Polly stood up straight. "That's nice," she said dizzily, and pitched headfirst across the bed she was stripping down.
Dick McCue, young and healthy and very tired after toting the burgess in, had slept twelve hours, awakening in darkness in the school gymnasium. A child was crying on one of the other litters and a weary mother was trying to soothe it. McCue was enormously hungry; his last "meal" had been a cup of syrupy coffee before he staggered into the improvised dormitory and passed out; his last before that had been breakfast on cheese crackers in the gas station. His stomach was actively growling.
He headed for a dim door, stumbling over litters and bundles of personal possessions; he was cursed a couple of times.
The dark corridor outside was lighted at its end, and he emerged into the school lobby full of men with homemade armbands. From somewhere came a tantalizing smell of coffee.
He asked one of the brassarded men. "Just coffee here," the man said. "Nearest food's the diner up the hill. Can't miss it; it's lit."
And the diner did stand out like a bonfire by virtue of one pressure lamp. He found a cop there to keep order and a chipper waitress who looked at him, grinned and set out a bowl of breakfast food, crunched open a can of condensed milk with the corner of a cleaver and poured the whole can into the bowl. "Sugar," she said, and shoved the dispenser at him.
"Thanks." He poured sugar on and began to spoon down the cloying mixture as fast as he could.
"Another?" the waitress asked when he was done.
He patted his stomach experimentally. "I guess not," he said. "You have any coffee?"