The spearhead of the nomad infantry attack broke through between two
lightly manned guard posts whose garrisons fled in retreat with a few
ineffective shots. The column came through in a widening wedge. As it
met more defenders it fell back, but it appeared to the nomads that the
whole defense line had crumbled or had been diverted to the south, as
anticipated.
They poured along Main Street in the faint dawnlight until they reached
12th Avenue. There, they split and fanned along 12th, east and west. It
was their strategy, obviously, to occupy and seal off this large
northern sector of the town, which amounted to one-quarter of its total
area and cut across a large portion of the business section. They would
solidify their position here, destroy all opposition, then move to still
another sector until they were in command of the entire town.
It was a strategy that would work, unless everything Mayfield possessed
were thrown against it, Ken thought. He saw now why 12th Avenue had been
chosen as the line of attack: the defenders were intrenched there and
were offering forceful opposition.
He looked for a moment to the south again. The defenses there were
light, yet the charge of the mounted nomads had to be contained or they
would drive all the way to the center of town, burning and killing as
they went. If they succeeded in joining with the infantry they would
have split Mayfield's defenses in two.
Johnson had mounted his best men, using the captured nomad horses as
well as the town's own. Desperately, this small force was trying to
contain and exterminate the fierce-riding enemy. Picked sharpshooters
had been carefully stationed with the best rifles available. Although
the gunfire was not heavy, Ken could see Johnson's men were taking a
heavy toll of the invader.
In the north, the lines of fixed battle had now been established. The
nomads had drawn back to positions of cover in the empty houses facing
12th. Their flanks were more mobile, fighting for advantage along
streets parallel to Main but some blocks away on either side, and
extending all the way back to the point of breakthrough. While he
surveyed the scene from the roof, Ken watched the stealthy movement of
defenders moving behind the main line to try to surround the enemy. That
was the strategy of the defense, and the gamble on which their entire
fate hung.
If they succeeded they would have the breach closed, leaving no retreat
for the surrounded invader.
The comet slowly appeared, illuminating the scene of battle as if it lay
upon some other planet. The day was clear so far, but a band of stratus
hung low over the western hills. It would probably be snowing by
nightfall, Ken thought.
Through the glasses he recognized the leader of a small patrol that was
moving east on 18th Avenue. It was Tom Wiley, the barber. His men were
mostly students from the college. They were trying to gain a house
farther up the block to provide a covering point from which a general
advance of the line on both sides of them could hinge. Tom could not
see that an opposing patrol had him under observation.
He led his men into the open to cross the street. Ken wanted to shout
for him to go back, but it was impossible to be heard at such distance.
The enemy patrol moved out slightly. They centered Tom and his men in a
murderous burst of rifle fire. The barber fell. Two of the others were
hit, but they managed to reach cover with the rest of their companions.
The body of Tom Wiley lay motionless where it fell in the snow-covered
street. Ken could see the sign, just a block away, that read, "Wiley's
Barber and Beauty Shop." From where Ken stood, the sign, which jutted
out over the sidewalk, seemed to project just above the body of the
fallen barber.
Ken hesitated in his resolve to go down there in the midst of the
fighting. He thought of Johnson's words and Hilliard's orders. Would the
defense strategy succeed? The nomads were trained and toughened by their
weeks of fight for survival, but Mayfield's men were only weakened by
their strained effort to keep the town alive.
On the eastern side of the encirclement a burst of smoke with a core of
orange flame at its center spurted upward from a house. This was
followed by a second and a third and a fourth. Defending fighters ran
from the rear of the burning houses to the row beyond. Behind the screen
of billowing smoke the nomads crept forward to repeat their tactics and
fire the houses where the defenders now had cover. It was obvious they
recognized the danger of encirclement by forces stronger than any they
had anticipated. They were making a desperate effort to straighten their
lines parallel to the barbed wire, with their flanks and rear clear of
threat.
Ken watched the success of their second incendiary thrust. They could go
on indefinitely unless the defenders succeeded in flanking them. That
was being attempted now. The defenders moved under the cover of the
smokescreen to fire on the advancing nomads. The latter recognized their
danger and held to solid cover of houses adjacent to those they had
fired.
North of this bulge, however, another column was forming, and Ken saw in
sudden horror that it was headed directly toward the warehouse! A house
only a half-block from the warehouse burst into flame.
There was a flurry of activity from the defenders as they, too,
recognized the fresh danger and brought up reinforcements before the
threatened warehouse.
This added resistance seemed to inflame the determination of the nomads.
They answered the increased fire sharply. Another incendiary ignited a
wooden building a step nearer the warehouse. The defenders tried to
flank the threatening column but the latter ran between a row of burning
houses along an alleyway, firing additional incendiaries as they went.
