“Hey,” he shouted nervously, “wake up!” He ran to the desk. “It's me, Corporal Gary!”
There was no answer, no appearance.
He hit the old desk with his fist, pounding on its scarred surface. Dust flew upward and he sneezed. The lobby remained empty of life. A calendar pad caught his eye and he snatched it up, blowing a fine film of dust from its surface. Wednesday, June 20th. The day after his birthday, the day after the evening on which he had begun the celebrated binge. But the calendar couldn't be right because he knew damned well he had not gotten drunk only the night before. That had been two or three days ago, maybe more, and he had slept it off upstairs. It was two or three days ago. The calendar had dust on it. To hell with the calendar!
He hurled the metal base and its papers through a lobby window, hearing the shards of glass sprinkle the pavement outside.
“I'm in here!” he shouted after the calendar.
Silence.
In sudden anger he picked up a heavy inkwell from the desk and tossed it through a second window, with the same negative result. No one came to investigate. Gary waited until he had counted fifty, aloud, and turned away from the desk. Sunlight shining through the unwashed glass of a street door caught his eye. He crossed the lobby, pushed through the door and stood on the sidewalk outside. The hot sun felt good on his half naked body but the pavement was uncomfortable to his feet.
He saw only a mongrel dog trotting along the gutter. The dog and a car.
Gary ignored the dog and concentrated on the car. The nose and radiator of the car were rammed through a plate glass window of a clothing store, the front tires flat and shredded where they had exploded upon violent contact with first the curb and then the building. Both fenders were crumpled and the windshield cracked and shattered to the limit of its resistance. A window dummy had toppled forward across the hood, while within the car another lifeless body hung across the wheel, impaled. The odor he had found in the room upstairs was multiplied here on the street.
Gary walked slowly from the hotel, fighting to read some kind of sense into what he had found. The bomb crater stopped him, shocked him. And then he knew.