Damnation Alley

He was moving along a clean, hard, wide road, and just then he wanted to travel it forever, to Florida, of the swamps and Spanish moss and citrus groves and fine beaches and the Gulf; and up to the cold, rocky Cape, where everything is gray and brown and the waves break below the lighthouses and the salt burns in your nose and there are graveyards where bones have lain for centuries and you can still read the names they bore, chiseled there into the stones above them; down through the nation where they say the grass is blue; then follow the mighty Missus Hip to the place where she spreads and comes and there's the Gulf again, full of little islands where the old boosters stashed their loot; and through the shagtopped mountains he'd heard about: the Smokies, Ozarks, Poconos, Catskills; drive through the forest of Shenandoah; park, and take a boat out over Chesapeake Bay; see the big lakes and the place where the water falls, Niagara. To drive forever along the big road, to see everything, to eat the world. Yes. Maybe it wasn't all Damnation Alley. Some of the legendary places must still be clean, like the countryside about him now. He wanted it with a hunger, with a fire like that which always burned in. his loins. He laughed then, just one short, sharp bark, because now it seemed like maybe he could have it.

The music played softly, too sweetly perhaps, and it filled him.

The bell that rang again, and yet again, did not completely submerge the sound of breaking glass. True, the silences came again, each deepened and intensified by memory and anticipation; but there had been that moment's pain within the already throbbing nervous system of the city.

The body moved to heal itself.

A light drizzle was descending, and the heavens flashed broken rainbows in all quarters. A downpour of dead fish, lasting perhaps a quarter of a minute, struck portions of the city, and telephone lines were draped with seaweed, and sand lashed against windowpanes. Sensing this provender, the rats came forth from the cellars and the barns, the sheds and the alleys, the junk heaps and the ditches, to feed upon the white-bellied ma

But they had not broken the window, nor had the fish.

Sergeant Donahue, who was driving, turned to Lieutenant Spano at his right.

"No siren?" he queried.

"No siren."

Lieutenant Spano unfastened his black and gleaming holster, which he wore high upon his right hip.

"Turn out the lights."

The sergeant complied.

The world dimmed before them, and tiny dark shapes fled before the police cruiser. They turned the corner and slowed, both men studying the storefronts that lined this block of the city, the place where the wound had occurred.

"Ready with the spot."

"It's ready."

They cruised, silently, along the damp and glistening curb. A rumble of thunder came down from the north, with a flash of light that turned the sky into a yellow scroll covered with smoky hieroglyphs. For a moment the entire block was illuminated: cars, cables, hydrants, stores, trees, houses, and rats.

"There he is! Our side of the street! Hit him with the spot!"

Donahue turned on the spotlight and moved it. It fell upon the man before the broken window, bent forward, sack in hand, frozen in mid-reach.

"Don't move! You're under arrest!" he called over the loudspeaker.

The man turned and stared into the light. Then be dropped his sack and bounded into the street.

Lieutenant Spano fired six rounds from his .38 Special, and the man crumpled, fell, and lay like a dirty and wrung-out dishrag, his blood mingling with the moisture on the pavement, a dead rat at his right hand, a stripped fish above his head.

"You killed him," said Donahue, braking the car.

"He tried to escape," said Spano.

"We've got orders to try to bring them in."

"But he tried to escape."

"We're supposed to wound them, then, if we can."

"Yes, but he kept ru

Donahue met the other man's eyes, then looked away.

"He tried to escape," he agreed.

They left the car and approached the body. Spano turned it over.

"He's only a kid!" said Donahue. Then he moved to the sidewalk and opened the sack.

"Sporting goods, " he said. "Softballs, a couple bats, a fielder's glove, and a catcher's mitt. Here's two footballs... A set of dumbbells… He was only a kid!"

Spano looked away. After a time he said, "He was looting."

"Yeah, and he tried to escape."

"Go see if you can get a call through to Precinct."

"Yeah. But I..."

"Donahue, shut up. You saw what happened."

"Yeah."

Spano lit a cigarette as the night became red and unreal, and the crimson notes of the bell filled the world to its brim with their shudders.

Nine crawling rats, dragging their legs behind them, Snapping at nothing, and wet, parlayed confusion and motion.

By morning he was into the place called Indiana and still following the road. He passed farmhouses which seemed in good repair. There could even be people living! in them. He longed to investigate, but he didn't dare stop. Then after an hour, it was all countryside again, and de generating.

The grasses grew shorter, shriveled, were gone. An occasional twisted tree clung to the bare earth. The radia tion level began to rise once more. The signs told him he was nearing Indianapolis, which he guessed was a big city that had received a bomb and was now gone away.

Nor was he mistaken.

He had to detour far to the south to get around it, backtracking to a place called Martinsville in order to cross over the White River. Then as he headed east once more, his radio crackled and came to life. There was a faint voice, repeating, "Unidentified vehicle, halt!" and he switched all the sca

He was hitting forty miles an hour along a halfway decent section of roadway, and he gradually increased his speed to fifty-five, though the protesting of his tires upon the cracked pavement was sufficient to awaken Greg.

Ta

He touched the brake as he rounded a long curve, and he did not reply to Greg's "What's the matter?"

When he saw it there, blocking the way, ready to fire, he acted instantly.

The tank filled the road, and its big gun was pointed directly at him.

As his eye sought for and found passage around it, his right hand slapped the switches that sent three armorpiercing rockets screaming ahead, and his left spun the wheel counterclockwise, and his foot fell heavy on the accelerator.

He was half off the road then, bouncing along the ditch at its side, when the tank discharged one fiery belch, which missed him and then caved in upon itself and blossomed.

There came the sound of rifle fire as he pulled back onto the road on the other side of the tank and sped ahead. Greg launched a grenade to the right and the left and then hit the fifty-calibers. They tore on ahead, and after about a quarter of a mile Ta

As soon as they reached a level plain, commanding a good view in all directions, Ta