Then sudden flame burst against the wooden walls of the old skating rink
and licked with red fury along its painted surface. In moments the
warehouse was bathed on all sides in seething flame, and the nomad
column spread beyond it, unaware of the mortal damage they had done.
* * * * *
Ken turned away. He walked slowly and decisively down the stairs. He
told his father what had just happened. "I'm going out there, Dad," he
said. "They're going to wipe us out, or destroy every chance we'll have
to survive even if we drive them off. Half of our food supply is gone
now. What chance have we got even if we kill every nomad in the valley?"
Ken's father turned to a closet and drew out a .30-06. From a hook he
took down a hunter's jacket. Its pockets were loaded with shells, and
he had an extra box he gave to Ken.
"Johnson left this here," he said. "He intended it for our use if the
nomads reached this far. I think maybe it had better be used before the
medical center needs defending."
Ken's eyes lighted with gratefulness. "Thanks, Dad," he said. "I'm glad
you're willing."
"I don't know if I'm willing or not. However, I think I agree with you
that there's nothing else to be done."
Ken ran from the building, clutching the solid, reassuring weight of the
rifle in his hand. His coat pockets and the hunting jacket were weighted
heavily with the supply of ammunition. There was a feeling of security
in the weapon and the shells, but he knew it was a short-lived,
deceptive security.
He went to Eighth Street and turned north, which would bring him close
to the burned warehouse. He could see the immense, rolling column of
black smoke and hear the bursting crackle of its flames. The whole town
could go, he thought, if the fire became hot enough. It would spread
from building to building regardless of the snow cover. He glanced at
the sky and hoped the snow might soon resume.
From the rooftop, it had seemed to Ken that the small units of the
defenders were almost leaderless, and there was lack of co-ordination
between them. He came up in their rear ranks and confirmed this
suspicion. They seemed to be depending as best they could on unanimous
and intuitive agreement about a course of action. What had happened to
their sergeants and lieutenants, Ken did not know. Perhaps in their
haste of organization there never had been any.
There was top-level command, of course, as appointed by Sheriff Johnson
for the entire sector, but it did not extend to the lower levels in any
degree Ken could see.
The men paid no attention as Ken joined them. He knew a few of the dozen
nearby, but they seemed to regard him as a total stranger. The shock of
battle was in their eyes, and they seemed wholly unaware of anything in
the world except the desperate necessity to find cover and to destroy
the invader.
Ken followed them into the shelter of a house flanking the
still-advancing incendiaries. He crouched at a window with an older man
whom he did not know and leveled his rifle through an opening. A pair of
figures appeared momentarily at the edge of the smoking cloud. The older
man jerked his gun and fired frantically and ineffectively.
"Slow!" Ken cried. "Aim before you shoot!"
The man glanced at him in a kind of daze. Ken sighted patiently and
carefully. The smoke cloud parted once again and he squeezed the
trigger. One of the figures dropped and the smoke cloud closed down
again.
Ken's calmness seemed to penetrate his companion who leaned back for a
moment to wipe a shaking hand across his sweat-stained face.
"I've never done anything like this before," he murmured helplessly.
"None of us have," said Ken; "but we've got to do it now. Watch it!
We're drawing their fire!"
Bullets shattered the window casing above and beside them. Across the
room a man crumpled. Ken risked a glance through the window. "We've got
to get out!" he exclaimed. "They're going to rush the house!"
It might have been possible to hold if he knew what cover and
reinforcements they had in the adjacent houses, but as far as he could
tell the small, 12-man patrol might be entirely alone in the area.
Suddenly, it all seemed utterly hopeless without communication, without
leadership--how could they hope to withstand?
"Let's go!" he cried. The others seemed willing to follow him. As they
went through the back he saw that the next house had indeed been
occupied, but they, too, were retreating, not knowing what strength was
near.
A new line of defenders was moving up from halfway down the block. Ken
held back to shout to the other patrol and to those coming, "Let's stand
in the next street!"
There were shouts of assent from down the line and they moved to the
shelter of the empty houses.
They were close to the edge of town, near the barbed-wire barricade, and
the nomads would obviously make their biggest effort here to wipe out
the forces that threatened to close them off. His own group, Ken saw,
would also have to make their stand here or risk being pocketed by the
uncoiling line of nomads.
"Don't let them get close enough to fire the buildings!" he shouted down
the line. The word was passed along with agreement. They broke into
small patrols and occupied the houses, Ken joining one that took over
the top floor of a 2-story house. This gave them the advantage of good
observation, but the added danger of difficult escape in case the house
was set on fire. Its walls were brick, however, and offered a good
chance of being held.
