Tomorrow! (34 page)

Then, and only then, having done her civilized duty, she looked at the house. The great Victorian pile was also burning. Flames surged in the broken guts of the building and curled among the down-hammered slates of the roofs and the many gables. It was all afire. The car that had brought them was on fire.

Willis said, “And the garage is blocked.”

Jeff was eying the city. “Do you think. . . ?”

“I hell-sure do! Gotta get out of here.”

“She should be in a hospital—”

“Right.” Willis glanced at Nora, at the gardener, and said, “Where’d the girls go?”

Nora reported. “Ran. Just ran.”

The chauffeur shrugged. “We’ll have to put her in a barrow, I guess, Jeff, and get her to the street. Maybe we can catch a lift—or borrow a parked car . . .”

Minerva Sloan overflowed the wheelbarrow, Nora noticed. Her head hung out and her legs hung out, and there was some blood on them but not much. The men had a very hard time pushing her. The ground was soft and there no longer was any snow—to Nora’s surprise. In the drive, though, it went easier. The gardener helped, too, taking the longest turn with the wheelbarrow.

It would be dark presently, Nora thought. The light, at the moment, was pinkish, as if a sunset had begun. But it was not a sunset at all and came from the south. It was the start of a fire storm, she knew.

When they reached the street, they stopped.

It was the first time Nora had got a good look at any dead people and now there were so many she could hardly decide which ones to look at first. They were mostly blackish, but some were scarlet and some had faces and bodies that looked exactly the way a steak looked when it caught on fire. And some, she saw, weren’t exactly dead, or completely dead. A few in cars were opening and closing their mouths or moving their arms feebly and one girl about Nora’s age kept bumping her head back and forth between the front and rear seats in a sedan. Some people in the park were crawling around and you could hear screams and groans, mostly from where some big store was crushed about Bat and the brick houses had caved in. It sounded like birds in the distance, the screaming, Nora thought: twittery and as if a big flock made it. Sparrows or starlings.

When they had all looked out over the square for a while and not said anything, the gardener turned around and stared with a peculiar expression at the mushroom cloud and the fire getting brighter underneath it and he just ran. He ran through the park in a zigzag and toward the west where, Nora realized finally, there was a big noise of other people yelling and raging around, though you couldn’t see them at that distance: just wreckage.

Jeff the butler, who was a tall man with large cords in his neck, looked at Willis and the chauffeur said, “Lost his head.”

“Shock,” Jeff answered.

Willis looked across the square as if he, too, would like to run; but then his eyes soon began to move along the row of cars which wasn’t exactly a row any more.

It was chilly now and getting dark quite fast. Nora had lost her hat but she never had taken off her woolly coat and she was glad of that. She tried to remember as much as she could of all she had heard at home, ever since she could remember anything, about atomic bombs. She realized that this one had gone off quite near, but she also realized she didn’t know how powerful it was or exactly how near. And she had to admit that, even if she’d known, she could only guess about the radioactivity.

She did recall, though, that people had put cars close to test bombs and they’d had their tops squdged down like some of those on the street, but people had started them right away.

Willis was walking along, looking at the cars that stood on their wheels and weren’t full of broken glass or smoking or anything. Once in a while, he bent forward and looked inside—to make sure no person was on the floor in a mess or anything.

At long last Willis got into a car and started it and drove it slowly down the street, winding around things. He and Jeff got Mrs. Sloan in the back somehow and she moaned once but her eyes didn’t open. Willis said, “Where to?” in a funny way and Nora thought probably he had a certain percentage of “shock,” also. Maybe about forty per cent, she thought, and she thought Jeff had about fifty and she had ten or maybe twenty per cent at most.

The car started along the street very slowly, going this way and that, but the lights were smashed and you couldn’t tell exactly what you were running over. They went around the east side of the square, sometimes going up over the curb, and past a brick house that was burning inside fiercely. Nora saw then that sweat was pouring down Willis’s face and he was crying and the butler beside him was looking straight ahead at absolutely nothing.

She was sitting between them and not being paid any attention to. When they reached St.

