They moved upward and forward onto the bridge and began their slow passage across the mighty Missus Hip. There were times when the bridge creaked beneath them, sighed, groaned, and they felt it move.
The sun began to climb, and still they moved forward, scraping their fenders against the edges of the wrecks, using their wings like plows. They were on the bridge for three hours before its end came into sight through a rift in the junkstacks.
When their wheels finally touched the opposite shore, Greg sat there breathing heavily and then lit a cigarette.
"You want to drive awhile, Hell?"
"Yeah. Let's switch over."
He did, and, "God! I'm bushed!" he said as he sprawled out.
Tanner drove forward through the ruins of East Saint Louis, hurrying to clear the town before nightfall. The radiation level began to mount as he advanced, and the streets were cluttered and broken. He checked the inside of the cab for radioactivity, but it was still clean.
It took him hours, and as the sun fell at his back, he saw the blue aurora begin once more in the north. But the sky stayed clear, filled with its stars, and there were no black lines that he could see. After a long while a rose-colored moon appeared and hung before him. He turned on the music, softly, and glanced at Greg. It didn't seem to bother him, so he let it continue.
The instrument panel caught his eye. The radiation level was still climbing. Then, in the forward screen, he saw the crater, and he stopped.
It must have been over half a mile across, and he couldn't tell its depth.
He fired a flare, and in its light he used the telescopic lenses to examine it to the right and to the left.
The way seemed smoother to the right, and he turned in that direction and began to negotiate it.
The place was hot! So very, very hot! He hurried. And he wondered as he sped, the gauge rising before him: What had it been like on that day, Whenever? That day when a tiny sun had lain upon this spot and fought with, and for a time beaten, the brightness of the other in the sky, before it sank slowly into its sudden burrow? He tried to imagine it, succeeded, then tried to put it out of his mind and couldn't. How do you put out the fires that burn forever? He wished that he knew. There'd been so many different places to go then, and he liked to move around.
What had it been like in the old days, when a man could just jump on his bike and cut out for a new town whenever he wanted? And nobody emptying buckets of crap on you from out of the sky? He felt cheated, which was not a new feeling for him, but it made him curse even longer than usual.
He lit a cigarette when he'd finally rounded the crater, and he smiled for the first time in months as the radiation gauge began to fall once more. Before many miles, he saw tall grasses swaying about him, and not too long after that he began to see trees. Trees short and twisted, at first, but the farther he fled from the place of carnage, the taller and straighter they became. They were trees such as he had never seen before, fifty, sixty feet in height, and graceful, and gathering stars, there on the plains of Illinois.
He was moving along a clean, hard, wide road, and just then he wanted to travel it forever, to Florida, of the swamps and Spanish moss and citrus groves and fine beaches and the Gulf; and up to the cold, rocky Cape, where everything is gray and brown and the waves break below the lighthouses and the salt burns in your nose and there are graveyards where bones have lain for centuries and you can still read the names they bore, chiseled there into the stones above them; down through the nation where they say the grass is blue; then follow the mighty Missus Hip to the place where she spreads and comes and there's the Gulf again, full of little islands where the old boosters stashed their loot; and through the shagtopped mountains he'd heard about: the Smokies, Ozarks, Poconos, Catskills; drive through the forest of Shenandoah; park, and take a boat out over Chesapeake Bay; see the big lakes and the place where the water falls, Niagara. To drive forever along the big road, to see everything, to eat the world. Yes. Maybe it wasn't all Damnation Alley. Some of the legendary places must still be clean, like the countryside about him now. He wanted it with a hunger, with a fire like that which always burned in. his loins. He laughed then, just one short, sharp bark, because now it seemed like maybe he could have it.
The music played softly, too sweetly perhaps, and it filled him.
The bell that rang again, and yet again, did not completely submerge the sound of breaking glass. True, the silences came again, each deepened and intensified by memory and anticipation; but there had been that moment's pain within the already throbbing nervous system of the city.
The body moved to heal itself.
A light drizzle was descending, and the heavens flashed broken rainbows in all quarters. A downpour of dead fish, lasting perhaps a quarter of a minute, struck portions of the city, and telephone lines were draped with seaweed, and sand lashed against windowpanes. Sensing this provender, the rats came forth from the cellars and the barns, the sheds and the alleys, the junk heaps and the ditches, to feed upon the white-bellied manna, tails and whiskers twitching, eyes aglow, fur sleeked or rumpled by the wet; and when they departed, leaving the arrow-bodied skeletons white as ivory, some of them remained, like inkblots upon the lawns, the pavements, the porches, licking feebly at the raindrops.
But they had not broken the window, nor had the fish.
Sergeant Donahue, who was driving, turned to Lieutenant Spano at his right.
"No siren?" he queried.
"No siren."
Lieutenant Spano unfastened his black and gleaming holster, which he wore high upon his right hip.
"Turn out the lights."
The sergeant complied.
The world dimmed before them, and tiny dark shapes fled before the police cruiser. They turned the corner and slowed, both men studying the storefronts that lined this block of the city, the place where the wound had occurred.
"Ready with the spot."
"It's ready."
They cruised, silently, along the damp and glistening curb. A rumble of thunder came down from the north, with a flash of light that turned the sky into a yellow scroll covered with smoky hieroglyphs. For a moment the entire block was illuminated: cars, cables, hydrants, stores, trees, houses, and rats.
"There he is! Our side of the street! Hit him with the spot!"
Donahue turned on the spotlight and moved it. It fell upon the man before the broken window, bent forward, sack in hand, frozen in mid-reach.
"Don't move! You're under arrest!" he called over the loudspeaker.
The man turned and stared into the light. Then be dropped his sack and bounded into the street.
Lieutenant Spano fired six rounds from his .38 Special, and the man crumpled, fell, and lay like a dirty and wrung-out dishrag, his blood mingling with the moisture on the pavement, a dead rat at his right hand, a stripped fish above his head.
"You killed him," said Donahue, braking the car.
"He tried to escape," said Spano.
"We've got orders to try to bring them in."
"But he tried to escape."
"We're supposed to wound them, then, if we can."
"Yes, but he kept running after I hit him. He tried to escape."
Donahue met the other man's eyes, then looked away.
"He tried to escape," he agreed.
They left the car and approached the body. Spano turned it over.
"He's only a kid!" said Donahue. Then he moved to the sidewalk and opened the sack.
"Sporting goods, " he said. "Softballs, a couple bats, a fielder's glove, and a catcher's mitt. Here's two footballs... A set of dumbbells… He was only a kid!"
Spano looked away. After a time he said, "He was looting."
"Yeah, and he tried to escape."