Read The Genocides for Free Online Page B

last forever.
    Jackie was crying real tears.
    “Sad?” he asked.
    “Oh, not sad … just a little déracinée. And annoyed with myself, because I don’t understand it.” She snuffled loudly, and the tears were all gone. “It’s so horribly like what they used to call an Act of God. As though God were the source of everything unreasonable. I like to know the reason for things.” Then, after a pause: “Perhaps it was the termites?”
    “The termites!” He looked at her unbelievingly, and her cheek began to show its telltale dimple. She was pulling his leg. They broke out laughing together.
    In the distance, the Alworth Building collapsed. Beyond, in the dry harbor, a ship lay on its side and squirted flames out of its portholes.
    Here and there, scuttling about the rubble, the incendiary mechanisms could be glimpsed attending their business. At this remove they seemed really quite innocuous. They reminded Jackie of nothing so much as of Volkswagens of the early Fifties, when all Volkswagens seemed to be gray. They were diligent, tidy, and quick.
    “We should be getting on our way,” he said. “They’ll be mopping up the suburbs soon.”
    “Well, good-bye, Western Civilization,” Jackie said, waving at the bright inferno, unafraid. For how can one be afraid of Volkswagens?

    They coasted their bicycles along the Skyline Parkway from which they had viewed the burning city. When the Parkway went up hill, they had to walk the bicycles, because the chain on Orville’s was broken.
    The Parkway, unmended for years, was full of potholes and cluttered with debris. Coming down from Amity Park, they were in the dark, for the hill cut off the light of the fire. They went slowly with their handbrakes on.
    At the bottom of the hill, a clear womanly voice addressed them out of the darkness:
Stop!
They jumped off the bicycles and spread themselves flat on the ground. They had practiced this many times. Orville pulled out his pistol.
    The woman stepped into view, her arms over her head, hands empty. She was quite old—that is to say, sixty or more—and defiantly innocent in manner. She came much too close.
    “She’s a decoy,” Jackie whispered.
    That much was obvious, but where the others were Orville could not tell. Trees, houses, hedges, stalled cars stood all about. Each would have been an adequate cover. It was dark. The air was smoky. He had lost, for the while, his night vision by watching the fire. Determining to make a show of equal innocence, he reholstered his gun and stood up.
    He offered his hand to the woman to shake. She smiled, but did not approach that near.
    “I wouldn’t go over that next rise, my dears. There’s some kind of machine on the other side. Some sort of flamethrower, I think. If you like, I’ll show you a better way to go.”
    “What does it look like, this machine?”
    “None of us have seen it. We’ve just seen the people who got crisped when they got to the top of the hill. Shocking.”
    It was not impossible nor even unlikely; it was equally possible and likely that he was being led into a trap. “One moment,” he told the woman. He signaled to Jackie to stay where she was and walked up the gentle slope of the hill. He scanned the debris that the years had heaped there and selected a strip of lathing that must have dropped from a load of firewood. Halfway up the hill he stopped behind one of the Plants that had broken through the asphalt. He hurled the stick of lathing over the crest of the hill.
    Before it reached the top of its arc it flared into flame, and before it fell out of sight, the flame was dead. The wood had been utterly consumed.
    “You’re right,” he said, returning to the woman. “And we thank you.”
    Jackie rose to her feet. “We don’t have any food,” she announced, less to the old woman than to those she supposed were surrounding them. The habit of distrust was too strong to break in an instant.
    “Don’t worry, my dears, you’ve passed your first