He meandered on, into another, larger chamber, one in which rays of sunlight lay like golden bars across piles of papers, files, and miscellany on a big desk in the center of the room. The clean-up detail on this ship needed a butt-kicking! He stumbled over a gilded golf trophy and almost went crashing down into the mess. This room was familiar; it seemed like home. Yet he didn’t remember winning any trophies. No, this couldn’t be his place.
A door opened onto a corridor, along here somewhere was a stairwell. Up there was another room he knew. Why did he feel terror when he thought about it? He pushed at the stairway door. It was locked. Memory whispered that this was just as well.
He let his feet carry him away. They were good feet, really learning their job! They bore him along other passages, past waiting rooms filled with silent, unmoving customers, into a big foyer full of desks and counters and computers and office machines.
And bodies.
All kinds of bodies: men, women, children; young and old; thin and fat; everybody rotting cheerily together in corrupt camaraderie. By the central desk an Arab in a bumoose slumped beside an Israeli officer in undress uniform, together in death as they could never be in life (great line! from some movie poster?). Next to them a bronzed American woman in a yellow sun-dress and harlequin glasses sat on the floor like a forgotten doll. At first he thought she was alive, but when he got closer he knew he didn’t want to pull off those glasses and look into the eyes beneath.
He staggered, stepped, and waltzed across the litter-strewn floor. Memory warned him that he needed fresh air, but he couldn’t smell a thing.
The street outside was full of drifting haze. Mist? Fog? No, smoke. Somebody was barbecuing rotten meat. Somehow he did smell that. It was close to sunset — or sunrise? — and the sun’s red ball peered into the world like the eye of the Bloody Beast of Armageddon. A dull-orange glow lined the purple horizon, and fingers of greasy, black smoke clawed up at the sky.
The city was on fire.
It was just what was needed: Keep Your City Clean! Be a Good Citizen! No Littering! Pick Up Your Trash! Bum, baby, bum!
He was tired, and he hurt. Best to rest here, at the top of the shallow steps leading down to the street. He slumped against the
stone balustrade and gazed out over a hellscape of abandoned cars, trucks, motorbikes, and bicycles. A heap of fruit from an upended produce van blocked the view to his left, but the fires behind it were lurid enough for a big-budget disaster movie. They didn’t have the best seats in the house, but these were okay! They could see. Let Beverly bitch all she wanted!
He was saddened more by the abandoned suitcases and the cars jammed with household goods nobody would ever use again than he was by the bodies. The voiceless, faceless, inoffensive dead: these were not bloated and horrid, like those back in his building; these were decent folk, already drying out, grey with drifting ash and dust, food for the wheeling, screeching birds and the clouds of blue-black flies. These corpses were working hard at blending into their environment. Good citizens all!
He dozed. The westering sunlight soothed his aching limbs.
He awoke. Something had moved out there.
Panic poured up into his throat. It was night, a shadow-ridden, red-black darkness punctuated with bursts of orange sparks and the boom of explosions behind the distant buildings. Beside him, Beverly Rowntree squeezed his arm and giggled. He hated that stupid giggle.
He heard footsteps: a slip-slap of sandals near a blue sedan jammed at an angle against the curb below him. In the middle blackness, amidst the welter of cars and trucks and bodies out in the street, he caught a stealthy crunch of boots.
A woman’s voice sounded tremulously from behind the car. “He’s alive, Sol! But he’s… he’s buck naked!”
The man called Sol emerged from behind an army truck some twenty feet away: a balding, stout, middle-aged, brawny individual with a jaw like Mussolini. He was dressed in a stained, white undershirt and shapeless, filthy slacks. He looked like a garage mechanic after a wallow in the grease pit. He shouted, “Shoot the gubber, Natalie! Watch out for an ambush!”
Sol had a gruff but pleasant voice; it reminded him of his own father. He stood up. Now was the time to speak up, say hello, sing out a cheery “Hi-i-i, there, everybody!” just like Junius Greenwald on TV. He struggled with lips of baked clay and a tongue of carved stone. No sound came out. He extended his hands, palms up.
“Shoot him!” Sol snarled. “Shoot the foozy!”
Natalie’s head appeared over the ash-dusted roof of the sedan. She had a skinny, bony face with eyes that were blank circles of orange light. A tide of terror swept over him: the hollow-eyed bogeyman of his childhood nightmares! Memory suggested, a trifle sarcastically, that the woman might just be wearing glasses.
“He don’t have no gun, Sol. Nobody up there with him.” She sounded as scared as his mother when his dad had gone in after a burglar in their pet shop. He held out his hands and strove to smile. In return Natalie waved her pistol at him. She edged to the side, around the sedan. He saw that she wore a smudged, short-sleeved, yellow blouse and white shorts with little happy-faces stitched on the pocket-flaps. She needed make-up and a decent hairdo. Now she looked too much like his mother.
Another, lighter voice came from farther up the street, “Come on, get on with it!” This speaker sounded forthright and efficient; he couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman.
The bald man looked as though he were sucking courage from the gleaming Israeli automatic rifle he clutched in both hands. He shuffled forward. “Okay, Riva, I don’t see nobody either. This gubber looks like he’s pog-dinkin’ gazoo! Shell-shocked, like. Dinkin’ naked already!”
The third person, the one named Riva, appeared from behind a mound of baggage and bedrolls fallen from a pickup truck. She was definitely female. Her wet-looking, black-leather pants and sun-top of fire-engine red were a statement: she was a macha, one of the militant feminists of the Banger movement. Her dark hair was as short as a boy’s, almost a crewcut, but she lacked the deliberate facial scars many machos wore. Under a glaze of sweat, smoke, and dirt, she had the appearance of a modeclass="underline" tall and willowy, flat-chested, with legs long enough to straddle an elephant. Crossbelts at her waist held a pair of automatic pistols, and she carried her stubby submachine gun as if she knew how to use it.
“Leave the dinker be!” Sol demanded. “We got to get to the airport. Come on!”
Natalie craned forward. “God, Sol, he looks like rotten meat!” She pointed. “What’s the matter with him? ‘N’ what’s that on his foot?”
The bald man scratched his chest. “Cover the foozy! Lemme look.” He stuck out a brawny hand. “Hey, you. C’mere.”
He smiled and obeyed. He had nothing to hide; he had buried the stash of pot Emily Pictrick had given him in the garden outside the high school. Let the principal search all he wanted.
“It’s a fuckin’ card. A card, like… tied to his fuckin’ toe!” Sol resembled a butcher trying to read his scale upside down. “It’s in Hebrew. Hey, Riva!”
“I heard. I ‘m here. ” The mocha’s accent identified her as a native Israeli. She came and bent down to squint.
“What?” Natalie jittered. “What is it?”
“It’s a… a tag. An identification tag from the police morgue.” She clicked her tongue in puzzlement. “It says this man is… dead.”
Somewhere far away a flower of yellow light bloomed upon the horizon. The thud-boom of an explosion bounded up the street toward them.
“He’s dead!” Natalie’s empty, glass eyes glittered red with fear-light.