And when the security office heard that they would immediately get the station on the line, or perhaps send around an officious major. It had been a despicable occurrence and they would caution the announcer to say no more about it. Might upset the citizens. There are some things they could not be trusted to know. Under cover of darkness a wily enemy agent had surreptitiously crossed the river and made his way to a telephone. It was to be regretted of course and it would not happen again. Alert sentries had cut the man down before be could climb out of the water. All quiet. All safe and snug west of the line of quarantine.
* * *
He stood with his chilled back against the barn, looking down across the sloping pasture toward the distant creek. The ancient pipe given him by the farmer was unlit but he continued to hold it in his mouth, savoring the stale taste of it.
The approaching dawn was bitterly cold and sulking behind the heavy cloud blanket, revealing itself only as a faint brightening close to the eastern horizon, a gradual increase in the visibility over the frozen fields. He saw the telltale marks of the night just past, the slow and crawling path the stranger had made coming up the slope, the infinite twists and turns to avoid the trip wires. The trail led up to the side of the barn, up to the corner where he had waited for the man. Before he had covered it with a shuffling foot there had been a frozen splotch of blood, black in the faint light of the new day. He saw his deeply indented footsteps where he had carried the heavy body back down the slope to the frozen creek, and returning, the light and wide-spaced marks he had left on the run.
But the first girl had been gone, the girl he wanted.
A short while ago that last station had left the air, left him scrabbling frantically over an empty dial searching for another voice, another bar of music. There were no more. The loneliness descended twofold then, and the hurt deepened. The airwaves were as empty as the land around him. He shut off the radio and was depressed by the silence of the room, by the emptiness of it after his new-found companions had left. Pulling on the borrowed overcoat he wore and taking up his gun, he had quit the house to make another patrol of the buildings, striding in a great circle through the nearer fields alert for fresh footprints leading toward the house. Eventually he had come upon the slurred trail made by last night's visitor, and followed it up to the barn.
He stood there, cold and forlorn.
Someday — out there, across those snowy wastes — would come the conquering army from across the Mississippi, mopping up the stragglers and paving the way for the reconstruction of a half-wrecked nation. Hoffman and his wife, the younger boy and Sandy — all stragglers, blocking their path. The four of them, four “enemy agents” rushing out to greet returning troops with heartfelt cries of welcome. What a shock they would receive.
Oliver's speculative medical aid was pretty much of a lost dream… what was it he had said? “It all depends on the prevailing mood of high brass and the state of medicine on the day bridges are reopened. If the stragglers can be cleansed and cured by some revolutionary medical means — well then, welcome back to the United States!” And “The patrols would gather up residue and test it for contamination; when the tested matter no longer revealed a danger, the crisis would be over except for mopping up the stragglers.”
A lost dream with a brutal awakening for many people; people like the Hoffmans who clung to their farm and what few possessions that remained to them, awaiting the day of deliverance. He didn't want to be here when that day came. He didn't want to see the terrified expression on Sandy's face again. And now he was convinced that day was coming, that kind of day… Judson May glibly spouting his lines had all but said it. Judson May was parroting the words and schemes placed in his mouth by high brass. High brass and the lamentable state of medicine had left no room in their blueprints of reconstruction for surviving stragglers, and a good many “enemy agents” would need be eliminated before Akron, Ohio, could be rebuilt again.