
"Go ahead Mike, no need for both of us to miss the earth-shattering replay. I'll be right in, you can tell me all about it."
As Mike left the room, Dawson carried the pizza over to the oven and wondered how Scott could get so worked up over nothing. Not only were the two teams in the wrong league, but they were the easiest two teams in that wrong league to root against.
"Well, what can you expect of a Los Angelino?" he muttered, and left the kitchen to join his friends.
The strange looks on their faces told him that something was drastically wrong. The voice from the tv set was not the bubbly effulgence of an inane sportscaster filling dead air. Instead it was the deadly serious, but somehow comically urgent, drone of a tv newsman. A bulletin of some sort.
"Either the missiles are in the air, or the president has another migraine," he thought.
Then he began to listen in earnest.
"You changed the channel, this is part of a movie, right?"
"No."
"A spoof then, like the War of the Worlds broadcast... 'We interrupt this meaningless mundane broadcast to bring you...'"
"No, man. This is serious."
"What sort of judge are you? You thought the Mets and Dodgers were serious."
"Shut the fuck up!"
They listened.
They watched.
The talking head in the box apprised them of the most incredible things. Then it was gone, and they watched some grown men playing with a ball on a green field.
Then the head came back, speaking even more urgently. This time he had film clips to show them too. Eventually the network stopped trying to go back to the game.
That's when Dawson knew that things were really out of hand.
The three of them sat in Dawson's living room for an unknowable period of time, mesmerized by phosphor dots, incomprehension and fear. They were subjected to a veritable parade of talking heads: reporters, so-called experts, and the seemingly inescapable man on the street.
The advice of the experts was, at best, difficult to fathom:
- Stay where you are. Secure it. It is unsafe to venture out.
- Seek a federally sanctioned shelter. Emergency personnel will be on hand to aid you. Stay tuned for a complete listing of government-run emergency shelters in your area.
- Stay clear of all federal and state-run shelters. Communications to many are down. Many have been overrun.
- Call this HOTLINE for expert advice and up-to-the-minute details of the situation in your area.
So they watched the horror unfold, increase in complexity, and develop new facets and twists of terror, in the proverbial comfort of Dawson's own home. It was being vigorously covered on television, thereby abridging any need for them to be anything other than spectators. The tv gave the experience a distinct air of unreality.
Dawson had the strange feeling that he had seen it all before in bits and pieces. The language of the television was the same as it had always been. Even the experts with their dry faces, excitable voices, and competing "facts" seemed only like so many salesmen delivering their eternal pitches:
"Act now..." '
"Don't delay..."
"Operators are standing by..."
"Over fifty locations to serve you..."
So the three of them continued staring, as each had done for uncountable hours in the course of their lives, at the strange blue phosphorescent glow of the tube.
It didn't occur to them to do anything else.
It didn't occur to them that there was anything else to do.
Eventually Mike roused himself sufficiently to go to the phone and dial the HOTLINE.
He listened to the phone ring.
Twenty times.
Then fifty.
Seventy-five.
Then he returned to the sofa, to sit and listen to the experts a little longer.
The next decisive action that any of them took was when the screen went blank. It was Scott who rose then and fiddled with the set until he found a station that was still broadcasting.
Mesmerized.
Phosphor dots and fear.
Maybe it was simply the fact that someone was knocking on the door. Surely that was a startling enough development itself. Not that the knocking frightened us, we were too far gone for that. Our fear had become abstract, incapable of approaching us in such a fashion. That, in fact, was our real problem at the time.
Besides, in the world we were used to - and had refused, to that point, to divorce ourselves of - knocks on the door were, at worst, annoyances, never threats. So even though we had all been informed that the world outside my apartment had changed drastically, I think we shared an instinctive rationale that death would never be polite enough to knock.
Perhaps it was the effect of seeing real people, made of actual flesh and actual blood, after so many hours of serious, soulless electronic faces.
But I think it was something more than either, or both, of these things.
