_Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange and unnatural._
--Hamlet
When I woke the light was almost full amber and I could feel no flesh
against mine, only the blanket under me. I very slowly rolled over and
there she was, sitting on the corner of the blanket not two feet from
me, combing her long black hair with a big, wide-toothed comb she'd
screwed into the leather-and-metal cap over her wrist stump.
She'd put on her pants and shirt, but the former were rolled up to her
knees and the latter, though tucked in, wasn't buttoned.
She was looking at me, contemplating me you might say, quite dreamily
but with a faint, easy smile.
I smiled back at her.
It was lovely.
Too lovely. There had to be something wrong with it.
There was. Oh, nothing big. Just a solitary trifle--nothing worth
noticing really.
But the tiniest solitary things can sometimes be the most irritating,
like _one_ mosquito.
When I'd first rolled over she'd been combing her hair straight back,
revealing a wedge of baldness following the continuation of her forehead
scar deep back across her scalp. Now with a movement that was swift
though not hurried-looking she swept the mass of her hair forward and to
the left, so that it covered the bald area. Also her lips straightened
out.
I was hurt. She shouldn't have hidden her bit of baldness, it was
something we had in common, something that brought us closer. And she
shouldn't have stopped smiling at just that moment. Didn't she realize
I loved that blaze on her scalp just as much as any other part of her,
that she no longer had any need to practice vanity in front of me?
Didn't she realize that as soon as she stopped smiling, her
contemplative stare became an insult to me? What right had she to stare,
critically I felt sure, at my bald head? What right had she to know
about the nearly-healed ulcer on my left shin?--that was a piece of
information worth a man's life in a fight. What right had she to cover
up, anyways, while I was still naked? She ought to have waked me up so
that we could have got dressed as we'd undressed, together. There were
lots of things wrong with her manners.
Oh, I know that if I'd been able to think calmly, maybe if I'd just had
some breakfast or a little coffee inside me, or even if there'd been
some hot breakfast to eat at that moment, I'd have recognized my
irritation for the irrational, one-mosquito surge of negative feeling
that it was.
Even without breakfast, if I'd just had the knowledge that there was a
reasonably secure day ahead of me in which there'd be an opportunity for
me to straighten out my feelings, I wouldn't have been irked, or at
least being irked wouldn't have bothered me terribly.
But a sense of security is an even rarer commodity in the Deathlands
than a hot breakfast.
Given just the ghost of a sense of security and/or some hot breakfast,
I'd have told myself that she was merely being amusingly coquettish
about her bald streak and her hair, that it was natural for a woman to
try to preserve some mystery about herself in front of the man she beds
with.
But you get leery of any kind of mystery in the Deathlands. It makes you
frightened and angry, like it does an animal. Mystery is for cultural
queers, strictly. The only way for two people to get along together in
the Deathlands, even for a while, is never to hide anything and never to
make a move that doesn't have an immediate clear explanation. You can't
talk, you see, certainly not at first, and so you can't explain anything
(most explanations are just lies and dreams, anyway), so you have to be
doubly careful and explicit about everything you do.
* * * * *
This girl wasn't being either. Right now, on top of her other
gaucheries, she was unscrewing the comb from her wrist--an unfriendly if
not quite a hostile act, as anyone must admit.
Understand, please, I wasn't _showing_ any of these negative reactions
of mine any more than she was showing hers, except for her stopping
smiling. In fact _I hadn't_ stopped smiling, I was playing the game to
the hilt.
But inside me everything was stewed up and the other urge had come back
and presently it would begin to grow again. That's the trouble, you
know, with sex as a solution to the problem of the two urges. It's fine
while it lasts but it wears itself out and then you're back with Urge
Number One and you have nothing left to balance it with.
Oh, I wouldn't kill this girl today, I probably wouldn't seriously think
of killing her for a month or more, but Old Urge Number One would be
there and growing, mostly under cover, all the time. Of course there
were things I could do to slow its growth, lots of little gimmicks, in
fact--I was pretty experienced at this business.
