“It’s all right,” he said in a dead voice. “Go to bed.”
She drew back a little. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean-”
Suddenly he knew he didn’t want her to go to bed. He wanted her to stay with him. He didn’t know why, he just didn’t want to be alone.
“I thought you were my wife,” he heard himself saying. “I woke up and I thought-”
He drank a mouthful of whisky, coughing as part of it went down the wrong way. Ruth stayed in the shadows, listening.
“She came back, you see,” he said. “I buried her, but one night she came back. She looked like-like you did. An outline, a shadow. Dead. But she came back. I tried to keep her with me. I tried, but she wasn’t the same any more-you see. All she wanted was-”
He forced down the sob in his throat.
“My own wife,” he said in a trembling voice, “coming back to drink my blood!”
He jammed down the glass on the bar top. Turning away, he paced restlessly to the peephole, turned, and went back and stood again before the bar. Ruth said nothing; she just stood in the darkness, listening.
“I put her away again,” he said. “I had to do the same thing to her I’d done to the others. My own wife.” There was a clicking in his throat. “A stake,” he said in a terrible voice. “I had to put a stake in her. It was the only thing I knew to do. I-”
He couldn’t finish. He stood there a long time, shivering helplessly, his eyes tightly shut.
Then he spoke again.
“Almost three years ago I did that. And I still remember it, it’s still with me. What can you do? What can you do?” He drove a fist down on the bar top as the anguish of memory swept over him again. “No matter how you try, you can’t forget or-or adjust or-ever get away from it!”
He ran shaking fingers through his hair.
“I know what you feel, I know. I didn’t at first, I didn’t trust you. I was safe, secure in my little shell. Now-He shook his head slowly, defeatedly. “In a second, it’s all gone. Adjustment, security, peace-all gone.”
“Robert.”
Her voice was as broken and lost as his.
“Why were we punished like this?” she asked.
He drew in a shuddering breath.
“I don’t know,” he answered bitterly. “There’s no answer, no reason. It just is.”
She was close to him now. And suddenly, without hesitation or drawing back, he drew her against him, and they were two people holding each other tightly in the lost measure of night.
“Robert, Robert.”
Her hands rubbed over his back, stroking and clutching, while his arms held her firmly and he pressed his eyes shut against her warm, soft hair.
Their mouths held together for a long time and her arms gripped with desperate tightness around his neck.
Then they were sitting in the darkness, pressing close together, as if all the heat in the world were in their bodies and they would share the warmth between them. He felt the shuddering rise and fall of her breasts as she held close to him, her arms tight around his body, her face against his neck. His big hands moved roughly through her hair, stroking and feeling the silky strands.
“I’m sorry, Ruth.”
“Sorry?”
“For being so cruel to you, for not trusting you.”
She was silent, holding tight.
“Oh, Robert,” she said then, “it’s so unfair. So unfair. Why are we still alive? Why aren’t we all dead? It would be better if we were all dead.”
“Shhh, shhh,” he said, feeling emotion for her like a released current pouring from his heart and mind. “It’ll be all right.”
He felt her shaking her head slowly against him.
“It will, it will,” he said.
“How can it?”
“It will,” he said, even though he knew he really couldn’t believe it, even though he knew it was only released tension forming words in his mind.
“No,” she said. “No.”
“Yes, it will. It will, Ruth.”
He didn’t know how long it was they sat there holding each other close. He forgot everything, time and place; it was just the two of them together, needing each other, survivors of a black terror embracing because they had found each other.
But then he wanted to do something for her, to help her.
“Come,” he said. “We’ll check you.”
She stiffened in his arms.
“No, no,” he said quickly. “Don’t be afraid. I’m sure we won’t find anything. But if we do, I’ll cure you. I swear I’ll cure you, Ruth.”
She was looking at him in the darkness, not saying a word. He stood and pulled her up with him, trembling with an excitement he hadn’t felt in endless years. He wanted to cure her, to help her.
“Let me,” he said. “I won’t hurt you. I promise I won’t. Let’s know-Let’s find out for sure. Then we can plan and work. I’ll save you, Ruth. I will. Or I’ll die myself.”
She was still tense, holding back.
“Come with me, Ruth.”
Now that the strength of his reserve had gone, there was nothing left to brace himself on, and he was shaking like a palsied man.
He led her into the bedroom. And when he saw in the lamplight how frightened she was, he pulled her close and stroked her hair.
“It’s all right,” he said. “All right, Ruth. No matter what we find, it’ll be all right. Don’t you understand?”
He sat her down on the stool and her face was completely blank, her body shuddering as he heated the needle over a Bunsen flame.
He bent over and kissed her on the cheek.
“It’s all right now,” he said gently. “It’s all right.”
She closed her eyes as he jabbed in the needle. He could feel the pain in his own finger as he pressed out blood and rubbed it on the slide.
“There. There,” he said anxiously, pressing a little cotton to the nick on her finger. He felt himself trembling helplessly. No matter how he tried to control it, he couldn’t. His fingers were almost incapable of making the slide, and he kept looking at Ruth and smiling at her, trying to take the look of taut fright from her features.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Please don’t. I’ll cure you if you’re infected. I will Ruth, I will.”