As soon as he opened the door, Dawson recognized the people on his doorstep, not as individuals, but as a class. He recognized their paraphernalia - their books and magazines and tracts - but most of all their hand was tipped by the patented, vacuous, God's-gracious-grins they wore.
For a moment Dawson was seized by a wave of vertigo. Everything seemed suddenly normal again.
It was a natural. One moment he had been sitting with friends watching God-knew-what on the tube, and in the next he was opening the front door to the local chapter of God's militia. Both were basically reliable components of his mundane Suburban-American existence.
He opened the door wide and smiled broadly at the four of them. Their spokesperson, an attractive black woman in her early thirties, launched her well-rehearsed spiel. Her voice was dripping with rapt sincerity and eagerly earnest goodwill.
Dawson began to laugh. It was a reed-thin laugh, pitched far too shrilly.
The woman stopped speaking.
Two of her companions moved back a step.
Dawson's laughter diminished, and the woman launched her spiel a second time.
"You have come to ask me," he interrupted, "if I have made my peace with God. Is that it?"
He glared at them maniacally.
One of them gave an uncertain nod.
"Then let me assure you," he went on in a voice made half of whisper and half of shout, "that He and I have never quarreled."
He beamed into their uncomprehending faces.
"In fact," he added, "I never even met the man!"
He slammed the door on them and turned to face his companions. He started laughing again, that same hysterical, high-pitched squeal.
"Can you believe it?" he shouted, "Jehovah's Witlesses, out on a day like this!"
He continued laughing until he collapsed, weeping, to the floor. A shuddering mass of confusion and nothing more.
It was several minutes before Mike moved to help him to his feet. Then Mike guided him back to his chair in front of the television.
What I think it was, was the realization that there were still people in the world. People making choices. People choosing to continue to live, not merely to survive, as we were doing almost in absentia. It seems to me now that that is the difference between living and surviving: the making of choices.
Scott and Mike and I hadn't made a conscious decision since the news had first interrupted our routine. Though, by mere luck, we had survived, we had ceased to be alive. We were merely zombies waiting for the ghouls to find us. How many were there like us? How long did any of them last?
The only thing that had saved us to that point was the fact that ghoulism - or whatever one might wish to call it - was not yet so widespread as it is now.
The only thing that saved us from that point on, I am now convinced, is the fact that the Witnesses found us first and woke us up.
They showed us that there were choices to be made simply by pursuing their own choice, which - pie in the sky or no - they must have known to be tremendously dangerous.
So perhaps they were out doing God's good work, if it is neither vain nor ridiculous for me to think that our personal fate could possibly matter to a God who had permitted these horrors.
Scott was a Vietnam veteran, the kind who maintained a belief that the war had been right and just, and that the United States had wimped out in the end. His choice was to steal a car, his own being unavailable at the time, and make his way to the nearest army installation so that he might re-enlist.
Neither Mike nor Dawson tried to talk him out of this decision, though Scott was forty-four years old and had not kept himself in the best of shape.
Mike, who had grown up within a mile of Dawson's residence, chose to seek the sanctuary of his old grade school. Though Mike had often complained that he had been scarred and victimized by the twin voices of God and discipline during his parochial school career, and though he had often claimed that the most terrifying presence he had ever encountered had been the enormous mass of his third-grade teacher, it was there, and to her in particular, that he felt compelled to turn in his greatest need of guidance and protection.
Dawson didn't try to explain to Mike that, according to his own descriptions of the woman, she had been an ancient and obese heart-attack candidate those many years ago and was now, quite certainly, many years dead.
Sometimes the choices we make, especially under unbearable stress, don't make any coherent sense. We will not allow another man to tell us that. It is the case of the drowning man attempting to mount the straw. Certainly it is imbecilic, but in such situations reason holds little sway. Even if you overcome the drowning man's initial anger and make him understand, you will have succeeded only in robbing him of hope and making him more miserable yet. Unless you have a timber to offer him.
How could I have dissuaded either of them? What had I to offer them in place of their thin straws?
