The Year When Stardust Fell by Raymond F. Jones (most recommended books .TXT) 📖

of defenders was moving up from halfway down the block. Ken held back to shout to the other patrol and to those coming, "Let's stand in the next street!"

There were shouts of assent from down the line and they moved to the shelter of the empty houses.

They were close to the edge of town, near the barbed-wire barricade, and the nomads would obviously make their biggest effort here to wipe out the forces that threatened to close them off. His own group, Ken saw, would also have to make their stand here or risk being pocketed by the uncoiling line of nomads.

"Don't let them get close enough to fire the buildings!" he shouted down the line. The word was passed along with agreement. They broke into small patrols and occupied the houses, Ken joining one that took over the top floor of a 2-story house. This gave them the advantage of good observation, but the added danger of difficult escape in case the house was set on fire. Its walls were brick, however, and offered a good chance of being held.

Within minutes, the nomads had occupied the houses just abandoned. Ken fired rapidly and carefully as he saw them exposed momentarily in their move to new positions. His marksmanship had a telling effect on the enemy, and encouraged his companions. As soon as the nomads had obtained cover however, it was a stalemate.

It was mid-morning already, and Ken wondered how it had grown so late. For an hour or two they exchanged shots with the enemy. Twice, attempts were made to hurl firebombs. Both were driven back.

Beyond this, however, the nomads seemed in no mood to make further attack. They were waiting for darkness, Ken thought, and then they would advance with their firebombs and grenades and have free choice of battle setting. If that happened, Mayfield might be a huge inferno by midnight. They had to seize the initiative from the invaders.

He called his companions and told them how it looked. They agreed. "What can we do?" a tired, middle-aged man asked.

"We've got to take the initiative before they come at us again." Ken glanced at the sky. "Within an hour it may be snowing hard. That will make it more difficult to hit a target. When daylight is almost gone we'll attack them instead of waiting for them to come after us. It can be done if we hit hard and fast enough. We'll lose some men, but not as many as if we wait and let them pick us off with their grenades and incendiaries as they feel like it."

The men considered it dubiously. "We've got a better chance to hit them as they break from cover," someone suggested.

"Not after dark, and that's what they're waiting for. They'll burn our houses and drive us back all night long if we give them the chance. We must not give it to them!"

Reluctant nods of agreement came from his group. "The way you put it, I guess it's the only chance we've got," the former objector agreed.

"I'll talk with the other groups," Ken said.

He moved down the stairs and out the back door of the house. The space between the two houses was entirely open. He flung himself down and crawled. Twice, he heard the whine of bullets above his head.

After heated argument, the group in the next house agreed to the plan to rush the invaders. He moved on down the block, regretting his own lack of authority that made it necessary for him to have to plead for co-operation. He wondered what was happening in the rest of the town. There had been gunfire all day, but it seemed incredible there had been no communication from any other sector or any evidence of command. No one he talked to had any idea what had happened to their command. There had been some in the beginning, but it had simply seemed to vanish. Ken's pleading for co-operation in an attack was the nearest thing to leadership they had seen for hours.

The snow was swirling hard and the sun was almost beyond the hills, what little of it was visible in the clouds. It was getting as dark as he dared allow before giving the signal for attack, but there was one more group to contact. He debated and decided to go to them.

Then, as he entered the rear of the house, he heard the cries of alarm from those houses he had been to. The invaders were breaking out for an incendiary attack.

He seized his gun and fired the signal for their own advance. He ran into the street shouting for the others to follow. The nomads were concentrating their fire charge at the other end of the row of houses, and there the defenders fell back without an attempt to advance.

Like watching a wave turned back by a rocky shore, Ken saw his companions fleeing in disorderly retreat through the rear of the houses to the block beyond. A bullet whizzed by his head. He dropped to the ground and crawled on his stomach to the safety of cover behind a brick house.

For a long time he lay in the snow, unmoving. He could not hold back the sobbing despair that shook him. He had never before known what it was like to be utterly alone. Mayfield was dying and taking away everything that was his own personal world. He had listened to news of the destruction of Chicago and of Berkeley without knowing what it really meant. Now he knew.

For all he knew, the nomads might even now be in control of the major part of the town. He could not know what had happened to his father, to Maria, to anyone.

The crackling of flames in the next house aroused him. He crawled inside the brick house, which was still safe, for a moment of rest. He knew he should be fleeing with the others, but he had to rest.