She sat without a word, looking at him with listless eyes as he worked. Her hands kept stirring restlessly in her lap.
“What will you do if-if I am,” she said then.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Not yet. But there are a lot of things we can do.”
“What?”
“Vaccines, for one.”
“You said vaccines didn’t work,” she said, her voice shaking a little.
“Yes, but-” He broke off as he slid the glass slide onto the microscope.
“Robert, what could you do?”
She slid off the stool as he bent over the microscope.
“Robert, don’t look!” she begged suddenly, her voice pleading.
But he’d already seen.
He didn’t realize that his breath had stopped. His blank eyes met hers.
“Ruth,” he whispered in a shocked voice.
The wooden mallet crashed down on his forehead.
A burst of pain filled Robert Neville’s head and he felt one leg give way. As he fell to one side he knocked over the microscope. His right knee hit the floor and he looked up in dazed bewilderment at her fright-twisted face. The mallet came down again and he cried out in pain. He fell to both knees and his palms struck the floor as he toppled forward. A hundred miles away he heard her gasping sob.
“Ruth,” he mumbled.
“I told you not to!” she cried.
He clutched out at her legs and she drove the mallet down a third time, this time on the back of his skull.
“Ruth!”
Robert Neville’s hands went limp and slid off her calves, rubbing away part of the tan. He fell on his face and his fingers drew in convulsively a
s night filled his brain.
Chapter Nineteen
WHEN HE OPENED HIS eyes there was no sound in the house.
He lay there a moment looking confusedly at the floor. Then, with a startled grunt, he sat up. A package of needles exploded in his head and he slumped down on the cold floor, hands pressed to his throbbing skull. A clicking sound filled his throat as he lay there.
After a few minutes he pulled himself up slowly by gripping the edge of the bench. The floor undulated beneath him as he held on tightly, eyes closed, legs wavering.
A minute later he managed to stumble into the bathroom. There he threw cold water in his face and sat on the bathtub edge pressing a cold, wet cloth to his forehead.
What had happened? He kept blinking and staring at the white-tiled floor.
He stood up and walked slowly into the living room. It was empty. The front door stood half open in the gray of early morning. She was gone.
Then he remembered. He struggled back to the bedroom, using the walls to guide him.
The note was on the bench next to the overturned microscope. He picked up the paper with numbed fingers and carried it to the bed. Sinking down with a groan, he held the letter before his eyes. But the letters blurred and ran. He shook his head and pressed his eyes shut. After a little while he read:
Robert:
Now you know. Know that I was spying on you, know that almost everything I told you was a lie. I’m writing this note, though, because I want to save you if I can. When I was first given the job of spying on you, I had no feelings about your life. Because I did have a husband, Robert.
You killed him.
But now it’s different. I know now that you were just as much forced into your situation as we were forced into ours. We are infected. But you already know that.
What you don’t understand yet is that we’re going to stay alive. We’ve found a way to do that and we’re going to set up society again slowly but surely. We’re going to do away with all those wretched creatures whom death has cheated. And, even though I pray otherwise, we may decide to kill you and those like you.
Those like me? he thought with a start. But he kept reading.
I’ll try to save you. I’ll tell them you’re too well armed for us to attack now. Use the time I’m giving you, Robert! Get away from your house, go into the mountains and save yourself. There are only a handful of us now. But sooner or later we’ll be too well organized, and nothing I say will stop the rest from destroying you.
For God’s sake, Robert, go now, while you can! I know you may not believe this. You may not believe that we can live in the sun for short periods now. You may not believe that my tan was only make-up. You may not believe that we can live with the germ now. That’s why I’m leaving one of my pills. I took them all the time I was here. I kept them in a belt around my waist. You’ll discover that they’re a combination of defebrinated blood and a drug.
I don’t know myself just what it is. The blood feeds the germs, the drug prevents its multiplication. It was the discovery of this pill that saved us from dying, that is helping to set up society again slowly. Believe me, it’s true. And escape!
Forgive me, too. I didn’t mean to hit you, it nearly killed me to do it. But I was so terribly frightened of what you’d do when you found out. Forgive me for having to lie to you about so many things.
But please believe this:
When we were together in the darkness, close to each other, I wasn’t spying on you.
I was loving you.
Ruth
He read the letter again. Then his hands fell forward and he sat there staring with empty eyes at the floor. He couldn’t believe it. He shook his head slowly and tried to understand, but adjustment eluded him.
He walked unsteadily to the bench. He picked up the small amber pill and held it in his palm, smelled it, tasted it. He felt as if all the security of mason were ebbing away from him. The framework of his life was collapsing and it frightened him.
Yet how did he refute the evidence? The pill, the tan coming off her leg, her walking in the sun, her reaction to garlic.
He sank down on the stool and looked at the mallet lying on the floor. Slowly, ploddingly, his mind went over the evidence.