* * * * *
For instance, I could take a shot at talking to her pretty soon. For a
catchy starter, I could tell her about Nowhere, how these five other
buggers and me found ourselves independently skulking along after this
scavenging expedition from Porter, how we naturally joined forces in
that situation, how we set a pitfall for their alky-powered jeep and
wrecked it and them, how when our haul turned out to be unexpectedly big
the four of us left from the kill chummied up and padded down together
and amused each other for a while and played games, you might say. Why,
at one point we even had an old crank phonograph going and read some
books. And, of course, how when the loot gave out and the fun wore off,
we had our murder party and I survived along with, I think, a bugger
named Jerry--at any rate, he was gone when the blood stopped spurting,
and I'd had no stomach for tracking him, though I probably should have.
And in return she could tell me how she had killed off her last set of
girlfriends, or boyfriends, or friend, or whatever it was.
After that, we could have a go at exchanging news, rumors and
speculations about local, national and world events. Was it true that
Atlantic Highlands had planes of some sort or were they from Europe?
Were they actually crucifying the Deathlanders around Walla Walla or
only nailing up their dead bodies as dire warnings to others such? Had
Manteno made Christianity compulsory yet, or were they still tolerating
Zen Buddhists? Was it true that Los Alamos had been completely wiped out
by plague, but the area taboo to Deathlanders because of the robot
guards they'd left behind--metal guards eight feet tall who tramped
across the white sands, wailing? Did they still have free love in
Pacific Palisades? Did she know there'd been a pitched battle fought by
expeditionary forces from Ouachita and Savannah Fortress? Over the loot
of Birmingham, apparently, after yellow fever had finished off that
principality. Had she rooted out any "observers" lately?--some of the
"civilized" communities, the more "scientific" ones, try to maintain a
few weather stations and the like in the Deathlands, camouflaging them
elaborately and manning them with one or two impudent characters to whom
we give a hard time if we uncover them. Had she heard the tale that was
going around that South America and the French Riviera had survived the
Last War absolutely untouched?--and the obviously ridiculous rider that
they had blue skies there and saw stars every third night? Did she think
that subsequent conditions were showing that the Earth actually had
plunged into an interstellar dust cloud coincidentally with the start of
the Last War (the dust cloud used as a cover for the first attacks, some
said) or did she still hold with the majority that the dust was solely
of atomic origin with a little help from volcanoes and dry spells? How
many green sunsets had she seen in the last year?
* * * * *
After we'd chewed over those racy topics and some more like them, and
incidentally got bored with guessing and fabricating, we might, if we
felt especially daring and conversation were going particularly well,
even take a chance on talking a little about our childhoods, about how
things were before the Last War (though she was almost too young for
that)--about the _little_ things we remembered--the big things were much
too dangerous topics to venture on and sometimes even the little
memories could suddenly twist you up as if you'd swallowed lye.
But after that there wouldn't be anything left to talk about. Anything
you'd risk talking about, that is. For instance, no matter how long we
talked, it was very unlikely that we'd either of us tell the other
anything complete or very accurate about how we lived from day to day,
about our techniques of surviving and staying sane or at least
functional--that would be too imprudent, it would go too much against
the grain of any player of the murder game. Would I tell her, or anyone,
about how I worked the ruses of playing dead and disguising myself as a
woman, about my trick of picking a path just before dark and then
circling back to it by a pre-surveyed route, about the chess games I
played with myself, about the bottle of green, terribly hot-looking
powder I carried to sprinkle behind me to bluff off pursuers? A fat
chance of my revealing things like that!
And when all the talk was over, what would it have gained us? Our
minds would be filled with a lot of painful stuff better kept
buried--meaningless hopes, scraps of vicarious living in "cultured"
communities, memories that were nothing but melancholy given concrete
form. The melancholy is easiest to bear when it's the diffused
background for everything; and all garbage is best kept in the can. Oh
yes, our talking would have gained us a few more days of infatuation, of
phantom security, but those we could have--almost as many of them, at
any rate--without talking.
For instance things were smoothing over already between her and me again
and I no longer felt quite so irked. She'd replaced the comb with an
inoffensive-looking pair of light pliers and was doing up her hair with
the metal shavings. And I was acting as if content to watch her, as in a
way I was. I'd still made no move to get dressed.
