News From Elsewhere by Edmuind Cooper Page B

first? I don’t think I can manage it alone.”
    He gave a grim laugh. “Don’t be barmy! Forty-five million dead, more to follow—and you want to bury your wife! Now hop it while the going is good. If any of my lot  sees you and they don’t shoot, chances are you’ll get volunteered into the army. We’re a bit shorthanded, like.”
    I gazed at him indecisively for a few moments. Then I turned to go. The logic of events was moving faster than my tired brain could cope with it. Now, I realized, I was living in an age where to survive was considered a . suspicious act. In less than a day, civilization had reverted to barbarism. Those who are not with us are against us.
    After I had taken a few steps I stopped and called back to him. “What did you say the name of that bug was?”
    “Botulinus toxin, mate. Friendly little thing, ain’t it? Better thank the Big Boy Upstairs for making you ruddy well immune. . . . But don’t press your luck.”
    I thanked him and made my way out of the park, trying not to look at the bodies I passed.
    I didn’t know where I was going. I just walked. The streets of the town were also littered with the dead. In the deepening September twilight their bodies did not look quite so terrible, and at times I pretended to myself that they were just sleeping off the aftereffects of one colossal celebration.
    A celebration indeed! The coronation of Botulinus Rex!
    In the marketplace among a group of stricken housewives who had presumably been shopping, I saw the body of an old man sprawling in the gutter—still clutching tightly in his hand a long piece of wood to which a tom placard had been pinned.
    There was still enough light for me to read its message:

Repent ye, for the Day of Judgment is at hand!

    I looked down at the old man and wondered vaguely if he had been surprised at the speed with which his prediction had become stop-press news. I wondered, too, if he had expected to find himself included in such a terrible judgment.
    Feeling oddly self-conscious, I eased the placard out of his stiff fingers and laid it over the top part of his body—a tattered paper shroud.
    Then, feeling like an automaton, I just kept on walking—trying to shut out of my mind the bitter knowledge that there was nowhere to go. . . .
    The events of the rest of that night are clouded over in my mind. But when dawn came I found that I had been  sleeping on one of the benches in a church. There were a million vacant beds in the city to choose from—including one that I knew I could never again sleep in alone—but somehow I had been drawn to the church. It was peculiar, I thought as I sat up and tried to ease the aching in my limbs, because I had never regarded myself as a religious sort of man.
    However, I was now- no longer alone. Others had evidently been subjected to the same strange motivation. Scattered around the pews there were three or four men, several women—some of them with babies and small children—and, huddled pathetically below the altar, a small boy of about seven who did not seem to belong to anyone present.
    It was another bright morning. Sunlight streaming through the tall, narrow windows might almost have convinced us that we were at the beginning of a normal, early autumn day. But as we saw the grayness in each other’s faces, the lines of tension and pain and sorrow, we knew with bitter certainty that, no matter how bright the sun, darkness would remain for a long time on the face of the earth. . . .
    Looking back now over fifty years, when my morning’s weaving has been done and my chair has been placed in the farmhouse doorway so that I can gaze across this lovely Derbyshire valley, I hear the voices of the children at play . . . children of the Dark Age.
    I hear them talking of the Great Ones—the godlike men whose civilization once spanned continents and whose descendants now live in tribal groups scattered over a strangely quiet world. I hear