The Genocides (10 page)

“Everybody—start getting your clothes on,” Orville commanded in a voice as calm as authoritative. “Leave this room as quickly as possible by the kitchen door and run into the woods. Take anything with you that’s at hand, but don’t waste time looking for things. Don’t wait for someone else to catch up. Quickly, now.”

As many as had heard Orville looked dumbfounded. It was not for him to be giving orders.

“Quickly,” Anderson directed, “and no questions.”

They were accustomed to obeying Anderson unquestioningly, but there was still much confusion. Anderson, accompanied by Orville, went directly to the area by the kitchen where his own family was quartered. They were all bundling into their heavy clothes, but Anderson bundled them faster.

Outside there were screams, brief as the whistle of a slaughtered rabbit, as the incendiary devices were turned on their spectators. A man ran into the room, flaming, and fell to the floor, dead. The panic began. Anderson, already near the door, commanded respect even in the midst of hysteria and managed to get his family out among the first. Passing through the kitchen, Lady grabbed an empty cooking pot. Blossom was burdened with a basket of laundry, which, proving too heavy, she emptied into the snow. Orville, in his anxiety to see them out of the commonroom safely, took nothing at all. There were no more than fifty people running through the snow when the far corner of the commonroom caught fire. The first flames shot up thirty feet from the roof, then began to climb as they ate into the bags of corn stacked against the walls.

It is hard to run through unpacked snow, just as it is hard to run in knee-deep water: as soon as you acquire momentum, you are apt to tumble forward. Lady and Greta had left the house wearing only straw slippers, and others streamed out the door now in their nightshirts or wrapped in blankets.

The Andersons had almost reached the forest edge when Lady threw aside her cooking pot and exclaimed:
The Bible! the Bible is back there!

No one heard her. She ran toward the burning building. By the time Anderson was aware of his wife’s absence, there was no longer any way to stop her. His own scream would not be heard among so many others. The family stopped to watch. “Keep running,” Orville shouted at them, but they paid no heed. Most of those who had escaped the house had reached the wood by now.

The flames illuminated the neighborhood of the building for a hundred feet, making the snow shine with an unsteady orange glow upon which the swift, uncertain shadows of the smoke rippled, like the fires of visible darkness.

Lady entered by the kitchen door and did not re-emerge. The roof caved in; the walls fell outward, neatly as dominos. The three spherical bodies could be seen in silhouette to rise higher from the ground. In close formation they began to glide toward the wood, their hum disguised by the crackling of the flames. Within the triangle they defined, the snow melted and bubbled and rose steaming into the air.

“Why would she do a thing like that?” Anderson asked of his daughter, but seeing that she was delicately poised on the brink of hysteria, he took her in one hand and the length of rope he had taken up from a wheelbarrow outside the house in the other and hurried after the others. Orville and Neil were practically carrying barefoot Greta, who was screaming obscenities in her rich contralto.

Orville was frantic, and yet close behind the frenzy was a sense of exultation and headlong delight that made him want to cheer, as though the conflagration behind them were as innocent and festal as a homecoming game bonfire.

When he shouted
Hurry on; hurry on!
it was hard to tell whether he was calling to Anderson and Blossom or to the three incendiaries not far behind them.

Maybe we’ll die
, Maryann thought, when they had at last stopped running and she could think. But that was impossible. It was so cold! She wished to heaven she could understand what Anderson was talking about. He’d just said: “We’ll have to take inventory.” They were all standing around in the snow. It was so cold, and when she’d fallen down she’d gotten snow inside her coat, under her collar. The snow was still coming down in the dark. She’d catch a cold and then what would she do? Where would she live? And her baby—what about him?

“Maryann?” Anderson asked. “
She’s
here, isn’t she?”

“Maryann!” Buddy barked impatiently.

“I’m here,” she said, snuffling the wet that trickled from her nose.

“Well—what did you bring with you?”

Each of her numb hands (she’d forgotten mittens too) was holding something, but she didn’t know what. She held up her hands so she could see what was in them. “Lamps,” she said. “The lamps from the kitchen, but one of them is broken. The chimney’s smashed.” It was only then that she remembered falling on it and cutting her knee.

“Who’s got matches?” Orville asked.

