Dogs ... squirrels....
Steven had some dim, almost dreamlike memory of dogs that acted friendly, dogs that didn't roam the streets in packs and pull you down and tear you apart and eat you alive; and he had a memory of the squirrels in the park being so tame that they'd eat right out of your hand....
But that had been a long, long time ago—before men had started hunting squirrels, and sometimes dogs, for food, and dogs had started hunting men.
Steven turned south and paralleled the bridle path, going always wherever the cover was thickest, moving as silently as the breeze. He was going no place in particular—his purpose was simply to see someone before that someone saw him, to see if the other had anything worth taking, and, if so, take it if possible. Also, he'd try to get a squirrel.
Far ahead of him, across the bridle path and the half-mile or so of tree-clumped park that lay beyond, was Central Park South—a sawtoothed ridge of grey-white rubble. And beyond that lay the ruin of midtown Manhattan. The bomb had exploded low over 34th Street and Seventh Avenue that night six years ago, and everything for a mile in every direction had been leveled in ten seconds. The crater started at around 26th and sloped down to where 34th had been and then up again to 40th, and it glowed at night. It wasn't safe to go down around the crater, Steven knew. He'd heard some men talking about it—they'd said that anyone who went there got sick; something would go wrong with their skin and their blood, and they'd start glowing too, and die.
Steven had understood only part of that. The men had seen him and chased him. He'd gotten away, and since then had never ventured below Central Park South.
It was a "war", they'd said. He didn't know much about that either ... who was winning, or had won, or even if it was still being fought. He had only the vaguest notion of what a war was—it was some kind of fight, but he didn't think it was over food. Someone had "bombed" the city—once he had heard a man call the city a "country"—and that was about as early as he could remember anything. In his memory was the flash and roar of that night and, hours before that, cars with loud voices driving up and down the streets warning everybody to get out of the city because of the "war". But Steven's father had been drunk that night, lying on the couch in the living room of their apartment on the upper west side, and even the bomb hadn't waked him up. The cars with the voices had waked Steven up; he'd gone back to sleep after a while, and then the bomb had waked him up again. He'd gone to the window and climbed out onto the fire escape, and seen the people running in the street, and listened to all the screaming and the steady rumble of still-falling masonry, and watched the people on foot trample each other and people in cars drive across the bodies and knock other people down and out of the way, and still other people jump on the cars and pull out the drivers and try to drive away themselves until someone pulled them out.... Steven had watched, fascinated, because it was more exciting than anything he'd ever seen, like a movie. Then a man had stood under the fire escape, holding up his arms, and shouted up at Steven to jump for God's sake, little boy, and that had frightened Steven and he went back inside. His father had always told him never to play with strangers.
Next afternoon Steven's father had gotten up and gone downstairs to get a drink, and when he saw what had happened, he'd come back making choked noises in his throat and saying over and over again, "Everybody worth a damn got out ... now it's a jungle ... all the scum left, like me—and the ones they hurt, like you, Stevie...." He'd put some cans of food in a bag and started to take Steven out of the city, but a madman with a shotgun had blown the side of his head off before they'd gone five blocks. Not to get the food or anything ... looting was going on all over, but there wasn't any food problem yet ... the man was just one of the ones who killed for no reason at all. There'd been a lot like that the first few weeks after the bomb, but most of them hadn't lasted long—they wanted to die, it looked like, about as much as they wanted to kill.