Damnation Alley (4 page)

Giant bats fled south, and far ahead he saw a wide waterfall descending from the heavens. It was gone by the time he reached the damp sand of that place, but a dead shark lay to his left, and there was seaweed, seaweed, seaweed, fishes, driftwood all about.

The sky pinked over from east to west and remained that color. He gulped a bottle of ice water and felt it go into his stomach. He passed more cacti, and a pair of coyotes sat at the base of one and watched him drive by. They seemed to be laughing. Their tongues were very red.

As the sun brightened, he dimmed the screen. He smoked, and he found a button that produced music. He swore at the soft, stringy sounds that filled the cabin, but he didn't turn them off.

He checked the radiation level outside, and it was only a little above normal. The last time he had passed this way it had been considerably higher.

He passed several wrecked vehicles such as his own. He ran across another plain of silicon, and in the middle was a huge crater, which he skirted. The pinkness in the sky faded and faded and faded, and a bluish tone came to replace it. The dark lines were still there, and occasionally one widened into a black river as it flowed away into the east. At noon one such river partly eclipsed the sun for a period of eleven minutes. With its departure, there came a brief dust storm, and Tanner turned on the radar and his lights. He knew there was a chasm somewhere ahead, and when he came to it he bore to the left and ran along its edge for close to two miles before it narrowed and vanished. The other vehicles followed, and Tanner took his bearings from the compass once more. The dust had subsided with the brief wind, and even with the screen dimmed Tanner had to don his dark goggles against the glare of reflected sunlight from the faceted field be now negotiated.

He passed towering formations which seemed to be quartz. He had never stopped to investigate them in the past, and he had no desire to do it now. The spectrum danced at their bases, and patches of such light occurred for some distance about them.

Speeding away from the crater, he came again upon sand, clean, brown, white, dun, and red. There were more cacti, and huge dunes lay all about him. The sky continued to change, until finally it was as blue as a baby's eyes. Tanner hummed along with the music for a time, and then he saw the Monster.

It was a Gila, bigger than his car, and it moved in fast. It sprang from out the sheltering shade of a valley filled with cacti, and it raced toward him, its beaded body bright with many colors beneath the sun, its dark, dark eyes unblinking as it bounded forward on its lizard-fast legs, sable fountains rising behind its upheld tail, which was wide as a sail and pointed like a tent.

He couldn't use the rockets, because it was coming in from the side.

He opened up with his fifty-calibers and spread his "wings" and stamped the accelerator to the floor. As it neared, he sent forth a cloud of fire in its direction. By then, the other cars were firing, too.

It swung its tail and opened and closed its jaws, and its blood came forth and fell upon the ground. Then a rocket struck it. It turned, it leaped.

There came a booming, crunching sound as it fell upon the vehicle identified as car number one and lay there.

Tanner hit the brakes, turned, and headed back.

Car number three came up beside it and parked. Tanfler did the same.

He jumped down from the cab and crossed to the Smashed car. He had the rifle in his hands, and he put six rounds into the creature's head before he approached the car.

The door had come open, and it hung from a single hinge, the bottom one.

Inside, Tanner could see the two men sprawled, and there was some blood on the dashboard and the seat.

The other two drivers came up beside him and stared within. Then the shorter of the two crawled inside and listened for the heartbeat and the pulse and felt for breathing.

"Mike's dead," he called out, "but Greg's starting to come around."

A wet spot that began at the car's rear end spread and continued to spread, and the smell of gasoline filled the air.

Tanner took out a cigarette, thought better of it, and replaced it in the pack. He could hear the gurgle of the huge gas tanks as they emptied themselves upon the ground.

The man who stood at Tanner's side said, "I never saw anything like it. . . . I've seen pictures, but… I never saw anything like it . . ."

"I have," said Tanner, and then the other driver emerged from the wreck, partly supporting the man he'd referred to as Greg.

The man called out, "Greg's all right. He just hit his head on the dash."

The man who stood at Tanner's side said, "You can take him, Hell. He can back you up when he's feeling better," and Tanner shrugged and turned his back on the scene and lit a cigarette.

"I don't think you should do...” the man began, and "Screw," said Tanner, and blew smoke in his face. He turned to regard the two approaching men and saw that Greg was dark-eyed and deeply tanned. Part Indian, possibly. His skin seemed smooth, save for a couple pockmarks beneath his right eye, and his cheekbones were high and his hair very dark. He was as big as Tanner, which was six-two, though not quite so heavy. He was dressed in overalls, and his carriage, now that he had had a few deep breaths of air, became very erect, and he moved with a quick, graceful stride.

"We'll have to bury Mike," the short man said.

"I hate to lose the time," said his companion, "but...” And then Tanner flipped his cigarette and threw himself to the ground as it landed in the pool at the rear of the car.

There was an explosion, flames, then more explosions. Tanner heard the rockets as they tore off toward the east, inscribing dark furrows in the hot afternoon's air. The ammo for the fifty-calibers exploded, and the hand grenades went off, and Tanner burrowed deeper and deeper into the sand, covering his head and blocking his ears against the noise.

As soon as things grew quiet, he grabbed for the rifle. But they were already coming at him, and he saw the muzzle of a pistol. He raised his hands slowly and stood.

"Why the goddamn hell did you do a stupid thing like that?" said the other driver, the man who held the pistol.

Tanner smiled, and, "Now we don't have to bury him," he said. "Cremation's just as good, and it's already over."

"You could have killed us all if those guns or those rocket launchers had been aimed this way!"

"They weren't. I looked."

