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her face.
On the second day, I came in after helping Quinton bury the cabins to their
windows in the sand. Judith was standing by the table.
The shoe box was open. In the center of the table lay a pile of charred
sticks, as if she had tried to light a small fire. Then I realized what was
there. As she stirred the ash with her fingers, gray flakes fell from the
joints, revealing the bony points of a clutch of ribs, a right hand and
shoulder blade.
She looked at me with puzzled eyes. "They're black," she said.
Holding her in my arms, I lay with her on the bed. A loud-speaker reverberated
among the dunes, fragments of the amplified commands drumming at the panes.
When they moved away, Judith said: "We can go now."
"In a little while, when it's clear. What about these?"
"Bury them. Anywhere, it doesn't matter." She seemed calm at last, giving me a
brief smile, as if to agree that this grim charade was at last over.
Yet, when I had packed the bones into the shoe box, scraping up Robert
Hamilton's ash with a dessertspoon, she kept it with her, carrying it into the
kitchen while she prepared our meals.
It was on the third day that we fell ill.
After a long, noise-filled night, I found Judith sitting in front of the
mirror, combing thick clumps of hair from her scalp. Her mouth was open, as if
her lips were stained with acid. As she dusted the loose hair from her lap, I
was struck by the leprous whiteness of her face.
Standing up with an effort, I walked listlessly into the kitchen and stared at
the saucepan of cold coffee. A
sense of indefinable exhaustion had come over me, as if the bones in my body
had softened and lost their rigidity. On the lapels of my jacket, loose hair
lay like spinning waste.
"Philip& " Judith swayed toward me. "Do you feel  What is it?"
"The water." I poured the coffee into the sink and massaged my throat. "It
must be fouled."
"Can we leave?" She put a hand up to her forehead. Her brittle nails brought
down a handful of frayed ash hair. "Philip, for God's sake  I'm losing all my
hair!"
Neither of us was able to eat. After forcing myself through a few slices of
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
cold meat, I went out and vomited behind the cabin.
Quinton and his men were crouched by the wall of the settling tank. As I
walked toward them, steadying myself against the hull of the weather
satellite, Quinton came down. When I told him that the water supplies were
contaminated, he stared at me with his hard bird's eyes.
Half an hour later, they were gone.
The next day, our last there, we were worse. Judith lay on the bed, shivering
in her jacket, the shoe box held in one hand. I spent hours searching for
fresh water in the cabins. Exhausted, I could barely cross the sandy basin.
The Army patrols were closer. By now, I could hear the hard gear changes of
the half-tracks. The sounds from the loud-speakers drummed like fists on my
head.
Then, as I looked down at Judith from the cabin doorway, a few words stuck for
a moment in my mind.
"& contaminated area& evacuate& radioactive& "
I walked forward and pulled the box from Judith's hands.
"Philip& " She looked up at me weakly. "Give it back to me."
Her face was a puffy mask. On her wrists, white flecks were forming. Her left
hand reached toward me like the claw of a cadaver.
I shook the box with blunted anger. The bones rattled inside. "For God's sake,
it's this
! Don't you see  why we're ill?"
"Philip  where are the others? The old man. Get them to help you."
"They've gone. They went yesterday, I told you." I let the box fall onto the
table. The lid broke off, spilling the ribs tied together like a bundle of
firewood. "Quinton knew what was happening  why the Army is here.
They're trying to warn us."
"What do you mean?" Judith sat up, the focus of her eyes sustained only by a
continuous effort. "Don't let them take Robert. Bury him here somewhere. We'll
come back later."
"Judith!" I bent over the bed and shouted hoarsely at her. "Don't you realize
 there was a bomb on board!
Robert Hamilton was carrying an atomic weapon!" I pulled back the curtains
from the window. "My God, what a joke. For twenty years, I put up with him
because I couldn't ever be really sure& "
"Philip& "
"Don't worry, I used him  thinking about him was the only thing that kept us
going. And all the time, he was waiting up there to pay us back!"
There was a rumble of exhaust outside. A half-track with red crosses on its
doors and hood had reached the edge of the basin. Two men in vinyl suits
jumped down, counters raised in front of them.
"Judith, before we go, tell me& I never asked you  "
Judith was sitting up, touching the hair on her pillow. One half of her scalp
was almost bald. She stared at her weak hands with their silvering skin. On
her face was an expression I had never seen before, the dumb anger of
betrayal.
As she looked at me, and at the bones scattered across the table, I knew my
answer.
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