leaning building-fronts and sagging porches, its caverns of empty windows and doorways shimmering in the heat. You couldn't see much dirt along the way; where the debris didn't come to your knees, it reached over your head.

At the end of the porch Ben stopped and listened again; heard nothing. He stepped down and walked as fast as he could—damn arthritis again—to the porch of the next building.

This had been Fat Sam Hogan's Hardware Store, and about all that was left of it was the porch; the rest was a twisted mess of wood that slumped away to the ground at the rear. The porch had been down too, right after the bombing—but the old men, working at night, had raised it and braced it up. Something to walk under.

A Springfield stood, oiled and waiting, against the wall. Ben paused and touched the barrel—it was his own. Or rather it had once been his own; now it was the town's, strictly speaking, to be used by whoever was nearest it when the time came. It was a good gun, a straight-shooter, one of the best—which was why it was here instead of at his house. A man could get a better shot from here.

He went on, hugging the wall.

He passed a rifle wedged up between the fender and hood of Norm Henley's old Model A, and he remembered how the bomb had flipped the car right over on its top, and how the car must have protected Norm from the blast—just a little. Enough so they found him two blocks up the street, in front of his mashed house, trailing blood from every hole in him, to get to his family before he died.

Ben passed rifles leaned against walls and chairs on porches, rifles standing behind trees, leaned in the cracks between what buildings still stood to provide cracks, even old Jim's carbine lying under the ledge of the pump-trough in front of Mason's General Store. All of them in places where they were protected from rain or snow, but where they were easy to get at.

He passed sixteen rifles—walking, as everybody walked when they were out of doors, as close to the walls of the buildings as possible. When you had to cross open spaces you ran as fast as your seventy or eighty year old legs would take you—and if you couldn't run, you walked real fast. And always you listened while you walked; particularly you listened before you went out. For planes. So you wouldn't be spotted from the air.

At the end of the porch of the last building on the street, Ben paused in the shade and 

 Prev. P 10/19 next