DARK BENEDICTION
Always fearful of being set upon during the night, Paul slept uneasily despite his weariness from the long trek southward.
When dawn broke, he rolled out of his blankets and found himself still stiff with fatigue.
He kicked dirt over the remains of the campfire and breakfasted on a tough forequarter of cold boiled rabbit which he washed down with a swallow of earthy-tasting ditchwater.
Then he buckled the cartridge belt about his waist, leaped the ditch, and climbed the embankment to the trafficless four-lane highway whose pavement was scattered with blown leaves and unsightly debris dropped by a long-departed throng of refugees whose only wish had been to escape from one another.
Paul, with characteristic independence, had decided to go where the crowds had been the thickest—to the cities—on the theory that they would now be deserted, and therefore noncontagious.
The fog lay heavy over the silent land, and for a moment he paused groping for cognizance of direction.
Then he saw the stalled car on the opposite shoulder of the road—a late model convertible, but rusted, flat-tired, with last year’s license plates, and most certainly out of fuel.
It obviously had been deserted by its owner during the exodus, and he trusted in its northward heading as he would have trusted the reading of a compass.
He turned right and moved south on the empty highway.
Somewhere just ahead in the gray vapor lay the outskirts of Houston.
He had seen the high skyline before the setting of yesterday’s sun, and knew that his journey would soon be drawing to a close.
Occasionally he passed a deserted cottage or a burned-out roadside tavern, but he did not pause to scrounge for food.
The exodus would have stripped such buildings clean.
Pickings should be better in the heart of the metropolitan area, he thought—where the hysteria had swept humanity away quickly.
Suddenly Paul froze on the highway, listening to the fog.
Footsteps in the distance—footsteps and a voice singing an absent-minded ditty to itself.
No other sounds penetrated the sepulchral silence which once had growled with the life of a great city.
Anxiety caught him with clammy hands.
An old man’s voice it was, crackling and tuneless.
Paul groped for his holster and brought out the revolver he had taken from a deserted police station.
“Stop where you are, dermie!” he bellowed at the fog. “I’m armed.”
The footsteps and the singing stopped.
Paul strained his eyes to penetrate the swirling mist-shroud.
After a moment, the oldster answered:
“Sure foggy, ain’t it, sonny?
Can’t see ya.
Better come a little closer.
I ain’t no dermie.”
Loathing choked in Paul’s throat.
“The hell you’re not.
Nobody else’d be crazy enough to sing.
Get off the road!
I’m going south, and if I see you I’ll shoot.
Now move!”
“Sure, sonny.
I’ll move.
But I’m no dermie.
I was just singing to keep myself company.
I’m past caring about the plague.
I’m heading north, where there’s people, and if some dermie hears me a’singing… why, I’ll tell him t’come jine in.
What’s the good o’ being healthy if yer alone?”
While the old man spoke, Paul heard his sloshing across the ditch and climbing through the brush.
Doubt assailed him.
Maybe the old crank wasn’t a dermie.
An ordinary plague victim would have whimpered and pleaded for satisfaction of his strange craving—the laying-on of hands, the feel of healthy skin beneath moist gray palms.
Nevertheless, Paul meant to take no chances with the oldster.
“Stay back in the brush while I walk past!” he called.
“Okay, sonny.
You go right by.