The bomb had gone off nearly an hour ago. With demented clarity, Kit Sloan realized he had been running this way and that, trying to get distance between him and the great fire, without making much headway. He had turned his ankle twice and he was still going on it, but it was swelling. Sometimes he covered a block or two and then had to retrace his steps because of a rubble mass or, more often, a jam-packed shambles of human beings filling the street from wall to wall and headed away so slowly that he didn’t want to be impeded by them.
Foreigners, mostly.
Their area had not been annihilated, just set on fire here and there, mauled, dumped in its streets. So they were on the move, on the way out of town, Polaks and Hunkies and Latwicks, Yids and Guineas and Micks. Not many Nigs. He even thought, racing past a bleeding family, there was a reason for the dearth of shines in the stampeded mobs: Niggertown was right on Ground Zero.
Up until he reached Elk Drive, a wide concrete boulevard with the parkways between, a kind of insane logic governed his actions. He had to escape. His mother was dead, in the city or in the ruins of their house. So his responsibility was for himself alone. He had nobody else to save. The fire behind, the dead and dying around, the hideous condition of the hurt—these acted as spurs and goads. If he had been like many people, they would have driven him to less violent activity, to crazed stasis, perhaps.
He even knew that Elk Drive had been his first goal. On Elk, he could get a ride of some sort, steal a car, or even run on by himself, using the lawns and adjacent fields, to get out of town. Elk Drive was wide and roomy and the houses were set well back, out through the developments, clear to the open countryside. And Elk Drive led to the municipal airport. He could gas his own plane up, if need be, figure his own chances in the traffic pattern, take off without consulting the control tower, and fly until he found some neighboring city or town—
Omaha, KC, Oklahoma City, even a small place like Kaknee or Dennis or Elvers—where there had been no bomb, where no fire roared as high as the stratosphere, as massive as an Act of God.
Traffic was whizzing on Elk, using both sides of the parkways to go in one direction—away. The people on foot used either the middle strips or lawns, running or walking, and there were thousands. But, still, they moved—every man and woman and child at his own chosen pace. There was room enough.
He stepped into the yard of a house, the Whittaker home, he realized with a kind of infant’s pleasure at mere identification. He threw himself down, to pant and rest, watching the fire-struck masses surge west.
Then the plane came.
Fast and low.
In the dark, Kit wouldn’t have seen the markings if it hadn’t banked so as to catch the raw glare from downtown. That made the red stars plainly discernible on the wings. My Christ, he thought, Soviet.
A turbo-pro job.
For an instant, vainly, he watched the sky behind it, assuming an American jet had driven the enemy to earth. None came.
What came, soon enough, over the length of Elk Drive, over the people running in scattered thousands, over the whizzing cars and fast-lumbering trucks, was a swift polka-dotting of white in the plane’s wake. Parachutes, Kit realized. Little ones.
They opened and began to descend. He watched them drift down, drift his way, in wonderment. Soon, one came quite close overhead. He stood up with the idea of capturing it.
Then he heard, above the pandemonium on Elk Drive, a hissing beneath the chute and saw a shining metal canister. Too late, he perceived that a considerable cloud of wind-dispersed vapor was blasting from the canister, under pressure, as an insect bomb spews mist. The vapor from the falling chute surrounded him, dampened him. And at last he knew what it was. Others on the street, caught in the swirls of mist, also guessed.
“Germs!”
“Bacteria!”
“It’s disease war!”
A truck, driven by a man who must also have known, braked ferociously to avoid a settling, sizzling missile. Instantly, fifty cars crashed behind it. And the chutes came down over the lot, spraying the dead and the injured along with the unharmed.
Kit knew he had breathed the stuff. He knew he had licked his culture-moistened lips. He knew his clothes were damp with it. So he knew that the thing he had been trying to escape had overtaken him. He spat, vomited, discarded his jacket and trousers, wiped his face with a handkerchief till blood came.
But from then on, he did not have even a demented logic. No one had sanity, on Elk Drive, after the bacteria sprayed them.