Tomorrow!

by Philip Wylie

  “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.

  2

  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.

  A turbo-pro job.

  For an instant, vainly, he watched the sky behind it, assuming an American jet had driven the enemy to earth. None came.

  What came, soon enough, over the length of Elk Drive, over the people running in scattered thousands, over the whizzing cars and fast-lumbering trucks, was a swift polka-dotting of white in the plane’s wake. Parachutes, Kit realized. Little ones.

  They opened and began to descend. He watched them drift down, drift his way, in wonderment. Soon, one came quite close overhead. He stood up with the idea of capturing it.

  Then he heard, above the pandemonium on Elk Drive, a hissing beneath the chute and saw a shining metal canister. Too late, he perceived that a considerable cloud of wind-dispersed vapor was blasting from the canister, under pressure, as an insect bomb spews mist. The vapor from the falling chute surrounded him, dampened him. And at last he knew what it was. Others on the street, caught in the swirls of mist, also guessed.

  “Germs!”

  “Bacteria!”

  “It’s disease war!”

  A truck, driven by a man who must also have known, braked ferociously to avoid a settling, sizzling missile. Instantly, fifty cars crashed behind it. And the chutes came down over the lot, spraying the dead and the injured along with the unharmed.

  Kit knew he had breathed the stuff. He knew he had licked his culture-moistened lips. He knew his clothes were damp with it. So he knew that the thing he had been trying to escape had overtaken him. He spat, vomited, discarded his jacket and trousers, wiped his face with a handkerchief till blood came.

  But from then on, he did not have even a demented logic. No one had sanity, on Elk Drive, after the bacteria sprayed them.

  3

  Ruth Williams still carried her dead baby. Its insides had come through its back, slowly, as she walked, and finally they’d jiggled so loose and slack that she stepped on them now and again.

  Jim came along behind her, his face clotted up in the cold, his hand on her back—because he couldn’t see. Behind Jim, holding onto a length of clothesline, came the rest of the family.

  People who saw Ruth leading, walking, tripping a little, slipping now and again-for visibility was good in the torchy night—said things and were sick or they screamed, and Ruth always smiled a little at their discomfiture.

  Finally, Ruth threw it away.

  They went faster, afterward—through Ferndale, down the main street, past the broken windows of all the stores.

  4

  Beau was lost.

  How he got so far downtown he never knew.

  He remembered the railroad tracks, beyond Cold Spring. He remembered, because he almost got killed there. A train—mixed and covered with people like flies on flypaper—came around a bend, headlight shining, folks scattering ahead. Some got hit. The train gave a whistle blast and thundered by, out of the city, Beau guessed. Even so, he must have taken the wrong direction on the tracks afterward. It was hard to remember which way you’d faced, after you’d rolled down an embankment.

  For a long time he didn’t identify the great pyre with direction. He had not tried to reason where the bomb had hit. He’d been in his cellar at the time—and the Light had merely been omnipresent, not directional, down there.

  He was somewhere around the Simmons Park area, though, in Wickley Heights, he thought.

  He stopped to take bearings.

  “Quite a night,” he said aloud.

  Netta’s dead, he thought.

  There was a big apartment building, a swanky place, on this street, he noticed. Nobody around. Nobody at all. The wind was blowing and the street was warm, nonetheless. The building had broken windows, big ones, because the ground floor was for
shops. He thought there might be a liquor store. He had lost his whisky bottle when he’d jumped out of the path of that goddamned wildcatting railroad locomotive.

  He didn’t think it would get very far, going like that, with the rails probably spread here and there and debris on the tracks.

  He walked along in front of the fire-illumined building, waded, rather, in deep glass that was slippery. All the street trees had been knocked over in neat rows pointing the same way.

  He stopped.

  It wasn’t a liquor store.

  It was a jewelry store.

  The big window was just a glass jaw, like a shark’s, that a man could step through. The glass counters were conveniently shattered. Inside, things glittered in the firelight, brighter than glass, and different colors.

  Beau said dazedly, rather happily, “Well!”

  He went in and picked up a bracelet and then a necklace.

  “Well, well!” he murmured. He commenced to stuff his pockets, humming. He hummed,

  “Happy days are here again. . . .”

  5

  Hook and Ladder Company Number 17 pulled hack to Broad Street, according to plan. The sea of fire began at Washington, to the north. Nothing could be done to stop a fire storm. It had to burn itself out, leaving just ash, the Hiroshima effect. The temperature inside it would rise to six thousand degrees or better. Any people alive, under that circle of one flame, would crisp and cremate, or, escaping that in some deep cellar, suffocate. For all the oxygen of the atmosphere near by would be used by the fire. Everything that could be oxidized would burn. The “air”

  would be CO and CO2.

  They reeled in their hoses and backed and filled until the equipment was turned around, the hook and ladder, the chemical engines, the pumps, the hose wagons, the chief’s car. Then they got aboard and went. It was their second major move. The first had been made in Condition Yellow—when they’d rendezvoused in Edgeplains and waited. It was a good tactic: the firehouse had been wrecked.

  They thought maybe they could save the Police Station and everything from there south.

  So they came over from Sunset Parkway again, cast, to the station. They noted, on the way, that the CD people were on the job. They’d dynamited clear through from the parkway to River Avenue, where a row of wooden houses had caught. Two bulldozers, sweating it out in the heat, had knocked down a scrabble of advertising signs, a house, and some miscellaneous junk that would otherwise have carried fire deeper into Green Prairie.

