Doomsday Morning M Read online

  I was glad, and a little sorry.

  Guthrie said, “Listen. Hear that?”

  A dry stick had snapped somewhere downhill in the dark beneath the trees. Another a little to the right. Two or three more to the left. A good many men were coming uphill toward us through the redwoods, spread far out, walking slowly. We were very silent now. Nobody coughed or stirred. We were a single encircling fortress of tensity and waiting, every sense strained toward the oncoming men. At that moment I had no awareness of myself as a separate thing at all. I was fully a part of Comus and the defenders of the station, and the fortress of tension we created around us in the night, a closed circle domed over with listening and watching.

  Guthrie’s voice was a breath in my ear. “Down there—see?”

  I couldn’t see. Only a shadow that moved fast behind the trees and was gone. Then off to the left a hiss and a sighing cough burst out, and I saw a flash of bluish light and a man under the trees fell backward and thudded to the ground without a single sound except the sound of falling. The hiss and the cough was a scatter-gun in operation. I was abstractly surprised at how silent they were. They only cough and spit blue fire politely—and mince to shreds any surface they strike.

  I found my own gun at my shoulder and my cold finger on the trigger. But I didn’t see anything to shoot at. I had an instant’s vision of Harris’s round, balding face, the man in the torn brown sweater. Rebels, sure. But did I really want to mince them with a scatter-gun? Could I?

  Somebody down the slope called a hoarse, low question. Somebody else answered uncertainly. Then a man broke cover and started up the hill, and Guthrie’s gun beside me sighed and flashed blue fire, and the man’s shoutwas cut off and smashed backward in his throat as he fell.

  A rifle cracked among the trees and I heard something whine nasally past and strike fire upon the side of the truck next to me. The sound was like a truck backfiring down by the river and a bullet smacked loud on the resonant steel.

  Instantly all along the row of trucks the hissing cough and the fans of blue flame sprang out as if the trucks were one long, segmented dragon wheezing and spitting fire. Guthrie glanced at me irritably, saying, “Go on, shoot, shoot! Wipe them out fast! Sweep the hillside!”

  I saw dark shapes drop and lie jerking a little on the slope. I saw the flash of gunfire down there and heard bullets whine. I wondered with some abstract chamber of the mind whether our troupe was still asleep back there, drugged with weariness and dope, thinking the rifle shots were trucks on the highway, perhaps, and the distant shouts truckers going off duty. Or were they awake and cowering?

  The whole arc of the dragon was hissing now, spitting blue flame from every joint. And still I could not fire.

  I could not take sides.

  Beside me I heard Guthrie give a sudden grunt. I had never heard quite that sound before, but I knew what it meant. Maybe some ancestral memory from the great wars of the last century. I knew. I whipped around toward him and saw his face for a moment drained and stark in the blue moonlight. The blood began to seep through the checkered shirt high on the shoulder and he sighed a little and said, looking down, “Not bad—I think. Too high.” Then he glanced up and his face convulsed suddenly and he said, “Rohan—shoot, shoot! Over there!”

  I spun back to look. There were three men running up the slope toward us, crouching, clear as day in the bright moonlight. The foremost was looking me right in the face and everything inside me seemed to turn over in one quick heave of horror and revulsion.

  There was so much about him to take in with one glance. I can see him now in every detail, and I think I always will. But it takes the mind a little while to sort out what the eye sees. I only knew then that a shock of hatred and revolt went curling outward from the pit of my stomach, a shock as strong as sudden pain even before I understood what it was I saw.

  He wore a red Comus coat perfectly fitted and tailored to his body, but open down the front over a bare, shaggy chest and stained with grease and dirt. He looked thick because of all the things he was carrying. Two dead and headless chickens hung by their feet from his belt, blood streaking down his pale gray trouser legs from the bloodstained necks. On the other side of his belt there swung by its silver chain a woman’s evening bag flashing with brilliants. He had two necklaces around his neck over the stained Comus coat and the tatters of the open shirt beneath it. One was a string of pearls. The other——

  I wondered why anybody would trouble to string dried apricots like that, but even as the wonder formed I knew they weren’t apricots. Apricots don’t bleed. So I knew what they had to be. It’s strange how like dried apricot halves human ears can look, strung like trophies into a necklace. A great many human ears. The white shirt was dark in the moonlight where the necklace crossed it.