Clay Kestner had matches. He lit the good lamp. By its light Anderson took a headcount: “Thirty-one.” There was a long silence while each survivor examined the thirty other faces and tallied his own losses. There were eighteen men, eleven women and two children.

Mae Stromberg began to cry. She’d lost a husband and a daughter, though her son was with her. In the panic Denny had not been able to find the shoe for his left foot, and Mae had pulled him the three miles from the conflagration on one of the children’s sleds. Anderson, having concluded the inventory, told Mae to be quiet.

“Maybe there’ll be more food back there,” Buddy was saying to his father. “Maybe it won’t be burnt up so bad we can’t still eat it.”

“I doubt it,” Orville said. “Those damn flamethrowers are pretty thorough.”

“How long will what we’ve got last if we ration it?” Buddy asked.

“Till Christmas,” Anderson replied curtly.

“If
we
last till Christmas,” Orville said. “Those machines are probably scouting the woods now, picking off anyone who got out of the fire. There’s also a matter of where we’ll spend the night. Nobody thought to bring along tents.”

“We’ll go back to the old town,” Anderson said. “We can stay in the church and tear off the siding for firewood. Does anyone know where we are now? Every goddam Plant in this forest looks like every other goddam Plant.”

“I’ve got a compass,” Neil volunteered. “I’ll get us there. You just follow me.” Off in the distance, there was a scream, a very brief scream. “I think it’s that way,” Neil said, moving toward the scream.

They formed a broad phalanx with Neil at the head and moved on through the snowy might. Orville pulled Greta along on the sled, and Buddy carried Denny Stromberg on his back.

“Can I hold your hand?” Maryann asked him. “Mine are just numb.”

Buddy let her put her hand in his, and they walked along together for a half hour in perfect silence. Then he said, “I’m glad you’re safe.”

“Oh!” It was all she could say. Her nose was dripping like a leaky faucet, and she began to cry too. The tears froze on her cold cheeks. Oh, she was so happy!

They almost walked through the village without realizing it. An inch of snow had blanketed the cold, leveled ashes.

Denny Stromberg was the first to speak. “Where will we go now, Buddy? Where will we sleep?” Buddy didn’t answer. Thirty people waited in silence for Anderson, who was kicking the ashes with the toe of his boot, to lead them through this Red Sea.

“We must kneel and pray,” he said. “Here, in this church, we must kneel and ask forgiveness for our sins.” Anderson knelt in the snow and ashes. “Almighty and merciful God…”

A figure came out of the woods, running, stumbling, breathless—a woman in bedclothes with a blanket wrapped shawl-like about her. Falling to her knees in the middle of the group, she could not draw breath to speak. Anderson ceased praying. In the direction from which she had come, the forest glowed faintly, as though, at a distance, a candle were burning in a farmhouse window.

“It’s Mrs. Wilks,” Alice Nemerov announced, and at the same moment Orville said, “We’d better pray somewhere else. That looks like a new fire over there.”

“There
is
nowhere else,” Anderson said.

“There must be,” Orville insisted. Under the pressure of hours of crisis, he had lost track of his original motive—to save the Andersons for his personal revenge, for slower agonies. His desire was more primary—self-preservation. “If there are no houses left, there must still be someplace to hide: a burrow, a cave, a culvert…” Something he had said touched the chord of memory. A burrow? A cave?

“A cave! Blossom, a long time ago, when I was sick, you told me you’d been in a cave. You’d never seen a mine, but you’d been in a cave. Was that near here?”

“It’s by the lake shore—the old lake shore. Near Stromberg’s Resort. It’s not far, but I haven’t been in it since I was a little girl. I don’t know if it’s still there.”

“How big a cave is it?”

“Very big. At least, I thought so then.”

“Could you take us there?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard enough in the summertime to find your way around through the Plants. All the old landmarks are gone, and with the snow besides…”

“Take us there, girl! Now!” Anderson rasped. He was himself again, more or less.

They left the half-naked woman behind them lying in the snow. Not through cruelty: it was simply forgetfulness. When they had gone, the woman looked up and said, “Please.” But the people whom she had thought to address were not there. Perhaps they had never been there. She got to her feet and dropped her blanket.

