by Philip Wylie
Shielding their faces from the hot wall of light, the two men approached a group of rescuers at work on the mountain of debris. One of them stepped forward, a man so black with soot and white with plaster as to be unrecognizable. He bellowed above the drum roll of the fire,
“Hi, Henry! Ed Pratt.”
Henry nodded. “What’s the situation now?” Ed, who had a house-painting business, was in charge of this team.
“About like our last talk. We got out over a hundred people, but we’ve only dug in about halfway.” He gestured toward some men hauling, tug-of-war fashion, on ropes. “We’re trying to deepen a passage now.” The ropes disappeared in a hole in the mass.
Henry went closer, followed by Lacey. “How hot is it?” He was not aware that he was shouting. The fire storm here was like near, continual thunder. But it was necessary to converse in shouts almost everywhere that night.
Ed waved at the blaze. “Gettin’ warmer in there all the time. Awful-looking thing, ain’t it?”
Henry hardly glanced at the intimidating fire wall. “I mean, radiation hot?”
“Oh! This new tunnel we’re making—I dun no. Got a monitor in there now, measuring!”
The rope-pullers shouted in unison, heaved together, and from the ragged entrance of their “tunnel” they drew forth a huge fragment of floor and ceiling lumber. Henry could see that the opening ran for at least a hundred feet into the wreckage. He shuddered and asked loudly.
“How do you know that cave will hold up?”
He couldn’t see Ed Pratt’s expression but he could guess it from the man’s voice: “We don’t know! Matter of fact, a few hours back one tunnel roof fell. We were trying to work the fire side of this mess then. Lost five of my people—and one of your radiation monitors. Couldn’t get back to ‘em. A whole hunk of apartment came down between them and us.”
“You mean-they’re still in there?”
“If they weren’t crushed, they maybe are. But it’s pretty hot on that side now. They’re probably cooked up by this time.”
A figure—then another—showed in the tunnel. Behind trudged a third and a fourth. They carried flashlights. The broken, snaglike intrusions in the tunnel made their approach slow. The first one, Henry saw, was wearing the yellow, plastic garments of a monitor and carrying a counter. This was the one who addressed Ed Pratt and, until he bent close, he didn’t realize it was a woman. Even then he did not recognize Lenore.
“It’s too high a level,” she reported. ‘We got to a lot of metal and kind of a big cave beyond, but it’s too hot to stick around. You can’t send your people any deeper, Mr. Pratt. In minutes they’d get enough radiation to be sick—maybe die.”
The men who had made the perilous trek with her stood by, panting a little, opening and shutting hands that were raw from pulling on timbers, throwing brick, moving heavy bits of building. Other rescue workers gathered around and passed the report along. One of the three who’d gone into the tunnel with Lenore said, “Pity. Beyond that opening she talked about, you could hear kids calling.”
Henry looked with fear and horror at the demolished building, at the frightening flame.
He looked at the rescue people, and they were eying him. “This whole crew,” he yelled out, “will get in touch with my headquarters for another assignment!” He jerked his head. “Abandon this!
You’ve done what you can.”
That was that. Men nodded. One or two women cried. But people began throwing picks, shovels, crowbars, a block-and-tackle, other gear into a metal truck. A bulldozer came alive and moved off in the street. Joe Dennison was driving it.
That was that—until Henry heard a shout near the tunnel mouth and saw two men rush in. “They shouldn’t!” The woman with the radiation counter exclaimed.
Henry recognized her then. “Great God Almighty,” he whispered. He reached out and gripped her arm. Her teeth showed white in a kind of smile. Her face was black as a miner’s.
“How about your family?” Lenore asked. She was hoarse from much shouted talk.
Henry felt the pain again. “I don’t know, dear! I don’t know!” He held his head close to reduce the need for bellowing every word. “Ted’s under a brick slide. . . .”
“I’m sorry.”
“Mother’s up at the First Aid. Nora—search me! Chuck reported yesterday at Hink Field.”
She nodded. She looked, briefly but in a special way, at the fire storm. Henry knew what she was thinking: Chuck was not in there; he hadn’t been caught downtown as she’d feared. But she didn’t mention her feelings. “Gotta get cracking,” she said and left.
He looked, now, at the tunnel. That was where she’d been. In that hole through hell.
There, where the roof might fall, where there could be a gas explosion, where she might be burned alive or slowly baked alive, suffocated, smothered, crushed, even drowned, pinned in some spot where a pipe leaked.
The crew was clearing out in cars and trucks, going someplace unknown to Henry. He hadn’t asked where. There were more assignments than people. And his people, he reflected grimly, were being reduced in numbers now to aid River City.
“Shall we get along?” Lacey asked.
“Wait.” Henry approached the tunnel, followed by the lieutenant. “You recognize your neighbor? The Bailey girl?”
