Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick Page B

I’ll never see them again.
    She plodded on, wincing at the pain, wishing she could find somebody, wondering about the sky overhead and becoming more lonely with each passing moment.

VI
    Driving his Volkswagen bus away, Andrew Gill caught one last sight of the woman in the paint-spattered jeans and sweater whom he had just let off; he watched her as she trudged barefoot along the road and then he lost her as his bus passed a bend. He did not know her name but it seemed to him that she was about the prettiest woman he had ever seen, with her red hair and small, delicately formed feet. And, the thought to himself in a daze, he and she had just now made love, in the back of his VW bus.
    It was, to him, a pageant of figments, the woman and the great explosions from the south that had torn up the countryside and raised the sky of gray overhead. He knew that it was war of some sort or at least a bad event of some modern kind entirely new to the world and to his experience.
    He had, that morning, driven from his shop in Petaluma to West Marin to deliver to the pharmacy at Point Reyes Station a load of imported English briar pipes. His business was fine liquors—especially wines—and tobaccos, everything for the serious smoker including little nickel-plated devices for cleaning pipes and tamping the tobacco down. Now as he drove he wondered how his shop was; had the event encompassed the Petaluma area?
    I had better get the hell back there and see how it is, he said to himself, and then he thought once again of the small red-haired woman in the jeans who had hopped into his bus—or allowed him to draw her into it; he no longer was certain which had happened—and it seemed to him that he ought to drive after her and make sure she was all right. Does she live around here? he asked himself. And how do I find her again? Already he wanted to find her again; he had never met or seen anyone like her. And did she do it because of shock? he wondered. Was she in her right mind at the time? Had she ever done such a thing before … and, more important, would she ever do it again?
    However, he kept on going, not turning back; his hands felt numb, as if they were lifeless. He was exhausted. I know there’re going to be other bombs or explosions, he said to himself. They landed one on the Bay Area and they’ll keep shooting them off at us. In the sky overhead he saw now flashes of light in quick succession and then after a time a distant rumble seized his bus and made it buck and quake. Bombs going off up there, he decided. Maybe our defenses. But there will be more getting through.
    Then, too, there was the radiation.
    Drifting overhead, now, the clouds of what he knew to be deadly radiation passed on north, and did not seem to be low enough yet to affect life on the surface, his life and that of the bushes and trees along the road. Maybe we’ll wither and die in another few days, he thought. Maybe it’s only a question of time. Is it worth hiding? Should I head north, try to escape? But the clouds were moving north. I better stay here, he said to himself, and try to find some local shelter. I think I read somewhere once that this is a protected spot; the winds blow on past West Marin and go inland, toward Sacramento.
    And still he saw no one. Only the girl—the only person he had seen since the first great bomb and the realization of what it meant. No cars. No people on foot. They’ll be showing up from down below pretty soon, he reasoned. By the thousands. And dying as they go. Refugees. Maybe I should get ready to help. But all he had in his VW truck were pipes and cans of tobacco and bottles of California wine from small vintners; he had no medical supplies and no know-how. And anyhow he was over fifty years old and he had a chronic heart problem called paroxysmal tachycardia. It was a wonder, in fact, that he had not had an attack of it back there when he was making love with the girl.
    My wife and the two kids, he thought. Maybe