Chapter 7

Bridgett was right. When we woke the next morning at dawn, we joined together again, her straddling me, this time, her breasts hanging down before me where I could reach them with both hands as she ground away on my erect shaft.

I thought she was a skilled lover, although I had no real basis for comparison. She rode me, and pleasured me, but made me last for her, much longer this time. Her motions seemed to be calculated to bring her the maximum possible pleasure, to make it possible, this time, for her to join me in reaching orgasm. Even so, the intensity of the experience was equal to the first time, and the more time I spent inside her writhing body, the better it was for me, too.

This time, when I came inside her, she allowed her upper body to collapse on me, and, breathing deeply, she whispered into my ear, "Very well done, Sweetheart!"

Bridgett prepared us a breakfast before our departure from West Point She was loving and attentive around the breakfast table, and stayed cheerful while cleaning up afterward. I was outside, preparing the RV for our departure. But we were close to New Hampshire, now, and I saw her becoming melancholy as we got closer to our destination -- Durham, home of the University of New Hampshire.

"How'd your son decide to go to school here?" I asked. "It's a long way from St. Cloud, Minnesota."

"His father graduated from The University of New Hampshire," Bridgett said. "He wanted to do what his father had done."

"What was -- What's your son's name?" I asked her.

"Gerald," she said. "His name... was... Gerald. We called him Gerry."

When we got to Durham, I expected the horror of visiting a dormitory or fraternity house full of young men, all nine days dead. But it turned out that Gerald had been an upperclassman, and he'd lived in a rented room in a small private home in the city. Bridgett had the address, and we found it without difficulty. "Let me look inside," I suggested.

"No. You wouldn't recognize him... But would you come in, with me?"

"Yes."

The house was locked, and when I broke a window to get inside, the awful odor of decaying flesh met us before we had even gotten inside. "Wait here," I told her. I climbed through a window off the house's small front porch and moved to open the front door. The pent-up odor in the closed house was truly terrible.

"Please wait outside," I told Bridgett. Let me look around. If I find anyone -- any young man -- I'll come for you."

Even outside, on the porch, she was nearly overwhelmed with the terrible smell of decay. She motioned her agreement and backed away, down the steps and out into the yard.

I found a young man in a small bedroom just off the front hallway. He was covered with blankets, up to his neck, but his face was visible. The odor in the room was tolerable, the blanket having masked it somewhat. I threw open two windows in the room, and then retraced my steps.

I told Bridgett what I had found. "He's in the bed. He died there, the way most people did. I can't be certain that it's your son. Do you want to go in?"

"Yes."

I led her back into the house and directly into the room. A cross-draft was moving fresh air into the room through one of the open windows. The boy looked undisturbed by death.

"It's Gerry," she said. She moved closer to the bed, as if to kiss him, but I pulled her away. "Don't disturb him," I said. "It's better to leave him as he is."

"Will you close the windows, before we leave?" she said.

"Yes. Go on back outside, and wait."

She stood there looking at the dead young man for a moment longer, took a framed 5 x 7 photo from the small desk in the bedroom, and did as I asked.

I closed the windows, closed Gerald's bedroom door, and followed Bridgett back outside. I closed the front door of the house -- now Gerald's and his landlord's tomb -- and led Bridgett back to the RV at the curb. She showed me the photograph. It was Gerald, smiling beside an older man -- no doubt his father.

"That picture was taken right here at the University," Bridgett said. In front of the Administration Building. I took it myself, the only time we visited him here."

"That's your husband."

"Yes."

"Nice-looking man."

She said nothing. She just got back into the RV. "Where will we go now?" she asked me.

I was pleased that there had been no talk of a burial for her dead son. We agreed, apparently, that the best resting places, when so many had died, were the beds they had died in.

"Where will we go now?" she said again, when I gave her no answer.

"The cities, I guess," I answered. "Boston. New York. Then, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington. Surely we can find someone; in the big cities."

Yes, of course. The only two living people we had discovered so far had been in Cripple Creek, Colorado and St. Cloud, Minnesota. Those two vast metropolises.

"After Washington," I said, "I guess we could go on to Atlanta."

We had arrived in Durham, New Hampshire late in the afternoon. We drove to nearby Portsmouth, on the ocean, and stopped there for the night. Once again, I used the transmitter to broadcast my general call for fellow live souls. Once again, I left out any geographical predictions of where we would expect to be, on the following night. I knew we would likely have reached New York by then, but the idea of providing the world with our New York destination, down at the street level, was frightening to me. I couldn't bring myself to do it.

We got to Boston early in the day -- what day was it now? Day nine? Day ten? I was having difficulty remembering. We stayed for three hours, driving through downtown streets, stopping to broadcast on the radio frequencies, waiting for responses.

"Maybe you should get a loudspeaker," Bridgett suggested. "We could mount it on top of the van, and broadcast as we drove along."

It was a good idea, and a bit of engineering that, technically, I might be competent to handle. But I wanted to think about it first. It didn't feel like the sort of thing to do on impulse.

Finally, we left Boston, having made no contact with anyone. Boston seemed to be empty.

It was a moonless night in Manhattan, and it was frightening to be there, in pitch dark, those tall buildings all around, blocking out what little light nature was affording us. I found a wide street, parked as far away from the surrounding buildings as possible, and tried to look up and see the stars.