Afterwards came the concussion, mitigated by the depth of the crater but still strong, flipping Hardesty across the crater floor. He let his muscles go slack, instinctively knowing there would be less likelihood of a broken bone that way. He tasted blood in his mouth and felt his head burrow into rubble and ashes. He stood up groggily as the all-clear sounded. You had to be cautious. Sometimes the spotters tricked you. Then you went out into the open and the bombs came down again almost as if the spotters and the enemy bombardiers were in secret entente with one another and would later meet in some undreamed of neutral place and share the booty collected from corpses and parts of corpses. It was a dog eat dog world. The concussion had ripped loose the firing post, which had fallen with the dead man still dangling, like a drunk leaning backwards against a lamp-post, across the woman. She lay there under its weight, her legs drumming, her arms twitching. "Help me," she called to Hardesty in a feeble voice. "Please help me." She was very ugly that way, with a look of supplication on her dirt-smeared face. Hardesty walked over to her and placed his foot on her shoulder so she wouldn't twitch so, then went through her pockets quickly. He found two five million dollar bills and a handful of small denomination coins, one and two hundred thousand dollars each, mostly. Shrugging his disappointment, Hardesty realized it would be only enough to keep him going a week, and that long only if he spent it frugally. Those were the breaks. "What else did you find?" the woman croaked through bloody lips. She would probably live, Hardesty figured. She was only pinned there; she didn't seem badly hurt. Naturally, he changed his residence in the bombed-out city every day, but if the blonde girl were caught and described him to save her own neck and if this woman confirmed the description to receive her share of the ten million dollars in denouncer's bounty, Hardesty might possibly be found. The penalty for jumping the gun or aiding gun-jumping was death. Other citizens didn't have their just opportunity to scavenge. "What else?" the woman asked again. Hardesty went over and found the sawed-off shotgun. "Nothing," he said, and split the woman's skull open with the stock of the shotgun. "Hey, man! Hey, over this way!" A digging crew was working with picks and shovels on a ruined building on 44th Street. It had been an office building of some dozen storys, but the whole façade had collapsed. The offices thus revealed looked like tiny cubicles with cardboard ceilings, floors and walls. The whole ruined structure looked like a giant compartmented eggbox lying on its side, the small square compartments cluttered with impossibly small office furniture carved to perfect scale. "Hey, man! We got an extra shovel."