I let them both go.
Even Mike whose choice was, by far, the most foolish.
Even Mike whom I have loved like a brother for better than fifteen years.
Only when he was alone in the house was Dawson able to make his own choice. Once he had, he made his preparations rapidly and left. He did not bother to turn off the TV.
The only choices we are ever really left with are these three: be a leader, be a follower, or be an individual.
Many find security only where the self is given up, subsumed. Where Authority makes the decisions. Where rules are clear and strict. Where orders create Order and are not to be questioned.
Others find it only where they are themselves the Authority and Order that fashions the rules and makes the decisions.
Scott may be safe now, following some well-armed, battle-wise sergeant or lieutenant amidst a throng of like-minded companions. But I doubt it.
Mike may be safe in the darkness of his old school, with his phantom Order protecting him from very real chaos. But that is even easier to doubt.
The Witnesses may still be knocking on peoples' doors, waking people up, protected by some heavenly umbrella. But that, I find, is hardest to believe.
More likely by now they have knocked on one too many doors. Have made the big change. Are still out there making converts, but of a different sort. Their teeth revealed no longer by their God's-gracious-grins, but by the godawful grimace of a hellacious hunger.
Yes. That I find easier to believe, but not to think about.
And I...? I have a goal. Straw or timber? How much farther? Can I make it? What will I find? Does it really matter?
[6]
"You know, a man can make it as far as he's gotta go, if he knows how to handle time.
"A man can hold on the rungs of a tank-car ladder for better'n five hundred miles if he ain't got no choice; if there ain't no way for him to crawl to a better position, and the train don't make no stops to allow him to relocate himself.
"But to do it he's gotta get it straight in his head that no time is gonna pass while he's hangin' there."
An eighteen-year-old Dawson looked on, listening closely. Incredulous, but wanting to believe.
"Now I'm not sayin' that it's gonna be easy, not by a long road, but it's when things ain't easy that a man's gotta learn to assert his control. It's when the world isn't offerin' any respite that a man's gotta manufacture some of his own.
"Sure, when he's hangin' there, his hands and arms and legs and back aren't about to start believin' him. They'll be keepin' their own kinda time. But that ain't where the battle's gotta be fought.
"I figure if a man can't keep his head from gettin' bossed about by his muscles, well... we'd have been better off just stayin' in the trees.
"But he can, and there's the rub. If a man has a mind to, he can learn to keep his head still in time. And if he keeps time from passin' up here," dark, leathery fingers tapped a sunburned forehead, "then he can keep himself from givin' his arms and legs the message that they are right: that he hasbeen hangin' on too long, that he doeshave too far left to go, that he might as wellgive up the ghost and let himself just slide on down beneath them merciless wheels.
"You see, the thing to remember about muscles is that they gotta get some message from the brain before they can do just about anything. So if a man can keep himself from believin' his muscles' complaints, he can keep himself from givin' in to them. If he can keep his brain from believin' that time is passing, he robs time of its meaning, and it stops altogether.
"Time ain't nothin' but a man-thought thing anyway, so if a man refuses to think it, it don't happen for him."
The weathered face flashed a mischievous smile.
"Course when the train finally does stop and that man finally does get off, it's not just his muscles as'll be arguin' the case against him. Every man-clock at the place he lights will chime in at callin' him a liar. But that man's still got his ace card up his sleeve. He gives it any thought he'll know there weren't no human possible way that he coulda hung onto that ladder for upwards of six or seven hours, whatever it took to get him where he is. And that alone oughta put the proof to it. It's gotta be the clocks and muscles that are wrong, cause there he is and still alive. He'd found a hole in time and slipped through that, 'stead of slidin' down beneath them wheels a good bit back.
"And knowin' that it works that way just makes it that much easier the next time he finds himself in that kinda spot."
And Dawson found he could believe, needed to believe. He shook back his long hair and nodded in vigorous affirmation.
Leader, follower, or individual?
I like to think I made my choice when I was eighteen, and have simply deferred its actualization all these years.
