Wyndham, John (13 page)

I turned toward my companions.

“Well, what do you want first?” I asked them.

“A billet,” said one. “We got to ‘ave a place to doss down.”
II reckoned I’d have to find that at least for them. I couldn’t just dodge out
and leave them stranded right where we were. Now we’d come this far, I couldn’t
do less than find them a center, a kind of H.Q., and put them on their feet.
What was wanted was a place where the receiving, storing, and feeding could be
done, and the whole lot keep together. I counted them. There were fifty-two;
fourteen of them women. The best course seemed to be to find a hotel. It would
save the trouble of fitting out with beds and bedding.

The place we found was a kind of glorified boardinghouse
made up of four Victorian terrace houses knocked together, giving more than the
accommodation we needed. There were already half a dozen people in the place
when we got there. Heaven knows what had happened to the rest. We found the
remnant, huddled together and scared, in one of the lounges—an old man, and
elderly woman (who turned out to have been the manageress), a middle-aged man,
and three girls. The manageress had the spirit to pull herself together and
hand out some quite high-sounding threats, but the ice, even of her most severe
boardinghouse manner,
was
thin. The old man tried to back her up by
blustering a bit. The rest did nothing but keep their faces turned nervously
toward us.

I explained that we were moving in. If they did not like it,
they could go:
if,
on the other hand, they preferred to stay and share
equally what there was, they were free to do so. They were not pleased. The way
they reacted suggested that somewhere in the place they had a cache of stores
that they were not anxious to share. When they grasped that the intention was
to build up bigger stores their attitude modified perceptibly, and they
prepared to make the best of it.

I decided I’d have to stay on a day or two just to get the
party set up. I guessed Josella would be feeling much the same about her lot.
Ingenious man, Coker—the trick is called holding the baby. But after that I’d
dodge out, and join her.

During the next couple of days we worked systematically,
tackling the bigger stores near by—mostly chain stores, and not very big, at
that. Nearly everywhere there had been others before us. The fronts of the
shops were in a bad way. The windows were broken in, the floors were littered
with half-opened cans and split packages which had disappointed the finders,
and now lay in a sticky, stinking mass among the fragments of window glass.
But as a rule the loss was small-and the damage superficial, and we’d find the
larger cases
in
and behind the shop untouched.

It was far from easy for blind men to carry and maneuver
heavy cases out of the place and load them on handcarts. Then there was the job
of getting them back to the billet and stowing them. But practice began to give
them a knack with it.

The most hampering factor was the necessity for my presence.
Little or nothing could go on unless I was there to direct It was impossible to
use more than one working party at a time, though we could have made up a
dozen. Nor could much go on back at the hotel while I was out with the foraging
squad. Moreover, such time as I had to spend investigating and prospecting the
district was pretty much wasted for everyone else. Two sighted men could have
got though a lot more than twice the work.

Once we had started, I was too busy during the day to
spend much thought beyond the actual work in hand, and too tired at night to do
anything but sleep the moment I lay down. Now and again I’d say to myself, “By
tomorrow night I’ll have them pretty well fixed up—enough to keep them going
for a bit, anyway. Then I’ll light out of this and find Josella.”

That sounded all right—but every day it was tomorrow that
I’d be able to do it, and each day it became more difficult. Some of them had
begun to learn a bit, but still practically nothing, from foraging to
can-opening, could go on without my being around. It seemed, the way things
were going, that I became less, instead of more, dispensable.

None of it was their fault. That was what made it difficult.
Some of them were trying so damned hard. I just had to watch them making it
more and more impossible for me to play the skunk and walk out on them. A dozen
times a day I cursed the man Coker for contriving me into the situation— but
that didn’t help to solve it: it just left me wondering how it could end.

I had my first inkling of that, though I scarcely recognized
it as such, on the fourth morning—or maybe it was the fifth—just as we were
setting out. A woman called down the stairs that there were two sick up there;
pretty bad, she thought.

My two watchdogs did not like it.

“Listen,” I told them. “I’ve had about enough of this
chain-gang stuff. We’d be doing a lot better than we are now without it ,
anyway.”

“An’ have you slinkin’ off to join your old mob?” said
someone.

“Don’t fool yourself,” I said. “I could have slugged this
pair of amateur gorillas any hour of the day or night. I’ve not done it because
you’ve got nothing against them other than their being a pair of dim-witted
nuisances

“‘Ere—” one of my attachments began to expostulate. “But,” I
went on, “if they don’t let me see what’s wrong with these people, they can
begin expecting to be slugged any minute from now.

The two saw reason, but when we reached the room they took
good care to stand as far back as the chain allowed. The casualties turned out
to be two men, one young, one middle-aged. Both had high temperatures and
complained of agonizing pain in the bowels. I didn’t know much about such
things then, but I did not need to know much to feel worried. I could think of
nothing but to direct that they should be carried to an empty house near by,
and to tell one of the women to look after them as best she could.

That was the beginning of a day of setbacks. The next of a
very different kind, happened around noon.

We had cleared most of the food shops close to us, and I bad
decided to extend our range a little. From my recollections of the
neighborhood, I reckoned we ought to find another shopping street about a half
mile to the north, so I led my party that way. We found the shops there, all
right, but something else too.

As we turned the corner and came into view of them, L
stopped. In front of a chain-store grocery a party of men was trundling out
cases and loading them on to a truck. Save for the difference in the vehicle, I
might have been watching my own party at work. I halted my group of twenty or
so, wondering what line we should take. My inclination was to withdraw and
avoid possible trouble by finding a clear field elsewhere; there was no sense
in coming into conflict when there was plenty scattered in various stores for
those who were organized enough to take it. But it did not fall to me to make
the decision, Even while I hesitated a redheaded young man strode confidently
out of the shop door. There was no doubt that he was able to see—or, a moment
later, that he had seen us.

