The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  And then, if rationing gets organized, we could turn in what we’d hoarded.”

  Bella shrugged hopelessly. “If you say so—”

  “I not only say so, but I say we’ve got to hurry or there won’t be anything worth taking! Now, look—!”

  A moment later Paula entered the store, where the women swarmed. She went through to the storeroom. She opened the rear door a crack. Bella was already there.

  Behind her was a high stucco wall; between the wall and the back of the store was a mountain of empty cartons.

  “Okay?” Paula asked. Bella looked furtively down the alley between the building and the wall. “I guess so. I closed the gate. I hope nobody saw me come in.”

  The women in the store proper were concerned with their own wants; to that concern was added an extreme nervousness about what they were doing. They paid little heed to each other and none at all to the fact that, fast as Bella and Paula loaded carts they wheeled them not out into the street but into the storeroom. From the storeroom they conveyed the groceries to empty cartons outdoors. And from the storeroom they also took cases of canned goods and sacks of flour, carrying them together and tossing them on the pile. Empty cartons were used to cover the loot.

  The work soaked them in perspiration and set them gasping, but they went on furiously, not stopping until the shelves in the store began to grow bare, the aisled mounds of food had melted to the floor and until other women began to enter the dark storeroom in search of more goods. Then, furtively, they closed the rear door and carefully locked it.

  Paula brought her car first. She entered the driveway while Bella held the gate.

  They loaded the car to its top. After that, Bella brought hers and it was filled in the same manner. They crammed the luggage compartments. And they drove away.

  Since they had chosen staples rather than the fancy preserves, meat spreads, chocolate creams, caviar, anchovies, stuffed olives and other items which many of the women had first assailed, they carried home, in the two carloads, a very considerable food supply.

  Bella’s frightened colored maid had come to work from Coconut Grove, on foot, because there was nothing to eat in her house and she did not know what else to do. She had been left with Sarah. Now she and the two women unloaded. Paula and Bella then went back to the store. The streets were bedlam; it was plain that, in an hour or two, nothing of value would be left anywhere on the village main street. They succeeded once again in driving unobtrusively through the gate and up the alley and in claiming second loads from their camouflaged stockpile.

  The third time they were unable to repeat the maneuver: their cache in the carton pile had been discovered. The alley was jammed with cars and brawling women threw the empty boxes about. Bella and Paula went back to Bella’s house and divided the plunder.

  Bella wept. “We shouldn’t have done it! We shouldn’t!”

  Her sister-in-crime was more sanguine. “We’ll see! I wouldn’t have done it if there had been a chance of stopping that mob. Since there wasn’t—I thought I’d just as soon have something to eat in the next few months as anybody else. If you’re going to steal, Bella, you might as well do a job of it. Besides, we’ll inventory it and send Sam’s wife a check. Which probably won’t be cashable for ages! What else was there to do?

  And look! We’ve got to hide it!”

  “Hide it?” Bella stopped sobbing and stared at the full cartons and heavy cases.

  “Hide it, for heaven’s sake? Where? And why?”

  “Because, from now on, when you happen not to be at home, there will probably be people going through your premises-looking! And not merely window-shopping either!”

  “Oh, dear! It’s so awful!”

  “It certainly is! See here! Both your place and my place are built high, and on slabs, and have ventilators. We’ve got three feet under our house—and places to crawl in.

  You’ve got a good two feet and a half—”

  “Crawl under the house—with all the snakes and scorpions and black widow spiders—!” The little woman shuddered.

  “We can bug-bomb first. And be damned to snakes! If we put the cases in there—

  it’s dry and fairly cool. Besides, not many women will feel any more like crawling under houses than we do. They won’t look there.”

  It was noon before they completed a job in which Edwinna and Hester were wakened to assist.

  When they had finished, they were hungry. “We’ll go over to your barbecue pit,”

  Paula said, “and cook steaks. I’ve got a lot of them; some in the refrigerator and the rest in the deep freeze.”

  “Steaks?” Bella was shocked. “For lunch?”

