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.