J. Ballard - The Drought

Ransom watched from the center of the pavement as they set off a few minutes later, the women waving from the tailboard. The small convoy, the launch, and water-trailer in tow, moved slowly between the lines of cars, then turned at the first intersection and labored slowly away past the ruined church.

Left alone, Ransom listened to the fading sounds, occasionally carried across to him as the trucks stopped at a road junction. The refuse fires drifted over the avenue, but otherwise the whole of Larchmont was silent, the sunlight reflected off the falling flakes of ash. Looking down the lines of cars, Ransom realized that he was now probably alone in Larchmont, as he had unconsciously intended from the very beginning.

He walked forward along the center of the road, letting his feet fall into the steps printed into the ash in front of him. Somewhere, sharply, a window broke. Hesitating to move from his exposed position, Ransom estimated that the sound came from two or three hundred yards away.

Behind him, he heard a thin spitting noise. Ransom looked around, then stepped backwards across the road. Ten feet away, watching him with the small precise gaze of a moody jeweler, was a fully grown cheetah, standing on the edge of the curb. It moved forward fractionally, its claws extending as it felt delicately for the roadway.

"Doctor…" Partly hidden behind one of the trees, Quilter sprang lightly on his left foot, holding the steel leash attached to the cheetah's collar. He watched Ransom with a kind of amiable patience, stroking the fleece-lined jacket he wore over his shirt. His pose of- vague disinterest in his surroundings implied that he now had all the time in the world. In a sense, Ransom realized, this was literally true.

"What do you want?" Ransom asked, keeping his voice level. The cheetah advanced onto the roadway and crouched down on its haunches, eying Ransom steadily. Well within its spring, Ransom stared back at it, wondering what game Quilter was playing with this silent feline killer. "I'm busy, Quilter. I can't waste any more time."

He made an effort to turn. The cheetah flicked an eye at him, like a referee noticing an almost imperceptible infringement of the rules.

"Doctor…" With a wry smile, as if decanting a pearl from his palm, Quilter let the leash slide off his hand into the road.

"Quilter, you bloody fool-!" Controlling his temper, Ransom searched for something to say. "How's your mother these days, Quilter? I've been meaning to call and see her."

"Mother?" Quilter peered at Ransom. Then he tittered softly to himself, apparently amused by this appeal to old sentiments. "Doctor, not now…"

He picked up the leash and jerked the cat backwards with a brisk wrench. "Come on," he said to Ransom, prepared to forgive him this gaffe. "Miss Miranda wants to see you."

Ransom followed him through the gateway. The garden was littered with burnt-out cannisters and the wire skeletons of catherine wheels. Several rockets had exploded against the house, and the black flashes discolored the white paint.

"My dear Charles…" The dapper figure of Richard Lomax greeted Ransom on the steps. He had exchanged his white suit for another of even more brilliant luminosity, the gleaming silk folds, as he raised his little arms in greeting, running like liquid silver. His pomaded hair and cherubic face, and the two jeweled clasps pinning his tie inside his double-breasted waistcoat, made him look like some kind of hallucinatory clown, the master of ceremonies at a lunatic carnival. Although Ransom was a dozen steps from him he raised his pudgy hands as if to embrace him reassuringly. "My dear Charles, they've left you."

"The Johnstones?" Ransom rested a foot on the lowest step. Behind him Quilter released the cheetah. It bounded away across the ashy surface of the lawn. "They were quite right to leave."

"Rubbish!" Lomax beckoned him forward with a crooked finger. "Charles, you look worried about something. You're not yourself today. Didn't you enjoy my firework display last night?"

"Not altogether, Richard. I'm leaving this afternoon."

"But, Charles-" With an expansive shrug, Lomax gave up the attempt to dissuade him, then flashed his most winning smile. "Very well, if you must take part in this madness. Miranda and I have all sorts of things planned. And Quilter's having the time of his life."

"So I've noticed," Ransom commented. "But then I haven't the sort of talents he has."

Lomax threw his head back, his voice rising to a delighted squeal. "Yeesss… I know what you mean. But we mustn't underestimate old Quilty." As Ransom walked away he shouted after him: "Don't forget, Charles-we'll keep a place for you here!"

Ransom hurried quickly down the drive. Quilter and the cheetah were playing about in the far corner of the garden, leaping and swerving at each other.

As he passed one of the ornamental fountains, its drained concrete basin half-filled with sticks and refuse, Miranda Lomax stepped out from behind it. She hovered beside the pathway, her white hair falling uncombed around her grimy robe, which trailed along the burnt earth. Streaked with ash and dust, as she gazed into the dried-up pool she reminded Ransom of an imbecile Ophelia looking for her resting-stream.

Her small rosebud mouth chewed emptily as she watched him. "Goodbye, doctor," she said. "You'll be back."

With this, she turned and disappeared among the dusty hedges.

To the south, the scarred ribbon of the highway wound off across the burnt land, the wrecked vehicles scattered along its verges like the battle debris of a motorized army. Abandoned cars and trucks had been driven off at random into the fields, their seats pulled out into the dust. To Ransom, looking down at the road as he crossed the hump of the motorbridge, it appeared to have been under a heavy artillery bombardment. Loose curbstones lay across the pedestrian walks, and there were large gaps in the stone balustrade where cars had been pushed over the edge into the river be- low. The roadway was littered with broken glass and torn pieces of chromium trim.

Ransom free-wheeled the car down the slip road to the river. Rather than take the highway, he had decided to sail the houseboat along the river to the sea, and then around the coast to an isolated bay or island. By this means he hoped to avoid the chaos on the overland route and the hazards of fighting for a foothold among the sand-dunes. With luck, enough water would remain in the river to carry him to its mouth. On the seat behind was a large outboard motor he had taken from a looted ship's chandlers on the north bank. He estimated that the journey would take him little more than two or three days.

Ransom stopped on the slip road. Ten feet from the houseboat the burnt-out hulks of two cars lay on their backs in the mud. The smoke from the exploding fuel tanks had blackened the paintwork of the craft, but otherwise it seemed intact. Ransom lifted the outboard motor from the seat, and began to haul it down the embankment to the landing stage. The fine dust rose around him in clouds, and after a dozen steps, sinking to his knees through the brittle crust, he stopped to let it clear. The air was in fever, the angular sections of the concrete embankment below the bridge reflecting the sunlight like Hindu yantras. He pressed on a few steps, pieces of the crust sliding around him in the dust-falls.

Then he saw the houseboat more clearly.

Ten feet from the edge of the channel, the craft was stranded high and dry above the narrow creek, its pontoon set in a trough of baked mud. It leaned on its side near the burnt-out cars, covered with the ash blown down from the banks.

Ransom let the outboard motor subside into the dust, and then ploughed his way down to the houseboat. The sloping bank was covered with old cans and dead birds and fish. Twenty feet to his left the body of a dog lay in the sunlight by the edge of the water.