“Yes.”
“Guts.”
Henry didn’t reply. He just nodded and bent to peer into the dark dreadfulness of the hole the rescuers had made and abandoned, the hole into which two men, against orders, had plunged.
For what seemed a long time nothing happened.
It wasn’t, Henry thought, actually long, but merely long by the standards of that night: ten minutes, perhaps, or maybe less. Then he saw a wink of lights and shadows moving. One man made his way to the tunnel mouth and put down the thing in his arms. It was a baby and it cried.
The man turned back.
“Got a torch?” Henry asked the policeman.
“You can’t go in!” Lacey yelled back. “Too risky for you!”
“Got a torch?”
Lacey went to the squad car and returned. He followed Henry into the tunnel.
Far down, they encountered the other man, helping along two children, who wept and shivered. Lacey, on Henry’s orders, led them back.
It was quiet in there. One of the men said to Henry, “You stay here, sir. Beyond this point, the radiation’s bad. There’s only one more kid and Sam’s getting her free. No use exposing yourself. We’ve already had the full dose and he won’t need help.”
The man left. He was gone awhile. Henry stood still, more frightened than he’d known he could be.
He could see, in the light of a lantern left by the tunnel-makers, what had happened. A weight of machinery and sheet metal had cut through the collapsing building and piled up, just ahead; that was the point of peak radioactivity, he was sure. Beyond, apparently with another lantern in it, he saw a kind of opening, room-sized; a girder or some other structural member had held up the debris. Beyond that was a doorway with a smashed-off door. Behind it, somewhere in the darkness, they’d found the children.
The second man came, with a form on his shoulder. A little girl, unconscious. As he passed the metal mass, he turned his back and put the inert girl in front of him, shielding her body with his own. Henry appreciated that what these two men had done might succeed, for the children. They might survive. But the men had quite likely received ultimately fatal doses of radiation when they tore a path around the intrusion of scrap metal. Some of the rescue squad, too, had probably been marked for sickness, at least, by working there, before Lenore arrived to measure.
Henry said nothing then. The man indicated the lantern with his toe. Henry picked it up, following. Soon they were outdoors in the light of the fire storm—in the strange night, where a cold wind blew on their faces and their hacks were seared by heat. Lacey had loaded the other children.
The man carried the unconscious girl to the car and
put her in, too. His brave companion was just standing by the fender, a smile of satisfaction on his face.
“I’ll send a car back for you two,” Henry said. ‘We’ll do everything we can—over at the Country Club. Got good doctors there. They may be able to . . .”
One man said, “Thank you.”
Henry gazed at them. “That was the finest thing I ever saw. Who are you two guys?”
The nearer one, a rather slight man, who was dabbing at the blood from a cut on his arm, laughed and answered, “I’m Jerome Taggert, minister of the Bigelow Street Baptist Church, and Sam is Father Flaugherty of St. Bonaventure’s Roman Catholic. . . .”
Henry said, “Oh,” and kept looking back at them as Lacey drove away.
13
Six men rode in the weapons carrier. Chuck was in command.
A sailor drove. They cruised street after street of the severe damage area. But there was not much left to do. Where they heard screams, they investigated, helped if they could. They didn’t search buildings and houses: it was too dangerous and there were too many such structures ready to fall, falling occasionally with an alarming roar, on fire, smoking. Here and there in River City they encountered individuals or groups at work-police, a few CD volunteers, firemen.
These few who had stood fast were trying to concentrate on such measures as would save the little that remained.
They had thrown a guard around St. Agnes Hospital, east of Market, and prevented the mob from stopping all useful work inside. They had kept the fringe fires from eating their way to the Mildred Tatum Infirmary. They had checked the reservoir for dangerous radioactivity and taken the dead bodies out of it. They had collected most of the wandering children, hurt or not, and sent them in cars outside River City to a big orphanage. These and other things the citizens of River City had done in the long night. But their training had been near nil, their numbers were pitifully inadequate, and for every saving effort they made, they had to watch helplessly while many times the number were lost.
Chuck realized, as they drove through the empty streets, that it was getting light. He gazed toward the fire storm, but that was not the source. The flame, in fact, was lessening in width and density. The light came from the sky again, from the east, where the sun would soon rise.
The sergeant in charge of the two-way radio began to speak, saying a number of “Yes, sirs” into the mike. He signed off.
“That was Hink Field, Lieutenant. All squads not engaged now in vital action are to rendezvous at the field. There’s to be breakfast. Dispersion afterward to try to check panic in the outlying areas.” The sergeant spat from the vehicle. “That ought really to be an assignment. The base said that about twenty towns around here have been taken over—”
“Taken over?” Chuck repeated.
