Page:Fantastic Volume 08 Number 01.djvu/123

 moving silently in the shadows. The whispering night wind muffled their stealthy approach as they crept upon the swarming rodents who gnawed at the tattered shards of the dogs' abandoned kill.

Squalls of feline rage and triumph,—squeaks of pain and terror, rustlings and scramblings of pursuer and pursued made a faint diminuendo in the darkness, as an antiphony of predator and prey as clouds swept out of the west to hide the moon and rain fell to soak the littered streets, plastering the torn scraps of paper against steel and concrete, swaddling the city in wet wrappings of papier mache. The water trickled forlornly through choked gutters to drip into hollow gurgling storm sewers as the clouds swept past and the moon shone low and pale against the gray light of dawn.

The red headlines of a newspaper plastered against an overturned car stood out in stark relief against the growing light. The headline six inches high carried all the news that was important.

It contained only three letters and an exclamation point.

It read quite simply — — WAR!

And in the light of the new day, she realized at last that there was no further need nor reason for her to remain. Stiffly she rose to her feet, looked down at her man, and then turned and walked slowly away

The hospital was a charnel house, a grisly monument that poked a long fingered spire toward the sky—a symbol of hope that failed. Men had come here for help and had remained to die. Hundreds of cots filled the wards and halls, each bearing a bloated burden of dissolution. The air was heavy with decay, a fetid miasma rank with the odors of decomposition. But in the midst of this carnival of death there was life.

There were the flies.

They clustered in black masses upon the walls and ceilings and upon the liquefying flesh of the dead, and the air swirled sluggishly to the beat of their myriad wings. A muffled drone augmenting and diminishing with uncertain rhythm echoed through the corridors of the dead as the flies sought the upper reaches of the halls for a warmer resting place to withstand the chill of approaching night.

But there were more than flies and maggots and the NOTHING BUT TERROR