Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2. Ray Bradbury
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window up.
‘Good Lord,’ she said, ‘those open-air butcher shops.’
The smell was still in the car, a smell of war and horror.
‘Did you see the flies?’ she asked.
‘When you buy any kind of meat in those markets,’ John Webb said, ‘you slap the beef with your hand. The flies lift from the meat so you can get a look at it.’
He turned the car around a lush bend in the green rain-jungle road.
‘Do you think they’ll let us into Juatala when we get there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Watch out!’
He saw the bright things in the road too late, tried to swerve, but hit them. There was a terrible sighing from the right front tire, the car heaved about and sank to a stop. He opened his side of the car and stepped out. The jungle was hot and silent and the highway empty, very empty and quiet at noon.
He walked to the front of the car and bent, all the while checking his revolver in its underarm holster.
Leonora’s window gleamed down. ‘Is the tire hurt much?’
‘Ruined, utterly ruined!’ He picked up the bright thing that had stabbed and slashed the tire.
‘Pieces of a broken machete,’ he said, ‘placed in adobe holders pointing toward our car wheels. We’re lucky it didn’t get all our tires.’
‘But why?’
‘You know as well as I.’ He nodded to the newspaper beside her, at the date, the headlines:
OCTOBER 4th, 1963: UNITED STATES, Europe SILENT!
THE RADIOS OF THE U.S.A. AND EUROPE ARE DEAD. THERE IS A GREAT SILENCE. THE WAR HAS SPENT ITSELF.
It is believed that most of the population of the United States is dead. It is believed that most of Europe, Russia, and Siberia is equally decimated. The day of the white people of the earth is over and finished.
‘It all came so fast,’ said Webb. ‘One week we’re on another tour, a grand vacation from home. The next week – this.’
They both looked away from the black headlines to the jungle.
The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.
‘Be careful, Jack.’
He pressed two buttons. An automatic lift under the front wheels hissed and hung the car in the air. He jammed a key nervously into the right wheel plate. The tire, frame and all, with a sucking pop, bounced from the wheel. It was a matter of seconds to lock the spare in place and roll the shattered tire back to the luggage compartment. He had his gun out while he did all this.
‘Don’t stand in the open, please, Jack.’
‘So it’s starting already.’ He felt his hair burning hot on his skull. ‘News travels fast.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Leonora. ‘They can hear you!’
He stared at the jungle.
‘I know you’re in there!’
‘Jack!’
He aimed at the silent jungle. ‘I see you!’ He fired four, five times, quickly, wildly.
The jungle ate the bullets with hardly a quiver, a brief slit sound like torn silk where the bullets bored and vanished into a million acres of green leaves, trees, silence, and moist earth. The brief echo of the shots died. Only the car muttered its exhaust behind Webb. He walked around the car, got in, and shut the door and locked it.
He reloaded the gun, sitting in the front seat. Then they drove away from the place.
They drove steadily.
‘Did you see anyone?’
‘No. You?’
She shook her head.
‘You’re going too fast.’
He slowed only in time. As they rounded a curve another clump of the bright flashing objects filled the right side of the road. He swerved to the left and passed.
‘Sons-of-bitches!’
‘They’re not sons-of-bitches, they’re just people who never had a car like this or anything at all.’
Something ticked across the windowpane.
There was a streak of colorless liquid on the glass.
Leonora glanced up. ‘Is it going to rain?’
‘No, an insect hit the pane.’
Another tick.
‘Are you sure that was an insect?’
Tick, tick, tick.
‘Shut the window!’ he said, speeding up.
Something fell in her lap.
She looked down at it. He reached over to touch the thing. ‘Quick!’
She pressed the button. The window snapped up.
Then she examined her lap again.
The tiny blowgun dart glistened there.
‘Don’t get any of the liquid on you,’ he said. ‘Wrap it in your handkerchief – we’ll throw it away later.’
He had the car up to sixty miles an hour.
‘If we hit another road block, we’re done.’
‘This is a local thing,’ he said. ‘We’ll drive out of it.’
The panes were ticking all the time. A shower of things blew at the window and fell away in their speed.
‘Why,’ said Leonora Webb, ‘they don’t even know us!’
‘I only wish they did.’ He gripped the wheel. ‘It’s hard to kill people you know. But not hard to kill strangers.’
‘I don’t want to die,’ she said simply, sitting there.
He put his hand inside his coat. ‘If anything happens to me, my gun is here. Use it, for God’s sake, and don’t waste time.’
She moved over close to him and they drove seventy-five miles an hour down a straight stretch in the jungle road, saying nothing.
With the windows up, the heat was oven-thick in the car.
‘It’s so silly,’ she said, at last. ‘Putting the knives in the road. Trying to hit us with the blowguns. How could they know that the next car along would be driven by white people?’
‘Don’t ask them to be that logical,’ he said. ‘A car is a car. It’s big, it’s rich. The money in one car would last them a lifetime. And anyway, if you road-block a car, chances are you’ll get either an American tourist or a rich Spaniard, comparatively speaking, whose ancestors should have behaved better. And if you happen to road-block another Indian, hell, all you do is go out and help him change tires.’
‘What time is it?’ she asked.
For the thousandth time he glanced at his empty wrist. Without expression or surprise, he fished in his coat pocket for the glistening gold watch with the silent sweep hand. A year ago he had seen a native stare at this watch and stare at it and stare at it with almost a hunger. Then the native had examined him, not scowling, not hating, not sad or happy; nothing except puzzled.
He had taken the watch off that day and never worn it since.
‘Noon,’ he said.
Noon.
The border lay ahead. They saw it and both cried out at once.