“By the mobs. River City people, mostly. But they said it was nothing to what was happening up toward KC. People from here, in cars, have piled up against people from Kansas City, also in cars and trucks, headed this way—and all roads are blocked—and they’re hungry and freezing and fanning out, burning barns and houses just to keep warm, cleaning out every little town, smashing all grocery stores and supermarkets, all jewelry stores. Women are being advised to take to the woods, all over the nation. Boy! If that isn’t something!”
“Let’s go,” Chuck said to the sailor-chauffeur.
As the weapons carrier rushed toward the new “front,” Chuck thought of the conversations he’d had, over the years, with his father. Here it was. Here was all that the experts said could never happen. Here was gigantic panic, uncontrolled and hideous.
To tens of thousands of River City people, this was the pay-off. It wrecked such small hopes as they’d cherished, destroyed their trivial but hard-won possessions. In so doing, it broke their link with the rest of the nation, with humanity itself. In reaction, they were turning on humanity, on each other, with a final, mindless venting of their stored-up resentments, their hates, their disappointments.
Here was the infectious breakdown of the “average mind,” the total collapse of man in the presence of that which he had not been willing to face. This was the lurid countenance of something unknown because he refused to know.
Here, too, Chuck could see, was that other fear—the horror of a bomb survived, raised to excruciating horror by the terror of another. Get out of the city: it was all they could think of. Get out now while you still have unburned meat to move your unbroken bones. That simple.
People in all cities, apparently—even where no bomb yet had fallen—were going out in the same way, for the same reason and with the same violence of fear, which would reach astronomical scope as soon as they found the countryside no refuge but a place of hostility, of unwelcome, of battle, of different but equally terrible peril.
Since these human effects were like his father’s predictions, like them, yet even more formidable, Chuck thought that beyond doubt his father’s further fear was sound. His dad knew people. His dad had felt that perhaps, just perhaps, the great cities would not only vomit themselves into the countryside, but that the self-expelled people would not go back to any city, now, or soon, or ever, in some cases. To tens of millions the only image of a city would be, for months, for years even, the image of what they’d seen happen to people in their own city or of what they’d heard had happened in many cities.
And who would set the pace for this flood of depopulation? Who but the worst elements, frightened beyond caring, doing what had thitherto been only fantasy, having a last fling—
criminal, psychopathic—in the presence of the end of the world?
Green Prairie had tried to brace itself even against that; Chuck prayed they were succeeding.
River City had not even tried.
The vehicle surged over a hill. Across the prairie was the village of Harmondale. It had stood there as long as Chuck could remember, like a post-card village, like a Grant Wood painting, neat and crisp, stores and steeples, white houses and red barns—a pretty cluster of orderly habitation.
Now, even across intervening miles, it had changed. Flames licked up the church spires; smoke rose over Main Street. And all around the village was a multitude, with its trucks and cars and luggage and duffel-a dark smear of humanity closing in on the hamlet, scores of attackers for every defender. Harmondale was fighting, still, for whatever remained of its life. As Chuck’s driver slowed, they could hear a constant fusillade of guns in the town.
But what could his men do against that human amoeba? The village would be sacked and abandoned. The amoeba would go on, hungrily.
14
Beth Conner trudged home. She had waited awhile in line, for a ride, with other women being relieved. But many of them lived farther away; and some didn’t even have homes of their own to rest in any longer. She decided to walk and. she moved along in the smoky streets, still carrying her suitcase, breathing whitely in the frigid air.
It was Christmas morning, she thought dazedly. When she saw the house, she stood for a long time, with tears in her eyes that did not fall.
It didn’t sit quite right any more. A chunk of the roof was gone, up over the boys’ room in the attic. The front yard was a pile of debris—some from the house, but most of it tree limbs shoved aside by bulldozers going down Walnut Street. The windows weren’t there any more.
She walked around in back. The paint on the rear wall was scorched and the boards were blackened here and there. The blast had quickly blown out the fire started by the heat. Lots of people had been lucky that way. The metal garage was all right.
She went back around to the front and glanced over at the Bailey house. It was about the same, except that the modernized façade had peeled off and you could see beams and studs and lath and plaster clear across the face of the house. The people across Walnut were better off.
There was a slight dip in the land, behind the Conner and the Bailey house; the bomb blast had rushed up to it; and the houses across the street had been given some protection
by those on the Conners’ side.
She went up on her front porch. The steps were loose under her feet and there was a big white, printed sign nailed on the door. “Inspected,” the sign said. “Safe for occupancy.
Use extreme caution. Beware of fire.” Underneath that, was written in red pencil,
“Radiation level okay. Am okay, too. Love. Lenore.”
“Bless her,” Beth whispered. She went in and put down the bag tiredly. She’d had three or four hours of sleep, all told.