  “You bet! The power’s off and things in the deep freeze will spoil if they don’t get it on, soon. The steaks in my refrigerator won’t last through the day.”

  Near the Elliot barbecue pit was a long wooden table, with benches. There, under the shade of red-splashed spathodeas, tamarinds and orchid trees, they had their meal; three white women, two colored women, little Sarah, Alicia—who was about the same age—and the girl Edwinna had brought from the wreck.

  Her name was Martha and she was still afraid. Dark eyes stared worriedly from beneath her dark, level bangs and she said almost nothing. She had only curtsied when she had met Paula. Now, with heartbreaking difficulty, she swallowed each mouthful.

  She was nine, she told them, when asked. She hadn’t said a word about her mother—or her daddy. She understood the futility of that.

  While they were eating, Kate West came up the street, cut through the hibiscus hedge, and stepped into the back yard. She was wearing a fresh cotton print-white, with blue figures that matched her eyes and black lines that were like her long, braided hair.

  She addressed Paula, speaking much as a child would: “I don’t suppose you want callers. But I was all alone last night. Nobody came at all. I tried to sleep but I couldn’t sleep much. And there wasn’t a thing left to eat in the house—after I’d had supper. I don’t buy much at a time. This morning I turned on the battery radio. One station is broadcasting and I listened to it for a long time. It’s the university station. Telling people what to do and where to go. Just like in hurricanes. But finally I simply had to go out. O

  took Teddy Barker’s car—the keys were in it and Higgie left ours downtown, of course.

  But I came back—no restaurants are open—” She looked at the steaks and the sliced bread and bricks of ice cream taken from the deep freeze and set out to melt enough to eat.

  “Sit,” Paula said.

  “If you don’t care. I was mighty lonesome—”

  So young, Paula thought. So attractive. A baby, really. She cut a piece of steak, put it between two slices of bread, set the big sandwich on a paper plate and handed it to the young woman.

  “Oh, I couldn’t eat,” Kate said nervously. “Nobody’s got enough for other people—now!”

  “Eat, you dope,” Paula answered. “It’ll just spoil if we don’t eat it up.”

  “Really?”

  “Really, Kate.” Paula watched the first big bite and turned her head away. She caught the sympathetic glimmer in Bella’s hazel eyes.

  Alicia began yelling for ice cream.

  “I think, Kate,” Paula said, “that you better move in with us.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of that!” And by the way she spoke they knew it was, from Kate’s point of view, just what she did dream of. And just what she was too proud and too game to let herself do, unless they meant it and urged her.

  “It isn’t safe—alone—in your bungalow,” Paula said.

  “Why not? There are only women left. The burglars are all—gone.” Like everyone, she carefully avoided saying “dead.” “I’m not afraid of women.”

  “You may be—in time,” Paula answered grimly. “And I won’t argue. We need you. I’ve got outside work to do. Bella will have, soon. Edwinna too. You can hold the fort when we’re away—with Hester and Bella’s Medora.”

>   “Could I—really? Help—I mean?”

  You wanted, Paula thought, to hug her. Husband and little boy gone, bewildered, alone, she’d put on that pretty dress and refused at first to eat—accepted solitude and hunger as her lot. Innocence, courage. . . .

  After the meal was finished, Paula said, “I’m turning in. Edwinna, wake me at six o’clock. You and I will both go up to the campus and relieve people. Bella, you better plan to stay home tonight. At my place, if you want, though it’ll probably be a good idea for someone to be here, in case people are starting to hunt through abandoned houses.”

  Paula was on her feet. “It’ll be worst, in a way, for the next few days.”

  “Why?” Edwinna asked.

  “Till they run out of gasoline.” Paula started toward the hedge.

  She was asleep in her bedroom—the upstairs, yellow-and-powder-blue bedroom—when Edwinna shook her. “Get up, Mum! It’s six!”

  Paula stared, stretched-remembered. “Anything happen?”

  “It was as quiet out here in the country as a grave—as a church! I went scrounging around for a while—left the kids with Hester. I kind of thought I ought to do something to equalize that grand larceny you and Bella pulled.” The younger woman grinned.

