“Mail call!” Harry cried cheerily. What the hell was going on here?
The sound of a gunshot matched the gentle tugging at the edge of his mailbag. Harry threw himself flat. The bag was higher than he was as he crawled for cover, and it jerked once, coinciding with another gunshot. A .22, he thought. Not much rifle. Certainly not much for the valley. He pulled himself behind a tree, his breath raspy and very loud in his own ears.
He wriggled the bag off his shoulder and set it down. He squatted and selected four envelopes tied with a rubber band. Crouched. Then, all in an instant, he sprinted for the Roman mailbox, slid the packet into it, and was running for cover again when the first shot came. He lay panting beside his mailbag, trying to think.
Harry wasn’t a policeman, he wasn’t armed, and there wasn’t anything he could do to help the Romans. No way!
And he couldn’t use the road. No cover.
The gully on the other side? It would be full of water, but it was the best he could do. Sprint across the road, then crawl on hands and knees…
But he’d have to leave the mailbag.
Why not? Who am I kidding? Hammerfall has come, and there’s no need for mail carriers. None. What does that make me?
He didn’t care much for the question.
“It makes me,” he said aloud, “a turkey who got good grades in high school by working his arse off, flunked out of college, got fired from every job he ever had…”
It makes me a mailman, goddammit! He lifted the heavy bag and crouched again. Things were quiet up there. Maybe they’d been shooting to keep him away? But what for?
He took in a deep breath. Do it now, he told himself. Before you’re too scared to do it at all. He dashed into the road, across, and dived toward the gulley. There was another shot, but he didn’t think the bullet had come anywhere close. Harry scuttled down the gulley, half crawling, half swimming mailbag shoved around onto his back to keep it out of the water.
There were no more shots. Thank God! The Many Names Ranch was only half a mile down the road. Maybe they had guns, or a telephone that worked… Did any telephones work? The Shire wasn’t precisely an official information source, but they’d been so sure.
“Never find a cop when you need one,” Harry muttered.
He’d have to be careful showing himself at Many Names. The owners might be a bit nervous. And if they weren’t, they damned well should be!
It was dusk when Harry reached Muchos Nombres Ranch. The rain had increased and was falling slantwise, and lightning played across the nearly black sky.
Muchos Nombres was thirty acres of hilly pastureland dotted with the usual great white boulders. Of the four families who jointly owned it, two would sometimes invite Harry in for coffee. The result was diffidence on Harry’s part. He never knew whose turn it was. The families each owned one week in four, and they treated the ranch as a vacation spot. Sometimes they traded off; sometimes they brought guests. The oversupply of owners had been unable to agree on a name, and had finally settled for Muchos Nombres. The Spanish fooled nobody.
Today Harry was fresh out of diffidence. He yelled his “Mail call!” and waited, expecting no answer. Presently he opened the gate and went on in.
He reached the front door like something dragged from an old grave. He knocked.
The door opened.
“Mail,” said Harry. “Hullo, Mr. Freehafer. Sorry to be so late, but there are some emergencies going.”
Freehafer had an automatic pistol. He looked Harry over with some care. Behind him the living room danced with candlelight, and it looked crowded with wary people. Doris Lilly said, “Why, it’s Harry! It’s all right, Bill. It’s Harry the mailman.”
Freehafer lowered the gun. “All right, pleased to meet you, Harry. Come on in. What emergencies?”
Harry stepped inside, out of the rain. Now he saw the third man, stepping around a doorjamb, laying a shotgun aside. “Mail,” said Harry, and he set down two magazines, the usual haul for Many Names. “Somebody shot at me from Carrie Roman’s place. It wasn’t anyone I know. I think the Romans are in trouble. Is your phone working?”
“No,” said Freehafer. “We can’t go out there tonight.”
“Okay. And my mail truck went off a hill, and I don’t know what the roads are like. Can you let me have a couch, or a stretch of rug, and something to eat?”
The hesitation was marked. “It’s the rug, I’m afraid,” Freehafer said. “Soup and a sandwich do you? We’re a little short.”
“I’d eat your old shoes,” said Harry.
It was canned tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, and it tasted like heaven. Between bites he got the story: how the Freehafers had started to leave on Tuesday, and seen the sky going crazy, and turned back. How the Lillys had arrived (it being their turn now) with the Rodenberries as guests, and their own two children. The end of the world had come and gone, the Rodenberries were on the couches, and nobody had yet tried to reach the supermarket in town.
“What is this with the end of the world?” Harry asked.
They told him. They showed him, in the magazines he’d brought. The magazines were damp but still readable. Harry read interviews with Sagan and Asimov and Sharps. He stared at artists’ conceptions of major meteor impacts. “They all think it’ll miss,” he said.
“It didn’t,” said Norman Lilly. He was a football player turned insurance executive, a broad-shouldered wall of a man who should have kept up his exercises. “Now what? We brought some seeds and farm stuff, just in case, but we didn’t bring any books. Do you know anything about farming, Harry?”
“No. People, I’ve had a rough day—”
“Right. No sense wasting candles,” said Norman.
All of the beds, blankets and couches were in use. Harry spent the night on a thick rug, swathed in three of Norman Lilly’s enormous bathrobes, his head on a chair pillow. He was comfortable enough, but he kept twitching himself awake.
Lucifer’s Hammer? End of the world? Crawling through mud while bullets punched into his mailbag and the letters inside. He kept waking with the memory of a nightmare, and always the nightmare was real.
Harry woke and counted days. First night he slept in the truck. Second with the Millers. Last night was the third. Three days since he’d reported in.
It was definitely the end of the world. The Wolf should have come looking for him with blood in his eye. He hadn’t. The power lines were still down. The phones weren’t working. No county road crews. Ergo, Hammerfall. The end of the world. It had really happened.
“Rise and shine!” Doris Lilly’s cheer was artificial. She tried to keep it up anyway. “Rise and shine! Come and get it or we throw it out.”
Breakfast wasn’t much. They shared with Harry, which was pretty damned generous of them. The Lilly children, eight and ten, stared at the adults. One of them complained that the TV wasn’t working. No one paid any attention.
“Now what?” Freehafer asked.
“We get food,” Doris Lilly said. “We have to find something to eat.”
“Where do you suggest we look?” Bill Freehafer asked. He wasn’t being sarcastic.
Doris shrugged. “In town? Maybe things aren’t as bad as… maybe they’re not so bad.”
“I want to watch TV,” Phil Lilly said.
“Not working,” Doris said absently. “I vote we go to town and see how things are. We can give Harry a ride—”
“TV now!” Phil screamed.
“Shut up,” his father said.
“Now!” the boy repeated.
Smack! Norman Lilly’s huge hand swept against the boy’s face.
“Norm!” his wife cried. The child screamed, more in surprise than pain. “You never hit the children before—”