Chapter 32.

After he had stored the drugs in a cabinet the animals couldn't get into, had lunch, and had run through the empty shortwave bands again, he stood in the middle of the living room asked himself, "What next?" There wasn't anything left to do. He knew it was unreal security, but, at the moment, with a well-provisioned living space and the protection of drugs, living at the end of the world was not all that difficult. In fact, he was bored.

He needed to plant another garden, but the ground was so wet he wouldn't be able to do that for several days. But other than that...?

He could read. The people who had lived here had all kinds of books. He took a paperback mystery down off the shelf and stood beside the bookcase and read a few pages. It was about people back in the old times going to movies and talking to each other, and it made him think of Delana. These people ate in restaurants, had wine brought to them, they kissed.... It made his heart ache to read it. He closed its covers and slid it back with the others.

He walked back and forth through the house, Isha's head turning to follow him each time he passed through through the living room, but nothing further occurred to him that he could do.

He took a bottle of beer from the floor of the garage where the cement kept it cool and stood out on the sidewalk in the bleary sunlight and drank it. A cow grazed in a neighbor's yard. The water had receded from a broad path down the middle of the street, but the gutter water moved very slowly. Probably it would be several days before it was gone. So. "What next?"

He knew the answer all along, of course. But admitting it to himself, actually saying the words inside his head, meant stepping into further uncharted territory, giving himself over to something that could be either momentous, lethal, or have grindingly depressing results.

"Well, now, shall I do it?" he asked himself as he stood on the edge of the street, the waters beginning to recede. Birds chattered as they waded and fed from the neighbors' yards. "I suppose now's the time."

Now he had said it. Now he would start looking for other people.

First thing, he strapped on the holster and pistol he'd found in the house, a .22 semi-automatic, went to a hardware store and got a small generator and a good-sized crowbar. Then, in the business area of the city, he selected one of the newer office buildings, broke in, and lugged the generator to an office where there was a copy machine. The dim, lifeless air in the place smelled of plastics and polyesters and raw cement.

He enjoyed putting the generator in the middle of the fake rosewood conference table and pulling the starter cord, bringing it to life. Then he plugged the copier into the outlet, turned it on, and watched the display lights turn from an orange Wait to a green Ready.

He pried open a storage cabinet and took out two reams of bright orange paper and stacked them into the copy machine's feeder tray. On a white sheet, the master, he wrote, ANYONE OUT THERE?.

I'll be at Arden Park near the Outcropping at sunset.

He centered this on the glass, punched in 999 copies, and the machine went to work.

"Neo-post-modern living," he said with a smile, a caveman with a copier instead of a club.

He wandered through the building while he waited. Already the roof of the fifteen story building had leaked down here to the third floor. The slump-block wall had grown slick with algae where water dribbled behind a secretary's desk.

On desks lay litters of papers and forms and blank-screened computers. Down the hallway, through a glass door, he saw the body of a man in an expensive pin-striped suit, still at his desk, slumped across an array of complex forms. The decomposition of his body was extreme and the plush carpet around his chair had stained black.

Martin felt himself grimacing as he thought of dying in such a place. The dead man must have been one of the few at the end who wanted to spend more time at the office.

How long would it be, he wondered, before mankind got this far again, building computers, information networks, and tall synthetic buildings in which to house everything? Two hundred years? Three hundred? Or maybe people would do something entirely different and base their livelihoods on something other than making money. But from what he knew of people, if it wasn't the acquisition of money, it would be the acquisition of something else that could readily be transformed into power.

He went back to the copier, disconnected the generator but left it where it was, and took the 999 sheets down to his car.

Before he left the office building's parking lot, he punctured the gas tanks of two cars, collected the fuel, refilled his own car, and went on to phase two of his project.

For two hours, he drove through Santa Miranda, mainly in the residential areas, honking the car horn - three short blasts every block - and dropping several orange sheets out the window. In the rearview mirror, he watched them spin behind the car, float down into the street or drift into the yards.

As usual, he had to drive around the dairy cows that stood dull-eyed and helpless in the middle of streets, probably wondering in their passive, hybridized minds if something had changed. What had changed was that now they were the prey of other animals. In three places he had seen the remains of cows that had been brought down. Their scattered bones had been picked clean.

It didn't seem to him that he had seen enough dog-packs to account for this. Perhaps there were other predators out there - leopards or bears or wolves that had been released from the zoo.

One neighborhood seemed to have been taken over by magpies. Whereas in the old world, he remembered occasionally seeing only one or two, now, in this one block, there were hundreds, perched on television antennas, power lines, pecking at bugs in wet overgrown lawns, strutting and flashing their stark black and white feathers in the cottony sunlight.

