Tomorrow! (40 page)

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.

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.

She looked out the kitchen window. A great smoke towered over the north view, but there was no visible fire. The kitchen was a shambles, but she had expected that. Women coming and going from the vast hospital area at Crystal Lake had described just such messes already.

She tried the gas stove; it didn’t work. She went back to the hall and opened the suitcase. There was a Sterno stove in it, six cans of pink fuel, powdered coffee, sugar, tinned milk—amongst many other items. She took the things for coffee, and a flashlight, and went back to the kitchen and tried the water but that didn’t run either.

Downstairs, in the air-raid shelter Henry had fixed up years before, were the five-gallon bottles of distilled water he made her change every six months. She was too exhausted to lug one up but she found a pan on the floor—silently thanking Lenore, because she otherwise would not have used any metal objects. She went down in the cellar. Light penetrated it from numerous places; she could see how the house had moved on its foundations. She poured water and went into the jelly closet, discovering that most of the canned things were still on the shelves where she’d placed them, labeled and tidy, all summer long and all during the fruit season in the fall.

They could eat, then, without drawing from the Green Prairie food stocks.

She went up with the water, unfolded the little stove, lit the solidified alcohol and put on the water. Someone knocked at the front door, frightening her. She ran to it.

“Hi, Mrs. Conner! Henry home yet?” It was Jed Emmings, from Spruce Street.

“Not yet”

“You all right?”

“Yes, thanks. Are you?”

“You bet—and thank God. So are my folks. I just came by, to let you know your Ted’s okay, too.”

“Ted?” She stared at him perplexedly. He was filthy dirty, like almost everybody. “I didn’t know,” she said finally, “Ted was hurt.”

“Hurt bad, Mrs. Conner. But he’s over in the Green Prairie Country Club, getting real good care. I was on duty there. I talked to him.”

“What
happened
?”

“Got buried in a brick slide. Broke both legs.”

“But. . . ?”

Jed Emmings smiled because he understood. “Absolutely okay, Mrs. Conner—or I’d have said so. No head injuries worth worrying about and nothing internal. Chipper and full of beans already. In traction, of course.”

She said, “Thank you, Jed.”

He nodded. “Glad to tell you. Glad to bring
some
good news to
one
door, anyhow!”

He went down the walk.

She noticed that the sun was shining. She hadn’t really noticed that before. She felt almost surprised that the sun was still there in the sky in its place.

When she went back to the kitchen, the water was close to a boil. She found an unbroken cup, rinsed it, put in some hot water and a spoonful of powdered coffee, started to take sugar and refrained, sat down on the seat of an armless chair to sip the hot fluid.

A little later, she heard car brakes.

I got home just in time, she thought. More visitors.

The car went on before she reached the hall and what she heard, she did not believe. It was Nora’s voice calling. “Mummie!
Mummie!
Aren’t you
home
?”

There she was, running up the walk, the way she always did, and Mrs. Conner felt things start to go black because she did not, could not believe. But there was a car, going away, a colored girl at the wheel, and it wasn’t quite the same Nora, coming up the steps on her spidery legs. She wore a different coat, too small for her, and a dress Beth didn’t recognize. Her hat was missing and one side of her long bob had been chopped off short. There was a big pad of bandage on her right cheek. Mrs. Conner still wasn’t absolutely sure, until she felt Nora in her arms.

“We thought—” she started to say.

Nora leaned back and looked up. “I had one
hell
of a time, I
really
did!” Nora said.

Henry didn’t get home till evening.

Outside of the place where Washington had been—far outside—in a big house that had belonged to a famous eighteenth-Century American, some fifty men held a meeting in the lamp-lit drawing room. The men came there by automobile, mostly; but three or four walked, and one arrived as the original householder often had, riding on a horse. Some of the men wore bandages, two were brought on stretchers, and all of them had to go through a considerable process of identification at check points around the estate. Bayoneted rifles and even cannon bristled on every hand.

When they had assembled, when they had waited for an hour beyond the agreed time—

and greeted a few additional arrivals with quiet joy—a man who wore the white garments of a doctor, and around whose neck a stethoscope hung, said to a man in slacks and a tweed jacket,

“Mr. President. . . .” The man shook his head. “I haven’t taken the oath yet.”

The doctor shrugged. “Mr. Gates, then. I think you ought to have the meeting soon, if possible. The Secretary of State is slipping fast.”

The man in tweeds, in slacks—“Mr. Gates”—walked to the middle of the handsome drawing room and stood at the head of a carved mahogany table. A young man handed him a gavel and he rapped. Talk stopped. Every person present turned toward Mr. Gates.