“It’s disease war!”
A truck, driven by a man who must also have known, braked ferociously to avoid a settling, sizzling missile. Instantly, fifty cars crashed behind it. And the chutes came down over the lot, spraying the dead and the injured along with the unharmed.
Kit knew he had breathed the stuff. He knew he had licked his culture-moistened lips. He knew his clothes were damp with it. So he knew that the thing he had been trying to escape had overtaken him. He spat, vomited, discarded his jacket and trousers, wiped his face with a handkerchief till blood came.
But from then on, he did not have even a demented logic. No one had sanity, on Elk Drive, after the bacteria sprayed them.
3
Ruth Williams still carried her dead baby. Its insides had come through its back, slowly, as she walked, and finally they’d jiggled so loose and slack that she stepped on them now and again.
Jim came along behind her, his face clotted up in the cold, his hand on her back—because he couldn’t see. Behind Jim, holding onto a length of clothesline, came the rest of the family.
People who saw Ruth leading, walking, tripping a little, slipping now and again-for visibility was good in the torchy night—said things and were sick or they screamed, and Ruth always smiled a little at their discomfiture.
Finally, Ruth threw it away.
They went faster, afterward—through Ferndale, down the main street, past the broken windows of all the stores.