by Philip Wylie
“Yes.”
“Come from the city?”
“Yes.’’
“I’m sorry, mister. We don’t dare let no one in. The radio tells us folks out here not to open doors or even show a light.”
“I saw your light.”
“Not from the road, you didn’t! I looked.”
“I’m Kit Sloan, maybe you’ve heard the name. I’ve got to rest a minute. Bathe! Eat something, get a drink of water. . . .”
“You mean—old lady—Mrs. Minerva Sloan’s son?”
“Yes.” Kit shivered. Bubonic, maybe, cholera. Musn’t let them know he was infected.
Chain rattled. The door opened.
Kit’s red eyes fell first upon a tall, rufous farmer with a shotgun across his arm. In the parlor behind him were four pretty girls and a plump, middle-aged woman who looked something like all four. Only one lamp was lighted and the radio was talking like firecrackers, but turned down low. The girls were young—perhaps twelve to seventeen or eighteen. Kit said,
“Thank you, sir,” to the farmer.
“Guess it’s all right,” the man answered. “You ain’t armed even. Couple of fellows stopped by a minute ago—they were. I was kind of nervous, but they tried the door and then beat it. Your mother’s bank holds our mortgage, Mr. Sloan.”
The smiles of the frightened girls, the sturdy look of their mother, the composed tone of their towering father brought Kit part way back to his senses. He looked down at his clothes, repressing horror. Some Asiatic disease, probably, that the sulfas and antibiotics wouldn’t touch.
They all looked.
“Marylou,” said the bearded man, “run up and get something from Chet’s closet. Mr.
Sloan, here, is kind of dirtied up.” He set the shotgun in the corner and turned to his unwanted guest. “My name’s Simpson. Alhert Simpson”—He jerked his head—“The missus—my daughters, Mr. Sloan. The bank.”
Kit said, “This is very kind of you.”
“I’ll get you something,” Mrs. Simpson put a workbasket aside. Kit realized, with a kind of feverish resentment, that she had been listening to everything the radio must have been saying—and darning. “We have fresh milk . . . ?”
“If you have anything stronger . . . ?” he ventured.
“I’m afraid that—”
“There’s brandy—in the medicine chest,” Mr. Simpson said. “Brandy would be fine.”
“Sarah, go get it.”
They stared while he poured all their brandy into a tumbler, which it half filled, and then drank it like water.
“We’re prohibitionists here,” Mr. Simpson smiled. “More or less. I don’t suppose you’d care to say anything about—where you came from?” He saw Kit’s immense shudder. “Likely not. What’s that, now!”
He rose, grabbed the shotgun and went to the door. The sound of a big truck grinding up the driveway grew louder and louder. Then it stopped on shrill brakes and many men’s voices filled the night.
The door knocked.
The farmer unlocked it, on the chain. “Who’s there?”
They shot him through the head.
The front windows kicked in.
In a trance of horror, Kit watched the men enter. Two—then four or five—then a dozen.
They were grinning a little. They were drunk. They were the kind of men who wear caps and work in alleys. They eyed the girls with joy.
On the staircase, Marylou stopped—a clean shirt and washed jeans folded over one arm.
She started to back up the stairs.
Her mother and sisters said nothing, nothing at all. “Come on downstairs, baby!” one of the men called, smirking.
Marylou backed another step. The man aimed a pistol and fired. The railing chipped.
Marylou came on down then, still holding her brother Chet’s clean clothes.
The women looked hopefully at Kit. He said, in a thin squeal, “You men move on.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“This is a private home. You’ve just done murder!”
Kit threw himself on the floor. It was his idea to get out—nothing else. His powerful muscles sent him slithering toward the dark hall. He didn’t even try to pick up the shotgun. He heard their shots and vaguely felt referred impact, from the floorboards. He reached the hall. He half stood, unchained the door, ran out.
Somebody bellowed through the smashed windows, “Hey, Red! Get that jerk!”
Kit saw the trees against the luminous sky line, the square silhouette of the truck, the palely white porch bannister. Flame squirted from the truck and his body was seared. He fell down the steps and lay without moving on his back.
He wished, seeing the stars as they began to swim and cavort, he’d at least grabbed the shotgun and plugged a couple of them.
In the parlor, the men turned toward the rigid women. “Going to be a nice little party,”
one said, licking his lips. “Private-like.”
Others laughed. One yelled, “Hey— Red! Come on in! We found five of ‘em!”
They moved toward the four girls and their mother.
She said, softly, “Pray, children.”
But nobody was listening to prayers that night.
12
Toward morning, but in that part of the hours when it should have been darkest, Henry left his second-in-command at his desk and went out in the night with the police lieutenant, Lacey. Some streets, some avenues, were slots leading arrow-straight to the fire storm, box-ended with flame.
Other thoroughfares merely caught the downbeat of illumination. On them, great shadows danced as the grotesque, the monstrous pyre flickered in the sky. Here and there, night infiltrated a row of houses, loomed in a stand of stores or glowered from the windows of a stalled streetcar.
