Thomas Disch - The Genocides

Orville was frantic, and yet close behind the frenzy was a sense of exultation and headlong delight that made him want to cheer, as though the conflagration behind them were as innocent and festal as a homecoming game bonfire.

When he shouted Hurry on; hurry on! it was hard to tell whether he was calling to Anderson and Blossom or to the three incendiaries not far behind them.

Maybe we’ll die , Maryann thought, when they had at last stopped running and she could think. But that was impossible. It was so cold! She wished to heaven she could understand what Anderson was talking about. He’d just said: “We’ll have to take inventory.” They were all standing around in the snow. It was so cold, and when she’d fallen down she’d gotten snow inside her coat, under her collar. The snow was still coming down in the dark. She’d catch a cold and then what would she do? Where would she live? And her baby—what about him?

“Maryann?” Anderson asked. “ She’s here, isn’t she?”

“Maryann!” Buddy barked impatiently.

“I’m here,” she said, snuffling the wet that trickled from her nose.

“Well—what did you bring with you?”

Each of her numb hands (she’d forgotten mittens too) was holding something, but she didn’t know what. She held up her hands so she could see what was in them. “Lamps,” she said. “The lamps from the kitchen, but one of them is broken. The chimney’s smashed.” It was only then that she remembered falling on it and cutting her knee.

“Who’s got matches?” Orville asked.

Clay Kestner had matches. He lit the good lamp. By its light Anderson took a headcount: “Thirty-one.” There was a long silence while each survivor examined the thirty other faces and tallied his own losses. There were eighteen men, eleven women and two children.

Mae Stromberg began to cry. She’d lost a husband and a daughter, though her son was with her. In the panic Denny had not been able to find the shoe for his left foot, and Mae had pulled him the three miles from the conflagration on one of the children’s sleds. Anderson, having concluded the inventory, told Mae to be quiet.

“Maybe there’ll be more food back there,” Buddy was saying to his father. “Maybe it won’t be burnt up so bad we can’t still eat it.”

“I doubt it,” Orville said. “Those damn flamethrowers are pretty thorough.”

“How long will what we’ve got last if we ration it?” Buddy asked.

“Till Christmas,” Anderson replied curtly.

“If we last till Christmas,” Orville said. “Those machines are probably scouting the woods now, picking off anyone who got out of the fire. There’s also a matter of where we’ll spend the night. Nobody thought to bring along tents.”

“We’ll go back to the old town,” Anderson said. “We can stay in the church and tear off the siding for firewood. Does anyone know where we are now? Every goddam Plant in this forest looks like every other goddam Plant.”

“I’ve got a compass,” Neil volunteered. “I’ll get us there. You just follow me.” Off in the distance, there was a scream, a very brief scream. “I think it’s that way,” Neil said, moving toward the scream.

They formed a broad phalanx with Neil at the head and moved on through the snowy might. Orville pulled Greta along on the sled, and Buddy carried Denny Stromberg on his back.

“Can I hold your hand?” Maryann asked him. “Mine are just numb.”

Buddy let her put her hand in his, and they walked along together for a half hour in perfect silence. Then he said, “I’m glad you’re safe.”

“Oh!” It was all she could say. Her nose was dripping like a leaky faucet, and she began to cry too. The tears froze on her cold cheeks. Oh, she was so happy!

They almost walked through the village without realizing it. An inch of snow had blanketed the cold, leveled ashes.

Denny Stromberg was the first to speak. “Where will we go now, Buddy? Where will we sleep?” Buddy didn’t answer. Thirty people waited in silence for Anderson, who was kicking the ashes with the toe of his boot, to lead them through this Red Sea.

“We must kneel and pray,” he said. “Here, in this church, we must kneel and ask forgiveness for our sins.” Anderson knelt in the snow and ashes. “Almighty and merciful God…”

A figure came out of the woods, running, stumbling, breathless—a woman in bedclothes with a blanket wrapped shawl-like about her. Falling to her knees in the middle of the group, she could not draw breath to speak. Anderson ceased praying. In the direction from which she had come, the forest glowed faintly, as though, at a distance, a candle were burning in a farmhouse window.

“It’s Mrs. Wilks,” Alice Nemerov announced, and at the same moment Orville said, “We’d better pray somewhere else. That looks like a new fire over there.”

“There is nowhere else,” Anderson said.

“There must be,” Orville insisted. Under the pressure of hours of crisis, he had lost track of his original motive—to save the Andersons for his personal revenge, for slower agonies. His desire was more primary—self-preservation. “If there are no houses left, there must still be someplace to hide: a burrow, a cave, a culvert…” Something he bad said touched the chord of memory. A burrow? A cave?

“A cave! Blossom, a long time ago, when I was sick, you told me you’d been in a cave. You’d never seen a mine, but you’d been in a cave. Was that near here?”

“It’s by the lake shore—the old lake shore. Near Stromberg’s Resort. It’s not far, but I haven’t been in it since I was a little girl. I don’t know if it’s still there.”

“How big a cave is it?”

“Very big. At least, I thought so then.”

“Could you take us there?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard enough in the summertime to find your way around through the Plants. All the old landmarks are gone, and with the snow besides…”

“Take us there, girl! Now!” Anderson rasped. He was himself again, more or less.

They left the half-naked woman behind them lying in the snow. Not through cruelty: it was simply forgetfulness. When they had gone, the woman looked up and said, “Please.” But the people whom she had thought to address were not there. Perhaps they had never been there. She got to her feet and dropped her blanket.

It was very cold. She heard the humming sound again and ran blindly back into the woods, heading in the opposite direction from that which Blossom had taken.

The three incendiary spheres glided to the spot where the woman had lain, quickly converted the blanket there to ash, and moved on after Mrs. Wilks, following the spoor of blood.

Much of the old lake shore was still recognizable under the mantle of snow: the conformation of the rocks, the stairways going down to the water—they even found a post that had once been part of the resort’s pier. From the pier Blossom estimated it would be a hundred yards to the cave entrance. She went along the rockface that rose ten feet above the old beach and played the lamplight into likely crevasses. Wherever she directed him, Buddy cleared the snow with a shovel, which, along with an axe, he had rescued from the commonroom. The other searchers scraped off the snow (which had drifted more than a yard deep among the boulders) with their hands, mittened or bare, as luck would have it.

The work went slowly, for Blossom remembered the entrance to the cave as being halfway up the rockface, so that one had to clamber over snowy rocks to be able to dig. Despite the hazard this involved, they did not have time to be careful. Behind the clouds, from which the snow sifted steadily down, there was no moon; the digging went on in near-total darkness. At regular intervals one of them would call a sudden halt to the work and they would stand there straining to hear the telltale bum of their pursuers that someone had thought he’d heard.