Wilson Tucker - The Long Loud Silence

And as the hour grew late, one by one the stations left the air, the announcer invariably bidding him a pleasant good night. One by one he chased the departing stations over the dial, avidly seeking a new one to replace the old. Each time he felt the brief fear that there would be no more stations waiting for him, and each time he tuned in another. The number of them steadily narrowed until finally there was but one and he clung to it possessively, hoping against hope it would stay with him all night. During the long hours he had even come to accept the intervening announcements and advertisements, to wait out nervously the longwinded appeals for the purchase of lotions and medicines and shrubs, of war bond drives and pleas for scrap iron, of short and worthless news bulletins and idle horseplay on the part of the speaker. Eventually the music came back.

Some of the numbers he knew and remembered of years before, some he had sung or tried to sing in saloons and Red Cross loafing rooms, a very few went all the way back to the bitter days in Italy and France. Others were undoubtedly as old but he hadn't heard them before — that, or had not paid enough attention to recognize them now. And once in a while there was something he was positive was new, brand-new. The recordings having men singers annoyed him but still he listened, for a year and a half is too long a time. Those sung by women hurt the most — the women and their words reminded him how desperately lonely he was.

He talked aloud to himself, and didn't care. He had done that in Europe a decade before and the mark of loneliness clung to him ever afterward. Not that he cared. He had not bothered to break the habit when he moved into the farmhouse, although he often found the children staring at him. They'd learn when they grew up — if they grew up. So he talked back to some of the women who sang to him — it depended on what they sang, how they said it; and sometimes he threw a bitter word at the announcer, disgusted with his asininity.

The world was gone. He knew it now with finality.

He was alone in it, just himself, and those other minor figures who moved about did so only as foils, as shadows from which he must protect himself or die, or other shadows on whom he must prey or die. There was no one else alive with a life he could feel, no living thing he could trust, eat with, sleep with. She was back there…

He snapped his finger, starting at the sound.

Irma. That had been her name — Irma something. The nineteen-year-old kid who had been with her college class on an exploration trip when the bombs fell. Irma who had come back home to loot jewelry shops when he found her, found her by the shattering noise of a plate glass window. It was difficult now to recall what she was like — young yes, but not little or undeveloped. She had looked like a sixteen-year-old but still there had been something of a woman about her. He could remember the brilliant blue of her eyes the first time he saw them — that night when he pinned her to the street, holding the light on her face. Her hair? He had the vague impression it had been brown. She had thrown herself at him the next morning in the hotel, the morning she thought him gone, and her tears had wet his naked chest. That was Irma.

They had eaten together while sitting on the curbing before some abandoned grocery store, or sitting on a hotel bed, or behind the wheel of a car. Eaten and lived together for many days back before he realized the world was lost. She had gone with him while he collected his weapons, his first car, his initial stock of supplies for the hungry days he supposed were ahead until he could get back to the army. Days! Irma had kept him close company, only to part at the bridge.

That had been a damned fool thing to do. They should have stayed together. Irma had been a pretty girl, would be pretty still — if she were living. She'd be twenty-one now, according to her figures. Attractive figures.

And after Irma?

The string bean who had walked up to them in the Tennessee hills. Sally. No other name, just Sally, who could be nice to them both but preferred Oliver, the schoolteacher. He wondered briefly if he had a son, or had Oliver? Sally was pretty much of a nonentity in his memory, just a woman who had been there at the time and left no indelible mark on him. Somewhat similar to the woman in New Orleans for a couple of weeks after leaving Sally. Her name was already lost, and the memory of her nearly so until he concentrated on it.

Three. In a year and a half. And that for a man who liked to boast around the barracks of his numberless conquests.

The world was gone. He stared through the window at the vast emptiness of it, wondering if it would ever again come alive. Just behind him an unseen woman sang softly. She sang from another world across the void because this one was gone, populated only by the quick and the dead; she sang from a world which used to exist for everybody but was now permanently restricted. She mouthed the words and carried the melody as though nothing untoward had happened, as though her singing — and the commercial appeal to follow — were all that mattered.

That hurt, too.

The casual acceptance of the propaganda and the news reports that they alone still lived, while all else was death. The willingness to believe that only they were safe and healthy while east of the river nothing but sure death and enemy agents stalked the land. How much will people believe without questioning? Did none of them stop to consider that someone might still be alive over here… that someone was listening to their broadcasts and knowing how false they were? Hadn't it ever occurred to any of them that their programs were being picked up by people who used to be in their world, people who could be hurt as they listened?

What if he had a telephone? Supposing that by some strange means he had a phone and he could casually pick up the receiver and put through a call to the radio station. To ask for a song, say. People did that all the time.

“What?” the surprised announcer would ask.

“I said,” Gary would have to repeat, “that I'm calling from something-or-other Wisconsin, and I want you to play a number.”

“But you can't be!” that disbelieving man would answer him. “There's no life in Wisconsin.”

“There is, and don't believe everything you hear. How about playing Clementine for me? Or maybe, Cruising Down the River ? That's a good one these days.”

“I can't, do you hear? I refuse. You're dead, Judson May said you were dead.”

“Upstick Judson May! You going to play me a song or not?”

“This is a trick! There's no one alive on the other side of the river. You're attempting to hoax me!” And he would hang up in anger. Or sudden fear.

And when the security office heard that they would immediately get the station on the line, or perhaps send around an officious major. It had been a despicable occurrence and they would caution the announcer to say no more about it. Might upset the citizens. There are some things they could not be trusted to know. Under cover of darkness a wily enemy agent had surreptitiously crossed the river and made his way to a telephone. It was to be regretted of course and it would not happen again. Alert sentries had cut the man down before be could climb out of the water. All quiet. All safe and snug west of the line of quarantine.

He stood with his chilled back against the barn, looking down across the sloping pasture toward the distant creek. The ancient pipe given him by the farmer was unlit but he continued to hold it in his mouth, savoring the stale taste of it.

The approaching dawn was bitterly cold and sulking behind the heavy cloud blanket, revealing itself only as a faint brightening close to the eastern horizon, a gradual increase in the visibility over the frozen fields. He saw the telltale marks of the night just past, the slow and crawling path the stranger had made coming up the slope, the infinite twists and turns to avoid the trip wires. The trail led up to the side of the barn, up to the corner where he had waited for the man. Before he had covered it with a shuffling foot there had been a frozen splotch of blood, black in the faint light of the new day. He saw his deeply indented footsteps where he had carried the heavy body back down the slope to the frozen creek, and returning, the light and wide-spaced marks he had left on the run.