Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

indiscriminately.

All Nora knew, for sure, when the ground jumped, was that the atomic bomb must have hit.

They’d been in the subcellar, with candles, sitting in old, discarded chairs—Minerva and Willis and three maids and Jeff, the butler, and the gardener. All around them were racks of dusty wine bottles, barrels of wine and cases—the tissue paper around the bottles, mildewed.

They couldn’t have been sitting there, Nora thought, for more than a minute. Then the whole place jumped and the candles went out and it was like being on the Whipsaw ride at Swan Island, and the maids screamed, but not like amusement-park screaming.

Then—the air full of moldy-smelling dust.

And the maids were hollering their fool heads off.

Minerva, who’d been saying something about, “Going back up, if this absurd situation lasts any length of time…” had been shut up by the tremendous heave right there.

Nora’s chair slid on the bare earth floor. Barrels fell and bounced and rolled.

Then Willis, his old voice fierce, yelled, “Quiet!”

Peculiarly, Nora thought, the maids became silent.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” Willis asked.

Mrs. Sloan didn’t answer.

A match struck. Nora noticed how it shook, how the hands that held a candle wobbled with it. Whoever it was, the gardener, she thought, had trouble sticking it to one of the shelves that held wine bottles. The first thing Nora saw was the maids, hugging each other, pale as death.

The next thing she saw was a big wine barrel that wine was gurgling out of. Then she saw Mrs.

Sloan, underneath it.

“We’ll have to get out of here,” Willis said. “And get her out.”

“Better wait a bit,” the gardener answered.

“Wait—the devil! The building above us is probably on fire. Try the door.” Willis came over to the chair where Nora was sitting and smiled faintly. “You all right, Miss?”

“Fine,” Nora said and she pointed to Mrs. Sloan. “Her legs are pinned under.”

Willis nodded.

The maids began to whimper. He stood in front of them. “Stop that, everyone of you!” he said. He turned to the butler. “Jeff, tear off a shelf-board and bear a hand! We’ll have to prize that hogshead off her. If she’s living.”

Nora heard the butler yanking in the gloom. One of the maids went back there with him and returned first, carrying a two-by-four. From the door, which he’d opened, the gardener called, “Stairway’s kind of blocked and it does smell smoky-like.”

Willis was kneeling, listening to Mrs. Sloan’s heart.

Her eyes were shut.

Willis said, ‘Well, clear a way through somehow! There’s plenty of cellar exits. But just that one, up from here.”

Pretty soon, they had moved the barrel. The butler, whose name was at least Jeff, Nora thought, was looking at Mrs. Sloan’s legs, holding another lighted candle and pulling up her skirts in a most casual manner. “Busted—smashed,” the butler said. “Have to make a stretcher.

Some weight!”

From the door of the wine cellar, the gardener yelled, “We can get around this junk. But hurry! I hear it crackling up there!”

So they dragged Mrs. Sloan. The maids went first, though—they ran. And Nora was next to the gardener, who went last. As she followed the dragged woman, she saw Mrs. Sloan’s pocketbook on the floor underneath the place where she’d been lying. Nora took it along and nobody paid any attention.

“Hurry up, kid,” the butler said. That was all.

The cellar was half caved in and you could sec lines of fire, through cracks overhead. The smoke was awful. Nora ran past the men with their slow-moving burden to the square of outdoor light, and she raced up stone steps, gratefully, for she was at last outdoors. She hoped she was in time to see the mushroom cloud, and she eyed the sky eagerly, ignoring her smoke-induced cough.

She was in time. In plenty of time.

And she saw more. The whole city, to the south, seemed on fire. It was, she told herself, extremely spectacular. It was unforgettable. She took a good look so she would never forget.

Then, and only then, having done her civilized duty, she looked at the house. The great Victorian pile was also burning. Flames surged in the broken guts of the building and curled among the down-hammered slates of the roofs and the many gables. It was all afire. The car that had brought them was on fire.

Willis said, “And the garage is blocked.”

Jeff was eying the city. “Do you think…?”

“I hell-sure do! Gotta get out of here.”

“She should be in a hospital—”

“Right.” Willis glanced at Nora, at the gardener, and said, “Where’d the girls go?”

Nora reported. “Ran. Just ran.”

The chauffeur shrugged. “We’ll have to put her in a barrow, I guess, Jeff, and get her to the street. Maybe we can catch a lift—or borrow a parked car…”

Minerva Sloan overflowed the wheelbarrow, Nora noticed. Her head hung out and her legs hung out, and there was some blood on them but not much. The men had a very hard time pushing her. The ground was soft and there no longer was any snow—to Nora’s surprise. In the drive, though, it went easier. The gardener helped, too, taking the longest turn with the wheelbarrow.

It would be dark presently, Nora thought. The light, at the moment, was pinkish, as if a sunset had begun. But it was not a sunset at all and came from the south. It was the start of a fire storm, she knew.

When they reached the street, they stopped.

It was the first time Nora had got a good look at any dead people and now there were so many she could hardly decide which ones to look at first. They were mostly blackish, but some were scarlet and some had faces and bodies that looked exactly the way a steak looked when it caught on fire. And some, she saw, weren’t exactly dead, or completely dead. A few in cars were opening and closing their mouths or moving their arms feebly and one girl about Nora’s age kept bumping her head back and forth between the front and rear seats in a sedan. Some people in the park were crawling around and you could hear screams and groans, mostly from where some big store was crushed about Bat and the brick houses had caved in. It sounded like birds in the distance, the screaming, Nora thought: twittery and as if a big flock made it. Sparrows or starlings.

When they had all looked out over the square for a while and not said anything, the gardener turned around and stared with a peculiar expression at the mushroom cloud and the fire getting brighter underneath it and he just ran. He ran through the park in a zigzag and toward the west where, Nora realized finally, there was a big noise of other people yelling and raging around, though you couldn’t see them at that distance: just wreckage.

Jeff the butler, who was a tall man with large cords in his neck, looked at Willis and the chauffeur said, “Lost his head.”

“Shock,” Jeff answered.

Willis looked across the square as if he, too, would like to run; but then his eyes soon began to move along the row of cars which wasn’t exactly a row any more.

It was chilly now and getting dark quite fast. Nora had lost her hat but she never had taken off her woolly coat and she was glad of that. She tried to remember as much as she could of all she had heard at home, ever since she could remember anything, about atomic bombs. She realized that this one had gone off quite near, but she also realized she didn’t know how powerful it was or exactly how near. And she had to admit that, even if she’d known, she could only guess about the radioactivity.

She did recall, though, that people had put cars close to test bombs and they’d had their tops squdged down like some of those on the street, but people had started them right away.