Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

No such thing happened. The curved walls closed over her head, at a point about half again as high as she was. The darkness thickened, deepened, and the echoing sound of her arctic-shod feet came back in a muffled fashion from the distances. She looked back. The light from Broad was dim and far behind. A sense of compression, and with it a gnawing anxiousness, began to replace her eager determination. Still she went on, and steadily she lost the confidence that her progress had established.

Suppose, she thought, it suddenly drops. She went ahead cautiously after that notion, feeling with her foot before she stepped.

Traffic bumbled and shook the place. She put a hand out, touched the damp side of the tube, moved slower, slower. The tunnel was curving now, but the curve was so gradual that she could not discern it in the dark. She did not notice any change until she looked back-for the wan comfort of the distant light—and saw it had vanished.

Panic touched her for the first time.

Yet it was not absolute panic. Had it been, she would have turned, fled whence she had come, screaming, perhaps. Instead, she stopped, shivered, and listened to her own hard breathing.

By an act of will, of self-scolding, she brought hack a measure of composure. Surely, she thought, it would be shorter to go ahead than the long way back to Broad Street. She admitted she was scared, which helped. And she determined to come out at the very next manhole. No more sewer-walking for her.

She had gone perhaps another hundred feet when two things happened simultaneously.

She became conscious of light, dim and somehow different, up ahead. It showed the tubular walls faintly. The bend was also disclosed, and Nora realized why she had lost the Broad Street light to view. But, at the same time, the geography of the city below Broad leaped into her mind: River Avenue slanted straight through Restland Cemetery before it reached Washington and she, presumably, was under the graveyard right here! The thought caused her flesh to prickle and a sprinkling sweat to burst out on her body. She felt too weak to move, too scared to scream, and yet unwilling to slide down into the trickling water that marked the exact bottom of the great pipe.

But she felt the dead all around her, not reckoning that the sewer had curved for the very purpose of avoiding the graveyard. She also saw the light ahead was not the white glaze of day, but yellowish, and it seemed to flicker .

Then, as her horror mounted, she heard voices.

Nora screamed.

She screamed repeatedly and the voices were still. She, also, listened, and screamed again. For she heard ghostly feet running and the yellowish glow began to waver.

The dead, disturbed, were coming for her.

Civil Defense headquarters for Green Prairie had been originally located in the midtown area, near City Hall. Its transference to an old high school building, on the east side of town, had followed the gradual realization that, if Civil Defense were taken earnestly, it followed that the midtown area was no place for headquarters: it would constitute the target area of any enemy attack. The present headquarters, unused by pupils after the construction of East High School, was a yellow brick structure set back from the intersection of Willowgrove and Adams.

Henry drove around the corner and into the parking yard on chattering tires. Other cars were ahead, others behind, and cars were waiting in line for space.

“Why don’t I drive on home and get my set going?” Ted asked.

“You’re too young to…” Henry grunted and turned from the line. “Take it home, son,” he said gently. “And go easy, because if the cops pick you up, we won’t have any communications at all. I’ll hitch a ride from here to the South School to assemble my section. If you can, lemme know when the folks get home.”

Henry said that over his shoulder. Men were running, like himself, into the school building. A few spoke his name. One or two called, “Know anything?”

Then they were in the lobby, at the place where they’d learned in the many drills that sector wardens were to report, if possible in person, otherwise by proxy, in emergency.

Douglas McVeigh was standing at the top of the steps on something—a table, maybe. Men and women ran in, saw him and either ran on to their posts because they belonged in H.Q., or stopped for orders.

That plan was working, Henry observed. Thirty or forty volunteers had gathered where McVeigh stood above them in as many, or as few, seconds.

“All personnel to their posts,” McVeigh was saying as Henry rushed in and was recognized. “Hi, there, Hank.”

“How”—Hank struggled to phrase the burning question in every mind—“how authentic is it, Doug?” He realized, as he spoke, he needn’t have doubted any longer. Doug McVeigh was stone grim, for all the ease with which he spoke, waved, nodded. He was using every ounce of his Scotch steel to hold himself that way: easy-seeming.

McVeigh glanced around, waited for a half-dozen new arrivals. “This is it, folks. A very large flight of long-range bombers is somewhere over Canada, right now.”

A woman began to cry audibly.

“No time for that!” McVeigh said shortly. “Get going, everybody!”

“Thank God we’re only a Class-Two Target Area,” a man beside Henry said. Henry raised his voice. “Who’s for South School? Henry Conner here. Need fast transportation!”

“Come on, Hank.” Luke Walters ran through the growing crowd in the lobby. “Mollie and I were notified at the store.”

Hank was driven from the school yard toward Willowgrove at breakneck speed, in spite of Mrs. Walters’s angry protests, by the excited owner of Green Prairie’s largest stationery store.

“What about your clerks?” Henry asked.

“Eh?” Luke was somewhat deaf.

“In your store? The clerks? They okay?”

“Man—I left ’em! Didn’t say a word. Condition Yellow means we gotta streak. But not a general alert. Right ?”

“Yeah. You fix up the store cellar, the way we recommended?”

Luke hated to have his driving interfered with by talk. And it was difficult driving: Willowgrove seemed to be filled, suddenly, with people who were trying to lose their lives—people going too fast, in both directions.

They made it safely, somewhat to Hank’s surprise, to his sector H.Q. Cars were assembling there, too, and people, moving quickly, were streaming into the building like ants, taking the places they had learned to take through the years.

Hank went to the principal’s office, shucked off his coat as he began giving orders, skimmed his hat at the rack and sat down. He rang a special number and reported himself at his post, his checkers at work, his people arriving in good numbers.

At the Walnut Street house, Ted drew up, his heart hammering and his ears crimson from the cold. It had been some drive, the way everyone was traveling. Looked as if quite a few were already making for the country. So it was evident that “security” about Condition Yellow was being partly violated.

He parked the car face out, in the drive, as it should be in a time of emergency. He was panting a little as he bounded up the porch steps: he’d never driven a car that far before, or anywhere near that fast—sixty, on one stretch.

Then he remembered that nobody had thought to give him a key. He couldn’t get in without breaking something.

He chose a front window because it was handiest. The glass shattered; he reached in… the lock turned.

He ran up both Bights of stairs, threw himself into the broken swivel chair at his work table, clapped phones on his head and started to pull switches, turn dials.