Tomorrow!

by Philip Wylie

The houses near by were shattered, some smashed Hat. His: own, he could see, across the empty square and the lawns—where trees lay prostrate, their boughs still heaving—was wrecked.

  Why, he wondered, was the square so empty? Then he looked again and saw the bundles of clothing, the blackened things, the charred people, the dead and the still-moving dead.

  His horror mounted. He heard bricks slide and scrambled away from the buried wreck of his car. He decided he would have to walk across the square. Have to.

  It was hard going. Things—just things—had dropped into the place—and, he soon realized, things were raining from the hot, spreading cloud. Part of a piano fell down and then a dead pooch hit and rolled and something like a stove lid rang on the hot asphalt. He entered the park. People were opening the doors of cars, hanging out, gasping. The ones on the ground were black. Or red. Or both. With holes, meaning mouths.

  A woman in what he first thought was a red sweater, vomited, sitting up straight in her car, vomited all over her own windshield. A man got out of a car that was upside down. He fell and didn’t rise.

  A door in a house opened and another man came out. A short, broad-chested man. He said something like, “Owowow-owowowowowo,” and began to run down the sidewalk, toward Kit, who stepped aside. Between the sounds he emitted, the man clicked as he ran. Every step, Kit saw, left a blood-gob on the flagstones. He saw the reason. Both the man’s feet were gone and he was running on the ends of his shinbones. That was why he seemed so short. He went a good ways, perhaps a quarter of a block, with his arms up and his fists doubled, like a track runner, and then he fell.

  Kit thought of not going to his house, of going in the other direction, away from the expanding cloud. It was darkening the sky now. It looked exactly like the Technicolor newsreel shots; a bit darker, perhaps.

  He began to trot. He slipped on somebody’s blood, recovered and hurried. A young woman, a pretty young woman with bright blue eyes and blonde hair sat up, right in front of him.

  He halted, mouth open. “Mister,” she said, “will you help me get on my feet?”

  He tried to. But when he reached down for where her arm should have been he felt gritty pulp and looked and it was just coming through her coat sleeve. She saw it, too, and screamed; he could hear her screaming all the way to his own lawn.

  He went around the house once. It was on fire in several places. There was no sign of life.

  He wasn’t even sure his mother had been at home anyway. She’d said something about having to shop.

  To shop.

  He spun around. From the heart of the city, a great smoke was rising. Beneath it, lighting its base, was fire. Somewhere he’d read that, in twenty minutes, the fire storm would come. The whole center of the city. You had at least twenty minutes to get clear, but then the temperatures rose with the holocaust. To six thousand degrees.

  He thought, desperately, of a car. He rushed to the garage. Its second floor had fallen down and over the four great doors. There’d been a car under the porte-cochere. He ran there. It was burning. Had to get out. Twenty minutes. He must have wasted ten already.

  He went fleetly north across the square, through its park, noticing nothing this time, sliding and getting his balance without looking, stepping on stones, boards, bricks, soft things—

  indiscriminately.

  All Nora knew, for sure, when the ground jumped, was that the atomic bomb must have hit.

  They’d been in the subcellar, with candles, sitting in old, discarded chairs—Minerva and Willis and three maids and Jeff, the butler, and the gardener. All around them were racks of dusty wine bottles, barrels of wine and cases—the tissue paper around the bottles, mildewed.

  They couldn’t have been sitting there, Nora thought, for more than a minute. Then the whole place jumped and the candles went out and it was like being on the Whipsaw ride at Swan Island, and the maids screamed, but not like amusement-park screaming.

  Then—the air full of moldy-smelling dust.

  And the maids were hollering their fool heads off.

  Minerva, who’d been saying something about, “Going back up, if this absurd situation lasts any length of time . . .” had been shut up by the tremendous heave right there.

  Nora’s chair slid on the bare earth floor. Barrels fell and bounced and rolled.

  Then Willis, his old voice fierce, yelled, “Quiet!”

  Peculiarly, Nora thought, the maids became silent.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?” Willis asked.

  Mrs. Sloan didn’t answer.

  A match struck. Nora noticed how it shook, how the hands that held a candle wobbled with it. Whoever it was, the gardener, she thought, had trouble sticking it to one of the shelves that held wine bottles. The first thing Nora saw was the maids, hugging each other, pale as death.

  The next thing she saw was a big wine barrel that wine was gurgling out of. Then she saw Mrs.

  Sloan, underneath it.

  “We’ll have to get out of here,” Willis said. “And get her out.”

  “Better wait a bit,” the gardener answered.

  “Wait—the devil! The building above us is probably on fire. Try the door.” Willis came over to the chair where Nora was sitting and smiled faintly. “You all right, Miss?”

  “Fine,” Nora said and she pointed to Mrs. Sloan. “Her legs are pinned under.”

  Willis nodded.

  The maids began to whimper. He stood in front of them. “Stop that, everyone of you!” he said. He turned to the butler. “Jeff, tear off a shelf-board and bear a hand! We’ll have to prize that hogshead off her. If she’s living.”

  Nora heard the butler yanking in the gloom. One of the maids went back there with him and returned first, carrying a two-by-four. From the door, which he’d opened, the gardener called, “Stairway’s kind of blocked and it does smell smoky-like.”

  Willis was kneeling, listening to Mrs. Sloan’s heart.

  Her eyes were shut.

  Willis said, ‘Well, clear a way through somehow! There’s plenty of cellar exits. But just that one, up from here.”

  Pretty soon, they had moved the barrel. The butler, whose name was at least Jeff, Nora thought, was looking at Mrs. Sloan’s legs, holding another lighted candle and pulling up her skirts in a most casual manner. “Busted—smashed,” the butler said. “Have to make a stretcher.

  Some weight!”

  From the door of the wine cellar, the gardener yelled, “We can get around this junk. But hurry! I hear it crackling up there!”

  So they dragged Mrs. Sloan. The maids went first, though—they ran. And Nora was next to the gardener, who went last. As she followed the dragged woman, she saw Mrs. Sloan’s pocketbook on the floor underneath the place where she’d been lying. Nora took it along and nobody paid any attention.

  “Hurry up, kid,” the butler said. That was all.

  The cellar was half caved in and you could sec lines of fire, through cracks overhead. The smoke was awful. Nora ran past the men with their slow-moving burden to the square of outdoor light, and she raced up stone steps, gratefully, for she was at last outdoors. She hoped she was in time to see the mushroom cloud, and she eyed the sky eagerly, ignoring her smoke-induced cough.

  She was in time. In plenty of time.

  And she saw more. The whole city, to the south, seemed on fire. It was, she told herself, extremely spectacular. It was unforgettable. She took a good look so she would never forget.

  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 th
at 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.