When he’d first seen her she’d run from him. Had it been a ruse? No, she’d been genuinely frightened. She must have been startled by his cry, then, even though she’d been expecting it, and forgotten all about her job. Then later, when she’d calmed down, she’d talked him into thinking that her reaction to garlic was the reaction of a sick stomach. And she had lied and smiled and feigned hopeless acceptance and carefully got all the information she’d been sent after. And, when she’d wanted to leave, she couldn’t because of Cortman and the others. He had awakened then. They had embraced, they had-
His white-knuckled fist jolted down on the bench. “I was loving you.” Lie. Lie! His fingers crumpled up the letter and flung it away bitterly.
Rage made the pain in his head flare hotly and he pressed both hands against it and closed his eyes with a groan.
Then he looked up. Slowly he slid off the stool and placed the microscope back on its base.
The rest of her letter wasn’t a lie, he knew that. Without the pill, without any evidence of word or memory, he knew. He knew what even Ruth and her people didn’t seem to know.
He looked into the eyepiece for a long time. Yes, he knew. And the admission of what he saw changed his entire world. How stupid and ineffective he felt for never having foreseen it! Especially after reading the phrase a hundred, a thousand times. But then he’d never really appreciated it. Such a short phrase it was, but meaning so much.
Bacteria can mutate.
PART IV: January 1979
Chapter Twenty
THEY CAME BY NIGHT. Came in their dark cars with their spotlights and their guns and their axes and pikes. Came from the blackness with a great sound of motors, the long white arms of their spotlights snapping around the boulevard corner and clutching out at Cimarron Street.
Robert Neville was sitting at the peephole when they came. He had put down a book and was sitting there watching idly when the beams splashed white across the bloodless vampire faces and they whirled with a gasp, their dark animal eyes staring at the blinding lights.
Neville jumped back from the peephole, his heart thudding with the abrupt shock. For a moment he stood there trembling in the dark room, unable to decide what to do. His throat contracted and he heard the roar of the car motors even through the soundproofing on his house. He thought of the pistols in his bureau, the sub-machine gun on his workbench, thought of defending his house against them.
Then he pressed his fingers in until the nails dug at his palms. No, he’d made his decision, he’d worked it out carefully through the past months. He would not fight.
With a heavy, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach he stepped back to the peephole and looked out.
The street was a scene of rushing, violent action illuminated by the bald glare of the spotlights. Men rushed at men, the sound of running boots covered the pavement. Then a shot rang out, echoing hollowly; more shots.
Two male vampires went thrashing down onto their sides. Four men grabbed them by the arms and jerked them up while two other men drove the glittering lance points of their pikes into the vampires’ chests. Neville’s face twitched as screams filled the night. He felt his chest shuddering with labored breath as he watched from his house.
The dark-suited men knew exactly what they were doing. There were about seven vampires visible, six men and a woman. The men surrounded the seven, held their flailing arms, and drove razor-tipped pikes deep into their bodies. Blood spouted out on the dark pavement and the vampires perished one by one. Neville felt himself shivering more and more. Is this the new society? The words flashed across his mind. He tried to believe that the men were forced into what they were doing, but shock brought terrible doubt. Did they have to do it like this, with such a black and brutal sl
aughtering? Why did they slay with alarum by night, when by day the vampires could be dispatched in peace?
Robert Neville felt tight fists shaking at his sides. He didn’t like the looks of them, he didn’t like the methodical butchery. They were more like gangsters than men forced into a situation. There were looks of vicious triumph on their faces, white and stark in the spotlights. Their faces were cruel and emotionless.
Suddenly Neville felt himself shudder violently, remembering. Where was Ben Cortman?
His eyes fled over the street but he couldn’t see Cortman. He pressed against the peephole and looked up and down the street. He didn’t want them to get Cortman, he realized, didn’t want them to destroy Cortman like that. With a sense of inward shock he could not analyze in the rush of the moment, he realized that he felt more deeply toward the vampires than he did toward their executioners.
Now the seven vampires lay crumpled and still in their pools of stolen blood. The spotlights were moving around the street, flaying open the night. Neville turned his head away as the brilliant glare blazed across the front of his house. Then the spotlight had turned about and he looked again.
A shout. Neville’s eyes jumped toward the focus of the spotlights.
He stiffened.
Cortman was on the roof of the house across the street. He was pulling himself up toward the chimney, body flattened on the shingles.
Abruptly it came to Neville that it was in that chimney that Ben Cortman had hidden most of the time, and he felt a wrench of despair at the knowledge. His lips pressed together tightly. Why hadn’t he looked more carefully? He couldn’t fight the sick apprehension he felt at the thought of Cortman’s being killed by these brutal strangers. Objectively, it was pointless, but he could not repress t he feeling. Cortman was not theirs to put to rest.
But there was nothing he could do.
With bleak, tortured eyes he watched the spotlights cluster on Cortman’s wriggling body. He watched the white hands reaching out slowly for handholds on the roof. Slowly, slowly, as if Cortman had all the time in the world. Hurry up! Neville felt himself twitch with the unspoken words as he watched. He felt himself straining with Cortman’s agonizingly slow movements.