1
Even the siren’s tearing willawa—the announcement, hooted across the city, that Condition Yellow had become Condition Red—did not entirely convince Henry Conner’s inner self of reality. The long years of work were here to meet their meaning. Yet he thought of them as a dream. The committees and conversations, the drills and exercises, even the arguments seemed like neighborly games, pleasant habits. They had gone on and on, in crackling autumns and the sweat of remote Julies. He could not think of their significance, or that they might be of benefit.
It was the Light that changed him.
“Duck, everybody!” he bellowed, forgetting that, with the first siren notes, his trained staff had started automatically towards the school corridors to lie down on the cold floor, feeling, all of them at the same time, a new trepidation and the old, familiar self-consciousness, the incongruity.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” he had called, almost apologetically, as they began to file through the doors. “Just want to finish this phone call…. Checking with the Parkway people about the road patrol.”
He wasn’t supposed to delay after that alarm. Not even he.
But he waited. The telephone soon told him the men were out on duty, the cars marked, all the necessary things done, and nearly three quarters of their assigned numbers on hand.
“Good,” he said.
His fingers drummed the table, his friendly eyes, narrowed with thought, looked unnoticing from his borrowed office on the top floor of the school.
Then his unseeing eyes were seeing, seeing too well, too much. The Light gushed over the trees. The view turned white; only degrees of whiteness existed anywhere outdoors. His retina beheld a scene like a positive negative lifted up to the naked sun, a scene of trees and roofs and the front of the tall hospital, Crystal Lake and more trees, more snow-clad grounds beyond, white, brilliant, one step from transparency.
“Duck, everybody!” he had bellowed at the empty room.
He shoved back his chair, fell on his face, crawled beneath the desk. The fist struck the building. It lurched. Steel-hard air ripped part of the roof away, went around walls, closed beyond and, driving and sucking, took the windows on one side across the schoolrooms to shatter and cascade along the walls, flung the rest out in the day, horizontally in the velocities, the temperatures, the glare.
Henry got up, looked at a crack through which the sky showed, watched plaster dribble, heard bricks cataract into the yard, stamped on a firebrand that dropped in the room, stared at the unglassed windows, noted by the scene beyond how the last flare of the fireball was vanishing.
Still it imbued with livid light a cityscape that seemed disorderly now and heaving, that had begun to show sudden smokes.
He was all right. And people, scared, moving weakly, were coming back from a corridor where every electric bulb had gone out.
“There’s a fire downstairs,” someone said.
“Two men,” someone else said, “are lying in the hall. Under bricks.”
“It was worse on the bomb side,” somebody murmured.
These voices came dimly, through the ringing of his cars.
They were looking at him and filing back, more all the time. “
Okay,” he heard his voice begin, “Trent and Dawson, see about the fire. The house crew’ll probably be on it soon, but check. The house medical’s in the gym. Send for them—start picking the bricks off the hurt men. Leete, inspect the other side and report back. Have the runners’ information collated downstairs from now on; just bring me the main points.”
Someone else said, “Maybe this building is no longer safe!”
Henry felt his lips turn into a grin, and the feeling buttressed him just when he needed support. “So what?” he replied. “It’s still here! That’s at least something.”
People began to move, to do things—slowly, Henry thought….
Ted Conner went under his table. The Light came. The house bucked and screamed as if some cosmic claw hammer were trying to open it. A thud seemed to compress his body on all sides at once. His radio equipment, the precious store of instruments earned by hundreds of mowed lawns, was flung on the floor and smashed. Hundreds of hours or work done on the set by his father, too: smithereens.
He picked himself up. His leg was bruised and bleeding. He drew out a jagged piece of Bakelite.
He went downstairs. The house was battered, but it was a house and their house still. His mother’s china cupboard lay on its face; broken cut glass glistened on the carpet. The kitchen was a shambles of crocks and pots and pans.
He went out in the back yard, stupefied. The clapboards on that side of the house were scorched, but nothing was burning. The blast, he thought, had put out the fire. The building looked tilted a little and askew on its foundations.