He did not share my indecision. He reached swiftly for his
pocket. The next moment a bullet hit the wall beside me with a smack.

There was a brief tableau. His men and mine turning their
sightless eyes toward one another in an effort to understand what was going on.
Then he fired again. I supposed he had aimed at me, but the bullet found the man
on my left. He gave a grunt as though he were surprised, and folded up with a
kind of sigh. I dodged back round the corner, dragging the other watchdog with
me.

“Quick,” I said. “Give me the key to these cuffs. I can’t do
a thing like this.”

He didn’t do anything except give a knowing grin. He was a
one-idea man.

“Huh,” he said. “Come off it. You don’t fool me.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, you damned clown,” I said, pulling on
the chain to drag the body of watchdog number one nearer so that we could get
better cover.

The goon started to argue. Heaven knows what subtleties his
dim wits were crediting me with. There was enough slack on the chain now for me
to raise my arms. I did, and hammered both fists at his head so that it went
back against the wall with a crack. That disposed of his argument. I found the
key in his side pocket.

“Listen,” I told the rest. “Turn round, all of you, and
keep going straight ahead. Don’t separate, or you’ll have had it. Get moving
now.”

I got one wristlet open, ridded myself of the chain, and
scrambled over the wall into somebody’s garden. I crouched there while I got
rid of the other cuff. Then I moved across to peer cautiously over the far
angle of the wall. The young man with the pistol had not come rushing after us,
as I had half expected. He was still with his party, giving them an
instruction. And now I came to think of it, why should he hurry? Since we had
not fired back at him, he could reckon we were unarmed and we wouldn’t be able
to get away fast.

When he’d finished his directions he walked out confidently
into the road to a point where he had a view of my retreating group. At the
corner he stopped to look at the two prone watchdogs. Probably the chain
suggested to him that one of them had been the eyes of our gang, for he put the
pistol back in his pocket and began to follow the rest in a leisurely fashion.

That wasn’t what I had expected, and it took me a minute to
see his scheme. Then it came to me that his most profitable course would be to
follow them to our H.Q. and see what pickings he could hijack there. He was, I
had to admit, either much quicker than I at spotting chances or bad previously
given more thought to the possibilities that might arise than I had. I was glad
that I had told my lot to keep straight on. Most likely they’d get tired of it
after a bit, but I reckoned they’d none of them be able to find the way back to
the hotel and so lead him to it. As long as they kept together, I’d be able to
collect them all later on without much difficulty. The immediate question was
what to do about a man who carried a pistol and didn’t mind using it.

In some parts of the world one might go into the first house
in sight and pick up a convenient firearm. Hampstead was not like that; it was
a highly respectable suburb, unfortunately. There might possibly be a sporting
gun to be found somewhere, but I would have to hunt for it. The only thing I
could think of was to keep him in sight and hope that some opportunity would
offer a chance to deal with him. I broke a branch off a tree, scrambled back
over the wall, and began to tap my way along the curb, looking, I hoped,
indistinguishable from the hundreds of blind men one bad seen wandering the
streets in the same way.

The road ran straight for some distance. The redheaded young
man was perhaps fifty yards ahead of me, and my party another fifty ahead of
him. We continued like that for something over half a mile. To my relief, none
of the front party showed any tendency to turn into the road which led to our
base. I was beginning to wonder how long it would be before they decided that
they bad gone far enough, when an unexpected diversion occurred. One man who
had been lagging behind the rest finally stopped. He dropped his stick and doubled
up with his arms over his belly. Then be sagged to the ground and lay there,
rolling with pain. The others did not stop for him. They must have heard his
moans, but probably they had no idea he was one of themselves.

The young man looked toward him and hesitated. He altered
his course and bore across toward the contorted figure. He stopped a few feet
away from him and stood gazing down. For perhaps a quarter of a minute he
regarded him carefully. Then slowly, but quite deliberately, he pulled his
pistol out of his pocket and shot him through the bead.

The party ahead stopped at the sound of the shot. So did L
The young man made no attempt to catch up with them—in fact, he seemed suddenly
to lose interest in them altogether. He turned round and came walking back down
the middle of the road. I remembered to play my part, and began to tap my way
forward again. He paid me no attention as he passed, but I was able to see his
face: it was worried, and there was a grim set to his jaw. I kept going as I
was
until he was a decent distance behind me, then I hurried on to the
rest. Brought up short by the Sound of the shot, they were arguing whether to
go on farther or not.

I broke that up by telling them that now I was no longer
encumbered with my two I.Q. -minus watchdogs we would be ordering things differently.
I was going to get a truck, and I would be back in ten minutes or so to run
them back to the billet in it.

The finding of another organized party at work produced a
new anxiety, but we found the place intact when we got back. The only news they
had for me there was that two more men and a woman had been taken with severe
belly pains and removed to the other house.

We made what preparations
we
could for defense
against any marauders arriving while I was away
.
Then I picked a
new party and we set off in the truck, this time in a different direction.

I recalled that in former days when I had come up to Hampstead
Heath it had often been by way of a bus terminus where a number of small shops
and stores clustered. With the aid of the street plan I found the place again
easily enough—not only found it, but discovered it to be marvelously intact.
Save for three or four broken windows, the area looked simply as if it had been
closed up for a weekend.

But there were differences. For one thing, no such silence
had ever before hung over the locality, weekday or Sunday. And there were
several bodies lying in the street. By this time one was becoming accustomed
enough to that to pay them little attention. I had, in fact, wondered that
there were not more
to
be seen, and had come to the conclusion that most
people sought some kind of shelter, either out of fear or later when they
became weak. It was one of the reasons that one felt a disinclination to enter
any dwelling house.