The world was gone. He knew it now with finality.
He was alone in it, just himself, and those other minor figures who moved about did so only as foils, as shadows from which he must protect himself or die, or other shadows on whom he must prey or die. There was no one else alive with a life he could feel, no living thing he could trust, eat with, sleep with. She was back there…
He snapped his finger, starting at the sound.
Irma. That had been her name — Irma something. The nineteen-year-old kid who had been with her college class on an exploration trip when the bombs fell. Irma who had come back home to loot jewelry shops when he found her, found her by the shattering noise of a plate glass window. It was difficult now to recall what she was like — young yes, but not little or undeveloped. She had looked like a sixteen-year-old but still there had been something of a woman about her. He could remember the brilliant blue of her eyes the first time he saw them — that night when he pinned her to the street, holding the light on her face. Her hair? He had the vague impression it had been brown. She had thrown herself at him the next morning in the hotel, the morning she thought him gone, and her tears had wet his naked chest. That was Irma.
They had eaten together while sitting on the curbing before some abandoned grocery store, or sitting on a hotel bed, or behind the wheel of a car. Eaten and lived together for many days back before he realized the world was lost. She had gone with him while he collected his weapons, his first car, his initial stock of supplies for the hungry days he supposed were ahead until he could get back to the army. Days! Irma had kept him close company, only to part at the bridge.
That had been a damned fool thing to do. They should have stayed together. Irma had been a pretty girl, would be pretty still — if she were living. She'd be twenty-one now, according to her figures. Attractive figures.
And after Irma?
The string bean who had walked up to them in the Tennessee hills. Sally. No other name, just Sally, who could be nice to them both but preferred Oliver, the schoolteacher. He wondered briefly if he had a son, or had Oliver? Sally was pretty much of a nonentity in his memory, just a woman who had been there at the time and left no indelible mark on him. Somewhat similar to the woman in New Orleans for a couple of weeks after leaving Sally. Her name was already lost, and the memory of her nearly so until he concentrated on it.
Three. In a year and a half. And that for a man who liked to boast around the barracks of his numberless conquests.
The world was gone. He stared through the window at the vast emptiness of it, wondering if it would ever again come alive. Just behind him an unseen woman sang softly. She sang from another world across the void because this one was gone, populated only by the quick and the dead; she sang from a world which used to exist for everybody but was now permanently restricted. She mouthed the words and carried the melody as though nothing untoward had happened, as though her singing — and the commercial appeal to follow — were all that mattered.