Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [219]
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 funny."
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?"
Johnny Baker nodded. "Griffith Park Zoo. The quake must have ripped some of the cages apart. No telling how the poor beast got this far north before he drowned or starved. Look close, gentlemen, you'll never see another … "
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.
In the supermarket there were half-empty shelves, and the water floated with corncobs and empty bottles and orange rinds and half-used loaves of bagged bread. They had not died hungry .. . but they had died, for their corpses floated everywhere in the supermarket and in the flooded parking lot. Scores of bodies. Most were women, but there were men and children, too, bobbing gently among the submerged cars.
"Are you … " Rick whispered. He bowed his head and cleared his throat and shrieked, "Are you all crazy?" They turned, shocked and angry. "If you want to see corpses, look around you! Here," his hand brushed a stained and rotting flowered dress, "and there," pointing to a child close enough for Deke to touch, "and there," to a slack face behind the windshield of the yolks bus itself. "Can you look anywhere without seeing somebody dead? Why are you crowding like jackals around a dead kangaroo?"
"You shut up! Shut up!" Kevin Murray's fists were balled at his sides, the knuckles white; but he didn't move, and presently he looked away, and so did the others.
All but Jacob Vinge. His voice held a tremor. "We got used to it. We just got used to it. We had to, goddamm it!"
The current shifted slightly. The kangaroo, if that was what it was, washed around the edge of the bus and began to move away.
The Jeep Wagoneer had once been bright orange with white trim, a luxury station wagon that only incidentally had four-wheel drive and off-road tires. Now it was splashed with brown and green paint in a camouflage pattern. Two men in Army uniform sat in the front seat, rifles held erect between their knees.
Alim Nassor and Sergeant Hooker