But he had already eaten it, and drunk the water.
Gary sat down again to puzzle it out, to think back to that morning when he woke up in the run-down hotel. What he had eaten had come from cans, liquids from sealed bottles. He had passed by the meats and vegetables, the bread in the stores because of mold and the decaying odors; he had not been able to brew coffee because water was not running from the taps. So he had opened cans and drunk from bottles. But what about shaving? That water was stale, clean but stale. It had lain untouched in the flush boxes since at least the day before the bombardment. And since then he had drunk only from bottles or fresh water country wells, forced to by the dry taps or the nearness of a well. The narrow margin between life and death, his life and death staggered him. Had water still been flowing from taps…
The only food that could still be regarded as safe, then, was stored on grocery shelves. And despite the immense loss of life, there still remained some thousands of people roaming the countryside between the river and the Atlantic. The grocery shelves would not supply them forever and in the very near future an acute situation would arise. When the food began to disappear, a different kind of plague would grip the survivors.
A man would either be quick, or dead.
Gary intended to be quick even before the necessity of making such a choice confronted him. He quit the library abruptly, conscious of the several days he had wasted, and descended the stairway at a fast trot with the two volumes under his arm. Absently closing the smashed door behind him, he dumped the books onto the automobile seat and gunned the motor, straining to recall the location of the street which carried the highway through town. He stopped only once more in the silent city to pick up tobacco from the shelves of an outlying store, and then nosed the car south along the highway which would eventually lead him to the Kentucky border.
Briefly as he drove he thought about the girl, the nineteen-year-old Irma something… what did she say her name was? He wondered what had become of her in the week since he had last seen her, wondered what she had done since deserting him at the bombed bridge. Or since he had deserted her. Where was she now?
Night found him still rolling southward.
He cautiously refrained from using the road lights for fear their brilliant beams might attract shooting. The white concrete strip was not hard to see as it unrolled before him; he drove with only the dim parking lights aglow, to give warning to anyone who might be in his path. Far over on the horizon an unseen structure illuminated the night with its fiery, burning glow. Another farmhouse, he supposed.
Sometime during the early morning hours he stopped for a few minutes to get out of the car, to stretch his legs and stand stiffly on the pavement examining the dawn stars. Waiting there, standing only half awake in the very dead stillness of the waning nights he picked up the sound of another car coming toward him, heard the fast approaching whine of a motor in labor and the peculiar sound of hot tires taking punishment on the cement roadway. Turning quickly, he discovered distant headlights probing the earth and sky.
Gary hesitated but a few indecisive seconds, and then leaped behind the wheel of his automobile to roll it forward across the road. He cut diagonally across the pavement to let the front wheels come to rest in a shallow ditch paralleling the highway, snapped off the motor and the lights and leaped out again, leaving one door hanging open as though the car had been abandoned. Recrossing the road, he sped back a hundred feet along the highway and dropped into the opposite ditch, to watch the approach of the strange car with his eyes barely above the rim of the depression.