  I can still see his face, if I let myself. But there was nothing human about it. Not in the eyes, or anywhere behind the thick, intent features. I squeezed the trigger of my scatter-gun at last, with perfect confidence, knowing how badly this needed doing.

  It gave me a savage pleasure to hear him grunt as the charge struck him. I felt the jolt of the gun against my shoulder, heard its cough, swung it left to catch the man beside the one who was just now falling. The blue flash illumined him briefly and I saw he too wore a necklace over a blue stained shirt with a fragment of white paper pinned to it. A travesty of Charlie Starr’s insignia. Or maybe no travesty. There were renegades from both sides here.

  The thoughts flashed through my head like the blue flash of the scatter-gun as I pulled the trigger twice and the last of the three men thudded backward to the moonlit ground, puffing up dust from the pine needles when he hit them.

  I remember almost nothing about what came after that. But I know the whole episode took place in a shorter time than I’d ever have believed possible, except that time itself extends under pressures like this. It ran its course and ended in less than a quarter of an hour from the first shot to the last, and for the most part it had happened as silently as a dream. And now everything was as still as death itself out there in the woods. The looters had filtered on past. The raid was over. But far off and muffled by the mountains I heard another distant outburst of rifle fire as I went heavily back to the station to turn in my gun.

  Passing our parked caravan, I paused to put my head in at the door, incredulous that they could have slept through it, even under drugs. Blankets rustled as I looked in and Pod Henken’s voice asked thickly if anything was wrong. I said in a soothing voice that nothing was, and heard him settle back. Roy didn’t stir. I paused to look at the two trucks in the moonlight for a moment, feeling a fleeting and foolish paternal warmth for the troupe over whose slumbers I had just stood guard.

  Guthrie sat at the counter in the station, elbows on the table, rolling a water glass between his hands with an inch of scotch in the bottom of it. The station was still dark except for the little blue flame under the coffee urn and I could see him only dimly. He looked pale even in this light, and his face had a drawn look, as if gravity were somehow pulling a little more strongly on him than it had ten minutes earlier. He turned painfully toward me, moving his bandaged shoulder no more than he had to.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Not bad.” He drank a single swallow of whiskey and shut his eyes as it ran down his throat. “No harm done. Lost a little blood is all. Nobody has to know about it if we keep our mouths shut.”

  I sat down beside him and reached, uninvited, for the bottle on the counter. My shakes had come back strongly and the scotch helped only partially. “Who were they?” I asked. “Out there—ooters. Are they rebels?”

  Guthrie shook his head. “Renegades, mostly, from both sides. Deserters from Comus. Jail-breakers. Gangs as big as this one get out of control for the locals.”

  “Can’t Comus——”

  “Comus doesn’t want to. Use your head. These people wanted to run things their own way—let ‘em.”

  “What about us, thoug
h?” I asked. “How about tomorrow? Is the campsite safe any more?” I turned my head to listen and thought I heard the distant firing again, perhaps around some other isolated farmhouse that hadn’t been warned in time. “If I’d known things could get this bad—I don’t know. I can make my own choice, but how much of a right have I got to choose for the others? For Cressy, say. Or the old people.”

  I saw the trouble on his face. He was staring down into the amber deeps of his glass as if it were some infathomable well with wisdom, maybe, at the bottom. He said, “Cressy,” in a meditative voice, his eyes looking sad and hooded.

  I prodded him gently. “Cressy?”

  He blew out his breath, winching as the shoulder muscles under the bandage moved. The breath smelled of scotch so heavily I wondered how full the water glass had been to start with.

  “Rohan,” he said suddenly, turning to meet my eyes, “you answer me something. You killed a man tonight. Probably your first. How do you feel about that?”