Elsewhere, a building or a home burning individually—and as a rule under siege by volunteers—
made a big candle for this block or that.
They went farther south. Henry had the lieutenant make their first stop, so he could inspect the injured on the banks of Crystal Lake.
Torches and bonfires glared on the near terraces, glimmered across the ice. Upon the metallic surface of the lake itself, men hurried hither and thither, some pulling children’s sleds heaped with clapboards and smashed steps, balustrades, broken ladders, branches, anything combustible. In the once-elegant yards all around other men were chopping. The earth was humanity—covered—a litter of supine men and women and children, blanketed, quilted, dressed like hobgoblins, warming fires spaced between. The snow here had turned to mud. And here the roar of the fire storm was a mumble. The earth quivered only a little.
Here, the night was rent by one single shriek, one voice of a myriad in agony. Lacey crossed himself when first he heard it, as he stopped his car and switched off its siren. Henry went closer. His skin pimpled with horror, his feet felt like freight, he wanted to retch. But the fires sent a drift of woodsmoke over the bloodscape and the burned-meat smell was abruptly overridden. He saw a doctor whom he remembered from the meetings.
“How’s it going?” Henry yelled.
“Don’t be a fool, man! Oh! You, eh, Henry?” The physician straightened up. A syringe glinted in his hand. “What can you expect?” he bellowed back. “They’re still dying! Blood’s run out. Plasma was out for a while—Army got some in. Cold. Some freeze.”
“I can’t spare any more people right now.”
“We’ve got people enough,” the doctor answered, bending even as he talked, fishing for an ampule in a case slung over his shoulder. “Unless you have more medical people.”
“No more medical people.” Henry shouted.
The physician stabbed a needle into the arm of a child. Her mouth opened. She was screaming. You couldn’t hear it at all, Henry realized. It was lost in the general scream.
“Help from outlying towns—” Henry broke off, said it more loudly because the doctor had cupped his car, “Help from outside will be coming in by morning.”
The doctor just nodded and turned away, looking at the patient-covered earth for the next one.
Because of the red headlights and the siren, they got across on Decatur and came back north to the Country Club, where the brief meeting was to be held. The clubhouse had no windows but it did have electric lights, which astonished Henry until he recalled that he had voted—
years before, when he’d still had his membership—to put in a power plant simply to show a little spunk to the electric company. Ambulances were feeding people into the club. It was a better place than the shore of Crystal Lake.
They went into the main room, which seemed a bright glare after a night of emergency illumination. A few dozen of the scattered easy chairs had been pulled together and faced in one direction. Sighing, not removing his overcoat, because it was cold there, Henry dropped into a chair. Lacey took a seat beside him. Perhaps fifty men were there already. They, like Henry, were just sitting, sitting low in the upholstered chairs, saying nothing.
The CD chief, McVeigh, came down an aisle left between the chairs. He was followed by two women who wore CD brassards. They pulled up a big library table, helped by the men in the front row. Then McVeigh faced the sector leaders and their delegates:
“We’ve had to pull out of headquarters,” he said. “Fire storm making it too difficult to save the place.” His face grimaced as if of its own accord: “What was left of it, I mean to say. Here’s why I asked you to come over or send a delegate. We’ve got it bad, but River City’s far worse. The bulk of their fire-fighting apparatus lost. Most doctors dead or casualties. Short—almost out entirely—of every class of personnel. The whole city panicked. Nobody’s coming down from Kansas City or up from Omaha; nobody who’ll do any good, that is. Hundreds of unchecked fires over there, besides their half of the main show. Thousands—tens of thousands of people—
still in the city. We don’t have to worry, for the moment, about the bulk of them. Because mostly they swarmed out of town. Point is, what can the Green Prairie outfit do to help—if anything?”
Not a man in the room spoke.
McVeigh nodded. “I know how you feel. I do myself. But what are we dealing with?
Certainly not local pride. Simply human numbers. If you can save ten here, you let one go there.
Right? All night I’ve been getting appeals from Jeffrey Allison—he’s their chief. I can’t decide alone. You’ll have to help me. We never figured we’d have to salvage Rivet City. It was their job, that they didn’t prepare for. If you sector heads could spare even one person in ten, of every classification, beginning at dawn—?”
A man whom Henry did not know stood up. “I can’t spare a man. I can’t spare myself here. I can use ten more for every man and woman I’ve got!”
There was a sound of agreement.
McVeigh studied the faces for a moment. “About fifty thousand people,” he said slowly,
“crowded into the ball park. God knows why. Somebody started it—the rest followed. Maybe a third were kids. They filled the field solid; then the bleachers caught fire and the whole mob stampeded. They’re up there, what remains of ‘em. Not one doctor. Nothing. That’s how things are all over River City.”
Henry stood up. “How can you get people around?”
McVeigh’s face cracked with a momentary look of relief. “I’ve got trucks. The roads in close are almost deserted now. The main swarm’s gone far beyond. You tell”—he jerked his head toward the women with arm bands—“these ladies how many men you can spare and at what point they can be picked up—and I’ll deliver them across the river. God knows they’re needed!”