Within minutes, the nomads had occupied the houses just abandoned. Ken
fired rapidly and carefully as he saw them exposed momentarily in their
move to new positions. His marksmanship had a telling effect on the
enemy, and encouraged his companions. As soon as the nomads had obtained
cover however, it was a stalemate.
It was mid-morning already, and Ken wondered how it had grown so late.
For an hour or two they exchanged shots with the enemy. Twice, attempts
were made to hurl firebombs. Both were driven back.
Beyond this, however, the nomads seemed in no mood to make further
attack. They were waiting for darkness, Ken thought, and then they
would advance with their firebombs and grenades and have free choice of
battle setting. If that happened, Mayfield might be a huge inferno by
midnight. They had to seize the initiative from the invaders.
He called his companions and told them how it looked. They agreed. "What
can we do?" a tired, middle-aged man asked.
"We've got to take the initiative before they come at us again." Ken
glanced at the sky. "Within an hour it may be snowing hard. That will
make it more difficult to hit a target. When daylight is almost gone
we'll attack them instead of waiting for them to come after us. It can
be done if we hit hard and fast enough. We'll lose some men, but not as
many as if we wait and let them pick us off with their grenades and
incendiaries as they feel like it."
The men considered it dubiously. "We've got a better chance to hit them
as they break from cover," someone suggested.
"Not after dark, and that's what they're waiting for. They'll burn our
houses and drive us back all night long if we give them the chance. We
must not give it to them!"
Reluctant nods of agreement came from his group. "The way you put it, I
guess it's the only chance we've got," the former objector agreed.
"I'll talk with the other groups," Ken said.
He moved down the stairs and out the back door of the house. The space
between the two houses was entirely open. He flung himself down and
crawled. Twice, he heard the whine of bullets above his head.
After heated argument, the group in the next house agreed to the plan to
rush the invaders. He moved on down the block, regretting his own lack
of authority that made it necessary for him to have to plead for
co-operation. He wondered what was happening in the rest of the town.
There had been gunfire all day, but it seemed incredible there had been
no communication from any other sector or any evidence of command. No
one he talked to had any idea what had happened to their command. There
had been some in the beginning, but it had simply seemed to vanish.
Ken's pleading for co-operation in an attack was the nearest thing to
leadership they had seen for hours.
The snow was swirling hard and the sun was almost beyond the hills, what
little of it was visible in the clouds. It was getting as dark as he
dared allow before giving the signal for attack, but there was one more
group to contact. He debated and decided to go to them.
Then, as he entered the rear of the house, he heard the cries of alarm
from those houses he had been to. The invaders were breaking out for an
incendiary attack.
He seized his gun and fired the signal for their own advance. He ran
into the street shouting for the others to follow. The nomads were
concentrating their fire charge at the other end of the row of houses,
and there the defenders fell back without an attempt to advance.
Like watching a wave turned back by a rocky shore, Ken saw his
companions fleeing in disorderly retreat through the rear of the houses
to the block beyond. A bullet whizzed by his head. He dropped to the
ground and crawled on his stomach to the safety of cover behind a brick
house.
For a long time he lay in the snow, unmoving. He could not hold back the
sobbing despair that shook him. He had never before known what it was
like to be utterly alone. Mayfield was dying and taking away everything
that was his own personal world. He had listened to news of the
destruction of Chicago and of Berkeley without knowing what it really
meant. Now he knew.
For all he knew, the nomads might even now be in control of the major
part of the town. He could not know what had happened to his father, to
Maria, to anyone.
The crackling of flames in the next house aroused him. He crawled
inside the brick house, which was still safe, for a moment of rest. He
knew he should be fleeing with the others, but he had to rest.
He heard sporadic shooting. A few nomads were straggling after their
companions at the other end of the street. It was too far to shoot.
However, one nomad stopped and swung cautiously under the very windows
of the burning house next door. Ken leveled his rifle and fired. The
bullet caught the man in the shoulder and flung him violently against
the wall. Ken saw that he would be buried by the imminent, flaming
collapse of that wall.
The man saw it, too. He struggled frantically to move out of the way,
but he seemed injured beyond the power to get away.
Ken regarded him in a kind of stupor for a moment. The man out there was
responsible for all this, he thought, for the burning and for the
killing....
He swung his rifle over his shoulder and went out. Brands were falling
upon the wounded enemy. Ken hoisted the man under the arms and dragged
him to the opposite side of the adjacent house. The nomad looked at Ken
with a strange fury in his eyes.
