Lucifer's Hammer

Alim was aware that there were movements to his right. Hooker had sent men out to flank him. Alim turned and shouted to purely imaginary followers. “Hold it up there, you bastards! This is a peace talk, dig? I’ll skin the first dude that shoots, and you know I’ll do it.” Too much, Alim thought. Like I’m worried they won’t do what I say. But the Army dudes heard me, and it stopped them. And Harold’s in the camp and nobody’s done any shootin’ yet…

And he’s done it, Alim shouted to himself. He’s talking to Hooker, and by God he’s done it. Hook’s comin’ out to meet me. We’re all right, all-fucking-right.

For the first time since Hammerfall, Alim Nassor felt hope and pride.

Two heavy farm trucks ground across the mud flats, taking a tortuous path to the new island in the San Joaquin Sea. They stopped at a supermarket, still half flooded, glass windows scraped of mud by laborious effort. Armed men jumped out and took up positions nearby.

“Let’s go,” Cal White said. He carried Deke Wilson’s submachine gun. White led the way into the drowned building, wading waist-deep in filthy water. The others followed.

Rick Delanty coughed and tried to breathe through his mouth. The smell of death was overpowering. He looked for someone to talk to, Pieter or Joh

“If it was up to me, I’d wait another week,” Kevin Murray said. Murray was a short, burly man with long arms. He’d been a feedstore clerk, and was lucky enough to have married a farmer’s sister.

“Wait a week and those Army bastards may be here,” Cal White called from inside. “Hold up a second.” White went on with another man and their only working flashlight, handpumped, and Deke’s submachine gun.

The gun seemed an irrelevant obscenity to Rick. There was too much death all around them. He wasn’t going to say that. Last night Deke had taken in a refugee, a man from southwards with information to trade for a meal: a gang of blacks had been terrorizing the south valley, and now they were linked up with the Army ca

Poor bastards, Rick thought. He could sympathize: blacks in this shattered world, no status, no place to go, wanted nowhere. Of course they’d join the ca

“Clear. Let’s get at it,” White called from inside. They waded in, a dozen men, three astronauts and nine survivors. A driver brought one of the trucks around so that the headlights shone into the wrecked store. Rick wished they hadn’t. Bodies bobbed in the filthy water. He choked hard and brought the cloth to his face, White had sprinkled a dozen drops of gasoline on it. The sweet sickening smell of gasoline was better than…

Kevin Murray went to a shelf of cans. He lifted a can of corn. It was eaten through with rust. “Gone,” he said. “Damn.”

“Sure wish we had a flashlight,” another farmer said.

A flashlight would help, Rick knew, but some things are better done in gloomy darkness. He pushed rotten remains away from a shelf. Glass jars. Pickles. He called to the others, and they began carrying the pickles out.

“What’s this stuff, Rick?” Kevin Murray asked. He brought another jar.

“Mushrooms.”

Murray shrugged. “Better’n nothing. Thanks. Sure wish I had my glasses back. You ever wonder why I don’t pack a gun? Can’t see as far as the sights.”

Rick tried to concentrate on glasses, but he didn’t know anything about how you might grind lenses. He moved through the aisles, carrying things the others had discovered, searching for more, pushing aside the corpses until even that became routine, but you had to talk about something else… “Cans don’t last long, do they?” Rick said. He stared at rotten ca

“Sardine cans last fine. God knows why. I think somebody’s already been here, there ain’t so much as the last store. We got most of what was here yesterday, anyway.” He looked thoughtfully at old corpses bobbing about him. “Maybe they ate it all. Trapped here…”

Rick didn’t answer. His toes had brushed glass.

They were all working in open-toed sandals taken from the shoe store up the road. They couldn’t work barefoot for fear of broken glass, and why ruin good boots? Now his toes had brushed a cool, smooth curve of glass bottle.

Rick held his breath and submerged. Near floor level he found rows of bottles, lots of them, different shapes. Fiftyfifty it was bottled water, barely worth room aboard the truck; but he picked one up and surfaced.

“Apple juice, by God! Hey, gang, we need hands here!”

They waded down the aisles, Pieter and Joh

White, the man in charge, turned slowly away with two bottles; turned back. “Good, Rick. You did good,” he said, and smiled, and turned slowly away and waded toward the doorway. Rick followed.

Someone yelled.

Rick set his bottles on an empty shelf to give himself speed. That had to be Sohl on sentry duty. But Rick didn’t have a gun!

Sohl yelled again. “No danger; I repeat, no danger, but you guys gotta see this!”

Go back for the bottles? Hell with it. Rick pushed past something he wouldn’t look at (but the floating mass had the feel, the weight of a small dead man or a large dead woman) and waded out into the light.

The parking lot was almost half full of cars, forty or fifty cars abandoned when the rains came. The hot rain must have fallen so fast that car motors were drowned before the customers in the shopping center could decide to move. So the cars had stayed, and many of the customers. The water washed around and in and out of the cars.

Sohl was still at his post on the roof of the supermarket. It would have done him no good to come closer; he was farsighted, and his glasses had been smashed, like Murray’s. He pointed down at what was washing against the side of a Volkswagen bus and called, “Will someone tell me what that is? It ain’t no cow!”

They formed a semicircle around it, their feet braced against the water’s gentle westward current, this same flow that held the strange body against the bus.

It was smaller than a man. It was all the colors of decay; the big, drastically bent legs were almost falling off. What was it? It had arms. For a mad moment Rick pictured Hammerfall as the first step in an interstellar invasion, or as part of a program for tourists from other worlds. Those tiny arms the long mouth gaping in death, the Chianti-bottle torso…

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “It’s a kangaroo.”

“Well, I never saw a kangaroo like that,” White said with fine contempt.

“It’s a kangaroo.”

“But—”

Rick snapped, “Does your newspaper run pictures of animals two weeks dead? Mine never did. It’s a dead kangaroo, that’s why it looks fu

Jacob Vinge had crowded close to the beast. “No pouch,” he said. “Kangaroos have pouches.”

The breeze shifted; the crescent of men opened at one end. “Maybe it’s a male,” Deke Wilson said. “I don’t see balls either. Did kangaroos have… ah, overt genitalia? Oh, this is stupid. Where would it come from? There ain’t any zoo closer than… where?”

Joh

Rick stopped listening. He backed out of the arc and looked around him. He wanted to scream.

They had come at dawn yesterday. They had worked all of yesterday and today, and it must be near sunset. None of them had even discussed what must have happened here, yet it was obvious enough. Scores of customers must have been trapped here when the first flash rain drowned their cars. They had waited in the supermarket for the rain to stop, they had waited for rescue; they had waited while the water rose and rose. At the end the electric doors hadn’t worked. Some must have left through the back, to drown in the open.