Fallout

9

It was a party of sorts-a going-away party. It wasn’t a big party. Marian Staley hadn’t made or wanted to make friends at Camp Nowhere. Most of the people stuck there, and the people in charge of the people stuck there, weren’t people she would have cared to have anything to do with in normal times.

But she’d known Fayvl Tabakman before, back when there still were such things as normal times. The two of them shared a bond, too, a bond of loss and disaster. It was a negative bond, yes, but no less real for that. And Fayvl’s cronies, Yitzkhak and Moishe, also understood loss and disaster from the inside out.

Moishe produced what looked like a wine bottle. After he swigged from it, though, he passed it to Marian with the warning, “Drink-but go easy.”

She did, with the caution he’d advised. She didn’t worry about drinking from a bottle someone else had used the way she would have before normal times vanished in fire and destruction. Even so, when she swallowed she wondered if she’d downed a lit Bunsen burner.

“Wow!” she said once speech returned to her charred vocal cords. “That’s-strong.”

“Uh-huh.” The middle-aged Jew from-from Minsk, that was where he’d grown up-nodded. “Pretty good samogon. How you say in English samogon?”

“Moonshine,” Fayvl said. He had a knock himself, then passed the bottle to Yitzkhak. “Yes, not bad.”

“Moonshine.” Moishe thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. He was one of those people who needed to be right all the time and got furious at himself when he wasn’t.

Yitzkhak also drank. He raised the bottle in salute to Marian. “Here’s to going from Camp Nowhere to somewhere that’s alevai somewhere.”

“Thanks.” She took the bottle. She had to drink to that. She didn’t think it was exactly moonshine-to her, that meant raw whiskey. This stuff was more like brandy, even if it had started life as Welch’s grape juice. The second sip didn’t burn so much. Maybe her gullet was stunned.

“We’ll miss you. I’ll miss you,” Fayvl said as he also drank again.

Moishe and Yitzkhak nodded. She didn’t think they meant it the same way the cobbler did. He was sweet on her. She would have laughed at that before Bill died. Now-who could say? People needed people, and not all the combinations that wound up working were the obvious ones.

“How come I don’t get any of that?” Linda asked as the grown-ups passed the bottle back and forth.

Fayvl, Yitzkhak, and Moishe laughed. After a second, so did Marian. “It’s booze, honey,” she explained.

“Oh,” Linda said, and then, “Yuck!”

“Before the war started, she kept after Bill to give her a sip of beer,” Marian said. “Finally, he let her have some. She tasted it and she looked at him and asked, ‘Am I poisoned?’?”

The three survivors of the worst the Old World could do laughed again. “I been poisoned on beer sometimes,” Fayvl said, miming a deadly headache.

“Yuck!” Linda said again, this time because of his expression.

Yitzkhak asked, “So what you will do, now you get out of this place?”

“Oh, Lord, I don’t know. Pick up the pieces. Try to find a job.” Marian didn’t mention that she’d already had to spend money to get the Studebaker running again. Tires, battery, spark plugs, oil…Nothing came cheap. She did her best not to think about that. “Whatever it is, I’ll be doing it out in freedom, not-here.”

“Freedom,” Fayvl echoed wistfully. “Freedom is wonderful.”

“Freedom is hard to find, is what freedom is,” Moishe said. “Used to be some here. How much is left in the middle of a stupid war? Well, who knows?”

Marian had heard stories that also made her wonder. After the A-bombs fell, the West Coast and some inland states where the governor and legislature got killed went under martial law, or something as close to it as made no difference.

In a way, it made sense. The military and the National Guard had lots of members. They had organization and discipline. And they had guns. If you needed to govern areas where civilian administration had literally gone up in smoke, where else would you turn?

That was fine for the short term. But as the short term grew longer, then what? How did you unfry and unscramble the egg? How did you get civilian government going again? How did you persuade the military to let go of the reins?

Those were all interesting questions. Marian had answers to none of them. “I’ll just have to see what it’s like and how things work out, that’s all,” she said.

Pretty soon, the bottle was empty. Marian’s head spun; she was glad she wasn’t leaving till tomorrow morning. Welcome to freedom! You’re under arrest for driving drunk! That wouldn’t be the way to celebrate getting away from the refugee camp, would it?

She’d drunk less than any of the men, too. Yitzkhak lit a cigarette. With all the potent booze he’d put down, she marveled he didn’t burst into flames. “So long. Good luck,” he said, and ambled away. It was also a wonder he didn’t stagger or fall, but he didn’t.

Neither did Moishe. “Keep your eyes open. Americans, they trust too much,” he said. That struck her as making good sense. Whether it would when she was sober…she’d see. Moishe also went off, under his own power and steady enough for all practical purposes.

That left Fayvl. He fiddled with the skin at the end of a fingernail. “You take care of yourself and your little girl, your oytser, here,” he said.

“I will,” Marian answered quietly. “I’ll do my best, anyway.”

“All you can do is all you can do. I tell myself that a lot. Sometimes almost I believe it for a little while.” Tabakman’s eyes were a million miles and a million years away. He shook himself like a retriever coming out of a cold lake. “You need anything, you have any kind trouble, you get hold of me, hear? I help you any way I can, promise.”

