The Year When Stardust Fell Part 29

He seized his gun and fired the signal for their own advance. He ran into the street shouting for the others to follow. The nomads were concentrating their fire charge at the other end of the row of houses, and there the defenders fell back without an attempt to advance.

Like watching a wave turned back by a rocky sh.o.r.e, Ken saw his companions fleeing in disorderly retreat through the rear of the houses to the block beyond. A bullet whizzed by his head. He dropped to the ground and crawled on his stomach to the safety of cover behind a brick house.

For a long time he lay in the snow, unmoving. He could not hold back the sobbing despair that shook him. He had never before known what it was like to be utterly alone. Mayfield was dying and taking away everything that was his own personal world. He had listened to news of the destruction of Chicago and of Berkeley without knowing what it really meant. Now he knew.

For all he knew, the nomads might even now be in control of the major part of the town. He could not know what had happened to his father, to Maria, to anyone.

The crackling of flames in the next house aroused him. He crawled inside the brick house, which was still safe, for a moment of rest. He knew he should be fleeing with the others, but he had to rest.

He heard sporadic shooting. A few nomads were straggling after their companions at the other end of the street. It was too far to shoot.

However, one nomad stopped and swung cautiously under the very windows of the burning house next door. Ken leveled his rifle and fired. The bullet caught the man in the shoulder and flung him violently against the wall. Ken saw that he would be buried by the imminent, flaming collapse of that wall.

The man saw it, too. He struggled frantically to move out of the way, but he seemed injured beyond the power to get away.

Ken regarded him in a kind of stupor for a moment. The man out there was responsible for all this, he thought, for the burning and for the killing....

He swung his rifle over his shoulder and went out. Brands were falling upon the wounded enemy. Ken hoisted the man under the arms and dragged him to the opposite side of the adjacent house. The nomad looked at Ken with a strange fury in his eyes.

"You're crazy!" he said painfully. "You're the one who shot me?"

Ken nodded.

"You'll be cut off. Well, it won't matter much anyway. By tomorrow your town will be burned and dead. Soon, we'll all be dead."

Ken kneeled on the ground beside him, as if before some strange object from a foreign land. "What were you?" he asked. "Before, I mean."

The man coughed heavily and blood covered his mouth and thick growth of beard. The bullet must be in his lungs, Ken thought. He helped wipe away the blood and brushed the man's mouth with a handful of snow.

"You're crazy," the nomad said again. "I guess we're all crazy. You're just a kid, aren't you? You want to know what I was a million years ago, before all this?"

"Yes," Ken said.

The man attempted a smile. "Gas station. Wasn't that a crazy thing? No need of gas when all the cars quit. I owned one on the best little corner in Marysvale."

"Why are you with them?" Ken nodded in the darkness toward the distant attackers.

The man glared, twisting with the pain. Then his glance softened. "You'd have done it, too. What else was there? I had a wife, two kids. No food within a hundred miles after we used what was in our own pantry and robbed what we could from the supermarket downtown.

"We all got together and went after some. We got bigger as we went along. We needed men who were good with rifles. We found some. We kept going. People who had food fought to keep it; we fought to take it.

That's the way it had to be.

"We heard about your town with its big h.o.a.rd of food. We decided to get it."

"Did you know you burned half of it this morning?"

"No. That's tough. That's tough all the way around. Don't look at me that way, kid. You would have done the same. We're all the same as you, only we didn't live where there was plenty of food on hand. We were all decent guys before. Me, those guys out in the street that you knocked off. I guess you're decent, too."

"Where's your family now?"

"Twenty miles down the valley, waiting with the rest of the women and children for us to bring them food."

Ken rose slowly to his feet. The man was bleeding heavily from the mouth. His words were growing m.u.f.fled. "What are you going to do?" he asked.

"Get on with what has to be done," said Ken wearily. He felt sure he must be walking in a nightmare and in just a little while he would awaken. "If there's a chance, I'll try to send somebody after you."

"Never mind me!" the nomad said with sudden fierceness. "I'm done for.

You've finished me. If our outfit should be unlucky enough to lose, see my wife and try to do something for my kids. Get some food to them. Tom Doyle's the name," the man said.

A fit of coughing seized him again and blood poured from his mouth. His eyes were closed when he lay back again. "Tom Doyle's the name," his b.l.o.o.d.y lips murmured. "Don't forget that, kid. Tom Doyle's Service, corner of First and Green in Marysvale. We were all good guys once."

The snow was so heavy it seemed like a solid substance through which Ken walked. In spite of it, row upon row of houses burned with a fury that lit the whole scene with a glow that was like the comet's own. Above this, the blanket of black smoke lay as if ready to smother the valley as soon as the light was gone.

Ken didn't know for sure where he was going. A kind of aimlessness crept over him and there no longer seemed any rational objective toward which to move. He crept on from house to house in the direction his group had gone, but he could not find any of them. Somewhere he touched the edge of combat again. He had a nightmare of going into a thousand houses, smashing their windows out, thrusting his rifle through for a desperate shot at some fleeing enemy.

The night was held back by a hundred terrible fires. He shot at shadows and ghosts that moved against the flames. He sought the companionship of others who fought, like himself, in a lonely vastness where only the sound of fire and gunshots prevailed.

Later, he moved through the streets stricken with cold that he could not lose even when he pa.s.sed and stood close to a ma.s.s of burning rubble.

He had stopped shooting quite a long time ago, and he guessed he was out of bullets. The next time he met someone, he thought, he would ask them to look in his pockets and see if any were left.

He kept walking. He pa.s.sed streets where the black, charcoal arms of the skeletons of houses raised to the sky. He pa.s.sed the hot columns of smoke and continued to shiver with cold as they steamed upward to the clouds. He pa.s.sed others but no one spoke. After a while he threw his gun away because it was too heavy to carry and he was too tired to walk any more.

The falling snow was covering the ruins with a blanket of kind obscurity. Ken kneeled down and was surprised to observe that he wasn't cold any more. He lay full length in the whiteness, cradling his head on his arms, and peace and stillness such as he had never known before closed over him.

It seemed an eternity later that there was a voice capable of rousing him, a familiar voice calling out in anguish, "Ken, Ken--this is your dad."

He responded, although it was like answering in a dream. "Take care of them, Dad," he said. "Don't let anything happen to them. A woman and two children. Tom Doyle's the name--don't forget that, Tom Doyle."

Chapter 17. _Balance of Nature_

He lay between white sheets, and the stench of burning things was everywhere, in the air that he breathed, in the clean white covers that were over him. His own flesh seemed to smell of it.

He was not quite sure if he were still in a world of dreams or if this were real. It was a golden world; the snow-covered ground beyond the window was gilded with rich, yellow light. He remembered something about such light that was not pleasant. He had forgotten just what it was.

Maria La.r.s.en stood at the foot of his bed. She smiled as his eyes opened. "h.e.l.lo, Ken," she said. "I've been waiting so long. I've been afraid you'd never wake up."

"Tom Doyle," he said. "Did you find Tom Doyle?"

Maria frowned. "I don't know who you mean!"

"You haven't found his family yet?" Ken cried, struggling to rise in the bed. "Go and find them right now. I promised Tom Doyle I'd do it."