Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [218]
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 cannibals. It might not be long before they came to Deke Wilson's turf again.
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 cannibals. And of course the local survivors were looking strangely at Rick Delanty again …
"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 canned stew.
"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. Fifty-fifty 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 Johnny and the farmers, all dog-tired and dirty and wet, moving like zombies. Some had strength to smile. Rick and Kevin Murray dipped for the bottles and handed them up, because they were the ones who didn't carry guns.
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