  “Did you?”

  “I sure as hell did! One of my recent boy friends is a bachelor who lives near here.

  House in the jungle, on a little canal that runs into the Bay. He has a motorboat—and a gas pump. I didn’t expect any of his other gal pals would think of it this soon. I scared up a bunch of five-and ten-gallon cans from the back yards of garages and paint stores and a hardware place. And I filled ‘em all—maybe sixty gallons—from the pump.”

  “Wonderful!”

  Edwinna laughed lightly. “I also fixed the guy’s pump so it won’t work any more.

  There ought to be a thousand gallons in his tank and now nobody can get it. I busted the gauge too. So, if we can locate a new pump someday and get it into the tank, we can have quite a private supply.”

  “Right under the very top layer of skin,” Paula said, “this family is strictly larcenous.”

  “You mean—self-sustaining and resourceful.”

  “I don’t know what I mean! But we’ve got to work. I’ll take a shower—”

  Edwinna shook her smoothly waved blonde hair. “No you won’t. The water pressure failed this afternoon. I sterilized the tubs and filled them. After we use that, we’ll have to depend on the hand pump on the well. Thank God for the hurricanes! You set up your place so as to get along without electricity, anyway!”

  “What else is happening?” Paula went into the bathroom, slipped off her pajamas, dipped water from the tub into the washbowl, and began a sponge bath.

  “Plenty. Kate’s been keeping a radio vigil all afternoon. Most of the stores not burned in Miami have been absolutely sacked. The retail stores. The university squads were smart enough to realize they couldn’t hold everything, so they concentrated on guarding wholesale places and warehouses and docks. Tourists and winter visitors on Miami Beach have got up soup kitchens. They’ve also formed an organization to demand passage back to their homes—only they don’t know who to protest to. Not a thing useful has come from Washington, of course. There just isn’t any government. Some state capitals are trying to get organized. A lot of cities are burning to cinders—a mess too horrible to think about. On the other hand, country people aren’t so badly off and they’re taking in refugees as fast as they can. In some places, money and goods have been ordered frozen. Which will do zero good. Because we dames everywhere are resorting to the old-fashioned custom of helping ourselves. A good many banks have been broken into and cash is floating around but it doesn’t buy much. Like that.”

  “Bad.”

  “A shambles,” Edwinna agreed. “But organization is at least starting.”

  “If the men reappeared as suddenly as they went—”

  “—which, please God, they will do!”

  “—they sure would think.” Paula continued, drying her face on a yellow towel,

  “We’d made a hideous botch of things.”

  8

  OF SIEGE AND A QUEST.

  Three days had passed since the “declaration” made by the Soviet government and the beginning of atomic war. In those three days seventeen Russia cities, including Moscow and Leningrad, had been attacked and either partly destroyed or wholly obliterated. Eight manufacturing centers behind the Ural Mountains had been wrecked and left radioactive.

  Nine members of the Politburo were dead. They had taken refuge in a subterranean labyrinth prepared for atomic blitz ninety miles outside Moscow—immense chambers furnished with generators, fuel supplies, communications, provisions, and even special tunneling apparatus for use in drilling to the surface in the event that a bomb should entomb the gigantic nerve center.

  American Intelligence had long since learned the nature and location of the headquarters. Five special bombs had been designed for its attack. These bombs, flown in separate planes, at different times, had been launched upon the troglodyte citadel on the second day of the conflict. One plane had won through the convulsive defenses and scored a direct hit above the area.

  Its “bomb,” instead of exploding, converted itself into an atomic furnace of a sufficient intensity to melt and liquefy the hundred-foot rock formation above the fortress. Its defenders, including the government heads, had been baked to death even before thousands upon thousands of tons of radioactive lava had cascaded into the miles of corridors and acres of chambers.

