Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

Jim said, or began to say, loudly and to all, but with a still-unconvinced tone, “Maybe we should do like they told us—duck—”

The blast wave struck. The Williams house, more than a thousand yards nearer the place of the fireball than the sturdier Conner home, had its top floor mashed as by a mallet. The windows screamed into the room. And that year they were double; Jim had put on storm windows. Don’s hand was amputated. Jim lost much of his face; it became scarlet stew. All the children fell, bleeding. But Irma, the baby, being kissed by her anxious mother, received a pound of glass in her back and lungs; she was tom almost apart.

Ruth was not hurt at all—the baby having shielded her—not hurt at all, physically.

Kit Sloan, on his way home from the River City Athletic Club, was in a temper even before the sirens started. The seasonal parties, dances, balls and festivities had given him an alcoholic nervousness. He’d decided that day to play squash early, get his rubdown, and come home to dress in time to make it over to the Ritz-Hadley for the Emerson cocktail thing.

But his customary opponents hadn’t been on hand. There was a rumor going, about an air-raid drill; and the three best players in the club, Green Prairie men, were in Civil Defense.

He’d been obliged to bat balls around by himself for an hour, curtly refusing to “give a game” to inferior challengers.

His cabinet bath, plunge and rub after the disappointment had failed to restore his well-being. So he drove vexedly in the Christmas crowds. It wasn’t far from the club to Pearson Square, but the waits for lights, the bumper-to-bumper pace between lights, made it seem a long way.

When at last he reached the southeast corner of the square, he saw that traffic along the south side was so badly jammed he decided it would be quicker to run the Jaguar beyond the side opposite, cut through an alley, and drive across the interior park itself, on a paved path meant for hikes and baby carriages. He doubted if the cops would bother him; he’d done it before, as a gag, at night. He figured he could blast a hole in the stalled traffic with his horn, thus getting into the Sloan driveway long before the log jam could be broken.

The decision saved him from swift death.

The siren caught him in the alley. He had to wait even there for three huge trucks, unloading behind the supermarket, to disentangle themselves and move down to the square. He followed. By then, a group of teen-age boys, attracted by the red car, were begging him to give them a ride. He ground up his windows in fury.

When the Light came, he didn’t think at all. He shot to the Boor of the car and covered his head with his arms: whatever it was, it was that kind of thing—a war kind, deadly. His reflexes so interpreted it. The blast followed.

The supermarket behind him disintegrated. The three-story brick houses beside him turned into brick piles. The cars and trucks across the square were pushed, lifted, rolled, skidded, mauled.

He did not see that; bricks roared down upon his car, bricks mounded in front of it, barricading the view; bricks buried his car. He lay in sudden dark and the choking dust of mortar.

People in the winter-locked square felt the heat of the bomb first. Their clothes smoldered, flamed. They screamed and fell. They wallowed and writhed. Yet a worse thing had befallen them in that chip of time: from the fireball which towered and expanded hideously in the near distance, they soaked up neutrons and gamma rays and were dead although to themselves alive-seeming still. The rays pierced every truck, every car, the thick wood, the thin steel, and the men and the women and the children inside, though they should live awhile, were doomed. Many perished then and there of blast and concussion and bashing; the rest, who thought they had escaped, were left with only a little while to live.

Trapped, hardly sensing as a special phenomenon the blast itself, Kit picked at the split glass of a window in his car. Bricks fell in on him but the illumination increased. Frantically, he pulled in more bricks. By and by he had a hole through which he could worm his way, hands first, tossing bricks aside.

Behind, he saw the supermarket. Smoking. Here and there, in the no-man’s-land look of it, things moved. He faced around and gazed up. The mushroom cloud, boiling with what seemed cubic miles of colored fires, was spreading out. Its edge was even with the far corner of the square.

The houses near by were shattered, some smashed Hat. His: own, he could see, across the empty square and the lawns—where trees lay prostrate, their boughs still heaving—was wrecked.

Why, he wondered, was the square so empty? Then he looked again and saw the bundles of clothing, the blackened things, the charred people, the dead and the still-moving dead.

His horror mounted. He heard bricks slide and scrambled away from the buried wreck of his car. He decided he would have to walk across the square. Have to.

It was hard going. Things—just things—had dropped into the place—and, he soon realized, things were raining from the hot, spreading cloud. Part of a piano fell down and then a dead pooch hit and rolled and something like a stove lid rang on the hot asphalt. He entered the park. People were opening the doors of cars, hanging out, gasping. The ones on the ground were black. Or red. Or both. With holes, meaning mouths.

A woman in what he first thought was a red sweater, vomited, sitting up straight in her car, vomited all over her own windshield. A man got out of a car that was upside down. He fell and didn’t rise.

A door in a house opened and another man came out. A short, broad-chested man. He said something like, “Owowow-owowowowowo,” and began to run down the sidewalk, toward Kit, who stepped aside. Between the sounds he emitted, the man clicked as he ran. Every step, Kit saw, left a blood-gob on the flagstones. He saw the reason. Both the man’s feet were gone and he was running on the ends of his shinbones. That was why he seemed so short. He went a good ways, perhaps a quarter of a block, with his arms up and his fists doubled, like a track runner, and then he fell.

Kit thought of not going to his house, of going in the other direction, away from the expanding cloud. It was darkening the sky now. It looked exactly like the Technicolor newsreel shots; a bit darker, perhaps.

He began to trot. He slipped on somebody’s blood, recovered and hurried. A young woman, a pretty young woman with bright blue eyes and blonde hair sat up, right in front of him.

He halted, mouth open. “Mister,” she said, “will you help me get on my feet?”

He tried to. But when he reached down for where her arm should have been he felt gritty pulp and looked and it was just coming through her coat sleeve. She saw it, too, and screamed; he could hear her screaming all the way to his own lawn.

He went around the house once. It was on fire in several places. There was no sign of life.

He wasn’t even sure his mother had been at home anyway. She’d said something about having to shop.

To shop.

He spun around. From the heart of the city, a great smoke was rising. Beneath it, lighting its base, was fire. Somewhere he’d read that, in twenty minutes, the fire storm would come. The whole center of the city. You had at least twenty minutes to get clear, but then the temperatures rose with the holocaust. To six thousand degrees.

He thought, desperately, of a car. He rushed to the garage. Its second floor had fallen down and over the four great doors. There’d been a car under the porte-cochere. He ran there. It was burning. Had to get out. Twenty minutes. He must have wasted ten already.

He went fleetly north across the square, through its park, noticing nothing this time, sliding and getting his balance without looking, stepping on stones, boards, bricks, soft things—