He heard sporadic shooting. A few nomads were straggling after their companions at the other end of the street. It was too far to shoot. However, one nomad stopped and swung cautiously under the very windows of the burning house next door. Ken leveled his rifle and fired. The bullet caught the man in the shoulder and flung him violently against the wall. Ken saw that he would be buried by the imminent, flaming collapse of that wall.

The man saw it, too. He struggled frantically to move out of the way, but he seemed injured beyond the power to get away.

Ken regarded him in a kind of stupor for a moment. The man out there was responsible for all this, he thought, for the burning and for the killing....

He swung his rifle over his shoulder and went out. Brands were falling upon the wounded enemy. Ken hoisted the man under the arms and dragged him to the opposite side of the adjacent house. The nomad looked at Ken with a strange fury in his eyes.

"You're crazy!" he said painfully. "You're the one who shot me?"

Ken nodded.

"You'll be cut off. Well, it won't matter much anyway. By tomorrow your town will be burned and dead. Soon, we'll all be dead."

Ken kneeled on the ground beside him, as if before some strange object from a foreign land. "What were you?" he asked. "Before, I mean."

The man coughed heavily and blood covered his mouth and thick growth of beard. The bullet must be in his lungs, Ken thought. He helped wipe away the blood and brushed the man's mouth with a handful of snow.

"You're crazy," the nomad said again. "I guess we're all crazy. You're just a kid, aren't you? You want to know what I was a million years ago, before all this?"

"Yes," Ken said.

The man attempted a smile. "Gas station. Wasn't that a crazy thing? No need of gas when all the cars quit. I owned one on the best little corner in Marysvale."

"Why are you with them?" Ken nodded in the darkness toward the distant attackers.

The man glared, twisting with the pain. Then his glance softened. "You'd have done it, too. What else was there? I had a wife, two kids. No food within a hundred miles after we used what was in our own pantry and robbed what we could from the supermarket downtown.

"We all got together and went after some. We got bigger as we went along. We needed men who were good with rifles. We found some. We kept going. People who had food fought to keep it; we fought to take it. That's the way it had to be.

"We heard about your town with its big hoard of food. We decided to get it."

"Did you know you burned half of it this morning?"

"No. That's tough. That's tough all the way around. Don't look at me that way, kid. You would have done the same. We're all the same as you, only we didn't live where there was plenty of food on hand. We were all decent guys before. Me, those guys out in the street that you knocked off. I guess you're decent, too."

"Where's your family now?"

"Twenty miles down the valley, waiting with the rest of the women and children for us to bring them food."

Ken rose slowly to his feet. The man was bleeding heavily from the mouth. His words were growing muffled. "What are you going to do?" he asked.

"Get on with what has to be done," said Ken wearily. He felt sure he must be walking in a nightmare and in just a little while he would awaken. "If there's a chance, I'll try to send somebody after you."

"Never mind me!" the nomad said with sudden fierceness. "I'm done for. You've finished me. If our outfit should be unlucky enough to lose, see my wife and try to do something for my kids. Get some food to them. Tom Doyle's the name," the man said.

A fit of coughing seized him again and blood poured from his mouth. His eyes were closed when he lay back again. "Tom Doyle's the name," his bloody lips murmured. "Don't forget that, kid. Tom Doyle's Service, corner of First and Green in Marysvale. We were all good guys once."

The snow was so heavy it seemed like a solid substance through which Ken walked. In spite of it, row upon row of houses burned with a fury that lit the whole scene with a glow that was like the comet's own. Above this, the blanket of black smoke lay as if ready to smother the valley as soon as the light was gone.

Ken didn't know for sure where he was going. A kind of aimlessness crept over him and there no longer seemed any rational objective toward which to move. He crept on from house to house in the direction his group had gone, but he could not find any of them. Somewhere he touched the edge of combat again. He had a nightmare of going into a thousand houses, smashing their windows out, thrusting his rifle through for a desperate shot at some fleeing enemy.

The night was held back by a hundred terrible fires. He shot at shadows and ghosts that moved against the flames. He sought the companionship of others who fought, like himself, in a lonely vastness where only the sound of fire and gunshots prevailed.

Later, he moved through the streets stricken with cold that he could not lose even when he passed and stood close to a mass of burning rubble. He had stopped shooting quite a long time ago, and he guessed he was out of bullets. The next time he met someone, he thought, he would ask them to look in his pockets and see if any were left.

He kept walking. He passed streets where the black, charcoal arms of the skeletons of houses raised to the sky. He passed the hot columns of smoke and continued to shiver with cold as they steamed upward to the clouds. He