Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

The bomb had gone off nearly an hour ago. With demented clarity, Kit Sloan realized he had been running this way and that, trying to get distance between him and the great fire, without making much headway. He had turned his ankle twice and he was still going on it, but it was swelling. Sometimes he covered a block or two and then had to retrace his steps because of a rubble mass or, more often, a jam-packed shambles of human beings filling the street from wall to wall and headed away so slowly that he didn’t want to be impeded by them.

Foreigners, mostly.

Their area had not been annihilated, just set on fire here and there, mauled, dumped in its streets. So they were on the move, on the way out of town, Polaks and Hunkies and Latwicks, Yids and Guineas and Micks. Not many Nigs. He even thought, racing past a bleeding family, there was a reason for the dearth of shines in the stampeded mobs: Niggertown was right on Ground Zero.

Up until he reached Elk Drive, a wide concrete boulevard with the parkways between, a kind of insane logic governed his actions. He had to escape. His mother was dead, in the city or in the ruins of their house. So his responsibility was for himself alone. He had nobody else to save. The fire behind, the dead and dying around, the hideous condition of the hurt—these acted as spurs and goads. If he had been like many people, they would have driven him to less violent activity, to crazed stasis, perhaps.

He even knew that Elk Drive had been his first goal. On Elk, he could get a ride of some sort, steal a car, or even run on by himself, using the lawns and adjacent fields, to get out of town. Elk Drive was wide and roomy and the houses were set well back, out through the developments, clear to the open countryside. And Elk Drive led to the municipal airport. He could gas his own plane up, if need be, figure his own chances in the traffic pattern, take off without consulting the control tower, and fly until he found some neighboring city or town—

Omaha, KC, Oklahoma City, even a small place like Kaknee or Dennis or Elvers—where there had been no bomb, where no fire roared as high as the stratosphere, as massive as an Act of God.

Traffic was whizzing on Elk, using both sides of the parkways to go in one direction—away. The people on foot used either the middle strips or lawns, running or walking, and there were thousands. But, still, they moved—every man and woman and child at his own chosen pace. There was room enough.

He stepped into the yard of a house, the Whittaker home, he realized with a kind of infant’s pleasure at mere identification. He threw himself down, to pant and rest, watching the fire-struck masses surge west.

Then the plane came.

Fast and low.

In the dark, Kit wouldn’t have seen the markings if it hadn’t banked so as to catch the raw glare from downtown. That made the red stars plainly discernible on the wings. My Christ, he thought, Soviet.

A turbo-pro job.

For an instant, vainly, he watched the sky behind it, assuming an American jet had driven the enemy to earth. None came.

What came, soon enough, over the length of Elk Drive, over the people running in scattered thousands, over the whizzing cars and fast-lumbering trucks, was a swift polka-dotting of white in the plane’s wake. Parachutes, Kit realized. Little ones.

They opened and began to descend. He watched them drift down, drift his way, in wonderment. Soon, one came quite close overhead. He stood up with the idea of capturing it.

Then he heard, above the pandemonium on Elk Drive, a hissing beneath the chute and saw a shining metal canister. Too late, he perceived that a considerable cloud of wind-dispersed vapor was blasting from the canister, under pressure, as an insect bomb spews mist. The vapor from the falling chute surrounded him, dampened him. And at last he knew what it was. Others on the street, caught in the swirls of mist, also guessed.

“Germs!”

“Bacteria!”

“It’s disease war!”

A truck, driven by a man who must also have known, braked ferociously to avoid a settling, sizzling missile. Instantly, fifty cars crashed behind it. And the chutes came down over the lot, spraying the dead and the injured along with the unharmed.

Kit knew he had breathed the stuff. He knew he had licked his culture-moistened lips. He knew his clothes were damp with it. So he knew that the thing he had been trying to escape had overtaken him. He spat, vomited, discarded his jacket and trousers, wiped his face with a handkerchief till blood came.

But from then on, he did not have even a demented logic. No one had sanity, on Elk Drive, after the bacteria sprayed them.

Ruth Williams still carried her dead baby. Its insides had come through its back, slowly, as she walked, and finally they’d jiggled so loose and slack that she stepped on them now and again.

Jim came along behind her, his face clotted up in the cold, his hand on her back—because he couldn’t see. Behind Jim, holding onto a length of clothesline, came the rest of the family.

People who saw Ruth leading, walking, tripping a little, slipping now and again-for visibility was good in the torchy night—said things and were sick or they screamed, and Ruth always smiled a little at their discomfiture.

Finally, Ruth threw it away.

They went faster, afterward—through Ferndale, down the main street, past the broken windows of all the stores.

Beau was lost.

How he got so far downtown he never knew.

He remembered the railroad tracks, beyond Cold Spring. He remembered, because he almost got killed there. A train—mixed and covered with people like flies on flypaper—came around a bend, headlight shining, folks scattering ahead. Some got hit. The train gave a whistle blast and thundered by, out of the city, Beau guessed. Even so, he must have taken the wrong direction on the tracks afterward. It was hard to remember which way you’d faced, after you’d rolled down an embankment.

For a long time he didn’t identify the great pyre with direction. He had not tried to reason where the bomb had hit. He’d been in his cellar at the time—and the Light had merely been omnipresent, not directional, down there.

He was somewhere around the Simmons Park area, though, in Wickley Heights, he thought.

He stopped to take bearings.

“Quite a night,” he said aloud.

Netta’s dead, he thought.

There was a big apartment building, a swanky place, on this street, he noticed. Nobody around. Nobody at all. The wind was blowing and the street was warm, nonetheless. The building had broken windows, big ones, because the ground floor was for shops. He thought there might be a liquor store. He had lost his whisky bottle when he’d jumped out of the path of that goddamned wildcatting railroad locomotive.

He didn’t think it would get very far, going like that, with the rails probably spread here and there and debris on the tracks.

He walked along in front of the fire-illumined building, waded, rather, in deep glass that was slippery. All the street trees had been knocked over in neat rows pointing the same way.

He stopped.

It wasn’t a liquor store.

It was a jewelry store.

The big window was just a glass jaw, like a shark’s, that a man could step through. The glass counters were conveniently shattered. Inside, things glittered in the firelight, brighter than glass, and different colors.

Beau said dazedly, rather happily, “Well!”

He went in and picked up a bracelet and then a necklace.

“Well, well !” he murmured. He commenced to stuff his pockets, humming. He hummed,

“Happy days are here again….”