Gary shoved aside the body of the lieutenant to examine the contents of the truck he had chosen. There were three radiation suits, the machine gun, several dozen boxes of C-rations, red gasoline cans and the personal effects of the troopers. Satisfied, he seated himself behind the wheel.
Without lights, the truck left the roadside park and rolled onto the highway, nose to the west.
Somewhere in Illinois, Gary stopped the vehicle on a deserted highway and climbed out, cradling the machine gun. Walking a distance from the truck, he turned and spewed it with slugs, leaving it nicked and scarred as though it had undergone a running battle. Taking off his clothes, he threw away his own identification tags and slipped the stolen chain over his head. His new name, he learned, was Forrest Moskowitz. He read the serial number over several times, striving to memorize the initial four or five digits. Satisfied, he put on the uniform. The papers carried by the late captain and lieutenant were already familiar to him — as the sole survivor, he would be expected to have read them from curiosity if nothing else. Gary was confident he could carry his new identity smoothly. There remained only the odd chance that someone at or near the bridge was familiar with Fort Knox.
He clothed the lieutenant's body in a radiation suit, donned another himself, and drove on.
The truck neared the Chain of Rocks bridge.
Two years — nearly two years since the day of his thirtieth birthday, the day of a glorious drunk and personal disaster. Two years since awakening in that broken-down hotel to find dust on the bed and death everywhere in the city. Two years since he had moved among living people with no great fear of the present or the future. Two years of dodging, hiding, stealing, killing to eat and stay alive, two years of hunting or be hunted. How many dead men lay behind him, he wondered then? How many lives had he taken to protect his own, or to gain what he wanted?
He couldn't remember their number.
But to hell with all that, to hell with the memories and the hunger and the freezing cold. Ahead lay the bridge.
He approached it slowly and cautiously, turned onto the span and commenced the long climb to the middle of the river, the truck creeping along at less than twenty miles per hour. A knot of excited panic gripped his stomach and for a brief moment he debated turning back, abandoning the truck and the sighted goal to turn and flee for the comparative safety of a known ground. Gary fought it away and drove on. Just over the arbitrary dividing line, just past that invisible point where the Illinois boundary touched Missouri, two tanks waited for him in the roadway, blocking passage with their bulk.
He pulled up short, staring into their gun muzzles. They excited him, frightened him not a little and at the same time they appealed to an almost forgotten emotion within him. Now he was standing under their snouts with impunity, in safety, and they again imparted the peculiar sense of friendly guns facing a common enemy. His guns now — almost. He climbed from the truck to lift an arm in greeting but they did not reply. Gary leaned against the vehicle to await their move. He wanted desperately to smoke but the suit prevented it.