Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

by Highsmith, Patricia

  That wasn’t all, of course, the one bomb on Philadelphia. Others now fell on Chicago, San Francisco, and the middle of Texas. This was because the USSR had by 8 p.m. that evening Eastern Standard Time suffered hits from Munich and elsewhere, or at least was aware, thanks to satellite, of high-flying airplanes carrying bombs toward their land, and of long-range cruise missiles coming their way. Any calmness or tit-for-tat had vanished. Neither side was holding back, though both sides intended to save a proportion of their huge arsenals for a last ditch stand, if such a term could be used when the atmosphere would have become insufferable for animal and plant life.

  Buck and Millie Jones had fled the White House by 6:45 p.m. leaving the servants to stow valuables into the White House basement, itself feared not to be a good shelter for the President and his wife, because the enemy attack was fiercest on the East Coast. The Joneses intended to go farther west. The helicopter pad of the White House had been by then overrun by White House staff with belongings, all awaiting chauffeur-driven cars or their wives in cars to pick them up, so the President’s limo with driver and one gorilla headed straight for Dulles Airport.

  A motorcycle escort cleared the way, edging private cars on to the shoulder if necessary, so that the President’s car could pass others on the rather long drive to the airport. One would have thought all Washington, DC was leaving and heading for Dulles. There was still rougher behavior at the airport, where fighting-mad people tried to get aboard aircraft of any kind. The gorilla pulled his gun, yelled, and charged toward Air Force One, whose position he knew thanks to his walkie-talkie.

  The President’s party took off, with Cincinnati, Ohio, as its destination, a name that sounded inland and cozy to Buck and Millie by now. Millie had in her purse a full (nearly) flask of whisky, but a letdown had begun to set in. Scared and determined, she kept assuring Buck that she and he, they, had done the right thing. Some fresh oxygen was released by a thoughtful steward, and another steward brought them a meal of filets mignons.

  “We might’ve thought of asking Laura Phipps to come with us,” Buck said to Millie. “This is going to look bad in the press.”

  “Wha-at? When Laura or her neighbor friend told you to get off her land? Let her sizzle!” Millie tackled her second filet.

  At Cincinnati, they were unable to land, circled for half an hour, then radioed that they were running out of fuel (almost true), and repeated that the President and his wife were aboard, so a way was given, a rough landing accomplished. Everyone was leaving Cincinnati too, it appeared. People were afraid of fall-out, and heading west. On the other hand, a bomb by now had hit San Francisco, so why should anyone go west?

  Well, there was Nevada, places like that, not so populated.

  The President and Millie stood in the noisy terminal, Millie a bit miffed at the lack of reception for them.

  “Let’s get to a shelter—or whatever we’re supposed to do for safety!” Millie yelled. “Who’s in charge here?”

  “I am!” said Buck. “Hey, Sam!” he called to the gorilla. “Get in touch with Dick Coombes, would you?”

  “At—Where is he, sir?” asked Sam.

  The President tried to think, couldn’t. “Can’t we radio him from Air Force One?”

  Sam grimaced. “I wouldn’t want to try to get back to that plane, sir! There’s a mob out there, all over the tarmac!”

  “Get us a limo!” Buck said. “You’ve got a gun!”

  Sam again pulled his gun from its shoulder holster, and made a path for them toward a door marked TAXIS–BUSES. Still using the gun, the gorilla persuaded a taxi driver (who said he was heading for home) to take them. Sam told the driver to go to the nearest air-raid shelter.

  “Air-raid shelter!” said the driver. “There’s one a few miles from here, but it’s jam full and closed, I can tell you, because I took a couple of fares there. Just forget it.”

  “Any others?” asked Sam.

  The driver said he didn’t know of any, so Sam and Buck agreed to try the jammed shelter and to force their way in, if necessary.

  “Wouldn’t a hotel be a lot more comfortable, Buck?” asked Millie.

  “We can’t take any chances,” Buck said. “This is an emergency.”

  The taxi made slow progress, going against airport-bound traffic which was spilling into the wrong lane. Then the driver had to stop for gas.

  “Can’t sell you more than one gallon,” said the station attendant. “They say a bomb’s coming this way and we’ve got to be fair to everybody.”

  “Got the President of the United States in the back seat,” said the gorilla who had got out of the taxi.

  “Oh, yeah? The guy who fired back—?” The attendant, a man of about thirty who looked exhausted, hung up his gasoline nozzle and stared into the taxi’s window. “You’re gettin’ a gallon like anybody else. Damn you for firing—”

  “We fired back!” cried Millie through a slightly opened window. “Russia fired—”

  “Wasn’t Russia! That’s what the news said. It was some other country with a bomb that we let ’em have. Ain’t got the time to argue, my wife’s having a baby in the city hospital, or I wouldn’t be here. You’ll get your gallon and you can go to hell!”

  “You don’t talk like that to the President!” said the gorilla Sam, jutting his jaw. Besides being broad, he towered several inches over the station attendant.

  “I don’t give a you-know-what!” replied the attendant, nozzle in hand again. “I’ll give you and the President this gallon in the face, if you’d prefer it!” He yanked the tank cap off, and angrily started to release gas, eye on the meter behind him. “Never mind paying, stuff your money.”