Only once in my life did I experience a setting in which a person could be an individual while maintaining the advantages of living in a group. It was a marriage of independence and interaction, of freedom and support.
It was a brief stay. Afterwards I somehow allowed myself to fall back into the ways for which I had been trained and educated all my life. I permitted myself to accept a position in the lower echelon of the rat race I claimed to despise. I let myself be distracted from the truths I had claimed I had learned throughout that summer turning into fall.
I tell myself now that those truths, my belief in them, merely slept and did not die. I tell myself that I am now the prodigal son, hoping that some family remains for me to return to.
One week after his graduation from high school Daw-son was farther from home than he had ever been before. His backpack and sleeping bag were slung on his back, his right thumb was pointing to the horizon behind him, and his left hand held a sign that simply read: FURTHER.
By early August he had found himself staying at a hobo camp, "among members of America's forgotten tribe," as he was to record passionately in one of his many journals of the period. Like most Americans he had assumed that hoboism had long since dwindled and died. This was not the only illusion that these people would shatter, or drastically reshape, during his brief stay.
He discovered that not all hobos were hopelessly flawed individuals, failures incapable of living within the society that their lifestyles defied. Some of them were outcasts, surely, but many of them were escapees; people too proud and willful to consign themselves to the strictures and constraints of a more "acceptable" American existence.
Flawed? Certainly. Each in his own way. But no more so than many whom Dawson had met in other walks of life.
Failures? Not at the lives that they had finally chosen for themselves, whatever failures and incompatibilities might have led them to this choice. Therefore, perforce, their choice had been a wise one.
On the whole they were flexible, tolerant and compatible beyond any other class-group in his experience. They combined the habits of self-reliance and selfless cooperation in a way that Dawson had always suspected was too idealistic to be practiced in any real-world setting. And he felt that there was no setting based more in the real world than theirs.
It was there that he met Hoagie.
Hoagie was the most remarkable individual that Dawson had ever met. In his presence Dawson sometimes wondered if he had ever reallymet an individual before.
Hoagie was, by every evidence, only a handful of years older than Dawson, though the ruggedness of his appearance made it difficult to ascribe to him any particular age. He was an educated man, though he had adopted a manner of speech that required one to pay careful attention to the thoughts he was conveying in order to divine that fact. He was a man who had found contemporary American society wanting - "wanting far too much," he would say - and so had discarded it as best he could. He was a man, so Dawson felt, of unparalleled wisdom, integrity and compassion.
All of this had quite an impact on Dawson at the time. He was, after all, a young man of semisheltered upbringing who had yet to have any of his personal wisdoms put to the acid test of living-it-out.
So Hoagie became a sort of hero to him.
He also became a steadfast friend.
Hoagie taught Dawson how to pick a freight; how to read the coded lettering on the flanks of the individual cars, so that he'd know where they had originated and where they were heading. He taught him how, and when, to mount a train; how to ride one; how to disembark; and what to do and where to go once he had done so. He taught him how to recognize and avoid the peculiar hazards of particular trains, railyards, and towns. And he taught him, without ever putting it into words, how to read the signs of another man's intentions during an initial confrontation.
By Hoagie's side Dawson learned how to live without money, how to live without food when he had to, and how to get both when he could without compromising his integrity. He also learned that integrity was an extremely personal thing, separate from any rules or strictures that had ever been imposed from without, and that each man had to discover its composition for himself.
Dawson learned about the Network. Something Hoagie referred to as "the only functional anarchy existing in the United States."
"All it is," Hoagie had told him, "is folk lookin' out for folk, knowin' that the favor'll be returned somewhere down the line. Some folks call it karma, some call it castin' your bread upon the waters, some just say 'what goes 'round, comes 'round.' Just simple cooperation is all, but so few really live that way, that when they see it work, they think it's some remarkable achievement.
"Think about it: You don't need no Bill of Rights if there ain't nobody tryin' to interfere with you."