"The flying metal could've… Oh. . . . I see. Pick up your damn rifle, buddy, and keep it pointed at the ground. Eject the rounds it's still got in it and put 'em in your pocket."

Tanner did this thing while the other talked.

"You wanted to kill us all, didn't you? Then you could have cut out and gone your way, like you tried to do yesterday. Isn't that right?"

"You said it, mister, not me."

"It's true, though. You don't give a good goddamn if everybody in Boston croaks, do you?"

"My gun's unloaded now," said Tanner.

"Then get back in your bloody buggy and get going! I'll be behind you all the way!"

Tanner walked back toward his car. He heard the others arguing behind him, but he didn't think they'd shoot him. As he was about to climb up into the cab, he saw a shadow out of the corner of his eye and turned quickly.

The man named Greg was standing behind him, tail and quiet as a ghost.

"Want me to drive awhile?" he asked Tanner, without expression.

"No, you rest up. I'm still in good shape. Later on this afternoon, maybe, if you feel up to it."

The man nodded and rounded the cab. He entered from the other side and immediately reclined his chair.

Tanner slammed his door and started the engine. He heard the air-conditioner come to life.

"Want to reload this?" he asked. "And put it back on the rack?" and he handed the rifle and the ammo to the other, who had nodded. He drew on his gloves then and said, "There's plenty of soft drinks in the fridge. Nothing much else, though," and the other nodded again. Then he heard car three start and said, "Might as well roll," and he put it into gear and took his foot off the clutch.

Charles Britt listened to the bell. His office was diagonally across the street from the cathedral, and each peal of the massive bell made his walls shake, and he was contemplating a lawsuit, for he maintained that its constant tolling had loosened his fillings and was causing his remaining teeth to ache.

He brushed a wisp of white hair back from his forehead and squinted through the bottom of his bifocals.

He turned a page in the massive ledger and lowered his head to read further.

Losses, all. If only he'd cornered the drug market. Patent medicines and aspirin seemed the only things that were selling just then.

Clothing was out. Everyone was making do with what be had. Foodstuffs were all suspect. Hardwares were doing very poorly, for few repairs were being made these days. Why bother?

He was in deeply when it came to clothing, foodstuffs, and hardware.

He muttered a curse and turned the page.

Nobody was working, nobody was buying. Three ships waited in the harbor, unable to unload their cargoes, his cargoes, because of the quarantine.

And the looting! He'd saved three extra damns for the looters. He was sure that the insurance companies would find a way to renege. He was sure because there was a lot of Britt money in insurance. At least the police were shooting to kill when it came to the looters. He smiled at that.

A light rain stippled his window, melted the cathedral beyond it. He felt a small pity for the wet town crier, whose bawled "Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!" rang now across the square, competing with the monotonous tolling of the death bell. This, because he, Charles Britt, had once been town crier, many years ago when his pants had been short and his eyes unimprisoned by spectacles and ledgers, and in those days he had hated the rain.

Nobody was riding in his taxis. The hearses and the ambulances had all the business this day, and he owned neither.

Nobody was buying guns and ammunition. With the reduced population, there were now enough to go around, for all who desired to offend or defend.

Nobody was visiting his movie houses, for there was drama enough, and pathos, to fill each human life this day.

And nobody, nobody, but nobody, was buying the last edition of his newspaper, a special, at that, for which he had driven his decimated staff to heroic ends, not to mention himself, what with the double-time he'd paid them to produce the thing. The Plague Edition, it had been, with an attractive black-bordered front page; an exclusive article on "The Plague Throughout History," by a professor at Harvard, yet; a medical article on the symptoms of bubonic, pneumonic, and systemic plague, so you'd know which variety you were coming down with; six and a half pages of obituaries; one hundred human-interest interviews with fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, widows, and widowers; and a stirring editorial on the heroic drivers of the six doomed vehicles on their way to the west coast. He almost wept when he considered the stacks of these growing old in the warehouses, for nothing, but nothing, is so stale as a dated newsrag, even if it does have an attractive, black-bordered front page.

The only thing that made him smile again was the final page in the ledger. He'd managed at the last moment to corner sixty percent of the coffins in town, two florist shops, which were presently costing him dearly to keep open, and somewhat over five hundred cemetery plots. "Buy into a rising market," had always been his philosophy, not to mention his religion, sex, politics, and aesthetics. This, at least, would serve as a weight on the other side of the balance, possibly even net him a profit. If death is the wave of the future, ride it, he figured.

He tugged at his ear and listened again to the crier's words, half-hid among those of the bell.

". . . there to be burned!"

This troubled him.

And as he heard the announcement repeated, he remembered the exclusive article on "The Plague Throughout History," by the Harvard professor.

Funeral homes, hospitals, and morgues were now as packed as the old charnel houses had been. So in those days they had taken to. . . Yes.

". . Mass cremations to avoid spread of the disease!" cried the boy. "The following three places have been chosen, and the dead will be delivered to these sites, there to be burned! Number one, Boston Common . . ."

Charles Britt closed his ledger, removed his glasses, and began to polish them.

He resolved to bring suit in the morning, as his jaws tightened upon the cold iron blade, relentless, and a metallic taste filled his mouth.

After they had driven for about half an hour, the man called Greg said to him, "Is it true what Marlowe said?"

"What's a Marlowe?"

"He's driving the other car…Were you trying to kill us? Do you really want to skip out?"

Hell laughed, then, "That's right," he said. "You named it."

"Why?"

Hell let it hang there for a minute then said, "Why shouldn't I? I'm not anxious to die. I'd like to wait a long time before I try that bit."