  A mile or so farther on, they passed a closed diner. They were all thirsty for plain water. It was nearly 3 in the morning when they reached the air-raid shelter in a farmer’s field on the left side of the road. It was merely a slight rise of land, easily missable, except that now several bonfires burned near it, and people sat round the fires huddled in blankets, like Indians.

  “They ain’t gonna open the doors,” one squatting-on-heels man said to Sam. “No, sir, not even for the President, ’cause they full up in there!”

  “Specially not for the President!” somebody said.

  Others laughed. Whisky seemed to be flowing.

  Sam clenched his fists and tried banging, shouting at the two closed doors, which slanted into the earth. The metal doors resembled those of a bank vault. He got no answer from them, and he gave up.

  “Try the spot down the road!” a young male voice cried, and this was followed by shrieks of female laughter, guffaws from the men.

  “What spot?” asked Sam.

  “Thataway ’bout a mile and a half. Right side o’ the road,” another voice said. “But it’s a nuclear shelter! Hah!”

  “Yee-hoo-hee!” Maniacal laughter now from all round.

  Sam was doubtful, but told the driver to go on in the direction they had been going, which was the way the bonfire people had pointed. This “spot” was visible, thanks to a couple of lanterns on posts. Here some fifty or sixty people milled about, tending bonfires, while others appeared to be digging into the side of a hill with shovels and pickaxes. The President was by now asleep with his head in Millie’s lap. Sam got out, tired, thirsty and hungry, but still in better shape than the taxi driver, who had collapsed now over the steering wheel. Dots of light, aircraft of all sizes, crept across the black sky, heading generally westward.

  “You got a pick or a shovel?” was the question that greeted Sam.

  “No. Is this an air-raid shelter?”

  “Hah! Man, this is supposed to be, but this is a nuclear waste disposal shelter!”

  “So the joke’s on us, see?” said a slurry female voice.

  “Then why’re you digging here? You people making a cave?” asked Sam, seeking to ingratiate himself, because these people had food and drink. “We can help, maybe.”

  “We’re digging because the ground is sort
of loose, but all we run into is steel boxes, cement walls—”

  “And maybe radioactivity,’” said a girl’s voice.

  “But maybe less activity than what’s gonna hit us!” said a male voice, and this was rewarded with loud laughter, sounding a bit drunken.

  Sam hesitated, then said, “Can you spare any water? Maybe a cupful? We’re a party of four and we’ve been—”

  “Buddy, we can’t, so piss off!” A red-headed fellow, only the top half of him visible in a flashlight’s beam, came forward. He was young and angry. “You coming by taxi and asking us for water? This is our site. Only diggers allowed.”

  “Scat! . . . Get lost! . . . We don’t need no more!”

  A rock the size of a baseball hit Sam in the chest, so he turned and walked as fast as possible in the darkness back to the taxi.

  “Hey, look! That’s it, ain’t it?”

  The excitement in the voice behind Sam made him stop and turn, and he saw it at once, a glow like a silvery moonrise, with a shaft of denser light going straight up its center. Sam ran toward the taxi now.

  Buck Jones had his elbow out of the window, grinning. “Isn’t it a beaut, honey?” he said to Millie. “Look at it spread! We’ll show ’em!”

  “But that’s theirs, not ours, Buck!” said Millie.

  “No go here!” said Sam, awakening the driver with a poke in the shoulder. “Let’s move on!”

  They got back into the traffic, the creeping stream of angry vehicles, passed another closed and dark roadside restaurant. And then they ran out of gas, the car gasped for a few yards, and stopped. Cars from behind bumped them, awakening the President who had fallen asleep again. Now Millie was sound asleep. Buck Jones asked the taxi driver to try the radio for news, and the driver did so. They were actually moving a bit now, being pushed by the cars behind them and beside them, but drivers behind them were shouting for them to get off the road.

  “Radio’s dead, mister,” said the taxi driver, and at that instant a heavy vehicle bumped the cab’s left side, the taxi slid into a ditch and fell on its own right side. The highway was without illumination, and three cars followed the taxi into the ditch one after the other. The President and party were buried under the first vehicle and a half, meaning nearly two tons of steel and hysterical humanity, and it was a slow and painful, bloody and gasping death they had.

  Before the dawn came, the sky over America and the whole temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere had turned a pale purple in which clouds of silvery hue rolled and played, rose and sank. The colorful atmosphere—lethal—had its beauty as it seeped into the Southern Hemisphere in long slow streaks, causing millions to flee from it toward the South Pole. Now trusty little satellites still orbited the earth or stayed in place, as if nothing had happened, kept taking photographs and sending them earthward, where no one was alive or in a condition to receive them, except a few lonely army stations in the South Pacific. Artists had depicted such scenes in the past, Hieronymus Bosch, Max Ernst, Tanguy to some extent.

  The people of the Southern Hemisphere when not fleeing gathered in groups small and large (several hundreds of people), attempted to share food equally, made speeches about the necessity of having hope and courage (the Church did well here), which sounded quite good, even though ninety percent of the speakers, formal and informal, did not believe a word of what they were saying. The rotating Earth had become entirely too saturated by radioactive atmosphere, which its gravitational force held fast. There seemed less wind or winds than normal, the last curse of all.