Once we had started, I was too busy during the day to spend much thought beyond the actual work in hand, and too tired at night to do anything but sleep the moment I lay down. Now and again I’d say to myself, “By tomorrow night I’ll have them pretty well fixed up—enough to keep them going for a bit, anyway. Then I’ll light out of this and find Josella.”
That sounded all right—but every day it was tomorrow that I’d be able to do it, and each day it became more difficult. Some of them had begun to learn a bit, but still practically nothing, from foraging to can-opening, could go on without my being around. It seemed, the way things were going, that I became less, instead of more, dispensable.
None of it was their fault. That was what made it difficult. Some of them were trying so damned hard. I just had to watch them making it more and more impossible for me to play the skunk and walk out on them. A dozen times a day I cursed the man Coker for contriving me into the situation—but that didn’t help to solve it: it just left me wondering how it could end…
I had my first inkling of that, though I scarcely recognized it as such, on the fourth morning—or maybe it was the fifth—just as we were setting out. A woman called down the stairs that there were two sick up there; pretty bad, she thought.
My two watchdogs did not like it.
“Listen,” I told them. “I’ve had about enough of this chain-gang stuff. We’d be doing a lot better than we are now without it, anyway.”
“An’ have you slinkin’ off to join your old mob?” said someone.
“Don’t fool yourself,” I said. “I could have slugged this pair of amateur gorillas any hour of the day or night. I’ve not done it because I’ve got nothing against them other than their being a pair of dim-witted nuisances——”
“？’Ere——” one of my attachments began to expostulate.
“But,” I went on, “if they don’t let me see what’s wrong with these people, they can begin expecting to be slugged any minute from now.”
The two saw reason, but when we reached the room they took good care to stand as far back as the chain allowed. The casualties turned out to be two men, one young, one middle-aged. Both had high temperatures and complained of agonizing pain in the bowels. I didn’t know much about such things then, but I did not need to know much to feel worried. I could think of nothing but to direct that they should be carried to an empty house nearby, and to tell one of the women to look after them as best she could.
That was the beginning of a day of setbacks. The next, of a very different kind, happened around noon.
We had cleared most of the food shops close to us, and I had decided to extend our range a little. From my recollections of the neighborhood, I reckoned we ought to find another shopping street about a half mile to the north, so I led my party that way. We found the shops there, all right, but something else too.
As we turned the corner and came into view of them, I stopped. In front of a chain-store grocery a party of men was trundling out cases and loading them onto a truck. Save for the difference in the vehicle, I might have been watching my own party at work. I halted my group of twenty or so, wondering what line we should take. My inclination was to withdraw and avoid possible trouble by finding a clear field elsewhere; there was no sense in coming into conflict when there was plenty scattered in various stores for those who were organized enough to take it. But it did not fall to me to make the decision. Even while I hesitated a redheaded young man strode confidently out of the shop door. There was no doubt that he was able to see—or, a moment later, that he had seen us.
He did not share my indecision. He reached swiftly for his pocket. The next moment a bullet hit the wall beside me with a smack.
There was a brief tableau. His men and mine turning their sightless eyes toward one another in an effort to understand what was going on. Then he fired again. I supposed he had aimed at me, but the bullet found the man on my left. He gave a grunt as though he were surprised, and folded up with a kind of sigh. I dodged back round the corner, dragging the other watchdog with me.