They heard about accidents en route from Joe Harrison in the WEYE copter. Traffic monitors were the only private planes allowed in the skies over New England. Some in fixed wing and some helicopters, these airwaves flyers that hovered daily over metropolitan areas at peak traffic periods alerting drivers to what lay ahead on their homeward commute, were vital support during this sudden crush to abandon New England. Their eyes in the sky were able to spot trouble points and focus emergency vehicles at a time when ground services were unable to cruise about freely. They had been making flights all night. That they were still at it on the morning of March 17 was a tribute to their courage or foolhardiness, take your pick.
“We shoulda taken 93,” said Janice Guaranga for the third time.
“We been over that,” growled Mike. “Susie, don’t lean out the window.”
“Nothing’s happening, why are we stopped?” asked his daughter, age twelve.
“Cause we shoulda taken 93,” repeated Janice.
“Did you hear him? Did you listen, huh? Joe Harrison said Boston’s locked up tight and so’s 128. So we take 93, to where? There’s no friggin place to get off it!”
Janice folded arms across her chest. “You know what time it is? It’s almost seven o’clock. We got just five hours to get out of Mass. Then we’re dead.”
Susie started to cry.
“Geez, Janice, whyn’t you just break her arm! It’s okay, Suze. This trip’s just a precaution. It’s probably all a big bluff. Six billion, and all they done was send six letters! I shoulda sent one to the mayor; think he’d pay me a couple mill? What I don’t like is leavin Maple Street.”
“I sure wasn’t going to stay there!”
“But everybody was leavin: the Gillises, the Santiagos, the Velises, the whole street. Nobody’s left to look after the houses. Maybe this is all a big scheme to scare people out of town so they can burglarize the houses, just take whatever they want.”
Janice turned to look at him. “You think that might be it?”
“Well it could be, couldn’t it?”
Janice thought about it. “They’re not going to bother with Lawrence when they got Newton and Brookline and money places like that.”
A few seconds of silence. All Janice could stand. “Oh Mike, suppose it’s a bomb. All kinds of countries have atomic bombs now, Koreans, Indians, Pakistanis anybody can get a hold of them.” She turned to him. “If an atomic bomb went off in the center of Boston, how far away would you have to be to be safe?”
“I don’t know. Fifty miles?”
“How far are we from Boston right now?”
“Maybe twenty-five miles is enough. That’s a long way when you think about it, all the way to Angelica’s from Maple Street. Doesn’t seem like a bomb would carry that far.”
“We’re not far enough, are we?”
“The wind’s from the north. Maybe it would blow the stuff away from us.”
“And the blast? How about the blast? How far does that carry?”
“Hey, they’re movin,” said Nando with seven-year excitement.
“Yeah! Here we go.” Mike put the wagon in gear. “Must have gotten that wreck off the road.”
“It’s just the left lane,” said Janice. “Ours isn’t moving at all. Cut in there, Mike.”
“Shit! They won’t let me.”
“Just do it! What are they going to do, hit you?”
“Okay, hold on!” There was a screeching of brakes and a crash as a car slammed into their left front fender, locking with the bumper. “God damn it! Hey you bastard, what are you trying to do, kill us?”
“Keep going! Keep going! We can’t stop now!” Janice was bouncing in her seat. Mike wrestled the wheel and gave the station wagon gas. With a rasping metallic protest the cars parted. The battered wagon limped into lane one with a tinkling of glass from the shattered headlight.
“We made it!” Janice thumped the dash. “Keep going, the hell with the car!”
He turned the wheels from side to side. They moved freely, nothing pressing against them. As he floored the pedal to catch up with the cars ahead, another from his former lane pulled out in front of him. Unable to brake in time, the wagon plowed into the driver’s door of a 94 Mercury.
“Shit!” screamed father Guaranga. “What the Christ does that son-of-a-bitch think he’s doing! He cut right in front of me!”
The force of the crash moved the Mercury back into lane two, where the car trailing it hit its right rear fender. The car behind that one, trying to avoid the pileup, swung into lane one, where it was hit by a car trying to turn into lane two. These in turn were clobbered by those behind them...
The radio in the incapacitated Guaranga car had been damaged and its volume stuck at a loud blare: “This is Joe Harrison in the WEYE copter. We’re over Route 290, there’s a ten-car pileup in the southbound lane. One of the cars has been flipped on its side. This is going to take a while to sort out. Take Route 93 if you can; it’s started to open up. Traffic south is heavy but moving...”
Chapter 36
Joel Albert’s feet were wet. Snow along the riverbank was over the top of his National Guard boots, and had worked its way down the inside to melt. The temperature hadn’t climbed out of the teens, and a piercing northwest wind made it feel colder. Had he his druthers he’d be nearly anyplace but on the banks of the Connecticut River slogging through deep snow looking for something that shouldn’t be there. But today was N Day; the day the Nutcracker will unleash his horror on New England, unless he, Joel, or others in the Guard get there first. They’d been told about the pods the afternoon before and what horror they could bring; horror he had already experienced in Stewart, without knowing the source, so he scarcely felt the wind and wet. Carol was depending on him, as she had in Stewart. They’d gotten out of that place. He’d moved the two of them up river, clear to Lebanon, New Hampshire. He hadn’t much cared where they went, as long as it was out of Stewart. But Carol had been brought up on the Connecticut, and, well, who would have suspected the river…
“Joel! Hey Joel, over here!” Bruce Jeaneau was digging snow. “Something’s moving the water.”
Joel unstrapped his own shovel and dug it in next to Bruce’s. Made for compactness, these implements were too small to be effective in snow.
“I’ll get help. Craig!”, he put force behind the yell to carry upwind. “Tell Stover we’ve got something here. Could use a snow shovel.”
With one good shovel and six others designed for foxholes, they’d soon cleared five-foot square down to frozen earth, right to the edge of the sluggishly moving Connecticut.