He crawled backward off the bridge approach and sought the sanctuary of a near-by field, cautiously seeking out the hollow depression where he had been lying when the old woman passed a half hour before. Nearing the spot, he stopped to listen and sniff the air, to satisfy himself no intruder had hidden there while he was away. Curiosity had made him follow the woman, the morbid curiosity of an onlooker who knows the game will end in disaster. She had been carrying no food, he saw that in his first swift scrutiny and again realized it when he became aware of her intentions. Had she been carrying anything to eat she wouldn't have attempted to cross the bridge, and he would have forcibly taken it from her. The old and the lame lose their meager rations to the quick and the young.
But her arms had been bare and there were no bulges to her pockets. So he had indifferently let her go onto the bridge, silently following for no real reason. Now he lay on his back in the unkempt field, studying the clouded, moonless sky. The night was hot and sticky with a high temperature, a typical midsummer night along a riverbank in Illinois There would be rain eventually, if not tonight or tomorrow, then the following night. It didn't matter.
Nothing mattered except the real problems of living, the day-to-day existence. Where tomorrow's meals were to be found, the careful avoidance of armed men, how to live until the following day and the day after that. How to stay alive and reasonably healthy until the quarantine was lifted.
The army owed him a year's pay — maybe more. And sometime during the summer he had passed his thirty-first birthday; there was no knowing what particular day. But he remembered vividly the day of his thirtieth birthday, the day he had gotten blind drunk celebrating his ten years of service. He could have been among those lucky troops on the other side of the river, the safe side. If he hadn't tossed that big one. He could have been over there with them, continuously on the prowl, taking part in the river watch that never ended. And shooting at old women who tried to sneak across under cover of darkness, or who were damned sick and tired of quarantined starvation and wanted to commit suicide. He could have been dumping their bodies in the river, and waiting for the next ones. How long could he have kept at that?
His tenure on the beach at Salerno was five brief days but he hadn't wanted to stay there. The swing across France, sometimes at a run and sometimes at a crawl, was much better than Salerno but he hadn't wanted that either. No more than he had wanted the past year or thirteen months on the wrong side of the river. But — here he was and here he'd have to stay until the powers beyond saw fit to remove him, the same as at Salerno, the same at the Rhine. The one small difference to the predicament was that he had drunk himself into this one.
The awakening from that was vivid, too.
He remembered the dusty, lonely awakening, the firetrap of a hotel, the stabbed woman lying on the bed, the loss of his money and clothes. The bombed and deserted streets of cities had become a common sight but he still remembered that first one, the morning he awoke from the celebration. He had taken his meals on the sidewalk, eating from cans picked up in the grocery store. There had been the crash of a window — and that girl. The one who looted shops; now what in the hell was her name? Not Sally. Sally had been the winter in Florida and the dissolved partnership. Not Bea. Bea was the tiger-tempered three weeks in New Orleans before he struck out for the north. The name of the looter, then? The kid who had laughed at him and proved herself nineteen? She —
A sound alerted him.
Gary rolled over on his stomach to bury his beard in the dirt. Slowly and with much care he brought up his rifle, muffling with his clothing the slipping of the safety so that it would make no answering sound in the night.
He peered into the night around him, straining to pick out a blacker shape moving against the darkness, listening for an incautious footfall or perhaps the odor of stale tobacco. A few near-by crickets continued to chirp, moderate assurance that he was still alone. The sound came again, between him and the river, and he aimed the rifle that way.