Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/22

36 astonishment gradually receded; it did not grow: it became a curtain in his awareness, new background that gave a new proportion. But he stopped now and then to ponder the astounding fact once more, and his thinking did not lessen the fact that these streets in the center of London were filled with dead.

To one he did give heed. A girl, seventeen or eighteen, had been leaning out of a first-story window, face cupped in hand. Her elbows had spread on the sill, and her fingers had slid into her yellow hair. Chin and part of one cheek rested on the stone slab.

He ran to the door of the house. He pressed the bell, wielded the knocker till the street echoed. No one was aroused.

"It's a plague!" Penderby shouted. His voice was shrill. A sickly, light sweat stood on his forehead. "It's a plague! It's got all the town and it'll get me!"

But he began to reason, with the surprising coolness that marked most of what he did that day. He walked from one to another of six or seven bodies on the street. The expressions of the faces were those of persons who had tried to prevent themselves from slipping, from tripping, from being struck. There was no sign of panic. And there was no sign that anyone had run to aid anyone else.

"No," he concluded. "If it was a plague, it killed everyone at once. But a plague couldn't do that; and anyway how comes it that I'm here, after sleeping beside an open window all night?" Then, "But am I awake?"

He pinched the soft skin on the backs of his hands, in turn, several times, stamped, shook himself as if to fling a burden away.

He was awake. These others had died, Edward Penderby was alive.

He went on, his bearing less hesitant than before.

or seventeen busses, passengers in all of them, drivers and conductors in a few, stood in the Victoria railroad-depot yard. Penderby did not enter any of them. He noted a blue-uniformed group in a corner, and remembered that drivers, conductors, and inspectors had gathered at the spot.

There was no sound of trains. One, bearing travelers from the Continent who had landed the evening before, had drawn in. Some doors were open, but the cars still were full.

Outside were taxi-men dead, newsboys dead, policemen dead. Two bodies in German-cut clothes had fallen into a gutter; they were those of refugees, probably.

Horror and alarm gained brief mastery, and Penderby fled the place. As he fled, Big Ben and Cathedral bells began to peal the useless hour, and made a clangor in his ears.

He stopped only when his lungs seemed about to burst and his aching legs could not carry him farther.

An automobile stood six feet from him. It was the first he had noticed. He stepped onto the running-board. But he had had to respect property, and he paused.

"Is there anyone alive here?" he shouted. Then he bawled the question.

There was no reply, and he slipped in.

But the ignition had been locked and the key removed. He cursed in impatience already different from the vexations of his months of struggle, and jumped out. A bigger automobile was ahead, and the driver had slumped onto the wheel. He opened the nearest door, turned the body off balance and guided it to the ground, seated himself at the wheel, and started the engine. The key had been lying on the floor.

Bicycles, cars and bodies blocked the way every few yards; so Penderby traveled slowly. He passed the houses of