Queenie came up to him, mewing. Beau Bailey bolted from his front door and ran, yelling something Ted didn’t catch….
Netta had insisted on trying to get her clothes down to the cellar. She argued; Beau, increasingly panicked by the siren, had taken a reluctant armful down and stayed—in the warm company of the furnace.
For him, the Light was a stabbing bar that shot through the dirty coal windows and turned the place to day.
For Netta, still upstairs, it was incomprehensible, an irritant. Her reaction was to run to the window and gaze obliquely north toward the perplexing source. She could not see it, quite.
But she did realize it was a phenomenon of some new, fantastic sort and, dimly, she began to feel horror.
The blast brought the window in on her. Her face, her breast, her abdomen were sliced to red meat; she was doll-flung to the opposite wall, mercifully knocked unconscious.
Beau, calling, coming up a step at a time, afterward, found her. He assumed she was dead and watched the pulsing blood for no more than a moment. Then he tiptoed down the suddenly treacherous stairs and entered his living room. “Need a drink,” he said quietly to himself.
He found a bottle finally that wasn’t broken. He drank from it and with it in his hand, without a coat, he went outdoors. He had a vague idea that somebody should do something about Netta.
As he left his house, not aware he was running, he kept calling, “Where’s a doctor?
Where’s a doctor?”
Those were the words Ted Conner heard and did not understand—before he went back indoors, checked the gas and the lighting circuits (there was no power) and got his coat and hat in preparation for making his scarey way over to the school to report.
It was what they had always planned he should do if his radio set was knocked out, or the power failed.
Mrs. Conner was on her way to the Presbyterian Church, a fairly long walk. She was, wearing her old winter coat—glad she hadn’t given it away—and carrying a heavy suitcase. The suitcase was her own idea and she hadn’t told Henry about it. In it were “odds and ends,”
assembled by Beth as she had listened over the years to Civil Defense talk about what might happen. She had slipped onto her arm the brassard of her volunteer corps: “Emergency Nurse,” it said, in red, white and blue felt letters.
The sirens were warbling like wounded demons and the only other people on foot were air-raid wardens, here and there, who hurried toward her to tell her to take cover, then saw the arm band and grinned and called, usually, “Hello, Mrs. Conner!” or, “Watch it!”
She answered mildly. She was thinking about Nora. And she was obliged, besides, to cross carefully at the intersections. There weren’t many cars about in this part of town; but the ones moving were hitting sixty or seventy and taking corners on two wheels, some headed away from town but most of them converging on South High where Henry would be.
The Light caught her on Ash Street, near Arkansas Avenue. Henry had told her to get down in the gutter with the curb between herself and the hot whiteness, but she was afraid of the cars. There were, however, small terraces in the Wister’s front lawn, where Maud had crocuses because of the southern slope. Beth dropped on her hands and knees, then flattened herself. The blast and the Wister windows and some of the tiles from the roof went over her and she was not hurt.
She got up and trudged on, carrying the suitcase still. When she reached Lake View Road she saw that the windows of the Jenkins Memorial Hospital had been blown away; and the steeple of the Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church, her destination, a hospital itself in the event of emergency, had been broken off at the middle.
In Ferndale, Jim Williams’s family assembled while the sirens wailed unheard, and only the ultracalm radio voice gave a warning. Ruth, whoo-whooing, brought the older ones in. Jim hastily put some Coke in a pail—and some beers—and pulled out the screw driver which served as a bolt for the cellar door. The house was heated by oil stoves, so he’d had no occasion to go down to the cellar for some days.
When the door creaked open, he knew by the smell, however.
He switched on the light. Sure enough. Water had seeped in during the thaw, a week back. There was a dark pool of it on the floor.
“Wait up, you!” he called, and went down the cobwebby steps. He found the handle of an old shovel and probed gingerly.
“Water down here,” he reported disgustedly. “About a foot deep! We better stay upstairs after all.”