* * *
Hoagie taught Dawson about hardship and freedom. And Hoagie taught Dawson about time.
I can almost believe that it is all over. That the horror has finally ceased. That I have traveled forward or backward in time, to a period when the threat does not exist.
Such thinking is dangerous. I cannot permit myself to believe such things. But it is difficult.
For twenty-four hours I have not been threatened. Looking out this window I am confronted only by grass and trees, shimmering in the complacent afternoon sun. There is a stream too. Not large enough for trout, but certainly supporting a thriving population of minnows, crayfish, frogs, salamanders, dragonflies and water-skaters.
Everything within my range of vision is so tranquilly unaffected.
And then there is me.
Wondering if I am insane.
Yet.
Wondering if the horror is really ended.
I cannot entertain such thoughts. I might begin to consider staying yet another day. And, if that day was uneventful, yet another.
Eventually they would find me.
My time here is limited. If I do not impose that limit, they most certainly shall.
Two men alone on a hillside, lying motionless among tall grasses that obscured them from the vision of the world, just as surely as it obscured the world from their own sight. A warm September sun was running gentle fingers over their weary muscles, inducing them to laziness and introspection. Occasionally from the base of the hill rose the sound of a passing train. To them the sound was unintrusive, even welcome. It was an affirmation of their freedom, and of the infinite multiplicity of choice. In all other ways the afternoon was silent.
Softly, dove-voiced, one of the men spoke.
"You know, all this was underwater once. Prehistoric fishes and sharks swimmin', right up over our heads. Maybe even that first fish that got so adventurous. The one that crawled up onto the shore to check things out or to get away from the sharks. The very one that started that long and weary march. That march that started turnin' fish into reptiles, and reptiles into birds and mammals, and some of them mammals into something like men. That march that we're continuin' whether we will or no.
"And maybe the reason that he got so damn adventurous is that he looked down here below him, and saw us lyin' in the tall grass in the sun, and it looked good to him.
"Better'n dodgin' sharks, anyway.
"Or maybe he just saw us, and recognized the fact that if somethin' like us was ever gonna happen, then someone somewhere along the line was gonna have to do a heap of adventurin'. Maybe he decided that it might as well be him as got the ball started rollin'.
"Or maybe he saw the next thing. The thing we're frayin' our fins into hands to become, without our ever knowin' it.
"Do you see 'em up there, swimmin' about?"
There was a significant pause before the second man replied. When he did, his voice was shaded faintly with a tone of loss, regret.
"No... no, I don't. Not really."
"Well I can. Know why?"
Silence.
"'Cause they're there, right now, swimmin' 'round just like they was a million years ago. Just like they always was, and always will be.
" 'All at once, is what eternity is.'
"That's what The Poet told us. And he was right. He was right about alot of things. But most people just don't see it."
"Which poet?"
" ThePoet. The only Poet. And I don't mean Shakespeare, or Milton, or Too Sad Eliot. Naw, none of them they teach at schools. Schools won't touch him, cause he got too much of it right. They don't want to deal with that. That's why I walked away a half-dozen credits shy of my B.A."
Another brief silence.
"Want an example?"
"Sure."
"Hear that train comin'?"
The second man listened, but heard nothing. He waited a moment before making his reply. As he opened his mouth to speak, his ears did pick up the sound, so faint and far as to be nearly indiscernible.
"Yes! I hear it."
"Okay, that's a start. Think with me now. Together we'll go back. Not nearly so far back as them fish, just a short hop. About a hundred years or so should suit.
"Think of it: the nineteenth century, the age of steel, the birthing and bursting Age of Industrialization, the heyday of the Iron Horse. Yeah, that very train is one of the things them fishies worked their fins to fingers for, or so the vanity of man would have you believe.
"The West's still wild, the slaves but lately freed, and a handful of Indians ain't laid down and given up the Ghost Dance yet.
"You got all that in your head now?"
"Yes."
"Good. Now you just think on that a space, and when that train gets 'round to comin' up beneath this hill, you just raise up and have yourself a peek. See if what The Poet said ain't true."
