Another bus, still southward because it was the first one out of the city.
He thought he had been in Shreveport before but he couldn't be sure — that other life had been so long ago that the memories of it sometimes played tricks on him. He might have been there a decade before with the Louisiana war games, or it may have been only a troop train passing through. But the memory of that tortured girl on the floor was no vague trick. It would not leave him, despite his efforts to wipe it away. It remained with him during the tedious bus ride south, haunted him as he stalked the brilliantly lit streets of Shreveport, a memory which burned bright and bitter. She lay on the floor, twisted, struggling for breath, accusing him with a barbed finger.
He couldn't stay anywhere now, couldn't stay longer than a day. Just one day! Wherever he paused, small town or bustling city, overnight at some farmhouse, he could stay but one day or his past would overtake him. That farm family — the Hoffmans — had not been affected by his presence for the same reasons they had lived through the initial exposure. They were immune, he was immune. These people living west of the river were not, and he was killing them. Carrying death to the people in the bus, the stores, those he jostled on the streets, the bartender, the girl in the shabby apartment.
Shreveport had lost the magic it once had known.
He drank by himself, off in a corner as though a few empty tables would erect a wall between him and the others, ate at a small and nearly deserted restaurant that served him cheap unsatisfactory food. At the opposite end of the counter a taxi driver nursed a cup of coffee, dawdling over a newspaper. Gary turned his eyes away from the paper — there was no picture of him, they didn't have that, but he knew after one glance the headlines concerned him. With that paper, there were many more men than soldiers after him now. Everyone was watching for him. Some of them would see him, but not know him until it was too late. Damn that schoolteacher! He had called the turn with an accurate deadliness.
This then was the brightly glowing life he had wanted west of the river, life filled with women, food and drink that could not be had in the contaminated area. This was what he had risked his life to gain — and he could stay here one day.
“They'll get the bastard all right!”
Gary jerked around, brought his attention on the cabby. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” He put down money on the counter and walked out.
So he was a bastard to be hunted down and shot, simply because he wanted to live with them instead of in that empty wasteland to the east. They wanted to kill him because he should have died long ago and didn't — wanted to kill him if they could find him. The laugh was on them. He actually held them in the hollow of his hand; he had only to cough in the cab driver's face, to touch or kiss the waitress, to throw his arm about the shoulders of a drunken barfly and he could slay them while they were hunting him. But he could stay only one day. Tomorrow they would discover he had been there.
Had been there. The taxi stood at the curb, motor running.