Presently he made out a moving mass not too far away, a mass that divided itself into three shapes as it approached. Three men, prowling the field. He followed them with the gun, drawing a bead on the nearest. They moved along in the night with a stealth born of practice but betraying themselves nonetheless because of their number. He waited. They did not stop, did not make the slightest attempt to inspect the field in which he lay hidden.
Gary relaxed slightly.
The three shadows moved closer to the bridge, slowing their steps too late to muffle the noise of movement, and as they reached the concrete abutment where he had lain earlier, they dropped to their hands and knees to become lost to his sight.
Gary lowered the rifle and began to breathe again. With that last movement he knew their purpose. The trio were scavengers, attracted by the sound of the shot from across the river; they came to the bridge in hopes the body had fallen on this side, or failing that, had left something behind worth salvaging or eating. After their short, fruitless search they would continue on their way.
He remained watchfully alert until they had gone.
A man, or a woman or a child for that matter, lived by his wits and his nature. The reversion had come fast in the year following the calamity. Whether that nature lay shallow or deeply buried, it had quickly come to the surface of every man who stayed alive. Wits were of the utmost importance, often marking the dividing line between those who lived and those who did not. On his journey up from the South during the spring and early summer months, Gary had noticed solitary plunderers raiding farmhouses, quietly and at great peril to themselves; and again he had watched a noisy, armed band burn another house to the ground and take what they wanted — at a cost of four or five lives in the mob.
Somewhere in Alabama a hulking, amiable Negro had shared a poor supper with him and warned him of some of the more dangerous colored men to the immediate north. The Negro then tried to stab him while he slept. And also in Alabama he had stopped to watch a dozen women and children scouring the fields for grasshoppers, sweeping them into gunnysacks they carried for the purpose. Those who couldn't obtain food by force or wile obtained it in another way.
In the hills along the Kentucky-Tennessee line he had discovered a squad of armed soldiers like himself, a half-dozen men who shared the common disaster of awakening on the wrong side of the river. Their leader, a private who possessed in brawn what he lacked in rank, had invited Gary to join them.
Gary refused. “You're too much of a target — I heard you coming a mile away. And it's tougher to feed seven than six. Thanks, anyway.”
“Suit yourself, Jack,” the private told him. He stared at the tanned, well-fed body Gary had acquired on the beach. “Where'd you winter?”