The first man closed his eyes and lay still.
The second man waited alertly, almost without breathing. He thought about what his companion had said. He listened intently, until he could almost feel himself becoming one with the slowly increasing sound of the train. He was soon convinced that something was different, that something had changed, but was uncertain whether the change he felt was within himself or without.
The train was a long time coming. When he was certain that it had reached the base of the hill, he rose up on his knees and peered downward over the tall grasses.
Then he drew in his breath and held it, as a wave of vertigo washed over him.
He was watching a huge, black, nineteenth-century steam engine pull a sooty tender, and an equally dated line of passenger cars, along the shining double line of the rails. His eyes lingered on the mixture of smoke and steam pouring out of its stack, trailing down the entire length of the train and dispersing gently in the still summer air.
When the train had passed from sight, he sat back down and stared at his companion, who seemed to have fallen asleep. Puzzled, he laid himself back in the grass, his eyes searching the sky above him.
A voice floated gently over him, as if his friend were chanting softly in his sleep.
"Swim, little fishy, swim.
"Crawl, little fishy, crawl.
"Build, little fishy, build.
"Fly, little fishy, fly.
"Then blow it all to hell, and die."
Later Dawson would come up with any number of logical, and unsatisfying, explanations for what had occurred that afternoon. But the magic of those moments would never diminish, or recede from his memory.
So I will leave at dawn, grateful for my brief reprieve.
I have gathered everything that I intend to carry with me, into this one room. I have left the window open for two reasons: to allow in the breeze, which is gentle and kind; and to allow in any sounds from below, which might not be.
A small bureau is pushed up against the bedroom door. I know that it might slow down my escape, if things should take a certain turn; but it might also buy me some valuable time, if things should twist a slightly different way.
My pack is stuffed, as full as I can get it, with the food and water that I have found. I am also taking the bottle of rum. Perhaps this is foolish, but I tell myself that I have no other form of anesthetic. Foolish or not, it is the choice that I have made.
At dawn I will set out, once again, for the Hub. Hoagie told me once that I could find him, if I ever really needed him.
I need him now.
If anyone knows how to survive this horror, and still remain alive, it is him.
"If you ever need to find me, this is the place to start. It's like the Network is a nervous system, and the Hub is the brain. A word dropped here at nightfall will be trav-elin' six different directions by noon the next day. By noon the day after that, you couldn't tabulate all the places it's gone. And the word'll reach its man, sure as rain, if he's still on the Network, no matter where on the continent he may be. You can count on it.
"So if you ever need me, start here. If I ain't around, just put out the word and wait. You'll get me, or my message, before too long."
That November had started out cold. Dawson pulled his tattered overcoat more tightly around his body, shuffled his feet and nodded.
"I'll be back," he said softly, making a pretense of adjusting the straps on his backpack. Then he looked into his companion's eyes, nodded more firmly, and spoke with greater resolution.
"Yeah. Probably in the spring."
He was startled by his friend's laughter.
"Oh yeah. I got you pegged, brother. Fair-weather sort, eh?"
Though the assertion was made good-naturedly enough, Dawson felt his face color. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.
Hoagie just shook his head, slowly letting his smile give way to a more sober expression.
"Yeah, you're a fair-weather sort, for now at least, but that's okay. You're young yet. Life hasn't burned you. The cradle hasn't cramped you up too bad. But you'll grow."
He raised a hand to Dawson's shoulder, gripped him hard.
"Maybe I'll see you next spring, and maybe not. You'll make that decision when the time comes. Either way, remember this: someday, when you wake up and realize what a mess you're in - what a goddamn mess the whole of the civilized world has got itself in, draggin' you along to boot - and you decide you just don't wanna stay caught up inside that mess anymore... just remember you ain't gotta be. You got choices, and nobody's got a right to make them choices for you, or to tell you which is right and which is wrong.
"There's alot worse ways to live than this, even if a bunch of them ways are easier and a bit more comfy. There ain't no reason you gotta live and die in any of them worse ways.
