Harry Turtledove: Fallout

“Gak,” Istvan said when he’d worked that through. “You make me want to cross myself, and I don’t even think it does any good.”

Sergeant Gergely cuffed him again, this time with a chuckle. “Cute, kike-cute,” he said. From his lips, the insult sounded almost affectionate. Szolovits had heard plenty worse from his alleged countrymen, anyhow.

–

Marian Staley dreamt about her large, comfortable house in Everett, Washington. She wandered from room to room to room-so many rooms, and all of them hers! The only thing wrong in the dream was that she couldn’t find Bill in any of those rooms. She kept wandering. Her husband couldn’t have gone very far…could he?

Her eyes opened. The house disappeared, swallowed up by wakefulness rather than the atomic fire that had really wrecked it. She lay curled up on the front seat of her Studebaker, where she’d slept every night since the A-bomb fell. Linda, her five-year-old, lay on the back seat. She was still small enough not to need to curl up to fit. She was also getting over a cold. Her snore would have done credit to somebody three times her age.

As for Bill, the waking Marian knew she could hunt from room to room forever without finding him. He’d been the copilot in a B-29 that went down over Russia. Marian didn’t know his plane was carrying an A-bomb, but she figured it must have been.

So here she and Linda were, living in the refugee camp outside of shattered Everett. Camp Nowhere, the inhabitants called it. Nobody used the official name, Seattle-Everett Refugee Encampment Number Three. Who would, when Camp Nowhere fit like such a glove?

There were other camps like this outside of Everett and Seattle. There were more on the outskirts of Portland, and around the San Francisco Bay, and in Los Angeles, and next door to Denver, and in Maine. Marian had no idea how many people they held, not to the nearest hundred thousand. She wondered whether anyone did.

She supposed there would be refugee camps in Russia, too, and in Red China, and in the European countries one side or the other had bombed. Those places wouldn’t be just like Camp Nowhere, though…or would they? The people in them might speak different languages and live under a different flag, but wouldn’t they be disgusted and bored and irritated, too? They were people, weren’t they? How could they be anything else?

It was getting light outside. Now that summer was arriving, sunup came early and sundown came late. Daylight here, almost as far north as you could go and stay in the USA, stretched like taffy in spring and summer. Marian liked that…when she had her house with all those rooms, and with curtains and windowshades on the windows. When you were sleeping in a Studebaker, all of a sudden these long days didn’t seem so wonderful any more.

The outlines of tents of every size and shape made dark silhouettes against the brightening eastern sky. Most people lived in one of those. Most people here had no car. Plenty of autos-the dark-painted ones-on Marian’s block had gone up in flames when the bomb fell. The Studebaker was bright yellow. It survived.

She wondered if it would start now. She had her doubts. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d turned the key. What was the point? She wasn’t going anywhere. She had nowhere to go. People with anywhere else to go didn’t wind up in places like Camp Nowhere.

When her stomach told her it was getting on toward breakfast time, she woke Linda. Her daughter was no more happy about getting up than any other little kid. “You’ve got to do it,” Marian said. “Potty and then food and then kindergarten.”

“Yuk!” Linda said. Marian didn’t know which of those she was condemning, or whether she meant all of them. Any which way, she sounded very sincere.

Sincerity, though, cut no ice with Marian. She made herself sound like a drill sergeant: “You heard me, kiddo. Get moving!”

Every once in a while, Linda would mutiny and need a smack on the behind to get her in gear. Marian didn’t like to do it. No doubt her folks hadn’t liked to spank her, either. But they had when she earned it, and now she did, too. She was glad it didn’t come to that this morning. Linda looked sullen, but she got out of the car with her mother.

Marian didn’t like the latrine tent any better than Linda did. The seats were just holes in plywood set above metal troughs with running water. Even those were an improvement on the slit trenches that had been here at first. Still no stalls. No privacy, not even when you had your period. And in spite of the running water, it smelled horrible.

Breakfast wasn’t wonderful, either. The choices were sludgy oatmeal or cornflakes and reconstituted powdered milk. The milk that went with the oatmeal was reconstituted, too. The milk Marian poured into her instant coffee (which reminded her of hot mud) was condensed. To her, it tasted like a tin can; before the bomb fell, she’d used half-and-half or real cream. The sugar, at least, was the McCoy. Linda slathered it on her cornflakes. Marian couldn’t cluck. Without it, they had all the flavor of soggy newspaper.

Fayvl Tabakman came into the refectory tent a few minutes after Marian and Linda sat down. The cobbler gravely touched a forefinger to the front of his old-style tweed cap. Marian nodded back. He was a familiar face; she’d gone to his little shop before the bomb hit. And he was a nice man.

He and his friends-also middle-aged Jews from Eastern Europe-never groused about the food or the latrines or the sleeping arrangements here. Tabakman had a number tattooed on his upper arm. After Auschwitz, Camp Nowhere had to seem like the Ritz by comparison.

“You are good, Marian?” he asked. Considering that he’d been in the country only a few years, he spoke excellent English.

“Yes, thanks,” she answered. He’d lost his whole family to the Nazis. Of all the people she knew, he best understood what she was going through now that Bill was dead. “How are you?”

He shrugged. “Still here.” She nodded; she knew what that meant, all right. But then Tabakman smiled. “How are you, Linda?”

“These are blucky cornflakes,” she said.

“Blucky.” He tasted the word-if that was what it was. Then he nodded. “Well, I would not be surprised. Now you will excuse me, I hope.” He lined up to get his own breakfast. Odds were it would be blucky, too, but not next to what the Master Race had fed him in Poland, when it bothered to feed him at all. From what he’d said, he’d been down to about ninety pounds when the last war ended. He wasn’t big, and he remained weedy, but at ninety pounds he would have been a walking skeleton.

The Germans, of course, had done their best to kill off the Jews and queers and Gypsies and other undesirables they shipped to Auschwitz and the other concentration camps they set up. The Americans were trying to keep the people in Camp Nowhere and the other refugee camps as comfortable and healthy as they could. Somebody like Fayvl Tabakman, with standards of comparison, had no trouble telling the difference.

To someone like Marian, who was used to a comfortable, middle-class life, this seemed much too much like a concentration camp.

It had started to drizzle while they were eating breakfast. Linda made theatrical noises of despair. Marian had lived in Washington long enough to take the rain in stride. She didn’t suppose real concentration camps had kindergartens. This one reminded her that people here were doing their best, not their worst.

Then four National Guardsmen in fatigues came by carrying a stretcher with a body on it. Definitely a body, not someone hurt-a towel covered the face. She’d seen that a lot in her earliest days here, as people died of radiation sickness and injuries from the bomb. She’d got a dose of radiation sickness herself, as had Linda, but luckily they were both mild cases. This might have been someone who’d lingered till now and then at last given up the ghost.