“We’ll tithe,” Henry said.
Lieutenant Lacey grabbed his arm: “You can’t do it, I lank! That doctor just told you-we’re short on the medical end—”
“No medical end at all at the ball park.”
“You’ll be letting Green Prairie people die!”
Henry nodded. His eyes were empty. The room was listening to this private argument.
“Sure. Green Prairie people will die. One for ten, didn’t he say?”
McVeigh cut in. “That’s about the size of it. Much as our people can do here, they can do ten times as much where there isn’t any functioning group at all.”
“Okay,” Henry said. “We’ll get going. I’ll have about a hundred and fifty ready in an hour—for your first load.”
Henry stalked from the room. Behind him, he could hear other sector chiefs making offers. It didn’t hearten him. He felt no pride in having started the ball rolling. He’d never done a tougher thing in his life: he’d condemned some of the provident to save many of the improvident. He wasn’t even sure it was just.
“Mr. Conner!” someone called from across the club porch.
“Yeah?”
The man ran up. “Thought you ought to know. Your son Ted was running a walkie-talkie down the line. Got buried in a brick slide. They’re trying to dig him out now.” The man said that and ducked away through the dark. He picked up a rolled stretcher, slung it over his shoulder, trotted toward a waiting ambulance.
Henry took hold of a porch post. He felt Lacey’s hand on his arm.
“I know about where that crew was,” the police lieutenant said. “Let’s go!”
The other man sobbed just once. He took one immense breath. His head shook. “What the hell extra could two of us do? Let’s get on.”
While Lacey drove, Henry used the car radio. He ordered his subordinates to take one tenth of the personnel—medical, rescue, first aid, decontamination, and so on-off what they were doing. Quietly, firmly he put down frantic protests. He arranged for the assembly of the selected people and said he’d be back as soon as he finished his inspection.
While Henry gave the orders, Lacey kept glancing at him. He looked, shook his head, turned to the business of driving through partially blocked streets, past fire-fighting points, and turned back to stare again at the man beside him, to shake his head slowly. Henry didn’t notice.
They went down to the perimeter. That was where things were toughest. All the way around the fire storm’s edge. The spot they had chosen was the closest practicable approach, on Bigelow Avenue.
This particular juncture of street and flame occurred at the site of a number of apartment houses built in the latter part of the First World War. They had been vast structures, six stories high, brick on the outside, wood within—built hastily to accommodate white-collar workers in the booming new industries of the Sister Cities.
The atomic bomb had not only collapsed these buildings on their tenants but hurled on top of them, by some freak of blast, the contents of a half-dozen small factories and machine shops, closer in town, along with the scrap and metal stocks in the yards of the plants. From this area, all night, Henry had been besieged with calls for monitors, for medical and aid people, for rescue and decontamination personnel as well as fire fighters. Here, more furiously than anywhere else in his sector, the rescue battle raged. It was conducted against a backdrop of the fire storm which seethed straight into the sky at what seemed no distance at all, down Bigelow Avenue. It was actually some blocks distant, yet near enough so that a man could not stand long exposure to the direct heat of it. For intense heat baked outward from the fire wall in spite of the wind, a near-hurricane draft which bellowed and squealed down the street, tearing loose parts of roofs and Slicking them in, whipping the clothing of the rescuers with painful force, even knocking down men and women who tripped or were careless. The wind fed oxygen to the titanic, fiery wall.
There was no water pressure in the mains here. They had been shattered. The fire companies had long since abandoned the scene. All that stood was a great moraine of debris which had been apartments the day before—a miscellaneous mountain that furnished a barricade against the fire-head, a flame-lee, but no windbreak.
Into it, during the night, spelling one another, men had tunneled their way. Wherever they had holed through to rooms, halls or their crushed remains, they
had found the living and living-dead—these last because masses of metals in the machining area were close to the fireball; they had been violently irradiated and were giving back that deadliness now. Some of the tunneled corridors in the debris were entirely safe; many were passable to people who did not stay too long: but some were contaminated beyond a radiation level that permitted any exposure, however brief. And the farther the rescuers fought their way into the fantastic scramble of the apartment houses, the more deadly the ray dosages became.
Henry had come to this place with a view to ordering his crews back farther. The proximity of the fire storm constantly threatened the rubble mass with burning, in which case it would become a mere addition to the central torrent of heat and flame. The general outdoor radiation level, high at many points near the fire storm, was endangering everyone who worked in this area for too many hours. South of the apartment buildings, furthermore, was a wide, empty space in the process of conversion from a near-slum to a new development. It had been bulldozed bare and would serve, even if the crushed apartments caught, to prevent further local spread of the great, central blaze. This fire, in any case and most providentially, had only a minor tendency to eat its way outward: the hurricane force of in-sucked winds controlled and delimited the fire storm: it could not be put out by any human device, or by any number of human beings and machines; but it would bum out.