He said, after a moment, "Maybe you're right. But we'd better get started. Do you have a gun?"
She produced an ancient revolver. "I found this, in the house next door. I wanted something—I was so afraid the Brotherhood would come here—"
Wales nodded. "We'll get you something better than that. Now listen, Martha. You must keep silent, you must do what I say. There's no one at all to help us, if things go wrong."
She nodded. He opened the back door and they went out of the old house, and across its ragged back yard to the alley.
Wales, his gun in his hand, led the way down the alley. Where it crossed Grant Street, he stopped, stuck his head out and peered both ways. The street of old houses was still and dead. The maples along it drowsed in the dying sunlight. A little breeze whispered, and was quiet again.
Wales and Martha darted across the street fast, into the shelter of the alley again. As they went down it, hugging the backs of buildings, heading toward the Diamond, Wales had again that fantastic feeling of unreality.
He remembered every foot of these blocks. How many times, carrying a newspaper route as a boy, he had short-cutted along this alley. And how would a boy dream that he would come back to it someday, when the familiar town lay silent and empty before approaching world's end?
They reached the Diamond, an oval of grass with benches and a Civil War monument and with the three-story storefronts all around it, their dusty windows looking down like blind eyes. "KEEP RIGHT" said a big sign at each end of the Diamond, but nothing moved along the wide street, nothing at all.
Wales peered from a doorway, then took Martha's wrist and hurried across. Dutton's Hardware, with its windows still full of fishing-tackle displays, was on the other side. But when he tried the door, it was locked.
He could smash the plate-glass of the door but that would be to advertise his presence inside. He hurried, tense and sweating now, around to the alley in back of the store. The back door by the little loading platform was locked too, but he broke a window with his gun-butt.