"You're crazy!" he said painfully. "You're the one who shot me?"
Ken nodded.
"You'll be cut off. Well, it won't matter much anyway. By tomorrow your
town will be burned and dead. Soon, we'll all be dead."
Ken kneeled on the ground beside him, as if before some strange object
from a foreign land. "What were you?" he asked. "Before, I mean."
The man coughed heavily and blood covered his mouth and thick growth of
beard. The bullet must be in his lungs, Ken thought. He helped wipe away
the blood and brushed the man's mouth with a handful of snow.
"You're crazy," the nomad said again. "I guess we're all crazy. You're
just a kid, aren't you? You want to know what I was a million years ago,
before all this?"
"Yes," Ken said.
The man attempted a smile. "Gas station. Wasn't that a crazy thing? No
need of gas when all the cars quit. I owned one on the best little
corner in Marysvale."
"Why are you with them?" Ken nodded in the darkness toward the distant
attackers.
The man glared, twisting with the pain. Then his glance softened. "You'd
have done it, too. What else was there? I had a wife, two kids. No food
within a hundred miles after we used what was in our own pantry and
robbed what we could from the supermarket downtown.
"We all got together and went after some. We got bigger as we went
along. We needed men who were good with rifles. We found some. We kept
going. People who had food fought to keep it; we fought to take it.
That's the way it had to be.
"We heard about your town with its big hoard of food. We decided to get
it."
"Did you know you burned half of it this morning?"
"No. That's tough. That's tough all the way around. Don't look at me
that way, kid. You would have done the same. We're all the same as you,
only we didn't live where there was plenty of food on hand. We were all
decent guys before. Me, those guys out in the street that you knocked
off. I guess you're decent, too."
"Where's your family now?"
"Twenty miles down the valley, waiting with the rest of the women and
children for us to bring them food."
Ken rose slowly to his feet. The man was bleeding heavily from the
mouth. His words were growing muffled. "What are you going to do?" he
asked.
"Get on with what has to be done," said Ken wearily. He felt sure he
must be walking in a nightmare and in just a little while he would
awaken. "If there's a chance, I'll try to send somebody after you."
"Never mind me!" the nomad said with sudden fierceness. "I'm done for.
You've finished me. If our outfit should be unlucky enough to lose, see
my wife and try to do something for my kids. Get some food to them. Tom
Doyle's the name," the man said.
A fit of coughing seized him again and blood poured from his mouth. His
eyes were closed when he lay back again. "Tom Doyle's the name," his
bloody lips murmured. "Don't forget that, kid. Tom Doyle's Service,
corner of First and Green in Marysvale. We were all good guys once."
* * * * *
The snow was so heavy it seemed like a solid substance through which Ken
walked. In spite of it, row upon row of houses burned with a fury that
lit the whole scene with a glow that was like the comet's own. Above
this, the blanket of black smoke lay as if ready to smother the valley
as soon as the light was gone.
Ken didn't know for sure where he was going. A kind of aimlessness crept
over him and there no longer seemed any rational objective toward which
to move. He crept on from house to house in the direction his group had
gone, but he could not find any of them. Somewhere he touched the edge
of combat again. He had a nightmare of going into a thousand houses,
smashing their windows out, thrusting his rifle through for a desperate
shot at some fleeing enemy.
The night was held back by a hundred terrible fires. He shot at shadows
and ghosts that moved against the flames. He sought the companionship of
others who fought, like himself, in a lonely vastness where only the
sound of fire and gunshots prevailed.
Later, he moved through the streets stricken with cold that he could not
lose even when he passed and stood close to a mass of burning rubble.
He had stopped shooting quite a long time ago, and he guessed he was out
of bullets. The next time he met someone, he thought, he would ask them
to look in his pockets and see if any were left.
He kept walking. He passed streets where the black, charcoal arms of the
skeletons of houses raised to the sky. He passed the hot columns of
smoke and continued to shiver with cold as they steamed upward to the
clouds. He passed others but no one spoke. After a while he threw his
gun away because it was too heavy to carry and he was too tired to walk
any more.
The falling snow was covering the ruins with a blanket of kind
obscurity. Ken kneeled down and was surprised to observe that he wasn't
cold any more. He lay full length in the whiteness, cradling his head on
his arms, and peace and stillness such as he had never known before
closed over him.
* * * * *
It seemed an eternity later that there was a voice capable of rousing
him, a familiar voice calling out in anguish, "Ken, Ken--this is your
dad."
He responded, although it was like answering in a dream. "Take care of
them, Dad," he said. "Don't let anything happen to them. A woman and two
children. Tom Doyle's the name--don't forget that, Tom Doyle."