“Okay. Good.” The corporal nodded. Behind them, the glow of riven atoms slowly faded. Cade stared, transfixed at the hellish beauty of the rising, swelling mushroom cloud. The corporal went on, “What do you want me to do now, sir? Go on taking you north or turn around so we can lend a hand to them poor sorry bastards back there?”
No one could possibly fault Cade for telling the driver to go on toward the front. That was what he was supposed to be doing. But his orders didn’t take the A-bomb into account, and it struck him as more urgent than one more first lieutenant in the trenches. “I won’t command you to turn around,” he said after the briefest of pauses. “But if you’re willing to do that, I’ll thank you for it.”
“Gotcha, sir. That’s jake by me.” The corporal made a neat Y-turn on the narrow road. They’d just started heading south again when wind from the atomic blast briefly buffeted the jeep. The driver let out a harsh chuckle. “We’re a coupla goddamn fools, is what we are, y’know?”
“Now that you mention it, that did cross my mind, yes,” Cade said, which made the corporal laugh again.
They hadn’t gone very far south before there was another flash in the sky behind them, which meant that A-bomb blew to the northwest. It was much farther away than the one that had just incinerated Pusan. Somberly, the driver said, “The guys you was goin’ back to, Lieutenant, they’re liable not to be there no more.”
“I know.” Those were Cade’s men, up there in the trenches near Chongju. Or they had been. Now they were part of a new mushroom cloud. If I hadn’t got leave and gone drinking and making a pig of myself and getting my ashes hauled, I’d be dead with them, Cade thought. Guilt pierced him for no better reason than that he was still breathing and they weren’t. The top part of his mind understood how ridiculous the feeling was, which didn’t make it go away.
The other thing was, the Americans had just had a big hole bitten out of their line. Would the Red Chinese and the North Koreans swarm through it? He was all too sure they would. How much would they care if their soldiers got a little radioactive, or more than a little? That question answered itself as soon as it occurred to him.
There was light ahead, not just from the dissipating mushroom cloud above Pusan but also from the countless ordinary fires the bomb had set. “Fuck it,” the driver said. “I’m gonna turn on my headlights. We got bigger things to worry about than Bedcheck Charlie an’ gooks with Tommy guns.”
“Fine by me.” Cade wanted to see what he could, too. How often did you find yourself on the edge of an atomic explosion?
Once, he soon decided, was at least three times too often. The farther in they got, the worse things looked. Tents burned. Prefab buildings went over as if they’d been assembled from playing cards. They caught fire, too. Fighter planes that hadn’t got off the ground blazed. So did the trucks that had fueled them.
Next to one of those trucks writhed a burning man. If you splashed kerosene on a cockroach and tossed in a match, the effect would have been similar but smaller. “Christ!” the corporal said. “Is he too far away for you to shoot him with that thing?”
Cade glanced down at the PPSh in his lap. “Afraid so. I sure would if I could, though.”
“Oh, hell, yes. But Jesus God, sir, what are we gonna do? What can we do? What can anybody do? This goddamn thing is too big for people to do any good with.”
Although Cade thought he was right, they did get stopped and put to work before they’d gone much farther. They made up two links in the human chain of a bucket brigade that was trying without much luck to keep a barracks from going up in flames. Cade wondered how radioactive he was getting. Then another bucket came by. Passing it along was easier than thinking.
9
It was a party of sorts-a going-away party. It wasn’t a big party. Marian Staley hadn’t made or wanted to make friends at Camp Nowhere. Most of the people stuck there, and the people in charge of the people stuck there, weren’t people she would have cared to have anything to do with in normal times.
But she’d known Fayvl Tabakman before, back when there still were such things as normal times. The two of them shared a bond, too, a bond of loss and disaster. It was a negative bond, yes, but no less real for that. And Fayvl’s cronies, Yitzkhak and Moishe, also understood loss and disaster from the inside out.
Moishe produced what looked like a wine bottle. After he swigged from it, though, he passed it to Marian with the warning, “Drink-but go easy.”
She did, with the caution he’d advised. She didn’t worry about drinking from a bottle someone else had used the way she would have before normal times vanished in fire and destruction. Even so, when she swallowed she wondered if she’d downed a lit Bunsen burner.
“Wow!” she said once speech returned to her charred vocal cords. “That’s-strong.”
“Uh-huh.” The middle-aged Jew from-from Minsk, that was where he’d grown up-nodded. “Pretty good samogon. How you say in English samogon?”
“Moonshine,” Fayvl said. He had a knock himself, then passed the bottle to Yitzkhak. “Yes, not bad.”
“Moonshine.” Moishe thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. He was one of those people who needed to be right all the time and got furious at himself when he wasn’t.
Yitzkhak also drank. He raised the bottle in salute to Marian. “Here’s to going from Camp Nowhere to somewhere that’s alevai somewhere.”
“Thanks.” She took the bottle. She had to drink to that. She didn’t think it was exactly moonshine-to her, that meant raw whiskey. This stuff was more like brandy, even if it had started life as Welch’s grape juice. The second sip didn’t burn so much. Maybe her gullet was stunned.
“We’ll miss you. I’ll miss you,” Fayvl said as he also drank again.
Moishe and Yitzkhak nodded. She didn’t think they meant it the same way the cobbler did. He was sweet on her. She would have laughed at that before Bill died. Now-who could say? People needed people, and not all the combinations that wound up working were the obvious ones.
“How come I don’t get any of that?” Linda asked as the grown-ups passed the bottle back and forth.
Fayvl, Yitzkhak, and Moishe laughed. After a second, so did Marian. “It’s booze, honey,” she explained.
“Oh,” Linda said, and then, “Yuck!”
“Before the war started, she kept after Bill to give her a sip of beer,” Marian said. “Finally, he let her have some. She tasted it and she looked at him and asked, ‘Am I poisoned?’?”
The three survivors of the worst the Old World could do laughed again. “I been poisoned on beer sometimes,” Fayvl said, miming a deadly headache.
“Yuck!” Linda said again, this time because of his expression.
Yitzkhak asked, “So what you will do, now you get out of this place?”
“Oh, Lord, I don’t know. Pick up the pieces. Try to find a job.” Marian didn’t mention that she’d already had to spend money to get the Studebaker running again. Tires, battery, spark plugs, oil…Nothing came cheap. She did her best not to think about that. “Whatever it is, I’ll be doing it out in freedom, not-here.”
“Freedom,” Fayvl echoed wistfully. “Freedom is wonderful.”
“Freedom is hard to find, is what freedom is,” Moishe said. “Used to be some here. How much is left in the middle of a stupid war? Well, who knows?”
Marian had heard stories that also made her wonder. After the A-bombs fell, the West Coast and some inland states where the governor and legislature got killed went under martial law, or something as close to it as made no difference.
In a way, it made sense. The military and the National Guard had lots of members. They had organization and discipline. And they had guns. If you needed to govern areas where civilian administration had literally gone up in smoke, where else would you turn?