  The hydrogen bomb secreted in Pittsburgh had been discovered in time to save that American city. However, a plutonium mine had exploded in the outer harbor of New York City. Apparently owing to some technical error on the part of Soviet engineers, its tritium-lithium envelope had not been fusively activated. The city had therefore been spared all but the relatively minor damage of a blast, which, at the long distance from the mine, merely smashed a few thousand sleazy buildings, mostly of brick and brownstone, and sent avalanches of window glass into the streets at the bases of some skyscrapers. A radioactive cloud of steam, salt water, and atomic debris had blown across Long Island, killing hundreds and probably inflicting ultimately fatal burns and injuries on thousands: but it had lifted before reaching the Connecticut coast and dissipated.

  Oakland and Berkeley had disappeared in the whelming holocaust that had wrapped San Francisco Bay in atomic fire. Chicago was gone, as was San Francisco. The radius of severe devastation at Chicago extended beyond Gary, Indiana, on the east, Joliet on the south, and Aurora to the west. This was the flash that Gaunt had seen in the predawn hours of the sixteenth.

  In the “total” area of destruction, a region roughly forty miles in radius, little indeed remained of man or his works. The bomb used to cause the ruin was on the order of five hundred thousand times as powerful as the most potent plutonium bomb they manufactured and involved principles both unknown and regarded as unfeasible by American experts. It was dropped at 5.40 A.M., Central Time. Approximately twenty-eight hundred square miles of city, suburb and farm had been flattened and driven from twenty to two hundred feet below their former level. The hammered urban pancake had instantly melted. Planes flying high over the resultant immensely radioactive area immediately after the blast saw it as a majestic saucer, here cherry-red, there white-hot, everywhere incandescent.

  At the same time, approximately twenty-two hundred square miles of the waters of Lake Michigan had been dealt with, in two fashions, by the astronomical blast. Surface water had been converted to steam. The violence of the explosion had driven the balance of the quasi-incomprehensible fluid out into the body of the lake, setting up a tidal wave which had, in the ensuing minutes and hours, inundated all lakeshore communities. In due course a thunderous water had all poured back upon the gleaming “dent” where Chicago and its environs had been. The heated surface had boiled the awesome ram into steam clouds, also radioactive although in a lesser degr
ee. These, for the next hours, shrouded the dreadful landscape in vapors which were seen to rise, with the light of morning, to an altitude of eighty thousand feet.

  It was estimated that in this holocaust some two million six hundred thousand males had been exterminated by one factor or another; and the death list was rising as the radioactive fogs, mists, rains and clouds dispersed over the states to the south and east on the then prevailing winds. Such was the “superbomb.”

  When Gaunt returned to his hotel on the morning of the third day of atomic warfare, he had reached that pitch of fatigue and shock at which the steadiest nerves and the most resolved minds are unreliable instruments. It was not that, in spite of all conceivable precautions, the annihilation of Washington was momentarily expected by its inhabitants: death had become almost an invalid source of anxiety to the individual. What unnerved Gaunt was universal. A collective part of the spirits of surviving men found itself in a kind of autonomous extremity, a generic, perhaps animal agony mu the likelihood of the ending of the entire species. It was the waking of an instinct, the innermost and the ultimate instinct of living things.

  After three days and nights of all but incessant conference, of snatched sleep and food consumed without conscious thought, of crisis piling upon catastrophe as the news rolled in, Gaunt felt the frightful drive of that instinct to save, not himself, but somebody, something, anybody, anything.

  During the past forty-eight hours he had seen happenings bizarre enough to shatter an ordinary mind. He had read reports that left even the most capacious and prepared imagination utterly aghast. He had seen a lieutenant general of the United States Army calmly repeat what he knew of the San Francisco situation, walk to a velvet-draped window, put a pistol to his head and pull the trigger. He had seen the director of a great industrial laboratory, during a review of the Soviet assault (a review which had involved a wall map and colored pins) burst into uncontrollable laughter, fight off with the utmost violence all who tried to check his shouts of hilarity, and succumb at last to drugs and hospital attendants. He had seen a roomful of haggard scientists, waiting for another conference with the President-silent, bowed, weeping.