Passing by a neighborhood park, he saw a coyote trot stiffly through the overgrown weeds, see him, pause in midstep, and then vanish, like magic.

Nature was resuming its reign over the earth. As soon as man let up his endless cutting, leveling, fencing, and patroling, all designed to push nature into neatly controlled parcels, it came back in a rush. Now coyotes, birds, hippos, giraffes, wandering dog-packs, and who knew what else would compete, prey and evade, and fill the niches in the redefining ecology.

He dropped the last of his advertisements out the car window and still had a couple of hours before sunset, so he drove the three miles to the appliance store where he had hooked up the freezers and found they were working fine. He refilled the generators' gas tanks, and from one of the freezers he took a frozen loaf of bread dough, and a package of bacon, and drove on to his house.

When he let himself in, Isha pranced around him and made breathy whining noises till he gave her half a dozen long, head-to-rump strokes.

"We may have company," he said to her, putting out some food for her and the cat. They both ate heartily. He hadn't paid much attention to it, but the young cat was growing noticeably, just in the last week, and he had read but hadn't noticed till now that the manx was built differently from other cats: its body was shorter than an ordinary cat, and its back legs were longer than the front, giving it a raked look. "Mona, what kind of beast will you be when you grow up?"

She glanced across at his feet but didn't lift her head from her food.

He read the directions for the bread, but since he didn't have an oven, he put it in a large sauce pan, let it thaw and rise, and then put it on low heat on the gas camp stove. Meanwhile, he fried up the bacon, and the house filled with a smell he then realized he had forgotten. The greasiness of the smell was sickeningly heavy, but it was also pungently sweet, and watching the bacon edges turn brown as they ruffled up made his mouth water.

The bread was not thoroughly baked, but it was hot and it smelled like bread and he loved it. With the crusts he sopped up the drops of grease on his plate but he began feeling overfull almost immediately and tossed the pieces onto the floor for the two animals. Isha wolfed hers but Mona stood over her small crust, not knowing exactly what to do with it, growling as loud as a dog and watching that no one tried to take it away from her.

Martin looked out the window for the position of the sun, thinking how he had already given up watches and precise time.

The sun didn't set these days; instead it faded into the thickened atmosphere at the horizon, and it was time now for him to return to Santa Miranda, to Arden Park, to see if anyone had found his message.

"Isha, come along." She became instantly alert. "Maybe you can help me with this."

Martin took the .22 from the back of a kitchen chair, buckled it on, and the two of them got in the car.

He parked five blocks from Arden Park, closed the car door without noise, and approached cautiously. Isha saw his caution and kept near him, her ears up, alert.

Once near the park, Martin scanned it for any movement or human form and then watched Isha as she did the same, waiting to see if her attention focused on anything in particular. Neither saw anything, so they took a side street, circled around, and studied the park from a different direction. Again, they saw no one.

This time he'd do whatever it took to keep from running into another Curtiz.

On the third approach, from the north side, Isha stopped suddenly, her ears erect and focused forward. She stopped breathing through her mouth and began using her nose to sample the air.

That was when Martin saw the woman. He and Isha were still across the street from the park, a hundred feet or so away. The young woman sat out in the open, on a bench next to the chainlink fence that surrounded the base of the outcropping. She sat with her legs crossed, her head bent forward, long hair covering her shoulders and most of her face, reading a book.

The next question was whether she was alone. The nearest trees were thirty or forty feet away and too narrow to conceal anyone. Several clumps of weedy bushes were closer, but he could see through enough parts of them to know no one was hiding there.

He slipped his fingers of his left hand under Isha's collar, glanced down to check that the butt of the pistol was free of his shirt, and stepped away from his cover, across the sidewalk, across the street and to the edge of the park.

"Hello," he said. "Are you alone?"

She looked up, closed her book on her finger, and said, "Yes. Are you going to rape me?"

The question startled him. It was one he knew he should answer immediately, but he couldn't seem to get the words together fast enough.

"No. No, I wasn't thinking about it."

"Okay," she said. "So you weren't thinking about it then, but are you thinking about it now?"

"No, I'm not going to rape you, all right?"

"Yes, it's all right with me," she said, still holding her book on her crossed knees with her finger marking her place.

If this were the old world, he would have walked away from her in an instant, but she was the first woman who had spoken to him in over a year. He gazed at her in fascination. She was younger than he, in her early twenties, and she wore faded jeans and a man's white shirt. She had long straight brown hair, parted in the middle.

"Why were you driving around honking today and advertising for people to come here?" she asked.

"I got lonely," he said. "By the way, my name is Martin."

She looked at him several moments. "I'm Moreen."

"I thought if a few survivors got together, it might make all our lives a little easier."