She looked real sweet, you know, primping herself that way. Her face was
a little flat, but it was young, and the scar gave it just the fillip it
needed.
But what was going on behind that forehead right now, I asked myself? I
felt real psychic this morning, my mind as clear as a bottle of White
Rock you find miraculously unbroken in a blasted tavern, and the answers
to the question I'd asked myself came effortlessly.
* * * * *
She was telling herself she'd got herself a man again, a man who was
adequate in the primal clutch (I gave myself that pat on the back), and
that she wouldn't have to be plagued and have her safety endangered by
_that_ kind of mind-dulling restlessness and yearning for a while.
She was lightly playing around with ideas about how she'd found a home
and a protector, knowing she was kidding herself, that it was the most
gimcracky feminine make-believe, but enjoying it just the same.
She was sizing me up, deciding in detail just what I went for in a
woman, what whetted my interest, so she could keep that roused as long
as seemed desirable or prudent to her to continue our relation.
She was kicking herself, only lightly to begin with, because she hadn't
taken any precautions--because we who've escaped hot death against all
reasonable expectations by virtue of some incalculable resistance to the
ills of radioactivity, quite often find we've escaped sterility too. If
she should become pregnant, she was telling herself, then she had a real
sticky business ahead of her where no man could be trusted for a second.
And because she was thinking of this and because she was obviously a
realistic Deathlander, she was reminding herself that a woman is
basically less impulsive and daring and resourceful than a man and so
had always better be sure she gets in the first blow. She would be
thinking that I was a realist myself and a smart man, one able to
understand her predicament quite clearly--and because of that a much
sooner danger to her. She was feeling Old Number One Urge starting to
grow in her again and wondering whether it mightn't be wisest to give it
the hot-house treatment.
That is the trouble with a clear mind. For a little while you see things
as they really are and you can accurately predict how they're going to
shape the future ... and then suddenly you realize you've predicted
yourself a week or a month into the future and you can't live the
intervening time any more because you've already imagined it in detail.
People who live in communities, even the cultural queers of our maimed
era, aren't much bothered by it--there must be some sort of blinkers
they hand you out along with the key to the city--but in the Deathlands
it's a fairly common phenomenon and there's no hiding from it.
* * * * *
Me and my clear mind!--once again it had done me out of days of fun,
changed a thoroughly-explored love affair into a one night stand. Oh,
there was no question about it, this girl and I were finished, right
this minute, as of now, because she was just as psychic as I was this
morning and had sensed every last thing that I'd been thinking.
With a movement smooth enough not to look rushed I swung into a crouch.
She was on her knees faster than that, her left hand hovering over the
little set of tools for her stump, which like any good mechanic she'd
lined up neatly on the edge of the blanket--the hook, the comb, a long
telescoping fork, a couple of other items, and the knife. I'd grabbed a
handful of blanket, ready to jerk it from under her. She'd seen that I'd
grabbed it. Our gazes dueled.
There was a high-pitched whine over our heads! Quite loud from the
start, though it sounded as if it were very deep up in the haze. It
swiftly dropped in pitch and volume.
The top of the skeletal cracking plant across the freeway glowed with
St. Elmo's fire! Three times it glowed that way, so bright we could see
the violet-blue flames of it reaching up despite the full amber
daylight.
The whine died away but in the last moment, paradoxically, it seemed to
be coming closer!
This shared threat--for any unexpected event is a threat in the
Deathlands and a mysterious event doubly so--put a stop to our murder
game. The girl and I were buddies again, buddies to be relied on in a
pinch, for the duration of the threat at least. No need to say so or to
reassure each other of the fact in any way, it was taken for granted.
Besides, there was no time. We had to use every second allowed us in
getting ready for whatever was coming.
First I grabbed up Mother. Then I relieved myself--fear made it easy.
Then I skinned into my pants and boots, slapped in my teeth, thrust the
blanket and knapsack into the shallow cave under the edge of the
freeway, looking around me all the time so as not to be surprised from
any quarter.