It was very cold. She heard the humming sound again and ran blindly back into the woods, heading in the opposite direction from that which Blossom had taken.

The three incendiary spheres glided to the spot where the woman had lain, quickly converted the blanket there to ash, and moved on after Mrs. Wilks, following the spoor of blood.

Much of the old lake shore was still recognizable under the mantle of snow: the conformation of the rocks, the stairways going down to the water—they even found a post that had once been part of the resort’s pier. From the pier Blossom estimated it would be a hundred yards to the cave entrance. She went along the rockface that rose ten feet above the old beach and played the lamplight into likely crevasses. Wherever she directed him, Buddy cleared the snow with a shovel, which, along with an axe, he had rescued from the commonroom. The other searchers scraped off the snow (which had drifted more than a yard deep among the boulders) with their hands, mittened or bare, as luck would have it.

The work went slowly, for Blossom remembered the entrance to the cave as being halfway up the rockface, so that one had to clamber over snowy rocks to be able to dig. Despite the hazard this involved, they did not have time to be careful. Behind the clouds, from which the snow sifted steadily down, there was no moon; the digging went on in near-total darkness. At regular intervals one of them would call a sudden halt to the work and they would stand there straining to hear the telltale hum of their pursuers that someone had thought he’d heard.

Blossom, under the unaccustomed weight of responsibility, became erratic, running from rock to rock. “Here!” she would say, and then, running: “Or here?” She was a good two hundred yards from the old pier, and Buddy began to doubt that there
was
a cave.

If there were not, then surely they had come to an end.

The prospect of death disturbed him most in that he could not grasp the
purpose
of these burnings. If this were an invasion (and even his father could not doubt that now; the Good Lord did not need to build machines to wreak his vengeance), what did the invaders want? Were the Plants themselves the invaders? No, no—they were only Plants. One had to suppose that the real invaders—the ones inside the incendiary globes (or whoever had built them and put them to work)—wanted the Earth for no other reason than to grow their damn Plants. Was Earth, then, their farm? If so, why had there been no harvest?

It wounded his pride to think that his race, his species, his world was being defeated with such apparent ease. What was worse, what he could not endure was the suspicion that it all meant nothing, that the process of their annihilation was something quite mechanical: that mankind’s destroyers were not, in other words, fighting a war but merely spraying the garden.

The opening to the cave was discovered inadvertently—Denny Stromberg fell through it. Without that happy chance, they might well have gone the whole night without finding it, for everyone in their party had passed it by.

The cave went farther back than the lamplight would reach from the entrance, but before the full depth was explored, everyone was inside. All the adults except Anderson, Buddy, and Maryann (all three under five feet six) had to bend over double or even crawl to keep from hitting their heads against the crumbling ceiling. Anderson declared that the moment for silent prayer was at hand, for which Orville was grateful. Huddled next to each other for warmth, their backs against the sloping wall of the cave, they tried to recover their sense of identity, of purpose, of touch—whatever senses they had lost in the hours-long stampede through the snow. The lamp was left burning, since Anderson judged that matches were more precious than oil.

After five minutes given over to prayers, Anderson, Buddy, Neil and Orville (though not of the family hierarchy, he
had
been the one to think of the cave—and of more things besides than Anderson cared to reckon) explored the back of the cave. It was big but not so big as they’d hoped, extending some twenty feet to the rear, narrowing continually. At its far end, there was a small el filled with bones.

“Wolves!” Neil declared.

Closer inspection confirmed this with some definiteness, for the skeletons of the wolves themselves were discovered, stripped as clean as the others, topmost on the pile.

“Rats,” Neil decided. “Just rats.”

To reach the far depth of the cave they had had to squeeze past the gigantic root of a Plant that had broken through the cave wall. Returning from the pile of bones the men examined this, the only other exceptional feature of the cave, with some care. The Plant’s root at this level was very little distinguishable from its trunk. To judge from the curvature of the portion exposed in the cave, it was, like the bole of the Plant, some fourteen or fifteen feet in diameter. Near the floor of the cave, the smooth surface of the root was abraded, just as the smooth green trunks were often chewed by hungry rabbits. Here, however, there appeared to be more than a nibble taken out.