"For the last time ..." began the block captain.
Swinging the shovel like a baseball bat, Hardesty bounced it off his jaw. He didn't wait to see the results. He bolted for the curb, scooped up his sawed-off shotgun, and ran.
It was snowing now, big dry flakes which fell from a windless sky, slow patient flakes which would fall for many hours if the leaden sky was any indication, choking the broken arteries of the perishing city.
Let it, thought Hardesty. I don't have to go to Brooklyn, after all. I know where I can dispose of this wristwatch.
He was jogging along in no great hurry. He had darted down Vanderbilt Avenue by the ruins of Grand Central Station, then cut back and forth through the streets in the low forties. They had chased him for a while but had given him up by now, he supposed. Hell, it was only one wristwatch. He slowed to a walk along Park Avenue and watched the city die.
The city had been moribund ever since Hardesty could remember. It seemed the natural state of things, just as the public politicians had finally given in to the inevitable and now decried that war was the natural state of human society. With war, cities died. With dead cities, war became a more personal thing. That was where personal politics came in. War became an individual thing as well as a social enterprise. That was the way you lived.
An old woman came trudging along in the snow, her boot-shod feet making footprints clear down through the thin white covering to the broken gray sidewalk beneath it. She was selling poor-grade booty, trinkets and a few items of faded old clothing. "Anything I've got," she hawked, holding a yellow straw basket up for Hardesty's inspection, "anything in the basket for only a hundred thousand dollars."
When Hardesty shook his head, she tagged along, gripping his sleeve in clawlike fingers and tugging at it. "Go away, grandma," he said. The old lady went on ranting about her wares in a high, incongruously childish voice. Maybe a few of the diggers were still looking for him, Hardesty thought. The crone's piercing voice would attract people for blocks.
The hag cleared her throat and spat yellow phlegm in the clean white snow. "See this dress? See, it's second hand, but you could hardly tell. For you, a special price because you have a cruel face. For you—"