Relieved, the entire family went back to the parlor. They sat around uncertainly, the kids, for once, quiet. Ruth, alone, stood. When the Light came, she snatched the baby from its pen, where she’d just put her down. Irma began to sob irritatedly. Ruth patted her, feeling comforted because the little thing was in a mother’s arms, where all infants should be in moments of blinding, fearsome Light.
Jim said, or began to say, loudly and to all, but with a still-unconvinced tone, “Maybe we should do like they told us—duck—”
The blast wave struck. The Williams house, more than a thousand yards nearer the place of the fireball than the sturdier Conner home, had its top floor mashed as by a mallet. The windows screamed into the room. And that year they were double; Jim had put on storm windows. Don’s hand was amputated. Jim lost much of his face; it became scarlet stew. All the children fell, bleeding. But Irma, the baby, being kissed by her anxious mother, received a pound of glass in her back and lungs; she was tom almost apart.
Ruth was not hurt at all—the baby having shielded her—not hurt at all, physically.
Kit Sloan, on his way home from the River City Athletic Club, was in a temper even before the sirens started. The seasonal parties, dances, balls and festivities had given him an alcoholic nervousness. He’d decided that day to play squash early, get his rubdown, and come home to dress in time to make it over to the Ritz-Hadley for the Emerson cocktail thing.
But his customary opponents hadn’t been on hand. There was a rumor going, about an air-raid drill; and the three best players in the club, Green Prairie men, were in Civil Defense.
He’d been obliged to bat balls around by himself for an hour, curtly refusing to “give a game” to inferior challengers.
His cabinet bath, plunge and rub after the disappointment had failed to restore his well-being. So he drove vexedly in the Christmas crowds. It wasn’t far from the club to Pearson Square, but the waits for lights, the bumper-to-bumper pace between lights, made it seem a long way.
When at last he reached the southeast corner of the square, he saw that traffic along the south side was so badly jammed he decided it would be quicker to run the Jaguar beyond the side opposite, cut through an alley, and drive across the interior park itself, on a paved path meant for hikes and baby carriages. He doubted if the cops would bother him; he’d done it before, as a gag, at night. He figured he could blast a hole in the stalled traffic with his horn, thus getting into the Sloan driveway long before the log jam could be broken.
The decision saved him from swift death.
The siren caught him in the alley. He had to wait even there for three huge trucks, unloading behind the supermarket, to disentangle themselves and move down to the square. He followed. By then, a group of teen-age boys, attracted by the red car, were begging him to give them a ride. He ground up his windows in fury.
When the Light came, he didn’t think at all. He shot to the Boor of the car and covered his head with his arms: whatever it was, it was that kind of thing—a war kind, deadly. His reflexes so interpreted it. The blast followed.
The supermarket behind him disintegrated. The three-story brick houses beside him turned into brick piles. The cars and trucks across the square were pushed, lifted, rolled, skidded, mauled.
He did not see that; bricks roared down upon his car, bricks mounded in front of it, barricading the view; bricks buried his car. He lay in sudden dark and the choking dust of mortar.
People in the winter-locked square felt the heat of the bomb first. Their clothes smoldered, flamed. They screamed and fell. They wallowed and writhed. Yet a worse thing had befallen them in that chip of time: from the fireball which towered and expanded hideously in the near distance, they soaked up neutrons and gamma rays and were dead although to themselves alive-seeming still. The rays pierced every truck, every car, the thick wood, the thin steel, and the men and the women and the children inside, though they should live awhile, were doomed. Many perished then and there of blast and concussion and bashing; the rest, who thought they had escaped, were left with only a little while to live.
Trapped, hardly sensing as a special phenomenon the blast itself, Kit picked at the split glass of a window in his car. Bricks fell in on him but the illumination increased. Frantically, he pulled in more bricks. By and by he had a hole through which he could worm his way, hands first, tossing bricks aside.
Behind, he saw the supermarket. Smoking. Here and there, in the no-man’s-land look of it, things moved. He faced around and gazed up. The mushroom cloud, boiling with what seemed cubic miles of colored fires, was spreading out. Its edge was even with the far corner of the square.
