by James Philip
Gretchen went on: “Dan is my research student. We were working at Yale when the alarms went off. It seemed sensible to come out to the country until we knew what is going on.”
Although Dan did not know if he cared to be described as anybody’s researcher, he let the comment pass unremarked.
“This,” Gretchen continued, turning to the matronly presence at her shoulder, “is Mrs Nordstrom,” a gesture at the older man, “and this is Mr Nordstrom. They’ve looked after Oak Hill for my parents for as long as I can remember.” Gretchen drew herself to her full height and took command of the situation. “Until we establish what is going on I suggest we all make ourselves comfortable in the cellar.”
“Surely we will be safe all the way out here?” The old man queried respectfully.
Dan tried not to laugh. Getting hysterical was not going to help. However, the notion that anybody had ever been, or ever would be safe again, anywhere, seemed so incredible as to be surreal.
He wanted to shout out: “Which part of global nuclear war do you not understand?”
He did not say, or shout anything of the kind because he was in somebody else’s house and it would have been unspeakably rude. He had not been brought up that way and he was not about to start behaving like a jerk just because World War III had broken out.
“We only heard very garbled pieces of news on the car radio,” he said, addressing Mrs Nordstrom, whom he guessed called the shots in the Nordstrom household. “You may have a better idea than us what is actually going on.”
“They say Boston got hit bad,” the woman reported, her tone implicitly suggesting she thought that this was Boston’s fault.
Dan Brenckmann went cold inside.
“An hour ago,” Mr Nordstrom added, eager to share his wife’s thunder added, “they said Buffalo and Niagara got hit by a big one...”
Gretchen and the Nordstrom’s were suddenly looking at Dan very oddly.
Unconsciously, he put out an arm to steady himself.
Everything was spinning.
He felt like Joe Louis had just landed a haymaker in his gut.
“My Ma and Pa are in Boston,” he muttered. “And...”
He thought he was going to be sick.
His voice was that of a stranger.
“My kid sister is at college at New York State in Buffalo...”
Chapter 14
00:16 Hours Pacific Standard Time (03:16 Hours Washington Time)
Sunday 28th October 1962
Haight Street, San Francisco, California
Downstairs people had been sitting around getting high and drinking themselves oblivious when the sirens had cranked up the first time. That was over four hours ago but nobody had gone home and nobody had thought of anything better to do than to carry on getting high and drinking. Some of the people at the party had always believed the World would end this way, with a big bang not a whimper, and most of the others, even the ones of a naturally less pessimistic disposition were easily persuaded that even if they were lucky enough to find deep enough holes in the ground to survive the first bombs, that radiation would get them sooner or later.
Miranda Sullivan had missed the party.
She had taken a couple of pink pills to help her sleep that afternoon, passed out on Johnny Seiffert’s bed – his huge circular red-sheeted ‘love altar’ – and slept a deep, nightmare filled drugged-induced sleep until the moment shortly after midnight that the door had crashed open, and two partially clad, frantically coupling complete strangers had stumbled into the bedroom and fallen on top of her.
None of which had registered immediately, or for some minutes thereafter.
Why are there two half-naked people fucking on the bed beside me?
How weird was that?
Johnny was always boasting about the ‘awesome gigs’ he had had on this bed.
Johnny was full of shit!
When he fucked her it was like he was always in a hurry. Like foreplay was some kind of race. Not that any of Johnny’s girls let him fuck them because he was any kind of latter day Casanova. Johnny knew everybody; Johnny opened doors none of the other shithead ‘agents’ and ‘promoters’ could open. Most important, Johnny had no shame. That was why the little prick had signed Sam Brenckmann up to tour with those redneck no-hopers the Limonville Brothers. Brothers! Jesus, those guys were jerks! The moment she had laid eyes on them she had decided that wherever they came from idiocy ran in the family and that they still allowed brothers and sisters to get married! Miranda hated feeling so guilty about Sam’s gig with the Brothers; just not so much she had wanted to risk upsetting Johnny by trying to talk him out of it. Sam should have treated her better. He should have listened to what she was trying to tell him. The dumb schmuck only had himself to blame...
Miranda blinked in the gloom.
The only illumination was the loom from the hall light coming into the bedroom through the half-open door. She squinted myopically. A big black guy was pumping a chubby white girl with flowers in her hair. He was doing her from behind, very hard, and the girl was gasping snatches of dirty talk, goading him to fuck her ‘deeper’.
The other woman glanced at Miranda, her eyes glazed.
Three in a bed gigs had never rung Miranda’s bell.
The black guy groaned loudly and collapsed on the fat girl. He was sweating heavily, Miranda could smell him. His breath rasped, he coughed, propped himself on his elbows. Oblivious of Miranda’s presence inches away his hips rose and fell as he re-commenced thrusting, faster and faster.
Miranda rolled away, and attempted to sit up.
This turned out to be a really bad mistake.
Her head swam, she leaned forward and retched.
