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

very first days of the famine she had stayed at the main hospital, living in the isolation ward. The hospital personnel had traded on its skills and medical supplies and gotten through even the worst times—except, apparently, for that last worst time of all. The survivors were mostly nurses and interns; the doctors had retired to their country houses when, after the failure of the Government, anarchy and famine had governed the city. In the last years, Alice Nemerov had gone about the city, armored in innocence and the certain knowledge that her skills would be a passport among even the meanest survivors, secure also in the knowledge that she had passed quite beyond the point where she need worry about rape. Thus, she had come to know many of her fellow refugees, and she effected their introductions with aplomb and tact. She told too of other survivors and the curious expedients by which they had saved themselves from starvation.
    “Rats?” Jackie asked, trying not to seem overdelicate in her disgust.
    “Oh yes, my dear, lots of us tried that. I’ll admit it was highly unpleasant.” Several of her listeners shook their heads in agreement.
    “And there were cannibals, too, but they were poor guilty souls, not at all what you’d think a cannibal would be like. They were always pathetically eager to talk, for all of them lived quite alone. Fortunately, I never came across one when he was hungry, or my feeling might be different.”
    As the sun mounted to noonday, weariness and sheer contiguity made the others drop their guards and speak of their own pasts. Orville realized for the first time that he was not quite the monster of iniquity that he had sometimes thought himself. Even when he revealed that he had been a foreman on the Government labor crews, his hearers did not seem outraged or hostile, though several of them had been impressed for labor in their time. The invasion had turned everyone into relativists: as tolerant of each others’ ways, and means, as if they were delegates at a convention of cultural anthropologists.
    It was hot, and they needed sleep. The breaking down of the barriers of solitude had tired their spirits almost as much as the march had tired their bodies.
    The band did post sentinels, but one of them must have slept. The opportunity for resistance was already past before it was realized.
    The farmers—their bones as ill-clothed with flesh as that flesh with tattered denim—outnumbered them three to one, and the farmers had been able, while the wolves slept (lambs, might not one better say?) to confiscate most of the weapons and prevent the use of the rest.
    With one exception: Christie, whom Orville had thought he might grow to like, had managed to shoot one farmer, an old man, in the head. Christie was garroted.
    Everything happened very quickly, but not too quickly for Jackie to give Orville a last kiss. When she was pulled away from him, roughly, by a younger farmer who seemed better fleshed-out than the majority, she was smiling the special, bittersweet smile which was reserved for just such occasions as this.

FIVE: Blood Relations
    Lady tucked Blossom into bed that night just as though she were still her little girl. She was only thirteen after all. Outside the men were still going at it. It was a terrible thing. If only she could shut her ears to it.
    “I wish they didn’t have to do that, Mother,” Blossom whispered.
    “It’s necessary, darling—a necessary evil. Those people wouldn’t have hesitated to kill us. Are you warm under that thin blanket?”
    “But why don’t we just bury them?”
    “Your father knows best, Blossom. I’m sure it distresses him to have to do this. I remember that your brother Buddy—” Lady always referred to her stepson as Blossom’s and Neil’s brother, but she could never forget that this was a half-truth at best and she stumbled over the word. “—that he once felt the same as you.”
    “
He
wasn’t there tonight. I asked Maryann.