Meanwhile the girl had put on her boots, located her dart gun, unscrewed
the pliers from her stump, put the knife in, and was arranging her scarf
so it made a sling for the maimed arm--I wondered why but had no time to
waste guessing, even if I'd wanted to, for at that moment a small dull
silver plane, beetle-shaped more than anything else, loomed out of the
haze beyond the cracking plant and came silently drifting down toward
us.
The girl thrust her satchel into the cave and along with it her dart
gun. I caught her idea and tucked Mother into my pants behind my back.
I'd thought from the first glimpse of it that the plane was disabled--I
guess it was its silence that gave me the idea. This theory was
confirmed when one of its very stubby wings or vanes touched a corner
pillar of the cracking plant. The plane was moving in too slow a glide
to be wrecked, in fact it was moving in a slower glide than I would have
believed possible--but then it's many years since I have seen a plane in
flight.
It wasn't wrecked but the little collision spun it around twice in a
lazy circle and it landed on the freeway with a scuffing noise not fifty
feet from us. You couldn't exactly say it had crashed in, but it stayed
at an odd tilt. It looked crippled all right.
An oval door in the plane opened and a man dropped lightly out on the
concrete. And what a man! He was nearer seven feet tall than six,
close-cropped blond hair, face and hands richly tanned, the rest of him
covered by trim garments of a gleaming gray. He must have weighed as
much as the two of us together, but he was beautifully built, muscular
yet supple-seeming. His face looked brightly intelligent and
even-tempered and kind.
Yes, kind!--damn him! It wasn't enough that his body should fairly glow
with a health and vitality that was an insult to our seared skins and
stringy muscles and ulcers and half-rotted stomachs and half-arrested
cancers, he had to look kind too--the sort of man who would put you to
bed and take care of you, as if you were some sort of interesting sick
fox, and maybe even say a little prayer for you, and all manner of other
abominations.
* * * * *
I don't think I could have endured my fury standing still. Fortunately
there was no need to. As if we'd rehearsed the whole thing for hours,
the girl and I scrambled up onto the freeway and scurried toward the man
from the plane, cunningly swinging away from each other so that it would
be harder for him to watch the two of us at once, but not enough to make
it obvious that we attended an attack from two quarters.
We didn't run though we covered the ground as fast as we dared--running
would have been too much of a give-away too, and the Pilot, which was
how I named him to myself, had a strange-looking small gun in his right
hand. In fact the way we moved was part of our act--I dragged one leg as
if it were crippled and the girl faked another sort of limp, one that
made her approach a series of half curtsies. Her arm in the sling was
all twisted, but at the same time she was accidently showing her
breasts--I remember thinking _you won't distract this breed bull that
way, sister, he probably has a harem of six-foot heifers_. I had my head
thrown back and my hands stretched out supplicatingly. Meanwhile the
both of us were babbling a blue streak. I was rapidly croaking something
like, "Mister for God's sake save my pal he's hurt a lot worse'n I am
not a hundred yards away he's dyin' mister he's dyin' o' thirst his
tongue's black'n all swole up oh save him mister save my pal he's not a
hundred yards away he's dyin' mister dyin'--" and she was singsonging an
even worse rigamarole about how "they" were after us from Porter and
going to crucify us because we believed in science and how they'd
already impaled her mother and her ten-year-old sister and a lot more of
the same.
It didn't matter that our stories didn't fit or make sense, the babble
had a convincing tone and getting us closer to this guy, which was all
that counted. He pointed his gun at me and then I could see him hesitate
and I thought exultingly _it's a lot of healthy meat you got there,
mister, but it's tame meat, mister, tame!_
He compromised by taking a step back and sort of hooting at us and
waving us off with his left hand, as if we were a couple of stray dogs.
It was greatly to our advantage that we'd acted without hesitation, and
I don't think we'd have been able to do that except that we'd been all
set to kill each other when he dropped in. Our muscles and nerves and
minds were keyed for instant ruthless attack. And some "civilized"
people still say that the urge to murder doesn't contribute to
self-preservation!