The bathroom might have been a million miles away for all the chance she had of getting to it before she threw up; and inevitably, she was sick in the doorway, on the floor at her feet, on her feet, and on her long, crazily tangled blond hair. On the plus side she felt a little better afterwards. Glancing over her shoulder she discovered that the black guy had turned the fat girl onto her back and was rocking back and forth on top of her; and for a very brief moment she felt so much better she actually started feeling horny, which was not – when all was said and done - a thing that happened very often when she was in Johnny’s bedroom.
There was loud music blaring from the ground floor.
The sound of voices; and the sickly stench of cheap hash were in the air.
Suddenly Miranda desperately needed to get to the bathroom before she pissed herself.
Stumbling into the bathroom it was obvious that it had already been visited by partygoers in a far worse state than she was. She would have been angry or even a little disgusted if she had not just been so sick in her own hair. Pot calling the kettle black and all that shit. Her temples throbbed. Taking pills, any pills that Johnny gave you was never a good idea.
The smell in the bathroom was so bad she opened the window wide.
The cool night air hit her all at once and she almost passed out.
Her head cleared.
“...ALL CITIZENS ARE ADVISED TO STAY INDOORS IF THEY ARE UNABLE TO REACH A COMMUNAL PLACE OF SAFETY...”
What?
“...IF THE FALLOUT ALARM SOUNDS STAY INDOORS WITH ALL DOORS AND WINDOWS CLOSED UNTIL THE ALL CLEAR SOUNDS...”
What the fuck?
The booming, muffled sound of the Tannoy was coming from outside in the street.
Did somebody say the word ‘fallout’?
Miranda leaned out of the window.
“...STAY INDOORS...”
A police car was cruising south down Haight Street towards the intersection with Ashbury Street, its lights spinning brightly. There was no other traffic on the road.
None at all.
Fallout alarm...
The music downstairs had stopped.
She heard the radio being tuned, the volume turned up high, and several savage bursts of seething static rising and falling as somebody twirled th
e tuning dial.
“...THE STATE OF EMERGENCY DECLARED IN THE BAY AREA AT TWENTY HUNDRED HOURS WEST COAST TIME REMAINS IN EFFECT. THE GOVERNOR HAS ANNOUNCED THAT NATIONAL GUARD UNITS WILL BE DEPLOYED ON THE STREETS AND THAT LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT...”
Miranda suddenly stopped worrying about the vomit in her hair.
The fat girl came out onto the landing as she staggered out of the bathroom.
The fat girl was young, and her fat was puppy fat. The kid would have been pretty if she had not been bawling her eyes out. Miranda thought about being a true sister, of maybe putting her arm around the kid’s shoulders. But the girl rushed towards the stairs before she could act on her fleeting good intentions.
Fallout. States of emergency. The National Guard on the streets. Looters to be shot on sight...
Fallout...
The mad bastards in Washington and the Kremlin had finally done it!
The end of the World was nigh.
Notwithstanding that the end of the World was nigh the big black man was standing in the bedroom door with other things on his mind, watching his distraught fuck mate disappear down the stairs.
Miranda stared dreamily at his very large, semi-erect penis.
That was when she decided she would worry about nuclear fallout and the fate of nations some other time.
Chapter 15
03:31 Hours Zulu (Washington DC Time)
Sunday 28th October 1962
NORAD, Ent Air Force Base, Colorado Springs, Colorado
“I don’t know what came over me,” Max Calman muttered, staring at the floor of the small windowless office the base security officers had frog marched him into a few minutes after ‘the incident’.
The Base Security Officer, a major with a face that spoke of a life running through walls in the pursuit of his duties was not buying it. He studied the ashen-faced, blood spattered round shouldered man sitting across the other side of the gun metal table. Looking at the man one would not have believed him capable of beating up his boss. However, in the Base Security Officer’s long experience in the military the harmless looking guys were almost always the most dangerous ones.
“You put your boss in hospital,” he growled like a grizzly with toothache, “and you don’t know what came over you?”
“No.”
Major Paul Gunther had been in uniform thirty-one years. He had started out as a rifleman at Fort Bragg when Herbert Hoover was President. He had first seen combat in China, defending the US Legation in Nanjing from rioters in 1937; and first killed one of his nation’s enemies on Guadalcanal in 1942. He had been commissioned in 1943 and assigned to Douglas MacArthur’s personal staff in command of a headquarters guard platoon in 1944. As a mustang – an enlisted man selected from the ranks for a commission – he had never expected to progress beyond captain, in the event he had been awarded his major’s oak leaf insignia five years ago. Deep into his fiftieth year the posting to Ent Air Force Base was likely to be his swansong; in a couple of years his time would be up, he would take his pension and look for a post at a cadet school or perhaps, possibly as a security consultant with one of the big contractors involved in the SAGE Project.
Four years ago Gunther could have written everything he knew about the US computer industry on the back of a stamp, since then he had become intimately acquainted with the ways, means, feral business practices and cut-throat alley cat morals of the competing players greedily engaged in shamelessly fleecing every last greenback from the US taxpayer.
