She laughed at him again, an echo of last night's wild laughter which had burned his ears, made him ashamed of himself. “I'm nineteen… and I could be a nice mascot.”
“Hell's fire, you'd have the army on its ear and I'd be in the guardhouse for life. If you want to do something, the Red Cross people could put you to work.”
“I don't want the Red Cross people,” she snapped at him peevishly, “I want you.”
He flicked away his half-smoked cigarette. “Tough, sister. The army saw me first.”
“Russell…” She turned to him, easily forcing the tears into her eyes. “Russell, supposing I'm in trouble?”
He eyed her silently, contemptuously.
“Well,” she wavered, “I was only supposing…”
“You can get out and walk any time you want to, Irma.”
“I won't talk about it any more, Russell. I promise. Russell… will you really leave me?”
“I haven't any choice. When I meet up with the army, we say good-bye.”
She settled back in the seat as he started the car. “All right, Russell.”
“We'll try Chicago first.”
They did not drive into Chicago. Gary drove near the metropolis, moving slowly and incredulously through the small fringe-area towns which infest every major highway leading into the city. He was turned back by the fire and the smell of death borne on the night wind. The wind whipped the odor south, to where he finally stopped the car on the highway and got out to stare at the flames in the night sky. The fire had evidently been burning for days and now it was eating rapidly toward them, pushed on by the torrid winds. The unholy red glow of it stretched from one horizon to the other, indicative of methodical and widespread bombardment, making the city a vast crematorium. Chicago: bottleneck and major target, terminus of every railroad north of Saint Louis, possessor of the only waterway connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi and the Gulf, headquarters of a vast defensive ring designed to protect the nation from invasion from the north. Chicago: obsolete now in the strictest sense.
Gary clung to the car door and stared at the fiery spectacle in the sky, unable even to utter the curse on his tongue. It shocked him as that first city never had.
“Russell…” the girl inched toward him on the Seat, staring forward through the windshield. “Russell, isn't it dangerous? If atom bombs did that, isn't is dangerous for us to be here?”
He shook his head. “I don't know. The radiation is supposed to disappear after a few days… but I don't know. Mother of Moses! What they must have poured on that place!” He had read descriptions, had seen the army films of the destruction caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki… and as he remembered it, something like sixty percent of the cities were obliterated and over a hundred thousand had died in those two places. One bomb on each city. And Chicago with a population of almost four million had quite apparently received many direct hits.
“Let's leave, Russell. I'm afraid.”
He slowly turned the car around, staring first through the open window and then in the rear-vision mirror at the towering flames. Driving south again, away from the vanishing city, he couldn't help from turning his head to look behind. The glow persisted, hung in the sky after they had traveled many miles. It left him with a deep sense of despair that he could not shake off, plunged him into a mood and a silence so deep that the girl was forced to speak twice to make herself heard.
“Russell! I said, where shall we sleep?”
“I don't know. Anywhere.”
“We passed some motor courts.”
“I'm not turning around. Find another one.”
Sunrise the following morning was no better than the two previous dawns, no different from those other two unpleasant awakenings to a changed world. He rolled his head on the twisted pillow, trying to clear away the ghastly memory of the burning city. The image of the flames persisted and he found himself wondering if anything alive still moved in Chicago's streets, wondering what it would be like to be in their shoes. The picture would not erase itself. He had gone to sleep with the fire burning fitfully behind his eyelids, had dreamed of it, talked aloud of it in the night, and awakened in the morning with the red sky still fresh in his mind. It shouldn't be! Chicago was different from those cities in Europe, big and little cities that had undergone brutal destruction from the skies. Chicago was
Chicago hurt him.
He arose and dressed, ignoring the sleeping girl, to walk outside and scan the sky.
Gary turned the car west toward the Mississippi.
His reasoning was that the east was dead or deserted like the towns they had driven through, that the large cities crowding the eastern sections of the country must by now be only counterparts of the death and silence they found everywhere. Or else they were like Chicago. Deeper in the west there was more room, more space, and cities were greater distances apart. The place to find sane, living people, to find the army was somewhere in the west. He filled the gas tank from an abandoned station and started.
The countryside they traversed was the same as the day before, the road and the few people unchanged from the previous unfriendly attitudes. Disaster had overtaken the nation and strangers were regarded with open Suspicion. Occasionally Gary discovered an isolated farmer still working his fields, and more often a few men and boys hovering close to their farm buildings with shotguns very much in evidence. Some few farmhouses were silent with an air of desertion, while one had burned to the ground, smoking embers the only remaining trace of it. The small towns and villages along the highway were fast becoming islands of feudalism.
Some, like the farms, were empty, the population having gone elsewhere. Others only appeared to be empty as the automobile passed the length of the one, long main street. Gary saw signs of unfriendly people behind the curtained windows, the closed doors. Storekeepers were armed. And in one a heavily armed delegation met him at the village limits, stopped him. He explained his mission, his desired destination, and showed them the army identification tags hanging about his neck. After a while they allowed him to proceed through the village, one of the armed townsmen riding in the back seat to make certain they did not stop. The man had no news to offer, apparently knew no more of the general situation that Gary had already discovered for himself.
The airwaves remained dead.
In a town near the river he had his first piece of luck. Some country printer had issued a newspaper, a small and hastily assembled two-page journal turned out on a flat-bed press. The newspaper had cost him a half dollar and an unending series of questions shot at him by the printer — questions which revealed the sources of the news stories in the sheet. With the radio silent, the mails unmoving and the wire services long dead, the printer had obtained his news from travelers such as they.
It wasn't much, and much of it wasn't news.
Chicago was treated in some detail because its nearness made it important and because a local family had attempted to reach it, seeking relatives. Every city of respectable size in that area had been bombed, bombed by some mysterious enemy — speculations all pointed at one enemy but no one knew for a certainty. The survivors of those cities were pillaging farms and towns and many of them had been shot. There were not many survivors — Chicago and Peoria had died under atomic bombs, but the other cities had been hit by something else, something unknown, like a gas that killed as it spread. Sometimes the survivors of those cities had wandered into the country to die later; they apparently carried the death with them, living a few days longer only because they were physically able to withstand the original treatment.
When he could, Gary put a question to the printer.
The old man stared at him. “The army? Yeah, the army's out there.” He pointed westward. “My son saw ’em.”
“Where?”
“T'other side of the river.”
“Thanks — I've got to get going.”
The old fellow shook his head. “Can't get across.”
“No? Why not?”
“Blowed up the bridge.” He related the cold facts.
“I'll get across!”
