All of them stopped what they were doing. Jak was be-ginning to untie the mooring rope. The river had risen a foot or more during the night, but the raft was still held securely. J.B. was putting the backpacks on the raft.
“Adieu, old companion!” Doc shouted, his voice loud and clear. Taking the stovepipe hat by the rim and run-ning a hand caressingly over the dent in its crown, he spun it far out into the main stream of the Hudson, where it settled like a wing-broke raven, floating the right way up. The river took it, revolving in a stately manner, carrying it away, downstream to the south. They all watched it un-til it was only a small black blur against the deep blue-green of the water.
As Doc rejoined them, the other five gave him a round of applause and three rousing cheers. Doc’s cheeks cracked into a broad smile, showing his strong white teeth. He bowed in an old-fashioned, elegant manner.
“My dear, dear friends. How can I thank you for your generous reception of my cathartic act. That hat was too much a symbol of my past. My long, long past. And now I look forward.” He paused. “When I remember to, that is.”
hordes of pale lilac asters thronged the sides of the river as they drifted south. The water was still as clear as crystal glass, and filled with fish of all shapes and sizes.
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But after their feast on the small bears the previous night, none of the six felt hungry enough to try to catch any.
“Must be close to Newyork,” Ryan said to Doc. “Light’ll be going soon. It’s so wide here that we might have problems getting a place for the night. And the city’s rubble’s supposed to be double-bad. So they used to say.”
“I heard that in Mocsin,” the elderly scientist said. “The sec boss…” He shuddered.
Ryan pursed his lips in a silent whistle. “I know him. Strasser. Fireblast, but he was a bastard fitted for six feet of mold.”
He remembered the man well. It had been when he’d first met up with Doc Tanner. Strasser had been the sec boss in the ville of Mocsin. The ville of Jordan Teague, the baron. Strasser had always worn black, head to toe, and had a fringe of hair around a shaved skull. Thin was the word for Strasser. Thin body, thin face, thin eyes and lips. Lips that Ryan Cawdor had smashed to bloody pulp with a thrown blaster.
“He talked about New York. He’d been there. Traded there. Drugs and children. He said they were all ghouls, cannibals, night crawlers, blood tasters, dark watchers, death lovers.”
“From what I hear, Strasser was right for once,” J.B. said.
They passed another ruined bridge, its eastern section more or less complete. The shattered remnants of an old passenger wag hung poised on the brink, stuck there since the missiles had burned its driver to a crisp a century ear-lier. One day the rest of the bridge would rot through and the automobile would plummet down with it into the ever-patient Hudson.
A few minutes farther on the river narrowed down from more than two miles across to less than one. On their right
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the banks rose high in a series of wooded bluffs that Doc said he thought had once been called the Palisades of New Jersey.
Now, at last, on the left, the six companions began to witness the silent, twisted horror of total urban destruc-tion.
No trees grew on the eastern bank of the Hudson, other than the occasional stunted ash or sycamore. Ryan’s rad counter began to cheep softly, the needle creeping inex-orably through the orange and holding not far from the red that showed a dangerous hot spot.
The old Cross-Bronx Expressway vanished behind them, swallowed up in the pale gray mist that came drift-ing in from behind the bluffs. It wasn’t possible to make out anything still standing that even vaguely resembled a building. It was a rolling, melted sludge of concrete wil-derness. Nothing remained higher than a tall man in that part of what had been the Bronx.
They could only see two kinds of botanical life amid the ruins banks of nodding magenta fireweed, rising here and there far above the blasted sections of houses, shops and offices, and an ugly, rank weed-a sickly green color with a tough stem that twined around itself as though it sought suicide by strangulation. As the raft drifted toward the eastern shore, they could see more clearly. The weeds had serried bristles, like the skin of a hog, and they bore seedheads that were circular, letting poisonous yellow spores drift to the earth like malignant paratroopers.