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THE chasm
BY BRYCE WALTON
The old man's face was turning gray with fatigue under the wrinkled brown. He was beginning to get that deadly catching pain in his left chest. But he forced himself to move again, his ragged dusty uniform of the old Home Guard blending into the rubble the way a lizard merges with sand.
He hobbled behind a pile of masonry and peered through the crack. He angled his bald head, listening. His hands never really stopped quivering these days and the automatic rifle barrel made a fluttering crackle on the concrete. He lowered the barrel, then wiped his face with a bandanna.
He'd thought he heard a creeping rustle over there. But he didn't see any sign of the Children.
He'd been picked to reconnoiter because his eyes were only comparatively good. The truth was he couldn't see too well, especially when the sun reflecting on the flat naked angles of the ruined town made his eyes smart and water and now his head was beginning to throb.
A dust devil danced away whirling a funnel of dust. Sal Lemmon looked at it, and then he slid from behind the rubble and moved along down the shattered block, keeping to the wall of jagged holes and broken walls that had once been the Main Street of a town.
He remembered with a wry expression on his face that he had passed his ninety-fourth birthday eight days back. He had never thought he could be concerned with whether he lived to see his ninety-fifth, because there had always been the feeling that by the time he was ninety-four he would have made his peace with himself and with whatever was outside.
He moved warily, like a dusty rabbit, in and out of the ruins, shrinking through the sun's dead noon glare.
He stopped, and crouched in the shade behind a pile of slag that had once been the iron statue of some important historical figure. He contacted Captain Murphy on the walkie-talkie.
"Don't see any signs of Children."
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