The houses near by were shattered, some smashed Hat. His: own, he could see, across the empty square and the lawns—where trees lay prostrate, their boughs still heaving—was wrecked.
Why, he wondered, was the square so empty? Then he looked again and saw the bundles of clothing, the blackened things, the charred people, the dead and the still-moving dead.
His horror mounted. He heard bricks slide and scrambled away from the buried wreck of his car. He decided he would have to walk across the square. Have to.
It was hard going. Things—just things—had dropped into the place—and, he soon realized, things were raining from the hot, spreading cloud. Part of a piano fell down and then a dead pooch hit and rolled and something like a stove lid rang on the hot asphalt. He entered the park. People were opening the doors of cars, hanging out, gasping. The ones on the ground were black. Or red. Or both. With holes, meaning mouths.
A woman in what he first thought was a red sweater, vomited, sitting up straight in her car, vomited all over her own windshield. A man got out of a car that was upside down. He fell and didn’t rise.
A door in a house opened and another man came out. A short, broad-chested man. He said something like, “Owowow-owowowowowo,” and began to run down the sidewalk, toward Kit, who stepped aside. Between the sounds he emitted, the man clicked as he ran. Every step, Kit saw, left a blood-gob on the flagstones. He saw the reason. Both the man’s feet were gone and he was running on the ends of his shinbones. That was why he seemed so short. He went a good ways, perhaps a quarter of a block, with his arms up and his fists doubled, like a track runner, and then he fell.
Kit thought of not going to his house, of going in the other direction, away from the expanding cloud. It was darkening the sky now. It looked exactly like the Technicolor newsreel shots; a bit darker, perhaps.
He began to trot. He slipped on somebody’s blood, recovered and hurried. A young woman, a pretty young woman with bright blue eyes and blonde hair sat up, right in front of him.
He halted, mouth open. “Mister,” she said, “will you help me get on my feet?”
He tried to. But when he reached down for where her arm should have been he felt gritty pulp and looked and it was just coming through her coat sleeve. She saw it, too, and screamed; he could hear her screaming all the way to his own lawn.
He went around the house once. It was on fire in several places. There was no sign of life.
He wasn’t even sure his mother had been at home anyway. She’d said something about having to shop.
To shop.
He spun around. From the heart of the city, a great smoke was rising. Beneath it, lighting its base, was fire. Somewhere he’d read that, in twenty minutes, the fire storm would come. The whole center of the city. You had at least twenty minutes to get clear, but then the temperatures rose with the holocaust. To six thousand degrees.
He thought, desperately, of a car. He rushed to the garage. Its second floor had fallen down and over the four great doors. There’d been a car under the porte-cochere. He ran there. It was burning. Had to get out. Twenty minutes. He must have wasted ten already.
He went fleetly north across the square, through its park, noticing nothing this time, sliding and getting his balance without looking, stepping on stones, boards, bricks, soft things—
indiscriminately.
All Nora knew, for sure, when the ground jumped, was that the atomic bomb must have hit.
They’d been in the subcellar, with candles, sitting in old, discarded chairs—Minerva and Willis and three maids and Jeff, the butler, and the gardener. All around them were racks of dusty wine bottles, barrels of wine and cases—the tissue paper around the bottles, mildewed.
They couldn’t have been sitting there, Nora thought, for more than a minute. Then the whole place jumped and the candles went out and it was like being on the Whipsaw ride at Swan Island, and the maids screamed, but not like amusement-park screaming.
Then—the air full of moldy-smelling dust.
And the maids were hollering their fool heads off.
Minerva, who’d been saying something about, “Going back up, if this absurd situation lasts any length of time…” had been shut up by the tremendous heave right there.
Nora’s chair slid on the bare earth floor. Barrels fell and bounced and rolled.
Then Willis, his old voice fierce, yelled, “Quiet!”
Peculiarly, Nora thought, the maids became silent.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” Willis asked.
Mrs. Sloan didn’t answer.
