The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch Read Free Book Online Page A

had provisioned his fortress in the basement of the First American National Bank and retired from his life of public service.
    There had even been a romance, and it had progressed (unlike his marriage) exactly as a romance should progress: a strongly contested courtship, extravagant declarations, fevers, jealousies, triumphs—oh unceasing triumphs, and always the aphrodisiac of mortal danger that suffused the alleys and looted stores of the dying city.
    Three years he had been with Jackie Whythe, and it seemed no more than a holiday weekend.
    If it were true for him, would it not be true for the other survivors as well? Did they not all feel this clandestine gladness in their hearts, like adulterers together secretly in a strange town? It must be so, he thought. It must be so.

    Past the Brighton Beach Tourist Camp, the Plants grew denser and the urban sprawl thinned. The fortuitously met little group had come to the wilderness, where they might be safe. As they moved northeast on Route 61, the dim light of the burning city faded behind them, and the dimmer light of the stars was blotted out by foliage. They advanced into perfect darkness.
    They moved rapidly, however, for though the Plants had broken through the road wherever they wished, they had not obliterated it. It was not as though the hurrying band had to fight its way through one of the old scrub woods that had once grown around here: no branches tore at one’s face; no brambles snagged one’s feet. There were not even mosquitoes, for the Plants had drained all the marshes roundabout. The only obstructions were occasional potholes, and sometimes, where the Plants had broken the asphalt sufficiently to give headway to erosion, a gulley.
    Orville and the others followed the highway until morning glowed grayly through the eastern mass of forest, then turned toward the light, toward the lake, which had once been visible to the cars driving along this road. It seemed dangerous to follow Route 61 any farther, as though it were an extension of the city and subject to the city’s fate. Then, too, they were thirsty. If luck was with them, they might even get fish from the lake.
    The route had been forced on them by circumstances. It would have been wiser, with the winter in view, to move south, but that would have meant circling the burning city, a chance in no way worth taking. There was no water to the west, and to the east there was too much. Lake Superior, though diminished, was still an effective barrier. Perhaps one of the lakeshore villages would have maintained serviceable boats, in which case they might turn pirate, as that fleet of tugboats had done three years before when Duluth Harbor ran dry. But the best probable direction was to continue northeast along the shore of the lake, looting the farms and villages. Worry about winter when winter came.
    Lake Superior teemed with sunfish. Cooked over a driftwood fire, they were good even without salt. Afterward the group discussed, with some attempt at optimism, their plight and prospects. There was not much to decide: the situation dictated its own terms. The gathering was in fact less a discussion than a contest among the sixteen men to see who would assume leadership. Their band had been formed at hazard. Except for the couples, they did not know each other. (There had been little social life those last years; the only community that had survived in the cities had been the pack, and if any of these men had been in a pack before, he wasn’t talking about it now.) None of the contenders for leadership seemed willing to discuss the details of his own survival. Such reticence was natural and becoming: at least they had not become so brutalized as to exult in their depravity and brag of their guilt. They had done what they had to, but they were not necessarily proud of it.
    Alice Nemerov rescued them from this awkwardness by narrating her own story, which was singularly free of unpleasantnesses, considering. From the