A man did not have to be any kind of technical whizz kid, strategic genius or brain box computer analyst to know that SAGE, the multi-billion dollar system that its designers and builders had promised would enable American citizens to sleep safe in the beds at night had in the last few hours dismally failed in every meaningful aspect, in its avowed raison d’être. Moreover, right now he was looking at one of the ‘experts’ – albeit a bloodied example of the species – responsible for that failure and the subsequent deaths and injuries of hundreds of thousands, perhaps, millions of Americans, whose first response to letting down his country had it seemed, been to launch a ferocious, unprovoked assault on his own boss.
Gunther had files on all the civilian contractors at Ent Air Force base. Most of those files were thin; name, age, hair and eye colour, contact address sort of thin. The files on the key senior Burroughs and IBM contractors were like doorstops. He had Max Calman’s life history on record; and that of his wife, Lena, also. Their lives and the lives of their extended families, their friends, and every kind of affiliation, quirk, and foible were minutely detailed in his files. Calman’s home phone was not currently being tapped, but every call he made out of Ent AFB was monitored, likewise his checking account with the 1st Union Bank of Colorado, and his credit agreement with Chrysler for the Calman family station wagon. The civilian contractors hated being under surveillance, the military’s constant snooping and the periodic ‘security interviews’ to which they and in some cases, close members of their family were subjected to; but it came with the territory. If they did not like it they could go work for Coca Cola or Disney.
“When I put a man in hospital I always know why, Mr Calman,” the Chief of Security at Ent Air Force Base said grimly.
“I am not a violent man,” the civilian replied. His tone implied that he had initially intended to append “like you” to this statement.
“I doubt if Mr Drinkwater would agree with you about that.”
“I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”
“What sort of stress, Mr Calman?”
“My wife’s pregnancy.”
Paul Gunther did not think Calman was the sort of guy who lived and breathed his spouse’s pregnancy. He seriously doubted if the little prick had noticed the poor woman was pregnant at all until she was so huge she had trouble getting through doors. Calman was workaholic, obsessive, manic about his work. Sure he was married, a lot of the technical weirdoes were. The married ‘techies’ tended not to attract as much attention from the watchers as the single men; and having a little woman – better still a little woman and a few school-age kids - in the background lent a man who worked in a key, ultra-sensitive security role an air of reliability, an intrinsic soundness that curtailed any number of otherwise intrusive and inconvenient inquiries. For example, it established prima facie evidence that a man’s sexual proclivities were of a nature unlikely to lay him open to blackmail. Likewise, a stable married home life made it less likely that a man was an enemy agent because to get away with being a spy a man’s wife would have to be in league with him. Therefore, all things being equal, a married man was generally viewed as less of a security risk. Gunther suspected that Calman was the sort of man who had got married for no other reason than to reduce his ‘risk profile’ in the eyes of men like him. That suspicion had red-flagged Calman’s file a long time ago.
And now it just so happened that on the night of World War III Max Calman had put his boss in hospital and paralysed the Burroughs ‘expert team’ responsible for systems data analysis of a small but possibly mission critical NORAD department!
“You met your wife at college?” Gunther asked.
“Yes.”
“When you were twenty and she was eighteen?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t get hitched until a decade later?”
“No.”
“You didn’t get hitched until about the time you applied to join the Burroughs Corporation Systems Integration (Peterson Air Force Base) Network Implementation and Testing Team?”
Max Calman scowled impatiently.
“Joining the team was a big promotion for me. Lena and me had met up again a few months before and we were both excited about the opportunity. It made sense to get married.”
Paul Gunther sighed, got up and retreated to the wall by the door.
Max Calman held up his bloody and bruised hands.
“I need some ice on these,” he complained.
Chapter
16
002:35 Hours Mountain Standard Time (04:35 Washington DC Time)
Sunday 28th October 1962
Bellingham, Washington State
Apart from the rain pitter-pattering on the windows it was very, very quiet. The quietness of the night was broken only by the distant amplified bullhorn of the army truck driving around town and presently it was touring the other side of Bellingham.
“The governor of the State of Washington has declared a state of emergency. Martial law is now in force. All citizens are advised to stay in their homes and to listen for the fallout alert. Looters will be shot on sight...”
All things considered staying in bed seemed like the best thing to do in the circumstances.
“It doesn’t feel like the end of the World,” Judy said lowly, lazily.
Sam Brenckmann was not about to disagree. Most of the time since the craziness started – about seven or eight hours ago, he guessed – he had been getting progressively more intimately acquainted with the funny, pretty and sexy woman in his arms. In fact if he and Judy had got any more intimately acquainted they would have fucked each other to death by now.
Except, it had stopped feeling like fucking the last couple of times.
Judy wriggled and squirmed, giggled, rested her head on his chest.
“I can feel your heart beating,” she announced.
“We must be still alive,” he suggested, squeezing her close.
She giggled again.
In the morning – if they were still alive – they would have to face the new age. Everything would be different and none of the changes would be good news.
“Do you have a gun in the house?” Sam asked, idly.
“No, of course not.” Judy shrugged from his embrace, looked to him in the darkness. “Why?”