Paul Street, they couldn’t make a right tum because of the rubble so they went on north.

Finally Jeff said, “The City Hospital’s the other way, Willis.” He spoke quietly, as if he didn’t want to hurt the chauffeur’s feelings.

But Willis wasn’t making a mistake. He answered, “Jeff, there won’t
be
any city hospital down there.”

Jeff said, “Check,” and sounded crestfallen. “Where you headed?”

“I thought we might get through farther up here and around east and back to St. Paul on that side. The Infirmary.”

“Mrs. Sloan would be highly incensed—”

“I don’t know if she’ll ever be highly anything.”

There was less rubble and there were fewer fires up that way and they began to see a lot of people who weren’t hurt at all, just running around. Many were going in and out of houses, carrying things, and some families already had beds and bedding and trunks and suitcases and piles of clothing out on the street. Quite a few had put things in handcarts and even on children’s wagons, and they were hurrying along, pushing and pulling and carrying babies. All the windows were broken and all the sidewalks were littered with glass and there were very few parked cars.

Willis noticed that, too. “People that could,” he pointed out, “grabbed a car and beat it.”

When they crossed Market Street—which changed its name from Central Avenue at the bridge which Nora rightly supposed was now vaporized—they could see hordes of people everywhere, nearly all of them running north with something in their arms or on their backs, and children. But some blocks down, where the big Cathedral was plain to see because it was on fire and half-mashed anyhow, firehoses were shooting up and fire trucks were all around.

“That’s what comes,” Willis said, “of having all Harps in the Fire Department. Save the Catholic church and let the city go.”

Jeff said, haughtily, Nora noticed, “I guess it isn’t important. Half the fire companies must have been wiped out and the rest couldn’t do much. The flood that floated Noah couldn’t put this out!” He laughed a little; cackled, Nora called it to herself.

They covered about three miles to go about one straight mile and often they had to back out of streets because they could see they couldn’t go through. Sometimes people tried to stop them; and always people begged for rides and once some foreigners yelled a lot of words they couldn’t understand and threw stones at them.

When it got quite dark and when they were out of the region where the fires made it possible to see their way, Willis found a bigger car with locked doors and windows. He broke the windows with bricks and he raised the engine hood and fiddled under it and they moved Mrs.

Sloan, though it seemed all they could do. Nora took her pocketbook along, carefully. But the car lights helped a great deal when they finally got the other car moving, and some teen-age boys came shooting past them in the car they’d abandoned and hit a fire plug not three blocks away.

Once, when they were on the other side of Market Street, a plane went over, out toward Ferndale. It was flying terribly low and terribly fast and it was a very big plane. But only Nora bothered to wonder what it was doing there. She thought maybe it was a drone, sampling the atomic dust, but she decided there was no way to tell. She realized that Chuck would be at Hink Field in all probability and he could tell her, later, when she got home. If she ever did get home.

By the time they got to where they could see the Infirmary, the fire storm was really going full blast. It made one big blaze right in the middle of the Sister Cities about five miles high and maybe, Nora decided, two miles across. Since she had expected it, she took it for granted exactly as she did all other A-bomb phenomena: it impressed her without unduly astonishing her. But she could observe that Jeff and Willis were simply appalled. Several times, flicking his eyes up at the rising tower of sheer flame, Willis bumped into things with the car.

Pretty soon he stopped.

He stopped because the street ahead was solid with people lined up—or, rather, just there in a solid mass—trying to get to the Infirmary. They were all hurt. Some were bleeding and some were burned and many were both. Some had no faces as such, Nora noticed, and some had bones showing through their flesh and even through their clothes. And the whole mass of them, thousands and thousands, made one loud sound like community singing. A lot of people were already on the ground, unable to move or dead, and nobody paid any attention to them.

“I’ll have to get through somehow,” Willis said.

“It isn’t possible.”

“
We
can’t let her wait for her turn here. She’ll die, most likely.”