A match struck. Nora noticed how it shook, how the hands that held a candle wobbled with it. Whoever it was, the gardener, she thought, had trouble sticking it to one of the shelves that held wine bottles. The first thing Nora saw was the maids, hugging each other, pale as death.
The next thing she saw was a big wine barrel that wine was gurgling out of. Then she saw Mrs.
Sloan, underneath it.
“We’ll have to get out of here,” Willis said. “And get her out.”
“Better wait a bit,” the gardener answered.
“Wait—the devil! The building above us is probably on fire. Try the door.” Willis came over to the chair where Nora was sitting and smiled faintly. “You all right, Miss?”
“Fine,” Nora said and she pointed to Mrs. Sloan. “Her legs are pinned under.”
Willis nodded.
The maids began to whimper. He stood in front of them. “Stop that, everyone of you!” he said. He turned to the butler. “Jeff, tear off a shelf-board and bear a hand! We’ll have to prize that hogshead off her. If she’s living.”
Nora heard the butler yanking in the gloom. One of the maids went back there with him and returned first, carrying a two-by-four. From the door, which he’d opened, the gardener called, “Stairway’s kind of blocked and it does smell smoky-like.”
Willis was kneeling, listening to Mrs. Sloan’s heart.
Her eyes were shut.
Willis said, ‘Well, clear a way through somehow! There’s plenty of cellar exits. But just that one, up from here.”
Pretty soon, they had moved the barrel. The butler, whose name was at least Jeff, Nora thought, was looking at Mrs. Sloan’s legs, holding another lighted candle and pulling up her skirts in a most casual manner. “Busted—smashed,” the butler said. “Have to make a stretcher.
Some weight!”
From the door of the wine cellar, the gardener yelled, “We can get around this junk. But hurry! I hear it crackling up there!”
So they dragged Mrs. Sloan. The maids went first, though—they ran. And Nora was next to the gardener, who went last. As she followed the dragged woman, she saw Mrs. Sloan’s pocketbook on the floor underneath the place where she’d been lying. Nora took it along and nobody paid any attention.
“Hurry up, kid,” the butler said. That was all.
The cellar was half caved in and you could sec lines of fire, through cracks overhead. The smoke was awful. Nora ran past the men with their slow-moving burden to the square of outdoor light, and she raced up stone steps, gratefully, for she was at last outdoors. She hoped she was in time to see the mushroom cloud, and she eyed the sky eagerly, ignoring her smoke-induced cough.
She was in time. In plenty of time.
And she saw more. The whole city, to the south, seemed on fire. It was, she told herself, extremely spectacular. It was unforgettable. She took a good look so she would never forget.
Then, and only then, having done her civilized duty, she looked at the house. The great Victorian pile was also burning. Flames surged in the broken guts of the building and curled among the down-hammered slates of the roofs and the many gables. It was all afire. The car that had brought them was on fire.
Willis said, “And the garage is blocked.”
Jeff was eying the city. “Do you think…?”
“I hell-sure do! Gotta get out of here.”
“She should be in a hospital—”
“Right.” Willis glanced at Nora, at the gardener, and said, “Where’d the girls go?”
Nora reported. “Ran. Just ran.”
The chauffeur shrugged. “We’ll have to put her in a barrow, I guess, Jeff, and get her to the street. Maybe we can catch a lift—or borrow a parked car…”
Minerva Sloan overflowed the wheelbarrow, Nora noticed. Her head hung out and her legs hung out, and there was some blood on them but not much. The men had a very hard time pushing her. The ground was soft and there no longer was any snow—to Nora’s surprise. In the drive, though, it went easier. The gardener helped, too, taking the longest turn with the wheelbarrow.
It would be dark presently, Nora thought. The light, at the moment, was pinkish, as if a sunset had begun. But it was not a sunset at all and came from the south. It was the start of a fire storm, she knew.
When they reached the street, they stopped.
