With—”
“She won’t bother you,” he said as he gently disentangled the gun from the corpse.
He moved to a cupboard and found a box of shells behind an orange teapot.
“I may not be back, but I’ll send somebody.”
She buried her face in her plague-stained hands, and he stood for a moment watching her shoulders shiver.
“Don’t worry… I will send somebody.”
He stepped to the porcelain sink and pocketed a wafer-thin sliver of dry soap.
“What’s that for?” she muttered, looking up again.
He thought of a lie, then checked it.
“To wash you off of me,” he said truthfully. “I might have got too close.
Soap won’t do much good, but I’ll feel better.”
He looked at the corpse coolly.
“Didn’t do her much good.
Buckshot’s the best antiseptic all right.”
Willie moaned as he went out the door.
He heard her crying as he walked down to the waterfront.
She was still crying when he waded back to shore, after a thorough scrubbing.
He was sorry he’d spoken cruelly, but it was such a damned relief to get rid of her.
With the shotgun cradled on his arm, he began putting distance between himself and the sobbing.
But the sound worried his ears, even after he realized that he was no longer hearing her.
He strode a short distance inland past scattered fishing shanties, then took the highway toward the city whose outskirts he was entering.
It would be at least an hour’s trek to the end of the island where he would be most likely to encounter someone with medical training.
The hospitals were down there, the medical school, the most likely place for any charitable nuns—if Willie’s rumor were true.
Paul meant to capture a dermie doctor or nurse and force the amorous-handed maniac at gun-point to go to Willie’s aid.
Then he would be done with her.
When she stopped hurting, she would start craving—and he had no doubt that he would be the object of her manual affections.
The bay was wind-chopped in the moonglow, no longer glittering from the lights along 61st Street.
The oleanders along Broadway were choked up with weeds.
Cats or rabbits rustled in the tousled growth that had been a carefully tended parkway.
Paul wondered why the plague had chosen Man, and not the lower animals.
It was true that an occasional dog or cow was seen with the plague, but the focus was upon humanity.
And the craving to spread the disease was Man-directed, even in animals. It was as if the neural entity deliberately sought out the species with the most complex nervous system.
Was its onslaught really connected with the meteorite swarm?
Paul believed that it was.
In the first place, the meteorites had not been predicted.
They were not a part of the regular cosmic bombardment.
And then there was the strange report that they were manufactured projectiles, teeming with frozen microorganisms which came alive upon thawing.
In these days of tumult and confusion, however, it was hard.
Nevertheless Paul believed it.
Neuroderm had no first cousins among Earth diseases.
What manner of beings, then, had sent such a curse?
Potential invaders?
If so, they were slow in coming.
One thing was generally agreed upon by the scientists: the missiles had not been “sent” from another solar planet.
Their direction upon entering the atmosphere was wrong.
They could conceivably have been fired from an interplanetary launching ship, but their velocity was about equal to the theoretical velocity which a body would obtain in falling sunward from the near-infinite distance.
This seemed to hint the projectiles had come from another star.
Paul was startled suddenly by the flare of a match from the shadow of a building.
He stopped dead still in the street.
A man was leaning against the wall to light a cigarette.