've been alone six years?"

"No. There were other people for awhile. They went away."

"And you've been alone since?"

"Yes."

Hendricks glanced down. The boy was strange, saying very little.
Withdrawn. But that was the way they were, the children who had
survived. Quiet. Stoic. A strange kind of fatalism gripped them.
Nothing came as a surprise. They accepted anything that came along.
There was no longer any _normal_, any natural course of things, moral
or physical, for them to expect. Custom, habit, all the determining
forces of learning were gone; only brute experience remained.

"Am I walking too fast?" Hendricks said.

"No."

"How did you happen to see me?"

"I was waiting."

"Waiting?" Hendricks was puzzled. "What were you waiting for?"

"To catch things."

"What kind of things?"

"Things to eat."

"Oh." Hendricks set his lips grimly. A thirteen year old boy, living
on rats and gophers and half-rotten canned food. Down in a hole under
the ruins of a town. With radiation pools and claws, and Russian
dive-mines up above, coasting around in the sky.

"Where are we going?" David asked.

"To the Russian lines."

"Russian?"

"The enemy. The people who started the war. They dropped the first
radiation bombs. They began all this."

The boy nodded. His face showed no expression.

"I'm an American," Hendricks said.

There was no comment. On they went, the two of them, Hendricks walking
a little ahead, David trailing behind him, hugging his dirty teddy
bear against his chest.

* * * * *

About four in the afternoon they stopped to eat. Hendricks built a
fire in a hollow between some slabs of concrete. He cleared the weeds
away and heaped up bits of wood. The Russians' lines were not very far
ahead. Around him was what had once been a long valley, acres of fruit
trees and grapes. Nothing remained now but a few bleak stumps and the
mountains that stretched across the horizon at the far end. And the
clouds of rolling ash that blew and drifted with the wind, settling
over the weeds and remains of buildings, walls here and there, once in
awhile what had been a road.

Hendricks made coffee and heated up some boiled mutton and bread.
"Here." He handed bread and mutton to David. David squatted by the
edge of the fire, his knees knobby and white. He examined the food and
then passed it back, shaking his head.

"No."

"No? Don't you want any?"

"No."

Hendricks shr