"It's up to you."
[7]
A muffled thumping sound, followed by a faint scraping.
The same sounds repeated. Clumsy. Erratic. Intermittent. Persistent.
A similar series of noises rising from a slightly different location.
The noises doubled.
Trebled.
Dawson's heart was racing even before he opened his eyes. This time there was no luxurious forgetfulness, no vagrant searching for the nightstand and the clock. He was immediately aware of his desperate situation.
Dazed, he listened.
There was the sharp crack of wood splintering. Then a grating sound, as if a heavy object were being pushed across the wooden floor downstairs.
Somehow, he could not bring himself to move.
The first emotions he became conscious of were anger and indignation. They were invading his sanctum sanctorum. They were proving his sense of security to be false. They were proving him for a fool.
Then came the fear, and all other emotions became meaningless.
He was trapped.
Judging by the sounds, there were already too many at the entrance downstairs. Too many inthe entrance. There would be no escape through the narrow confines of the house. Clumsiness notwithstanding, their sheer numbers would overwhelm him.
Where had they all come from so suddenly?
Finally he bolted from the bed and thrust himself toward the window to look out.
Darkness.
Within the darkness, five darker shapes - no, seven - shambling about, moving vaguely toward the broken entrance of the house.
Eight - no, nine.
A sound behind him indicated that the first one had stumbled onto the base of the stairs. It was on his scent.
Eleven outside.
He wrestled his arms through the straps of his backpack, cursing his own clumsiness, then lurched back to the window. More were coming through the trees. Several had disappeared around the front of the house.
He thrust his legs out the window and bent awkwardly at the waist to get his head through. When he tried to sit up straight on the windowsill, his backpack struck the underside of the window, nearly causing him to fall. He ducked again, this time low enough to clear the backpack, and perched there, peering into the darkness below.
One of the ghouls in the yard looked up at him and made a wretched sound. Another turned toward it, then followed its gaze to the window.
Behind him Dawson heard the bureau being pushed slowly across the floor.
He leapt.
A moment of freedom.
Falling.
Movement through the night's damp air.
A sensation of speed.
PAIN!
Ankles legs spine stomach ribs PAIN. White/black PAIN. Red/white PAIN. Everything PAIN. Nothing but PAIN.
Then a thought crept in:
"Can't walk can't run can't escape."
Then, in answer:
"If I can't walk, they cannot make me be like them. Not like that. A predator."
A small victory. A minor success. He told himself to savor that at least. Then he opened his eyes.
Dark shapes swayed before him, looming ever nearer. Shadowed, contorted, vacant faces, shattered slavering mouths tight and shrill with horrific exhilaration.
"NO!!!"
He pressed hard against the pain and gained his feet, spun away from the approaching figures and lunged into something heavy, putrescently soft and yielding.
A grunt of air, not his. Hot, fetid breath pushing against his cheek. He screamed and swung his elbow in a high arc, felt it strike deeply into the soft thing's substance as it knocked the beast down. He kicked once, futilely, at the wretched face and nearly fell on top of it.
He screamed and ran.
As dawn began to filter through the trackless woods through which he moved, he believed that he was still running.
He was not. His staggering, lurching gait carried him no faster than an old man's ambling morning walk. It was the best that he could muster. Simply continuing onward demanded the utmost of his effort and his will, but he would not stop to rest.
Eventually he noticed the light growing bright around him. He decided then to leave the cover of the trees for the easier going of the roadside.
Later he heard a sound.
Some portion of his mind believed that he should be able to place that sound. That he should recognize it easily. But he was incapable of that.
Most of his mind was still trapped in the darkness of time, witnessing and reliving the moments when his hands were shoving putrid flesh away from his own face while, behind him, other hands were reaching out to draw him close. He could feel them there, behind him, getting closer, reaching out, about to grab him.
"NO!"
He shuddered.
Then he whimpered, "no."
He stared a moment at the sun, now well ab
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