  The chief, going past, cut his siren and tramped on his horn and waved, and one of the men on a dozer waved back.

  When they got to the station, they piled out. There were lights in the windowless building and even the green lights outside were burning again. An auxiliary plant. Over toward Bigelow and Cold Spring, it looked comfortingly dark, though the firemen knew brands and sparks would be raining down there and probably clear to the city limits. The CD people would have to take care of that. The business of Number 17 was the big stuff, like the row of stores blazing on Broad. Fortunately, the wind blew toward the center of town from every compass point, feeding the fire storm; it made peripheral fire-fighting practicable. If it hadn’t been for that in-sucked wind, all Green Prairie would have gone.

  The trucks fanned out. The growling sirens fell silent. Caps fell from fireplugs, hoses were screwed on, streams of water traversed Broad and crashed into the seething row of stores, sending up inverted spark-rains that could not be seen against the central city, the solid background of flame. Now, it vanished at the top—an unbelievable fire mountain that pierced a downreaching, outspreading pall of smoke. Smoke, with the dust from the bomb, canopied the Sister Cities.

  Lieutenant Lacey, looking military neat, came out of the Police Station and pointed at a huge lump of debris in the street—a tangle of metal, half-melted, unrecognizable, and as big as a small house. “It fell,” he yelled in the fire chief’s ear, “right after the blast. Think your men are safe around it?”

  The chief stared. “God knows! Around it is where they gotta be, anyhow, if they’re going to keep this fire from spreading.”

  “I phoned the school,” Lacey said, “for one of those radiation people. They haven’t got many. And Christ knows we need ’em in a million places!”

  The chief nodded. A roof fell across the street and he ran from the station steps to deal with the changed circumstances. This conflagration would have been a three-alarmer, in ordinary times; it was a mere match-sputter now, which the Green Prairie company would have to deal with alone.

  The Ford came fast, considering the condition of the streets.

  Somebody had stuck CD flags on both sides, so Lacey ran down and yanked open the door. “Big gob of metal dropped in the street,” he said. “I’ve kept my men clear of it, but the firemen have to work beside it.”

  “I’ll check.”

  Lacey stepped back and stared. It was a woman.

  She piled out, wearing some sort of plastic thing that made her look like an Arab, and carrying a box with dials and wires. He followed her.

  She didn’t even glance at the fire engines or the men swarming in the street or the blazing buildings. She went through the puddles, in boots, to the girder or rail mass he’d pointed out. She held a shiny metal rod out at it and began walking slowly around it. Because it was a woman, Lieutenant Lacey went right along with her. He could see, in the heaving firelight, that the dials on her gadget were jumping. But that didn’t make her hack away from the big slag heap, so he didn’t back away.

  “It’s hot,” she said. “Plenty.”

  “We’ll hose it down,” he answered.

  “I mean—radioactive. Looks like something blasted from a building. Steelwork and wiring. Balled up in the air and hurled out here.”

  “Is it killing the men?” he asked.

  Lenore chuckled and shook her hooded head. “No. They’d be safe even sitting on it, for a matter of a few hours. But I wouldn’t want it in my dining room for good.”

  “Cigarette?” Lacey asked.

  Lenore unzipped her transparent face protector. “I’d love one! Heaven knows when I had my last one, and I’ve got a list of calls to make”—she jerked her head toward her car—“as long as my arm.” She threw back her hood, inhaled, and said, “Thanks. You look spic and span, Lieutenant.”

  Lacey grinned. “This is the third uniform I’ve had on tonight. First one caught fire.

  Second one got—bloody. . . .”

  “Sorry.”

  He said. “Sorry? The devil! Rugged night!”

  Lenore took a long look at the seething fire storm. “It is that.”

  “You’re the Bailey girl, aren’t you?”

  “I am. Why?”

  Lacey answered, ‘Thought you might like to know something. My men have searched from Broad, here, to Ash. Your mother was pretty badly cut up. Or did you know?”

  Lenore shook her head. “Dad?”

  “Nobody else in your house, that we found. Your mother’s up at the Crystal Lake Church. She’ll live, I guess. Maybe she’s on the lawn, though, so no use looking. The church is crammed with the ones worst off.”

  “I haven’t time,” Lenore answered. She said, “Poor Mom!”

  A man ran up the street toward them. “Hey!” he yelled. “Hey!”

  “Another loony,” Lacey muttered. He reached out with one arm and stopped the man.

  He wasn’t out of his mind; he was merely burned badly and having trouble seeing. “I came across Broad on Bigelow from the cemetery,” he said, choking. “Place is loaded and the people can’t get any farther. Broad’s too hot. Look at me!”

  “Have to blast a way to ‘em,” Lacey said. He stared toward the fire chief.

  “They’re cooking in that graveyard!” the man said. He added, “Cooking alive. Thousands of them. Oh, my God, my face hurts me terrible.”

  Lacey stared at him. “Go up in the station. Say I sent you. Lacey’s the name.” He freed the man. He’d
need another uniform, now, Lenore thought. And she thought of the cemetery, long and wide and open, back behind the fire that was raging along the north side of Broad.

  Something stirred in her mind and receded and came to the fore. “Doesn’t that new sewer, under River Avenue, cut close to the cemetery?”

  “My Lord!” Lacy answered.

  He left her. He ran to the chief.