* * * * *
We were almost close enough now and he was steeling himself to shoot and
I remember wondering for a split second what his damn gun did to you,
and then me and the girl had started the alternation routine. I'd stop
dead, as if completely cowed by the threat of his weapon, and as he took
note of it she'd go in a little further, and as his gaze shifted to her
she'd stop dead and I'd go in another foot and then try to make my halt
even more convincing as his gaze darted back to me. We worked it
perfectly, our rhythm was beautiful, as if we were old dancing partners,
though the whole thing was absolutely impromptu.
Still, I honestly don't think we'd ever have got to him if it hadn't
been for the distraction that came just then to help us. I could tell,
you see, that he'd finally steeled himself and we still weren't quite
close enough. He wasn't as tame as I'd hoped. I reached behind me for
Mother, determined to do a last-minute rush and leap anyway, when there
came this sick scream.
I don't know how else to describe it briefly. It was a scream, feminine
for choice, it came from some distance and the direction of the old
cracking plant, it had a note of anguish and warning, yet at the same
time it was weak and almost faltering you might say and squeaky at the
end, as if it came from a person half dead and a throat choked with
phlegm. It had all those qualities or a wonderful mimicking of them.
And it had quite an effect on our boy in gray for in the act of shooting
me down he started to turn and look over his shoulder.
Oh, it didn't altogether stop him from shooting me. He got me partly
covered again as I was in the middle of my lunge. I found out what his
gun did to you. My right arm, which was the part he'd covered, just went
dead and I finished my lunge slamming up against his iron knees, like a
highschool kid trying to block out a pro footballer, with the knife
slipping uselessly away from my fingers.
But in the blessed meanwhile the girl had lunged too, not with a slow
slash, thank God, but with a high, slicing thrust aimed arrow-straight
for a point just under his ear.
She connected and a fan of blood sprayed her full in the face.
I grabbed my knife with my left hand as it fell, scrambled to my feet,
and drove the knife at his throat in a round-house swing that happened
to come handiest at the time. The point went through his flesh like
nothing and jarred against his spine with a violence that I hoped would
shock into nervous insensibility the stoutest medulla oblongata and
prevent any dying reprisals on his part.
I got my wish, in large part. He swayed, straightened, dropped his gun,
and fell flat on his back, giving his skull a murderous crack on the
concrete for good measure. He lay there and after a half dozen gushes
the bright blood quit pumping strongly out of his neck.
Then came the part that was like a dying reprisal, though obviously not
being directed by him as of now. And come to think of it, it may have
had its good points.
* * * * *
The girl, who was clearly a most cool-headed cuss, snatched for his gun
where he'd dropped it, to make sure she got it ahead of me. She
snatched, yes--and then jerked back, letting off a sizable squeal of
pain, anger, and surprise.
Where we'd seen his gun hit the concrete there was now a tiny
incandescent puddle. A rill of blood snaked out from the pool around his
head and touched the whitely glowing puddle and a jet of steam sizzled
up.
Somehow the gun had managed to melt itself in the moment of its owner
dying. Well, at any rate that showed it hadn't contained any gunpowder
or ordinary chemical explosives, though I already knew it operated on
other principles from the way it had been used to paralyze me. More to
the point, it showed that the gun's owner was the member of a culture
that believed in taking very complete precautions against its gadgets
falling into the hands of strangers.
But the gun fusing wasn't quite all. As the girl and me shifted our gaze
from the puddle, which was cooling fast and now glowed red like the
blood--as we shifted our gaze back from the puddle to the dead man, we
saw that at three points (points over where you'd expect pockets to be)
his gray clothing had charred in small irregularly shaped patches from
which threads of black smoke were twisting upward.
Just at that moment, so close as to make me jump in spite of years of
learning to absorb shocks stoically--right at my elbow it seemed to (the
girl jumped too, I may say)--a voice said, "Done a murder, hey?"
Advancing briskly around the skewily grounded plane from the direction
of the cracking plant was an old geezer, a seasoned, hard-baked
Deathlander if I ever saw one. He had a shock of bone-white hair, the
rest of him that showed from his weathered gray clothing looked fried by
the sun's rays and others to a stringy crisp, and strapped to his boots
and weighing down his belt were a good dozen knives.
Not satisfied with the unnerving noise he'd made already, he went on
brightly, "Neat job too, I give you credit for that, but why the hell
did you have to set the guy afire?"