It was the first time Nora had got a good look at any dead people and now there were so many she could hardly decide which ones to look at first. They were mostly blackish, but some were scarlet and some had faces and bodies that looked exactly the way a steak looked when it caught on fire. And some, she saw, weren’t exactly dead, or completely dead. A few in cars were opening and closing their mouths or moving their arms feebly and one girl about Nora’s age kept bumping her head back and forth between the front and rear seats in a sedan. Some people in the park were crawling around and you could hear screams and groans, mostly from where some big store was crushed about Bat and the brick houses had caved in. It sounded like birds in the distance, the screaming, Nora thought: twittery and as if a big flock made it. Sparrows or starlings.
When they had all looked out over the square for a while and not said anything, the gardener turned around and stared with a peculiar expression at the mushroom cloud and the fire getting brighter underneath it and he just ran. He ran through the park in a zigzag and toward the west where, Nora realized finally, there was a big noise of other people yelling and raging around, though you couldn’t see them at that distance: just wreckage.
Jeff the butler, who was a tall man with large cords in his neck, looked at Willis and the chauffeur said, “Lost his head.”
“Shock,” Jeff answered.
Willis looked across the square as if he, too, would like to run; but then his eyes soon began to move along the row of cars which wasn’t exactly a row any more.
It was chilly now and getting dark quite fast. Nora had lost her hat but she never had taken off her woolly coat and she was glad of that. She tried to remember as much as she could of all she had heard at home, ever since she could remember anything, about atomic bombs. She realized that this one had gone off quite near, but she also realized she didn’t know how powerful it was or exactly how near. And she had to admit that, even if she’d known, she could only guess about the radioactivity.
She did recall, though, that people had put cars close to test bombs and they’d had their tops squdged down like some of those on the street, but people had started them right away.
Willis was walking along, looking at the cars that stood on their wheels and weren’t full of broken glass or smoking or anything. Once in a while, he bent forward and looked inside—to make sure no person was on the floor in a mess or anything.
At long last Willis got into a car and started it and drove it slowly down the street, winding around things. He and Jeff got Mrs. Sloan in the back somehow and she moaned once but her eyes didn’t open. Willis said, “Where to?” in a funny way and Nora thought probably he had a certain percentage of “shock,” also. Maybe about forty per cent, she thought, and she thought Jeff had about fifty and she had ten or maybe twenty per cent at most.
The car started along the street very slowly, going this way and that, but the lights were smashed and you couldn’t tell exactly what you were running over. They went around the east side of the square, sometimes going up over the curb, and past a brick house that was burning inside fiercely. Nora saw then that sweat was pouring down Willis’s face and he was crying and the butler beside him was looking straight ahead at absolutely nothing.
She was sitting between them and not being paid any attention to. When they reached St.
Paul Street, they couldn’t make a right tum because of the rubble so they went on north.
Finally Jeff said, “The City Hospital’s the other way, Willis.” He spoke quietly, as if he didn’t want to hurt the chauffeur’s feelings.
But Willis wasn’t making a mistake. He answered, “Jeff, there won’t be any city hospital down there.”
Jeff said, “Check,” and sounded crestfallen. “Where you headed?”
“I thought we might get through farther up here and around east and back to St. Paul on that side. The Infirmary.”
“Mrs. Sloan would be highly incensed—”
“I don’t know if she’ll ever be highly anything.”
There was less rubble and there were fewer fires up that way and they began to see a lot of people who weren’t hurt at all, just running around. Many were going in and out of houses, carrying things, and some families already had beds and bedding and trunks and suitcases and piles of clothing out on the street. Quite a few had put things in handcarts and even on children’s wagons, and they were hurrying along, pushing and pulling and carrying babies. All the windows were broken and all the sidewalks were littered with glass and there were very few parked cars.
Willis noticed that, too. “People that could,” he pointed out, “grabbed a car and beat it.”
When they crossed Market Street—which changed its name from Central Avenue at the bridge which Nora rightly supposed was now vaporized—they could see hordes of people everywhere, nearly all of them running north with something in their arms or on their backs, and children. But some blocks down, where the big Cathedral was plain to see because it was on fire and half-mashed anyhow, firehoses were shooting up and fire trucks were all around.
“That’s what comes,” Willis said, “of having all Harps in the Fire Department. Save the Catholic church and let the city go.”