"My life's easy enough. Hell is other people." She still looked at him, not moving anything but her lips when she talked, not even her eyes. She was an attractive woman with light brown eyes, high cheek bones, and full lips. The way she looked directly at him made it seem that she could speak nothing but obvious truth.

"Look," Martin said, "I thought the people that were left could help each other out. And I'd like some company. Maybe you wouldn't. It's my choice to offer; it's your choice to refuse."

She still sat there looking at him, holding the place in her book as though she might continue reading as soon as he stopped bothering her.

"If you were afraid you might be raped, why did you come here?"

"I wasn't afraid," she said. "There are crazy people around. I just wanted to know if that's what you had in mind."

He looked at her looking at him. "No, it isn't," he said. "Not now, not later, and I'm not crazy."

"Crazy people don't know if they're crazy. But sometimes they say they are and think they're fooling other people. So you can't ever tell." She reached down and stroked Isha's head. "You have a nice dog. I've never seen a collie except on TV."

While telling himself to be cautious, to be observant, Martin told her about Isha and asked her if she'd had any pets. She told him about a horse she'd had, a dog, her guppies, and her voice began to take on some color and life.

After a pause, Martin said, "Look, I have a place with running water, food, and a little electricity. And I also have a car a few blocks away. You're welcome to share my house - with your own room and a locking door. Or not. Your choice. No expectations of you except some company and conversation."

She looked at him a moment longer, opened up her book where she had kept her finger the whole time, bent the corner of the page over, closed the book and stood up and said, "Okay."

He asked her if she had anything that she wanted to bring along and she said no. Halfway to his house, she mentioned that it had been raining a lot. Yes, he agreed, it had. The sky's still funny, she had said, and he agreed with that too.

Chapter 33.

As he hung his belt and pistol on the chair in the kitchen, she walked ahead of him into the living room and looked around. He liked the way her hips filled out her jeans and how they moved when she walked. At least it was something to look at.

She said, "You have a cat." Mona slept curled up on the sofa and looked like a pillow.

"Just the three of us," Martin said. "Hungry? I've got a whole room full of food. Functioning stove and refrigerator."

She nodded and said, "No thanks. I ate a couple of hours ago." Her voice was smooth and slow, and she spoke in a drifty sort of way that left no space between the words. "I found a house where the people had cached a year's worth of food."

"I have some soft drinks or would you like a beer?"

"I don't drink alcohol."

"Sit anywhere."

"I don't mind standing for a while." From where she stood she gazed around at the furniture and the books on the shelves. Her eyes kept going back to Mona.

Martin stood there and she stood there. It made him feel like he was in someone else's house.

"I'm trying to be hospitable," he said, almost exasperated. He sat down and Isha quickly positioned herself beside his chair with her muzzle resting on her forelegs, watching Moreen without being too obvious about it.

"Sorry," she said. She sat on the sofa at the end opposite Mona, who looked around sleepily and then ignored everything. "I don't want anything. I'm not used to being around anybody."

"Tell me why you're alive," Martin said.

"I was up in the mountains."

He waited for her to go on, but that seemed like the extent of her answer. He had thought that having someone around would make him feel comfortable and happy, but it was making him feel even more isolated.

Martin leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and spoke aloud what he was thinking: "Am I doing something wrong, something that bothers you?"

She looked at him without expression.

"Look," he said. "This is a new world, a new place. Back in the old world, people lied a lot, were defensive, said what they thought would get them what they wanted. People were worried that somebody would take advantage of them. But look at what's left. You and me."

She looked at him, same as before, with no expression.

"I had this feeling," Martin continued, "when I saw everyone was gone and I was one of the few left, that people would be a little more considerate of each other, less defensive. Judging from the people I've met so far, it was a stupid assumption for me to make."

"You want me to be friendlier," she said, still without expression.

"You could talk to me. That's how people get to know each other."

"And the upshot of all this, now or a week from now, is that you get me in bed."

Martin slouched. Beside him, Isha moved only her eyes, from him to her and back to him. "I'll be honest with you, even if it drives you away: it had crossed my mind. But raping you hadn't crossed my mind, if you're still worried about that."

"It would, sooner or later." She craned her head forward a little, her long hair moving along the sides of her face like a curtain in motion. "I don't need anything from you or from anyone else or from this world. I don't eat much, I don't drink much, I don't talk much. It's what I am now. I'll leave if you want."

She looked at him blankly. He wondered if she was crazy of if he just hadn't caught on to her yet.

"I was up in the mountains on a religious retreat. I was at a friend's cabin, fasting and meditating. I called my mother and she told me my daughter and ex-husband were dead and that I should stay where I was. I wanted to go back home, but God told me to stay where I was. Finally, when I called her, my mother didn't answer her phone anymore and I knew what had happened. So I stayed where I was. Till last month."

"You were isolated. So was I." He told her why.