Tomorrow! (38 page)

“Is her body mashed?”

“Oh, no. She’s all right. Her heart’s going good. We listened to it.”

“We?”

“Jeff, that’s her butler. He ran—toward the end. Willis, that’s the chauffeur. He had a stroke or something.”

“And you came on here?”

“Well, I finally did. I had to go back and around and every whichway—and I climbed in a window that was too little for some men—because they were thinking of climbing in and couldn’t.” She added, “Colored men. They boosted me.”

“I don’t know who we could send,” Alice Groves murmured. “Could you tell the nurses where her car is and what it looks like?”

“Oh, yes. It’s a green Buick sedan and it’s just this side of St. Angelica Street, a little on the right.”

One of the nurses said, “Let her die there, the old rip!”

Alice Groves shook her head. “She—her husband—built us this place. And she maintained it. And she was coming to us for help.”

“She didn’t
know
she was coming,” Nora said honestly. “She was brought.”

Alice smiled. “Miss Elman, see if Dr. Symes will come off a ward and take a bag and try to reach her. He used to play football, and if anybody could get through. . . .”

Another doctor, a colored man, in white, white clothes bloodier than any butcher’s, leaned from the operating room doorway. “Miss Groves, could you
please!
We’ve got a
bad
head wound here . . .”

Alice nodded. “In a sec!” She addressed the nurse again. “Have we got a bed anywhere—

crib—cradle—mattress . . . ?”

“Yours is still empty. . . .”

As the superintendent went back to work, she said, “Take her up. Give her a shot-she’s out on her feet.”

On the phone, Henry Conner said sharply to the Presbyterian minister, “Well, if it’s starting to freeze people on the north side of the Lake, move them where they get some warmth!”

“There’s no more space on the banks, Henry.”

“Great God! Beg your pardon. You mean . . . ?”

“I mean, Henry, we’ve got the church full and Jenkins Memorial and every house that’s safety-inspected and all the terraces around Crystal Lake—you can’t walk fast without stepping on a hand! And the thermometer’s down to thirty now, and we’ve run out of blankets!”

“Build fires. Bonfires.”

“Where? With what?”

“Good God—beg your pardon—that’s Jerome’s lookout. Where is he?”

“A side wall fell and killed Jerome, Henry.”

The sector chief sat a moment, drumming on his desk. “Look. See about this. There must be five . . . six gas stations above the lake on Windmere. Build your fires by using fences, porches, houses-if you need to. Take the manse apart. And pour on the gasoline. Siphon it down—garden hoses. . . !”

The minister’s voice was steady. “Will do, Henry.”

Kit looked back. You could see the light of the fire still but not the flame itself. He didn’t know where he was, just someplace well to the west. He didn’t know the make of the car he drove—

and recalled only dimly that he’d hit a fellow on the head to get it. He’d done that after seeing the wreck of Gordon Field and giving up the hope of flying. He was about at the end of his rope, he felt;
bushed.
When he hit a stretch where he couldn’t see a car ahead, or car lights in his rearview mirror, he watched along the side road and spotted a big, white farmhouse. He turned in the drive, switching his lights off. There were cattle in the barns, he could hear them. There were ducks in the trees, white ducks. And light leaked around the front window blinds, so someone was in the place. He knocked.

The door opened a couple of inches. “I need help,” Kit said. “Penicillin,” he added, eagerly.

A gruff, not inimical voice replied. “You alone?”

“Yes.”

“Come from the city?”

“Yes.’’

“I’m sorry, mister. We don’t dare let no one in. The radio tells us folks out here not to open doors or even show a light.”

“I saw your light.”

“Not from the road, you didn’t! I looked.”

“I’m Kit Sloan, maybe you’ve heard the name. I’ve got to rest a minute.
Bathe!
Eat something, get a drink of water. . . .”

“You mean—old lady—Mrs. Minerva Sloan’s son?”

“Yes.” Kit shivered. Bubonic, maybe, cholera. Musn’t let them know he was infected.

Chain rattled. The door opened.

Kit’s red eyes fell first upon a tall, rufous farmer with a shotgun across his arm. In the parlor behind him were four pretty girls and a plump, middle-aged woman who looked something like all four. Only one lamp was lighted and the radio was talking like firecrackers, but turned down low. The girls were young—perhaps twelve to seventeen or eighteen. Kit said,

“Thank you, sir,” to the farmer.

“Guess it’s all right,” the man answered. “You ain’t armed even. Couple of fellows stopped by a minute ago—they were. I was kind of nervous, but they tried the door and then beat it. Your mother’s bank holds our mortgage, Mr. Sloan.”

The smiles of the frightened girls, the sturdy look of their mother, the composed tone of their towering father brought Kit part way back to his senses. He looked down at his clothes, repressing horror. Some Asiatic disease, probably, that the sulfas and antibiotics wouldn’t touch.

They all looked.

“Marylou,” said the bearded man, “run up and get something from Chet’s closet. Mr.

Sloan, here, is kind of dirtied up.” He set the shotgun in the corner and turned to his unwanted guest. “My name’s Simpson. Alhert Simpson”—He jerked his head—“The missus—my daughters, Mr. Sloan. The bank.”

Kit said, “This is very kind of you.”

“I’ll get you something,” Mrs. Simpson put a workbasket aside. Kit realized, with a kind of feverish resentment, that she had been listening to everything the radio must have been saying—and darning. “We have fresh milk . . . ?”

“If you have anything stronger . . . ?” he ventured.

“I’m afraid that—”

“There’s brandy—in the medicine chest,” Mr. Simpson said. “Brandy would be fine.”

“Sarah, go get it.”

They stared while he poured all their brandy into a tumbler, which it half filled, and then drank it like water.

“We’re prohibitionists here,” Mr. Simpson smiled. “More or less. I don’t suppose you’d care to say anything about—where you came from?” He saw Kit’s immense shudder. “Likely not. What’s
that,
now!”

He rose, grabbed the shotgun and went to the door. The sound of a big truck grinding up the driveway grew louder and louder. Then it stopped on shrill brakes and many men’s voices filled the night.

The door knocked.

The farmer unlocked it, on the chain. “Who’s there?”

They shot him through the head.

The front windows kicked in.

In a trance of horror, Kit watched the men enter. Two—then four or five—then a dozen.

They were grinning a little. They were drunk. They were the kind of men who wear caps and work in alleys. They eyed the girls with joy.

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.

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—?”