Jeff stepped out of the car. His hair started to blow and his coat Bickered and Nora realized it was very windy. That would be the air moving in to feed the fire storm and it could reach hurricane force, they had often said, and suck fire engines and even people into its center to burn. The butler took a look at the hurt people, who were all around him now, and a long look at the big torch in the sky, and he just ran, like the panicky maids.

“Smelled’ em, I guess,” Willis said.

Nora stepped out. He didn’t prevent it. She felt the coldness of the pouring air on one side and the heat of the veritable Mount Everest of fire on the other. It was about the same altitude, she thought, to its top, where big slices of fire jumped up independently, in the sky, above the summit. She drew a breath and she thought Willis was right. They smelled like hot meat, burning fat, smoking grease and burned hair.

Then a terrible thing happened.

Willis got out of the sedan, too, and Mrs. Sloan was in it alone, and Willis suddenly grabbed his shoulder. His face became distorted and he tried to say something, tried to gesture, but he fell down on the pavement of the street. Nora squatted down and shook him and said, over and over, “Mr. Willis! Mr. Willis!” But he didn’t say a word so she knew his heart had failed.

It wasn’t surprising, she thought. He was a very elderly man. But more people were coming into the street all the time, pushing toward the Infirmary in a great stinking, screaming, sticky mob and soon they would hem her in. If she didn’t want to spend the rest of the night right there, she’d have to move. She thought she might be able to go up the street again and around and come into the hack or the side of the Mildred Tatum Infirmary. It was, in fact, not merely the only way to escape the increasing crowd but the only hope of getting a doctor for Mrs. Sloan, though she hesitated to try it, because now she would be all alone.

The bomb had gone off nearly an hour ago. With demented clarity, Kit Sloan realized he had been running this way and that, trying to get distance between him and the great fire, without making much headway. He had turned his ankle twice and he was still going on it, but it was swelling. Sometimes he covered a block or two and then had to retrace his steps because of a rubble mass or, more often, a jam-packed shambles of human beings filling the street from wall to wall and headed away so slowly that he didn’t want to be impeded by them.

Foreigners, mostly.

Their area had not been annihilated, just set on fire here and there, mauled, dumped in its streets. So they were on the move, on the way out of town, Polaks and Hunkies and Latwicks, Yids and Guineas and Micks. Not many Nigs. He even thought, racing past a bleeding family, there was a reason for the dearth of shines in the stampeded mobs: Niggertown was right on Ground Zero.

Up until he reached Elk Drive, a wide concrete boulevard with the parkways between, a kind of insane logic governed his actions. He had to escape. His mother was dead, in the city or in the ruins of their house. So his responsibility was for himself alone. He had nobody else to save. The fire behind, the dead and dying around, the hideous condition of the hurt—these acted as spurs and goads. If he had been like many people, they would have driven him to less violent activity, to crazed stasis, perhaps.

He even knew that Elk Drive had been his first goal. On Elk, he could get a ride of some sort, steal a car, or even run on by himself, using the lawns and adjacent fields, to get out of town. Elk Drive was wide and roomy and the houses were set well back, out through the developments, clear to the open countryside. And Elk Drive led to the municipal airport. He could gas his own plane up, if need be, figure his own chances in the traffic pattern, take off without consulting the control tower, and fly until he found some neighboring city or town—

Omaha, KC, Oklahoma City, even a small place like Kaknee or Dennis or Elvers—where there had been no bomb, where no fire roared as high as the stratosphere, as massive as an Act of God.

Traffic was whizzing on Elk, using both sides of the parkways to go in one direction—

away. The people on foot used either the middle strips or lawns, running or walking, and there were thousands. But, still, they moved—every man and woman and child at his own chosen pace. There was room enough.

He stepped into the yard of a house, the Whittaker home, he realized with a kind of infant’s pleasure at mere identification. He threw himself down, to pant and rest, watching the fire-struck masses surge west.

Then the plane came.

Fast and low.

In the dark, Kit wouldn’t have seen the markings if it hadn’t banked so as to catch the raw glare from downtown. That made the red stars plainly discernible on the wings.
My Christ,
he thought,
Soviet.