Bradbury Stories by Ray Bradbury Page A

little girls and Tom like wrens on a wire, on Mrs. Bentley’s front porch, waiting. And when the silvery chimes of the icicle man were heard, the front door opened, Mrs. Bentley floated out with her hand deep down the gullet of her silver-mouthed purse, and for half an hour you could see them there on the porch, the children and the old lady putting coldness into warmness, eating chocolate icicles, laughing. At last they were good friends.
    â€œHow old are you, Mrs. Bentley?”
    â€œSeventy-two.”
    â€œHow old were you fifty years ago?”
    â€œSeventy-two.”
    â€œYou weren’t ever young, were you, and never wore ribbons or dresses like these?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œHave you got a first name?”
    â€œMy name is Mrs. Bentley.”
    â€œAnd you’ve always lived in this one house?”
    â€œAlways.”
    â€œAnd never were pretty?”
    â€œNever.”
    â€œNever in a million trillion years?” The two girls would bend toward the old lady, and wait in the pressed silence of four o’clock on a summer afternoon.
    â€œNever,” said Mrs. Bentley, “in a million trillion years.”

AND THE ROCK CRIED OUT
    T HE RAW CARCASSES, HUNG IN THE SUNLIGHT , rushed at them, vibrated with heat and red color in the green jungle air, and were gone. The stench of rotting flesh gushed through the car windows, and Leonora Webb quickly pressed the button that whispered her door window up.
    â€œGood Lord,” she said, “those open-air butcher shops.”
    The smell was still in the car, a smell of war and horror.
    â€œDid you see the flies?” she asked.
    â€œWhen you buy any kind of meat in those markets,” John Webb said, “you slap the beef with your hand. The flies lift from the meat so you can get a look at it.”
    He turned the car around a lush bend in the green rain-jungle road.
    â€œDo you think they’ll let us into Juatala when we get there?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œWatch out!”
    He saw the bright things in the road too late, tried to swerve, but hit them. There was a terrible sighing from the right front tire, the car heaved about and sank to a stop. He opened his side of the car and stepped out. The jungle was hot and silent and the highway empty, very empty and quiet at noon.
    He walked to the front of the car and bent, all the while checking his revolver in its underarm holster.
    Leonora’s window gleamed down. “Is the tire hurt much?”
    â€œRuined, utterly ruined!” He picked up the bright thing that had stabbed and slashed the tire.
    â€œPieces of a broken machete,” he said, “placed in adobe holders pointing toward our car wheels. We’re lucky it didn’t get all our tires.”
    â€œBut why ?”
    â€œYou know as well as I.” He nodded to the newspaper beside her, at the date, the headlines:
    OCTOBER 4TH, 1963: UNITED STATES,
    EUROPE SILENT!
    THE RADIOS OF THE U.S.A. AND EUROPE ARE DEAD.
    THERE IS A GREAT SILENCE. THE WAR HAS SPENT ITSELF.
    It is believed that most of the population of the United States is dead. It is believed that most of Europe, Russia, and Siberia is equally decimated. The day of the white people of the earth is over and finished.
    â€œIt all came so fast,” said Webb. “One week we’re on another tour, a grand vacation from home. The next week—this.”
    They both looked away from the black headlines to the jungle.
    The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.
    â€œBe careful, Jack.”
    He pressed two buttons. An automatic lift under the front wheels hissed and hung the car in the air. He jammed a key nervously into the right wheel plate. The tire, frame and all, with a sucking pop, bounced from the wheel. It was a matter of seconds to lock the spare in place and roll the shattered tire back to the luggage compartment.