We got in all right. Brought food and such. A reactor’s set up self-contained and got huge air filters and water flow from the river. The water was clean, too, filtered enough to take out the fallout. The generators were still running good. We waited it out there. Crowded and sweaty but O.K. for ten days. That’s how long it took for the count to go down. Then we spilled out into a world laid to gray and yet circumscribed waste, the old world seen behind a screen of memories.
That was bad enough, finding the bodies—people, cattle, and dogs asprawl across roads and fields. Trees and bushes looked the same, but there was a yawning silence everywhere. Without men, the pine stands and muddy riverbanks had fallen dumb, hardly a swish of breeze moving through them, like everything was waiting to start up again but didn’t know how.
ANGEL
We thought we were O.K. then, and the counters said so, too—all the gammas gone, one of the kids said. Only the sky didn’t look the same when we came out, all mottled and shot through with drifting blue-belly clouds.
Then the strangest thing. July, and there’s sleet falling. Big wind blowing up from the Gulf, only it’s not the sticky hot one we’re used to in summer, it’s moaning in the trees of a sudden and a prickly chill.
“Goddamn. I don’t think we can get far in this,” Turkey says, rolling his old rheumy eyes around like he never saw weather before.
“It will pass,” Mr. Ackerman says, like he is in real tight with God.
“Lookit that moving in from the south,” I say, and there’s a big mass all purple and forking lightning swarming over the hills, like a tide flowing, swallowing everything.
“Gulf storm. We’ll wait it out,” Mr. Ackerman says to the crowd of us, a few hundred left out of what was a moderate town with real promise.
Nobody talks about the dead folks. We see them everywhere, worms working in them. A lot smashed up in car accidents, died trying to drive away from something they couldn’t see. But we got most of our families in with us, so it’s not so bad. Me, I just pushed it away for a while, too much to think about with the storm closing in.
Only it wasn’t a storm. It was somethin’ else, with thick clouds packed with hail and snow one day and the next sunshine, only sun with bite in it. One of the men says it’s got more UV in it, meaning the ultraviolet that usually doesn’t come through the air. But it’s getting down to us now.
So we don’t go out in it much. Just to the market for what’s left of the canned food and supplies, only a few of us going out at a time, says Mr. Ackerman.
We thought maybe a week it would last.
Turned out to be more than two months.
I’m a patient woman, but jammed up in those corridors and stinking offices and control room of the reactor—
Well, I don’t want to go on.
It’s like my Bud says, worst way to die is to be bored to death.
That’s damn near the way it was.
Not that Old Man Turkey minded. You ever notice how the kind of man that hates moving, he will talk up other people doing just the opposite?
Mr. Ackerman was leader at first, because of getting us into the reactor. He’s from Chicago but you’d think it was England sometimes, the way he acts. He was on the school board and vice president of the big AmCo plant outside town. But he just started to assume his word was it, y’know, and that didn’t sit with us too well.
Some people started to saying Turkey was smarter. And was from around here, too. Mr. Ackerman heard about it.
Any fool could see Mr. Ackerman was the better man. But Turkey talked the way he does, reminding people he’d studied engineering at Auburn way back in the twencen and learned languages for a hobby and all. Letting on that when we came out, we’d need him instead of Mr. Ackerman.
He said an imp had caused the electrical things to go dead, and I said that was funny, saying an imp done it. He let on it was a special name they had for it. That’s the way he is. He sat and ruminated and fooled with his radios—that he never could make work—and told all the other men to go out and do this and that. Some did, too. The old man does know a lot of useless stuff and can convince the dumb ones that he’s wise.
So he’d send them to explore. Out into cold that’d snatch the breath out of you, bite your fingers, numb your toes. While old Turkey sat and fooled.
TURKEY
Nothing but sputtering on the radio. Nobody had a really good one that could pick up stations in Europe or far off.
Phones dead, of course.
But up in the night sky the first night out we saw dots moving—the pearly gleam of the Arcapel colony, the ruddy speck called Russworld.
So that’s when Mr. Ackerman gets this idea.
We got to reach those specks. Find out what’s the damage. Get help.
Only the power’s out everywhere, and we got no way to radio to them. We tried a couple of the local radio stations, brought some of their equipment back to the reactor where there was electricity working.
Every damn bit of it was shot. Couldn’t pick up a thing. Like the whole damn planet was dead, only of course it was the radios that were gone, fried in the EMP—ElectroMagnetic Pulse—that Angel made a joke out of.
All this time it’s colder than a whore’s tit outside. And we’re sweating and dirty and grumbling, rubbing up against ourselves inside.
Bud and the others, they’d bring in what they found in the stores. Had to drive to Sims Chapel or Toon to get anything, what with people looting. And gas was getting hard to find by then, too. They’d come back, and the women would cook up whatever was still O.K., though most of the time you’d eat it real quick so’s you didn’t have to spend time looking at it.
Me, I passed the time. Stayed warm.
Tried lots of things. Bud wanted to fire the reactor up, and five of the men, they read through the manuals and thought that they could do it. I helped a li’l.
So we pulled some rods and opened valves and did manage to get some heat out of the thing. Enough to keep us warm. But when they fired her up more, the steam hoots out and bells clang and automatic recordings go on saying loud as helclass="underline"
“EMERGENCY CLASS 3
ALL PERSONNEL TO STATIONS”
and we all get scared as shit.
So we don’t try to rev her up more. Just get heat.
To keep the generators going, we go out, fetch oil for them. Or Bud and his crew do. I’m too old to help much.
But at night we can still see those dots of light up there, scuttling across the sky same as before.
They’re the ones know what’s happening. People go through this much, they want to know what it meant.
So Mr. Ackerman says we got to get to that big DataComm center south of Mobile. Near Fairhope. At first I thought he’d looked it up in a book from the library or something.
When he says that, I pipe up, even if I am just an old fart according to some, and say, “No good to you even if you could. They got codes on the entrances, guards prob’ly. We’ll just pound on the door till our fists are all bloody and then have to slunk around and come on back.”
“I’m afraid you have forgotten our cousin Arthur,” Mr. Ackerman says all superior. He married into the family, but you’d think he invented it.
“You mean the one works over in Citronelle?”
“Yes. He has access to DataComm.”
So that’s how we got shanghaied into going to Citronelle, six of us, and breaking in there. Which caused the trouble. Just like I said.