Blood Music by Greg Bear & Greg Bear

Author:Greg Bear & Greg Bear
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gollancz
Published: 2001-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

The lights went out on the fourth day-in the morning, just after she awoke. She put on her designer jeans (from the Salvation Army thrift store) and her best bra and a sweater, took out her windbreaker from the closet behind the stairs, and stepped out into the daylight. No longer blessed, she thought. No longer desirable to the devil or anybody. “My luck’s running out,” she said aloud.

But she had food, and the water was still running. She considered her situation for a moment and decided she wasn’t that badly off. “Sorry, God,” she said, squinting at the sky.

Across the street the houses were completely draped with mottled brown and white sheets that glistened like skin or leather in the sun. The trees and iron railings were hung with tatters of the same stuff. The houses on her side were starting to be overgrown, too.

It was time to move on. She wouldn’t be spared for long.

She packed food into boxes and stacked the boxes in the basket. The gas was still on; she cooked herself a fine breakfast with the last of the eggs and bacon, toasted bread over the fire as her mother had once taught her, spread it with the last of the butter and slathered it with jam. She finished four slices and went upstairs to pack a small overnight bag. Travel light, she thought. Heavy winter jacket and clothes, gun, boots. Wool socks from her brothers’ drawers. Gloves. Frontier time, pioneer time.

“I might be the last woman on Earth,” she mused. “I’ll have to be practical.”

The last thing into the cart, waiting at the foot of the stairs on the sidewalk, was the radio. She only played it a few minutes each night, and she had scrounged a boxful of batteries from Mithridates’. It should be useful for some time.

From the radio, she had learned that people were very worried, not just about Brooklyn, but about the entire United States, all the way to the borders, and Mexico and Canada beyond. Short wave news broadcasts from England talked about the silence, the “plague,” about air travelers being quarantined, and submarines and aircraft patrolling up and down the coast. No aircraft had as yet penetrated to the interior of North America, a very distinguished-sounding British commentator said, but secret satellite photographs, it was rumored, showed a nation paralyzed, perhaps dead.

Not me, Suzy thought. Paralyzed meant not moving. “I’ll move. Come look at me with your submarines and planes. I’ll be moving and I’ll be wherever I am.”

It was late afternoon as Suzy pushed the cart along Adams. Fog obscured the distant towers of Manhattan, allowing only pale silhouettes of the World Trade Center to rise above gray and white opacity. She had never seen fog so dense on the river.

Looking back over her shoulder, she saw great kitelike sails of brown and tan loft up in the wind over Cadman Plaza. Williamsburgh Savings Bank was sheathed along its 500-foot height with brown, no white this time, like a skyscraper wrapped for mailing.

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