  I shut my eyes briefly and tested myself, a sort of careful prodding for sensitive areas in the mind. “I don’t know. Not yet. Yes, he was the first. I shot two more later, and I may have hit more than that. I didn’t regard them as men, but that’s quibbling. Maybe it’ll hit me with a real jolt tomorrow, when I’ve quieted down. Why?”

  “It’s always a jolt,” he said. “I’ve done it many times, in line of duty, just as you did tonight. I never get used to it. But it’s part of my job.” He lowered his voice, looking into the empty glass and not at me. “Parts of my job I don’t like. Maybe it was a mistake to try to come bade after all these years. When you’re young you never doubt yourself. You never wonder if you’re justified. But as a man gets older he learns to doubt. Whether he can do a thing—whether he should.”

  He rubbed a hand across his eyes, hesitated, and then said, “You and I have a lot in common, Mr. Rohan. We’ve both been away from our jobs too long. We’ve both had to come back into a real world that’s a pretty merciless place sometimes. And we have one more thing in common.” He gave me a quick glance. “I’ve been drinking,” he said, “or I probably wouldn’t be talking like this. The fact is I lost my wife too, about a year ago. We’d been married thirty years.”

  I don#8217;t know whether he really paused or whether in my mind a moment of complete silence fell.

  “You asked about Cressy,” he said. “Maybe you wonder why I think about her more than you’d expect from a man my age. I’m not making a fool of myself. It’s just—she puts me so much in mind of my wife when I first met her. I don’t know if she’s told you anything about herself, Mr. Rohan. She’s had a hard row to hoe. I admire the girl. She’s like Bess in more than looks. If we’d ever had a daughter…” He let his voice die. Then he set down his empty glass carefully.

  “You asked me a tough question, Mr. Rohan. How much of a right have you and I got to make a choice for the rest of the troupe when their safety’s at stake this way? I know how you feel. I know how they feel, too. I’ve got a lot of sympathy for the old people, and Polly and Roy have a big problem, and Cressy——Well, I can only tell you the answer I’m making.” He swung round on the stool and looked me right in the eye.

  “We’re going on with our job until we finish,” he said in a firm voice. “That’s what we’re going to do.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE BIRDS SANG, the chipmunks darted, the morning sunlight moved warm and red up the gigantic trunks of the trees. Sempervirens is their name—the ever living redwoods. They’d seen a lot in the past couple of thousand years. They’d seen plenty last night. They would stand here to see much, much more. Last night was nothing. It hadn’t happened.

  When I came down to the fire after breakfast the clearing had bloomed with enormous yellow and blue flowers as large as washtubs, hanging from a rope stretched between trees. Polly, stooping over the water bucket, shook moisture from the crisp, belling skirts of a pink circlet and barked with sudden laughter at my expression.

  “We open tomorrow, don’t we? I thought you’d want dress rehearsals today.” She upended a three-foot tube and shook the last crumpled circle of ruffles out, soused it in the bucket. She looked tired. The prominent blue eyes were a little bloodshot and the lines in her face seemed deeper this morning than usual.

  What had happened last night had been, in a way, reorienting to me. I’d forgotten the play. I’d forgotten the rebels and my promises. I’d forgotten Nye and whatever it was that lay behind his call to me that night. Everything except the things that happened in the moonlight beyond my gun muzzle had receded and shifted focus in some indefinable way. Seeing Polly still tired from yesterday’s rehearsals, seeing the costumes lined up for today’s, bridged the gap abruptly and I found myself back with a jolt in my everyday existence. It was an uncomfortable feeling.

  “Rohan,” Polly said suddenly, “I want to talk to you. Carry this bucket over to the washhouse for me, will you? I want a little privacy.”

  The needles bounced resilently under our feet. I glanced around the clearing as we went, looking for traces of what had happened here last night. Nothing showed. If men had fallen in the clearing, other men had dragged them away.

  Polly said her abrupt voice, but quietly, “Rohan, something happened last night. What was it?”

