In the Balance

There weren’t enough spoons to go around; the town woman either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared that the church held a new arrival. Jens ate with somebody else’s, washed in cold water and dried on a trouser leg. Even though he’d given up on hygiene since leaving White Sulphur Springs, that was a new low.

As he chewed on tasteless beef stew, he worried what-if anything-Chicago was eating these days. Rather more to the point, he worried about Barbara. Fiat had at the outside a couple of hundred people for the surrounding countryside to feed. Chicago had three million, and was under Lizard attack, not safely under the Lizards’ thumb.

He wished he’d never left for Washington. He’d thought he was going into the worse danger himself, not leaving his wife behind to face it. Like most Americans under the age of ninety, he’d thought of war as something that happened only to unfortunate people in far-off lands. He hadn’t thought through all the implications of its coming home to roost.

Something strange happened as he was getting to the bottom of the can of stew. A Lizard skittered into the church, peered down into the box of food the grim-faced woman had brought The alien looked up in obvious disappointment, hissed something that could equally well have been English or its own language. Whatever it was, Larssen didn’t understand it.

The people who’d been stuck in church longer did. “Sorry,”

Marie said. “No crabapples in this batch.” The Lizard let out a desolate hiss and slunk away.

“Crabapples?” Larssen asked. “What does a Lizard want with crabapples?”

“To eat ’em,” Sal said. “You know the spiced ones in jars, the ones that go so nice with a big ham at Christmas time? The Lizards are crazy about ’em. They’d give you the shirt off their backs for a crabapple, except they mostly don’t wear shirts. But you know what I mean.”

“I guess so,” Larssen said. “Crabapples. Isn’t that a hell of a thing?”

“Gingersnaps, too,” Gordon put in. “I saw a couple of ’em damn near get into a fight one time over a box of gingersnaps.”

Marie said, “They look a little like gingerbread men, don’t they? They’re not all that far from the right color, and the paint they wear could do for icing, don’t you think?”

It was, without a doubt, the first time a Baptist church had ever resounded to the strains of “Run, run, as fast as you can! You can’t catch me-I’m the gingerbread man!” Laughing and cheering one another on, the prisoners made up verses of their own. Some were funny, some were obscene, some-the best ones-were both.

Jens flogged his muse, sang, “I’ve blown up your cities, and I’ve shot up your roads, and I can take your crabapples, too, I can!” He knew it wasn’t very good, but the chorus roared out: “Run, run, as fast as you can! You can’t catch me-I’m the gingerbread man!”

When at last they ran out of verses, Sal said, “I hope that sour old prune who brings us our food is listening. ’Course, she probably thinks having a good time is sinful, especially in church.”

“If she had her way, the Lizards would shoot us for having a good time in here,” Mort said.

Sal chuckled. “One thing is, the Lizards don’t pay no more attention to what she wants than we do. Other thing is, she don’t know what all goes on in here, neither.”

“Got to make our own fun,” Aloysius agreed. “Ain’t nobody gonna do it for us. Never thought how much I liked my radio till I didn’t have it no more.”

“That’s true; that’s a fact,” several people said together, as if they were echoing a preacher’s amens.

The short winter day wore on. Darkness poured through the windows and seemed to puddle in the church. Rodney walked over to the box the local woman had brought. “God damn her,” he said loudly. “She was supposed to bring us more candles.”

“Have to do without,” Marie said. “No use complaintng about it. We’ll get by as long as we don’t run out of coal for the furnace.”

“And if we do,” Aloysius said, “we’ll be frozen hard enough that we won’t start to stink till they get around to buryin’ us.”

That cheerful thought pretty well halted conversation. Sitting huddled in his overcoat in the darkness, Larssen thought how important the discovery of fire had been, not just because it heated Neanderthal man’s caves but because it lit them as well. A man with a torch could go out at midnight unafraid, knowing it would show him any lurking danger. And electricity had all but banished night altogether. Now the age-old fears proved not dead but merely sleeping, ready to rouse whenever precious light was lost.

He shook his head. The best way he could think of to fight the night terrors was to sleep through them. Sleep was what day-loving animals did in the dark-stay cozy and quiet so nothing dangerous could find them. He stretched out on the hard pew. It wouldn’t be easy.