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Read Ebook: The Chasm by Walton Bryce
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Ebook has 75 lines and 5726 words, and 2 pages
"Here," Cartley said. There was a small flat-bottomed rowboat, and in it were several cartons of food supplies, all in cans. There were also several large tins of water.
"We'll need a little time," Cartley said. "We'll have to wait. I figure we'll row upstream maybe a few hundred yards, and hole up in one of those caves. We can watch, Sal. We can watch and wait and try to figure it out."
"Sure," Sal said. "That seems the only way to start."
Cartley sat down on the bank near the boat, and Sal sat down too.
"The Children," Cartley said, "never had a chance to be any other way. But we're the oldsters, and we've got this obligation, Sal. Man's a cultural animal. He isn't born with any inherent concepts of right, or wrong, or good or bad, or even an ability to survive on an animal level. We have to be taught to survive by the elders, Sal. And we're the elders." He hesitated, "We're the only ones left."
A flare of horrid light exploded over the warehouse down river and it lit up Cartley's face and turned it a shimmering crimson. His hands widened to perfect roundness and he raised his hands in a voiceless scream to stop the sudden explosions of burp guns, grenades, machine guns, and rifles.
Looking down river then, Sal could see the flames eating up through the warehouse. The pier, the barge, everything for a hundred square yards was lit up as bright as day, and the flare spread out over the river and made a black ominous shadow of the opposite bank.
"They're getting away," Cartley said.
Sal watched the barge move out. The Children came screaming out of the blazing warehouse, overran the pier, streamed into the water. But a steady blast of fire from the barge drove them back, and in a few more minutes the barge dissolved downriver into darkness.
Cartley's hands were shaking as he gripped Sal's arm. "Let's go now. We need time. Time may help us a lot, Sal. We can wait and watch. We can figure something out."
Sal heard the screams and mocking savage cries coming up over the water, and then the jagged cries of some oldsters who hadn't managed to get away.
Still looking downstream toward the blazing pier, Sal pushed Cartley into the rowboat, and they shoved off. Sal started rowing, but he kept looking back.
"They should have put them in the same shelters with us," Sal said, "that would have made a difference. But they put us in separate shelters."
Only the oldest and the youngest had been saved. The old out of pity and because they were helpless, had been granted the safety of shelters. The young because they were the symbols of hope had been granted shelters, too.
"No," Cartley said. "It started long before that. The chasm was building up long before the war. This alienation between the young and the old. Between the sun and the seed. That's what we've got to bring back, Sal. Between us, we have stored up a hundred and seventy-nine years of human culture. There isn't a kid back there, Sal, more than twelve years old."
"We'll find a way," Sal said.
The rowboat was about fifteen feet away from the thick reeds growing in the marshy ooze of the bank.
Cartley heard the sound first and turned, his face white. When Sal looked toward the bank, he saw the girl. She came on out from the curtain of reeds and looked at them. She was perfectly clear in the moonlight standing there. She wore a short ragged print dress and she had long hair that seemed silken and soft and golden in the moonlight even though it, her dress, her little legs and her face were streaked with mud.
Sal hesitated, then pulled heavily on his left oar and the boat nosed toward her. Up close, Sal could see her face, the clear blue eyes wet, and the tears running down her cheeks.
The girl reached out and asked in a sobbing breath,
"Granpa? Is that you, Granpa?"
"Oh God, Oh God," Cartley said. He was crying as he picked her up and got her into the boat. He was rocking her in his arms and half crying and half laughing as Sal rowed the boat upstream.
"Yes, yes, honey," Sal heard Cartley say over and over. "I'm your granpa, honey. Don't cry. Go to sleep now. I'm your granpa and I've been looking for you, honey, and now everything's going to be all right."
It's funny, Sal thought, as he kept on rowing upstream. It's a funny thing how one little girl remembered her granpa, and how maybe that was the beginning of the bridge across the chasm.
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