Jeff said, haughtily, Nora noticed, “I guess it isn’t important. Half the fire companies must have been wiped out and the rest couldn’t do much. The flood that floated Noah couldn’t put this out!” He laughed a little; cackled, Nora called it to herself.
They covered about three miles to go about one straight mile and often they had to back out of streets because they could see they couldn’t go through. Sometimes people tried to stop them; and always people begged for rides and once some foreigners yelled a lot of words they couldn’t understand and threw stones at them.
When it got quite dark and when they were out of the region where the fires made it possible to see their way, Willis found a bigger car with locked doors and windows. He broke the windows with bricks and he raised the engine hood and fiddled under it and they moved Mrs.
Sloan, though it seemed all they could do. Nora took her pocketbook along, carefully. But the car lights helped a great deal when they finally got the other car moving, and some teen-age boys came shooting past them in the car they’d abandoned and hit a fire plug not three blocks away.
Once, when they were on the other side of Market Street, a plane went over, out toward Ferndale. It was flying terribly low and terribly fast and it was a very big plane. But only Nora bothered to wonder what it was doing there. She thought maybe it was a drone, sampling the atomic dust, but she decided there was no way to tell. She realized that Chuck would be at Hink Field in all probability and he could tell her, later, when she got home. If she ever did get home.
By the time they got to where they could see the Infirmary, the fire storm was really going full blast. It made one big blaze right in the middle of the Sister Cities about five miles high and maybe, Nora decided, two miles across. Since she had expected it, she took it for granted exactly as she did all other A-bomb phenomena: it impressed her without unduly astonishing her. But she could observe that Jeff and Willis were simply appalled. Several times, flicking his eyes up at the rising tower of sheer flame, Willis bumped into things with the car.
Pretty soon he stopped.
He stopped because the street ahead was solid with people lined up—or, rather, just there in a solid mass—trying to get to the Infirmary. They were all hurt. Some were bleeding and some were burned and many were both. Some had no faces as such, Nora noticed, and some had bones showing through their flesh and even through their clothes. And the whole mass of them, thousands and thousands, made one loud sound like community singing. A lot of people were already on the ground, unable to move or dead, and nobody paid any attention to them.
“I’ll have to get through somehow,” Willis said.
“It isn’t possible.”
“ We can’t let her wait for her turn here. She’ll die, most likely.”
Jeff stepped out of the car. His hair started to blow and his coat Bickered and Nora realized it was very windy. That would be the air moving in to feed the fire storm and it could reach hurricane force, they had often said, and suck fire engines and even people into its center to burn. The butler took a look at the hurt people, who were all around him now, and a long look at the big torch in the sky, and he just ran, like the panicky maids.
“Smelled’ em, I guess,” Willis said.
Nora stepped out. He didn’t prevent it. She felt the coldness of the pouring air on one side and the heat of the veritable Mount Everest of fire on the other. It was about the same altitude, she thought, to its top, where big slices of fire jumped up independently, in the sky, above the summit. She drew a breath and she thought Willis was right. They smelled like hot meat, burning fat, smoking grease and burned hair.
Then a terrible thing happened.
Willis got out of the sedan, too, and Mrs. Sloan was in it alone, and Willis suddenly grabbed his shoulder. His face became distorted and he tried to say something, tried to gesture, but he fell down on the pavement of the street. Nora squatted down and shook him and said, over and over, “Mr. Willis! Mr. Willis!” But he didn’t say a word so she knew his heart had failed.
It wasn’t surprising, she thought. He was a very elderly man. But more people were coming into the street all the time, pushing toward the Infirmary in a great stinking, screaming, sticky mob and soon they would hem her in. If she didn’t want to spend the rest of the night right there, she’d have to move. She thought she might be able to go up the street again and around and come into the hack or the side of the Mildred Tatum Infirmary. It was, in fact, not merely the only way to escape the increasing crowd but the only hope of getting a doctor for Mrs. Sloan, though she hesitated to try it, because now she would be all alone.