  I gave her an uneasy look, quickly averted. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Don’t give me that. I want to know. There was trouble on the road, wasn’t there? Shooting?”

  “Maybe you had a nightmare,” I said. “It’s noisy on the highway, sure. Trucks backfiring sound like shooting sometimes.”

  “I heard yelling,” Polly insisted, but she looked puzzled. “We slept like the dead, but I know I heard men yelling and gunfire somewhere, not very far off.”

  “Did you get up to see?”

  “No, I didn’t. I was too groggy. By the time I decided I’d better it had stopped. But I know something happened, Rohan. There’s a—I don’t know what. A feeling in the air this morning. Things are going on around here I don’t like. I have a right to know what they are.”

  “Why do you think I know any more than you do?” I asked.

  She searched my face with large, anxious eyes under the brassy hair. Uneasiness, weariness, long-term unhappiness were in them. You couldn’t know her even is long as I had without realizing here was a woman who had carried a heavy load a long, long way. She said in a low voice:

  “Roy and I need this job, Rohan. We get a good big bonus if we carry it through. Can’t you understand? I have to make the decision for us both and I haven’t got enough facts to go on. I’ve got to find out if the danger’s bigger than the bonus. Look at me, Rohan. What happened last night? I think you know. Tell me.”

  I didn’t want to look at her. Ever since I left Ted Nye in New York my confusion had been deepening, until by now my motives were more mixed than Polly’s. Far more mixed.

  It had looked so simple in New York. Come out to California and do the job. Come back to life, in a sense, back to the life I’d abandoned when Miranda abandoned the world and me. Guthrie and I together were staging comebacks into life. But I hadn’t thought it would be so difficult. Did it make sense to lie to Polly and say there was no danger? Did it make sense to stay on myself, knowing what I knew?

  “Roy depends on me, Rohan,” Polly said a little diffidently. “We’ve got to have that money. I don’t want to back out now. But if there’s really big trouble going on, if we’re in real danger, I’ve got to know. Tell me the truth, Rohan. Where do we stand?”

  I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t tell the truth. I had too much at stake myself. I knew that now, if I hadn’t known it before. The risks I had taken, the beating, the exhaustion, the dangers past and the dangers still to come, even the betrayal of Ted Nye for his own good and mine, even the risk that he knew about it—all this was nothing if I could earn the reward I wanted. Last night, looking at the sleeping caravans in the moonlight, I had felt a sense of foolish warmth
and responsibility for these people. I felt it still, but not enough to give up the goal I was working for.

  All I could do was look at Polly with sympathy and resolution, and lie to her.

  “As far as I know,” I said, “there’s no danger. Does that answer your question?”

  The prominent blue eyes searched mine again. Without speaking she shook her head a little and turned away. I went after her in silence. Guthrie looked out of his truck and gave me a casual salute with his good arm. He looked tough and placid, an old man who wasn’t old at all, an old man who would take a lot of killing when the time came.

  I saw Cressy combing her hair before a mirror hung on the side of a redwood, fastening an earring in her ear. I thought of the men with the trophy necklaces last night. Men who fought on both sides, I told myself, whichever side suited them best for the moment.

  Men like me.

  Thursday went by like a nightmare. We still didn’t know our lines too well when we had to speak them in action. Scenes that should have been swift and biting drew out into lethargy. Scenes that should have built to a climax limped and went flat. I was beginning to get the kind of grouping I wanted, so the stage at any given moment would present a balanced picture, and a certain rhythm of motion was developing. But it was all very slack still. Time after time we kicked over the grooves we had worn in the pine needles and went through the scenes without these obvious guides, and time after time we forgot them and fouled up our crosses and groupings. Unless we could chalk the street when we gave our play, it didn’t seem we’d get through the performances.

  When I was off stage myself I could yell at the cast for errors and see for myself when things went wrong. But on stage, as part of the play, I made the same mistakes they did. And yet, in a way, it was good to have these problems. Here at least was a job I knew how to do. And the more I concentrated, the farther into forgetfulness I could push those other problems, the ones that had no answers.