She shook her head. "No—no thanks. I—I'm meeting someone here."
The driver glanced at the smoky pall of the dump and shrugged. Seconds later the cruisecab was disappearing down the highway.
She walked past the clump of catalpa trees bordering the highway. There were bushes and then set back a bit would be the house. She stopped, staring, motionless. The house was gone. The State had torn it down and filled in the cellar hole.
As she looked across the littered back yard toward the clump of cattails, she experienced a strange sense of unreality. Sea gulls cried overhead and the sun filtered down through a pall of smoke, but the familiar scene seemed eerily unfamiliar.
Scowling, she closed her eyes momentarily and forced down the panic crowding within her. The house was gone; that was what made everything seem so strange, so unreal. Now she would take the little path that led across the back yard into the cattails. She would find Ralph and the others. Surely they were here somewhere. They would have shelter, at least a substitute for a house. She was acting like a fool. She should have expected the house to be gone; even if it hadn't been, it was no longer hers. She would have no right to enter it, if it were still standing.
Crossing the yard, she hesitated at the edge of the cattails. She imagined she could hear rats squeaking somewhere in the tangle ahead. Finally she picked up a heavy stick, took a deep breath and stepped into the narrow path which twisted through the cattail marsh.
She had thought the marsh covered only a small area; now she became appalled at its size. The path twisted on and on, like some kind of maze laid out to confuse the unwary. Every few yards her feet got wet. At length she had to stop and sit down. There were squeaks and twitterings around her. The eternal sea gulls flapped overhead. Smoke drifted sluggishly skyward. She arose and went on.
Noon found her sitting at the base of a great mound of ashes and trash. The sea gulls still squawked and the sun glared down. The cattail marsh lay far away. She was tired, confused and fearful. The dump area seemed enormous and she had not met a single human being. She had believed, previously, that the dump was mostly a level plateau; now she found to her dismay that it actually consisted of a great many mounds, gullies, ridges and pits. Unless she climbed to the top of a mound, she could not see very far. And even then she could not see down into distant holes and depressions.
She had called out until her voice broke. Now she sat silently. A huge grey-brown rat scurried into sight. Her hand tightened on the stick which she carried. The rat pretended it was nibbling on a paper shred but she knew it was watching her. It did not dart away.
She had a sudden horrible thought of night closing in, of rats by the dozen, by the hundreds, watching her, waiting....