Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

“Pretty bad, at first. I’m better now. And you?”

“I hid away in the Observatory basement during the worst of it. I was hardly affected at all. When I came out the next day, the whole Observatory was wrecked. You can’t imagine the carnage all over the place.”

Theremon said, “Damn Folimun! The Apostles—”

“They poured fuel on the fire, yes. But the fire would have happened anyway.”

“What about the Observatory people? Athor, Beenay, and the rest? Siferra—”

“I didn’t see any of them. But I didn’t find their bodies, either, while I was looking around the place. Maybe they escaped. The only person I came across was Yimot—do you remember him? One of the graduate students, the very tall awkward one? He had hidden himself too.” Sheerin’s face darkened. “We traveled together for a couple of days afterward—until he was killed.”

“Killed?”

“By a little girl, ten, twelve years old. With a knife. A very sweet child. Came right up to him, laughed, stabbed him without warning. And ran away, still laughing.”

“Gods!”

“The gods aren’t listening any more, Theremon. If they ever were.”

“I suppose not.—Where have you been living, Sheerin?”

His look was vague. “Here. There. I went back to my apartment first, but the whole building complex had been burned out. Just a shell, nothing salvageable at all. I slept there that evening, right in the middle of the ruins. Yimot was with me. The next day we set out for the Sanctuary, but there wasn’t any way of getting there from where we were. The road was blocked—there were fires everywhere. And where it wasn’t still burning, there were mountains of rubble that you couldn’t get past. It looked like a war zone. So we doubled back south into the forest, figuring we’d circle around by way of Arboretum Road and try to reach the Sanctuary that way. That was when Yimot was—killed. The forest must be where all the most disturbed ones went.”

“It’s where everyone went,” Theremon said. “The forest is harder to set fire to than the city is.—Did I hear you tell me that when you finally did get to the Sanctuary you found it deserted?”

“That’s right. I reached it yesterday afternoon, and it was wide open. The outer gate and the inner gate too, and the Sanctuary door itself unlocked. Everyone gone. A note from Beenay was tacked up in front.”

“Beenay! Then he made it to the Sanctuary safely!”

“Apparently he did,” said Sheerin. “A day or two before I did, I suppose. What his note said was that everybody had decided to evacuate the Sanctuary and head for Amgando Park, where some people from the southern districts are trying to set up a temporary government. By the time he got to the Sanctuary there was no one there but my niece Raissta, who must have been waiting for him. Now they’ve gone to Amgando also. And I’m heading there myself. My friend Liliath was in the Sanctuary, you know. I assume she’s on her way to Amgando with the others.”

“It sounds nutty,” Theremon said. “They were as safe in the Sanctuary as they could have been anywhere. Why the deuce would they want to come out into all of this insane chaos and try to march hundreds of miles down to Amgando?”

“I don’t know. But they must have had a good reason. In any case, we have no choice, do we, you and I? Everybody who’s still sane is gathering there. We can stay here and wait for somebody to slice us up the way that nightmarish little girl did to Yimot—or we can take our chances trying to get to Amgando. Here we’re doomed, sooner or later, inevitably. If we can make it to Amgando we’ll be all right.”

“Have you heard anything about Siferra?” Theremon asked.

“Nothing. Why?”

“I’d like to find her.”

“She may have gone to Amgando too. If she met up with Beenay somewhere along the way, he would have told her where everybody is going, and—”

“Do you have any reason to think that might have happened?”

“It’s only a guess.”

Theremon said, “My guess is that she’s still somewhere around here. I want to try to track her down.”

“But the odds against that—”

“You found me , didn’t you?”

“Purely by accident. The chances that you’d be able to locate her the same way—”

“Are pretty good,” Theremon said. “Or so I prefer to believe. I’m going to attempt it, anyway. I can always hope to get to Amgando later on. With Siferra.”

Sheerin gave him an odd look, but said nothing.

Theremon said, “You think I’m crazy? Well, maybe I am.”

“I didn’t say that. But I think you’re risking your neck for nothing. This place is turning into a prehistoric jungle. It’s become absolute savagery here, and not getting any better as the days go along, from what I’ve seen. Come south with me, Theremon. We can be out of here in two or three hours, and the road to Amgando is just—”

“I mean to look for Siferra first,” said Theremon obstinately.

“Forget her.”

“I don’t intend to do that. I’m going to stay here and search for her.”

Sheerin shrugged. “Stay, then. I’m clearing out. I saw Yimot cut down by a little girl, remember, right before my eyes, no more than two hundred yards from here. This place is too dangerous for me.”

“And you think going on a hike of three or four hundred miles all by yourself isn’t dangerous?”

The psychologist hefted his hatchet. “I’ve got this, if I need it.”

Theremon fought back laughter. Sheerin was so absurdly mild-mannered that the thought of him defending himself with a hatchet was impossible to take seriously.

He said, after a moment, “Lots of luck.”

“You really intend to stay?”

“Until I find Siferra.”

Sheerin stared sadly at him.

“Keep the luck you just offered me, then. I think you’ll need it more than I will.”

He turned and trudged away without another word.

For three days—or perhaps it was four; the time went by like a blur—Siferra moved southward through the forest. She had no plan except to stay alive.

There was no point even in trying to get back to her apartment. The city still seemed to be burning. A low curtain of smoke hung in the air wherever she looked, and occasionally she saw a sinuous tongue of red flame licking into the sky on the horizon. It appeared to her as if new fires were being started every day. Which meant that the craziness had not yet begun to abate.

She could feel her own mind returning gradually to normal, clearing day by day, blessedly emerging into clarity as though she were awakening from some terrible fever. She was uncomfortably aware that she wasn’t fully herself yet—managing any sequence of thoughts was a laborious thing for her, and she lost herself quickly in muddle. But she was on her way back, of that she was sure.

Apparently many of the others around her in the forest weren’t recovering at all. Though Siferra was trying to keep to herself as much as she could, she encountered people from time to time, and most of them looked pretty badly deranged: sobbing, moaning, laughing wildly, glaring weirdly, rolling over and over on the ground. Just as Sheerin had suggested, some had suffered such mental trauma during the time of the crisis that they might never be sane again. Huge segments of the population must have lapsed into barbarism or worse, Siferra realized. They must be setting fires for the sheer fun of it now. Or killing for the same reason.

So she moved carefully. With no particular destination in mind, she drifted more or less southward across the forest, camping wherever she found fresh water. The club that she had picked up on the evening of the eclipse was never very far from her hand. She ate whatever she could find that looked edible—seeds, nuts, fruits, even leaves and bark. It wasn’t much of a diet. She knew that she was strong enough physically to endure a week or so on such improvised rations, but after that she’d begin to suffer. Already she could feel what little extra weight she had been carrying dropping away, and her physical resilience beginning little by little to diminish. And the supply of berries and fruits was diminishing too, very rapidly, as the forest’s thousands of hungry new inhabitants picked it over.