The Survivors Read Free Page A

within seconds; the fifth prowler attack that night and the mildest.
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    Full dawn had come by the time he replaced the guards killed by the last attack and made the rounds of the other guard lines. He came back by the place where the prowlers had killed the woman, walking wearily against the pull of gravity. She lay with her dark hair tumbled and stained with blood, her white face turned up to the reddening sky, and he saw her clearly for the first time.
    It was Irene.
    He stopped, gripping the cold steel of the rifle and not feeling the rear sight as it cut into his hand.
    Irene … He had not known she was on Ragnarok. He had not seen her in the darkness of the night and he had hoped she and Billy were safe among the Acceptables with Dale. There was the sound of footsteps and a bold-faced girl in a red skirt stopped beside him, her glance going over him curiously.
    “The little boy,” he asked, “do you know if he’s all right?”
    “The prowlers cut up his face but he’ll be all right,” she said. “I came back after his clothes.”
    “Are you going to look after him?”
    “Someone has to and”—she shrugged her shoulders—“I guess I was soft enough to elect myself for the job. Why—was his mother a friend of yours?”
    “She was my daughter,” he said.
    “Oh.” For a moment the bold, brassy look was gone from her face, like a mask that had slipped. “I’m sorry. And I’ll take care of Billy.”
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    The first objection to his assumption of leadership occurred an hour later. The prowlers had withdrawn with the coming of full daylight and wood had been carried from the trees to build fires. Mary, one of the volunteer cooks, was asking two men to carry her some water when he approached. The smaller man picked up one of the clumsy containers, hastily improvised from canvas, and started toward the creek. The other, a big, thick-chested man, did not move.
    “We’ll have to have water,” Mary said. “People are hungry and cold and sick.”
    The man continued to squat by the fire, his hands extended to its warmth. “Name someone else,” he said.
    “But—”
    She looked at Prentiss in uncertainty. He went to the thick-chested man, knowing there would be violence and welcoming it as something to help drive away the vision of Irene’s pale, cold face under the red sky.
    “She asked you to get her some water,” he said. “Get it.”
    The man looked up at him, studying him with deliberate insolence, then he got to his feet, his heavy shoulders hunched challengingly.
    “I’ll have to set you straight, old timer,” he said. “No one has appointed you the head cheese around here. Now, there’s the container you want filled and over there”—he made a small motion with one hand—“is the creek. Do you know what to do?”
    “Yes,” he said. “I know what to do.”
    He brought the butt of the rifle smashing up. It struck the man under the chin and there was a sharp cracking sound as his jawbone snapped. For a fraction of a second there was an expression of stupefied amazement on his face then his eyes glazed and he slumped to the ground with his broken jaw setting askew.
    “All right,” he said to Mary. “Now you go ahead and name somebody else.”
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    He found that the prowlers had killed seventy during the night. One hundred more had died from the Hell Fever that often followed exposure and killed within an hour. He went the half mile to the group that had arrived on the second cruiser as soon as he had eaten a delayed breakfast. He saw, before he had quite reached the other group, that the Constellation ‘s Lieutenant Commander, Vincent Lake, was in charge of it. Lake, a tall, hard-jawed man with pale blue eyes under pale brows, walked forth to meet him as soon as he recognized him.
    “Glad to see you’re still alive,” Lake greeted him. “I thought that second Gern blast got you along with the others.”
    “I was visiting midship and wasn’t home when it