On the staircase, Marylou stopped—a clean shirt and washed jeans folded over one arm.
She started to back up the stairs.
Her mother and sisters said nothing, nothing at all. “Come on downstairs, baby!” one of the men called, smirking.
Marylou backed another step. The man aimed a pistol and fired. The railing chipped.
Marylou came on down then, still holding her brother Chet’s clean clothes.
The women looked hopefully at Kit. He said, in a thin squeal, “You men move on.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“This is a private home. You’ve just done murder!”
Kit threw himself on the floor. It was his idea to get out—nothing else. His powerful muscles sent him slithering toward the dark hall. He didn’t even try to pick up the shotgun. He heard their shots and vaguely felt referred impact, from the floorboards. He reached the hall. He half stood, unchained the door, ran out.
Somebody bellowed through the smashed windows, “Hey, Red! Get that jerk!”
Kit saw the trees against the luminous sky line, the square silhouette of the truck, the palely white porch bannister. Flame squirted from the truck and his body was seared. He fell down the steps and lay without moving on his back.
He wished, seeing the stars as they began to swim and cavort, he’d at least grabbed the shotgun and plugged a couple of them.
In the parlor, the men turned toward the rigid women. “Going to be a nice little party,” one said, licking his lips. “Private-like.”
Others laughed. One yelled, “Hey—Red! Come on in! We found five of ’em!”
They moved toward the four girls and their mother.
She said, softly, “Pray, children.”
But nobody was listening to prayers that night.
12
Toward morning, but in that part of the hours when it should have been darkest, Henry left his second-in-command at his desk and went out in the night with the police lieutenant, Lacey. Some streets, some avenues, were slots leading arrow-straight to the fire storm, box-ended with flame.
Other thoroughfares merely caught the downbeat of illumination. On them, great shadows danced as the grotesque, the monstrous pyre flickered in the sky. Here and there, night infiltrated a row of houses, loomed in a stand of stores or glowered from the windows of a stalled streetcar.
Elsewhere, a building or a home burning individually—and as a rule under siege by volunteers—made a big candle for this block or that.
They went farther south. Henry had the lieutenant make their first stop, so he could inspect the injured on the banks of Crystal Lake.
Torches and bonfires glared on the near terraces, glimmered across the ice. Upon the metallic surface of the lake itself, men hurried hither and thither, some pulling children’s sleds heaped with clapboards and smashed steps, balustrades, broken ladders, branches, anything combustible. In the once-elegant yards all around other men were chopping. The earth was humanity—covered—a litter of supine men and women and children, blanketed, quilted, dressed like hobgoblins, warming fires spaced between. The snow here had turned to mud. And here the roar of the fire storm was a mumble. The earth quivered only a little.
Here, the night was rent by one single shriek, one voice of a myriad in agony. Lacey crossed himself when first he heard it, as he stopped his car and switched off its siren. Henry went closer. His skin pimpled with horror, his feet felt like freight, he wanted to retch. But the fires sent a drift of woodsmoke over the bloodscape and the burned-meat smell was abruptly overridden. He saw a doctor whom he remembered from the meetings.
“How’s it going?” Henry yelled.
“Don’t be a fool, man! Oh! You, eh, Henry?” The physician straightened up. A syringe glinted in his hand. “What can you expect?” he bellowed back. “They’re still dying! Blood’s run out. Plasma was out for a while—Army got some in. Cold. Some freeze.”
“I can’t spare any more people right now.”
“We’ve got people enough,” the doctor answered, bending even as he talked, fishing for an ampule in a case slung over his shoulder. “Unless you have more medical people.”
“No more medical people.” Henry shouted.
The physician stabbed a needle into the arm of a child. Her mouth opened. She was screaming. You couldn’t hear it at all, Henry realized. It was lost in the general scream.
“Help from outlying towns—” Henry broke off, said it more loudly because the doctor had cupped his car, “Help from outside will be coming in by morning.”
The doctor just nodded and turned away, looking at the patient-covered earth for the next one.
Because of the red headlights and the siren, they got across on Decatur and came back north to the Country Club, where the brief meeting was to be held. The clubhouse had no windows but it did have electric lights, which astonished Henry until he recalled that he had voted—
years before, when he’d still had his membership—to put in a power plant simply to show a little spunk to the electric company. Ambulances were feeding people into the club. It was a better place than the shore of Crystal Lake.
They went into the main room, which seemed a bright glare after a night of emergency illumination. A few dozen of the scattered easy chairs had been pulled together and faced in one direction. Sighing, not removing his overcoat, because it was cold there, Henry dropped into a chair. Lacey took a seat beside him. Perhaps fifty men were there already. They, like Henry, were just sitting, sitting low in the upholstered chairs, saying nothing.
The CD chief, McVeigh, came down an aisle left between the chairs. He was followed by two women who wore CD brassards. They pulled up a big library table, helped by the men in the front row. Then McVeigh faced the sector leaders and their delegates:
“We’ve had to pull out of headquarters,” he said. “Fire storm making it too difficult to save the place.” His face grimaced as if of its own accord: “What was left of it, I mean to say. Here’s why I asked you to come over or send a delegate. We’ve got it bad, but River City’s far worse. The bulk of their fire-fighting apparatus lost. Most doctors dead or casualties. Short—almost out entirely—of every class of personnel. The whole city panicked. Nobody’s coming down from Kansas City or up from Omaha; nobody who’ll do any good, that is. Hundreds of unchecked fires over there, besides their half of the main show. Thousands—tens of thousands of people—still in the city. We don’t have to worry, for the moment, about the bulk of them. Because mostly they swarmed out of town. Point is, what can the Green Prairie outfit do to help—if anything?”
Not a man in the room spoke.
McVeigh nodded. “I know how you feel. I do myself. But what are we dealing with?
Certainly not local pride. Simply human numbers. If you can save ten here, you let one go there.
Right? All night I’ve been getting appeals from Jeffrey Allison—he’s their chief. I can’t decide alone. You’ll have to help me. We never figured we’d have to salvage Rivet City. It was their job, that they didn’t prepare for. If you sector heads could spare even one person in ten, of every classification, beginning at dawn—?”
A man whom Henry did not know stood up. “I can’t spare a man. I can’t spare myself here. I can use ten more for every man and woman I’ve got!”
There was a sound of agreement.
McVeigh studied the faces for a moment. “About fifty thousand people,” he said slowly, “crowded into the ball park. God knows why. Somebody started it—the rest followed. Maybe a third were kids. They filled the field solid; then the bleachers caught fire and the whole mob stampeded. They’re up there, what remains of ’em. Not one doctor. Nothing. That’s how things are all over River City.”