George Stewart - Earth Abides

That morning he worked out a plan. He felt sure that in an urban district of two million people others must be left alive. The solution was obvious; he must find someone, anyone. The problem was how to make contact.

First he set out to walk around the neighborhood, in the hope of discovering someone he knew. But around the well-known houses he saw no sign of people. The lawns were parched, the flowers wilting.

Returning home, he passed through the little park where he had often played as a boy, climbing the tall rocks. Two of them leaned together at the top to form a kind of little cave, high and narrow. Ish had often played at hiding there. It seemed a natural primitive refuge-place, and he looked into it. There was no one.

He walked on across a broad surface of smooth rock that sloped with the hillside. It was pitted with small round holes marking the places where squaws had once pounded with stone pestles.

“The world of those Indians passed away,” he thought. “And now our world that followed theirs has passed too. And am I the only one?”

After reaching the house again, he got into his car, mapping out in his head a route to cover the city so that few areas would be left out of the sound of the horn. He drove along, hooting the horn about every minute and then waiting, listening for some reply. As he drove, he looked about curiously, appraising what had happened.

The streets had an early-morning look. Many cars were parked, and there was little disorder. Fires were burning here and there, as he could see by smoke-columns. An occasional body lay where the man had finally been overcome, and near one of them he saw two dogs. At one street-comer, the body of a man was hanging from the cross-arm of a telephone pole, conspicuously labeled with a placard Looter . After he had passed this pole, he came to a good-sized business district, and then he noticed indeed that there must have been a certain amount of disorder. The big window of a liquor-store was broken.

As he came to the end of the business district, he blew his horn again in his regular routine, and half a minute later he started to hear a faint honk from far away. For a moment he thought that his ears might merely be tricking him.

He honked again quickly, and immediately this time he had a reply. His heart sank—“Echo!” he thought. But then he honked again, a long and a short, and as he listened carefully the reply came merely one long.

He turned, and drove in the direction of the sound, which he estimated must be half a mile away. Having driven three blocks, he honked again and waited. More to the right this time! He turned. Twisting through the streets, he came to a blind end, turned around, and sought another way. He honked, and the reply was closer. Straight ahead this time he went on, overshot, and heard the next reply to the right and behind him. He took another turn, and came to a small business district. Cars were parked along the street, but he saw no one. He thought it strange that whoever was signaling back to him did not stand in the street somewhere and wave. He honked, and suddenly the reply was almost at his elbow. He stopped the car, jumped out, and hurried along the sidewalk. In the front seat of a car parked at the curb, he saw a man. Even as he looked, the man collapsed and fell forward on the wheel. The horn, pressed down, emitted a long squawk as the body slipped sideways to the seat. Coming closer, Ish smelled a reek of whiskey. He saw the man with a long, straggly beard, his face bloated and red, obviously in the last stages of passing-out. Ish looked around, and saw that the liquor-store close by was wide open.

In sudden anger, Ish shook the yielding body. The man revived a little, opened his eyes, and emitted a kind of grunt which might have meant, “What is it?” Ish shoved the inert body to a sitting position; as he did so, the man’s hand fumbled for the half-empty bottle of whiskey which was propped in the comer of the seat. Ish grabbed it, threw it out, and heard it splinter on the curbing. He was filled only with a deep bitter anger and a sense of horrible irony. Of all the survivors whom he might have found, here was only a poor old drunk, good for nothing more in this world, or any other. Then as the man’s eyes opened and Ish looked into them, he felt suddenly no more anger, but only a great deep pity.

Those eyes had seen too much. There was a fear in them and a horror that could never be told. However gross the bloated body of the drunkard might seem—somewhere, behind it all, lay a sensitive mind, and that mind had seen more than it could endure. Escape and oblivion were all that could remain.

They sat there together on the seat. The eyes of the drunken man glanced here and there, hardly under control. Their tragedy seemed to grow only deeper. The breath came raspingly. On sudden impulse, Ish took the inert wrist and felt for the pulse. It was weak and irregular. The man had been drinking, doubtless, for a week. Whether he could last much longer was questionable.

“This, then is it!” thought Ish. The survivor might have been a beautiful girl, or a fine intelligent man, but it was only this drunkard, too far gone for any help.

After a while Ish got out of the car. He went into the liquor store for curiosity. A dead cat, it seemed, lay on the counter, but as he looked, it stirred to life and he realized that it had merely been lying, after the habit of cats, in such a position that it looked dead. The cat looked at him with a kind of cold effrontery, as the duchess at the chambermaid. Ish felt uncomfortable, and had to remind himself that this was the way cats had always behaved. The cat seemed contented and looked well fed.

Glancing around the shelves, Ish saw what he had been curious about. The man had not even bothered to pick out the better whiskey. Rot-gut had been good enough for his purposes.

Coming out, Ish saw that the man had now managed to find another bottle somewhere, and was taking a long drink. Ish realized that there was nothing much he could do about it. Still, he wanted to make a last try.

He leaned in at the window of the car. The man, revived perhaps by his last drink, was a trifle more alert. He looked at Ish, seeming able to focus his eyes, and he smiled, rather pathetically.

“Hi-ah!” he said in a thick drawl.

“How are you?” said Ish.

“Ah-bar-el-low!” said the man.

Ish was trying to make out what the sounds meant. The man gave his pathetic little child-like smile again, and repeated a trifle more clearly.

“Ah-nay-bar’l-low!”

Ish half caught it.

“Your name’s Barello?” he asked. “No, Barlow?”

The man nodded at the second name, smiled again, and before Ish could do anything, he was taking another drink. Ish felt himself close to tears, far from anger. What difference did a man’s name make now? And yet Mr. Barlow, in his befuddled mind, was trying to make what had been in civilization the first gesture of good will.

Then quite gently Mr. Barlow slumped down on the seat in stupor again, and the whiskey from the unstoppered bottle gurgled out to the floor of the car.

Ish hesitated. Should he cast in his lot with Mr. Barlow, get him sobered up, and make him reform? From what he knew of alcoholics, he did not think the prospects good. And by staying he might lose the chance to make contact with some more likely person.

“You stay here,” he said to the collapsed body, on chance that it might still be able to hear. “I promise to come back.”

Having said this, Ish felt he had fulfilled a kind of minimal duty. He had really no hope. The eyes showed that Mr. Barlow had seen too much; the pulse, that he had gone too far. Ish drove away, making note, however, of the location.

As for the cats, they had known little more than five thousand years of man’s domination, and had always accepted it with reservations. Those unlucky enough to be left penned inside houses, soon died of thirst. But those who had been on the outside managed better than the dogs to scramble-along one way or another. Their hunting of mice became an industry, not an amusement. They stalked birds now to satisfy the quick pang of hunger. They watched by the mole-tunnel in the uncut lawn, and by the gopher-burrow in the vacant lot. They prowled in the streets and alleys, here and there discovering some garbage-can that the rats had not yet looted. They spread outward from the edge of the city, invading the haunts of the quail and the rabbits. There they met with the real wild-cat, and the end was quick and sudden, as the stronger inhabitant of the woods tore the city cat to pieces.