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.