“Thank you.” Marian didn’t know what he could do. Maybe he didn’t know himself. She did believe he would try.

“Well, I should ought to go.” He touched a finger to his cloth cap, first at her, then at Linda. After that, he heaved himself to his feet. Like his friends, he moved better than he had any business doing. He looked back once, but only for a second.

“He’s a funny man,” Linda said.

“Is he?” To Marian, Fayvl Tabakman was about the least funny man she’d ever met. “Why do you think so?”

“Because he’s sad all the time, only he doesn’t want anybody to know,” Linda answered.

Marian gaped at her daughter. Out of the mouths of babes, she thought. She couldn’t have summed up Fayvl any better in one sentence herself if she’d tried for a week.

The next morning, she and Linda set out, going up the gravel road down which trucks brought supplies into Camp Nowhere. The camp had sprung up in what was a meadow. It was where people in Everett had clumped together after the Russian bomb went off.

Eventually, the gravel road ran into a real paved one. After a while, she came to Snohomish. It also showed damage from the bomb. She kept on driving south, sticking to roads that stayed well inland. If she veered back to the coast, she’d end up in Seattle, and Seattle was the last place she wanted to be.

She and Linda stopped for lunch at a roadside diner. She ordered a BLT. Linda had a kid’s hamburger and French fries. “This is yummy!” she said. And so it was. Ordinary food in an ordinary place seemed wonderful when you’d got used to the slop they served up at the refugee camp. Marian did have to remind herself to pay before she left. She hadn’t needed to think about that for a while. But you got what you paid for, sure as hell.

–

“This is Moscow speaking.” The voice came out of a speaker mounted on a wooden pole in front of the government building in what passed for Smidovich’s town square. Vasili Yasevich and a few other people paused to listen to the news.

“Moo!” one of the men said. Everybody who heard him chuckled. This broadcaster’s southern accent did make him sound something like a cow. From things Vasili had heard, Radio Moscow no longer originated in the city it claimed as its own. And the newsreader had replaced another man who’d sat in that seat for a long time.

If you were a Russian, you already knew that-knew it and took it for granted. No, you did if you were a Soviet citizen. Vasili was as Russian as anybody in Smidovich-more Russian than the Jews and slant-eyed natives who shared the place with people like him. But he was having to learn how to be Soviet as he went along.

“In its valiant assistance to the forces of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army continues to storm forward against the American imperialists and their lackeys in Korea,” the newsreader said. “Backing up its allies, the Soviet Long-Range Bomber Force, part of the ever-victorious Red Air Force, had previously punished the reactionary running dogs with doses of atomic fire.”

“Good. That’s very good,” the fellow beside Vasili muttered, to himself but intending to be heard by others. Vasili was used to news with a lot of propaganda stirred in-both the Japanese who ran Manchukuo and the Red Chinese who took over from them had seasoned the stew that way. But Stalin’s workers’ paradise used more than even he could stomach.

After two coughs, Roman Amfiteatrov murmured, “Please excuse me.” Then he went back to the news: “In Western Europe, progressive forces headed by that vanguard of proletarian triumph, the glorious Red Army, continue to regroup after the vicious and cruel onslaught staged by Truman’s clique of rabid capitalist hyenas. The advance is expected to resume in short order.”

When Stalin dropped A-bombs on Korea, that was patriotic and heroic. When Truman dropped them on Germany, that was vicious and cruel. Vasili was cynical enough to doubt that the American radio reporters saw things the same way. He did wonder how many of these Soviet citizens doubted as he did.

He wondered that for a little while, anyhow. Then he saw Grigory Papanin strutting along without a care in the world-and without any of his tough-guy henchmen. Vasili forgot about the mooing voice coming out of the speaker. As unobtrusively as he could, he followed Papanin. If the son of a bitch thought he could tell Vasili how to work, pretty soon he’d decide he could horn in on the money Vasili made, too.

Sure as the devil, Papanin figured he was the biggest turd in this little town. He might have been, till Vasili got here. Now he’d find out he wasn’t any more. Or I’ll find out I’m in over my head, Vasili thought. With a shrug, he pushed that aside. Such doubts, unlike the ones about newsreaders, did you no good.

Papanin didn’t even look behind him as he took his one-man parade down a dirt street. He thought such arrogance was his by right. Vasili thought he was a jerk.

He gained ground on the bigger man as fast as he could while staying quiet. His right hand went into his jacket pocket-not for the straight razor, but for a knuckleduster he’d got from a white-bearded Jew as part payment when he put a new floor in the old man’s house.

He tapped Grigory Papanin on the right shoulder from behind with his left hand. “Huh?” Papanin said as he turned to see who dared bother him. His face changed when he recognized Vasili. “You-” he began.

“Yeah, me, dickface,” Vasili said, and hit him in the nose, as hard as he could, with the brass knuckles. Cartilage mashed under metal. Blood squirted. Grigory Papanin squealed like a bull calf when it was suddenly made into a steer. His hands flew to the wounded part.

Vasili did his best to turn Papanin into a steer, all right. His booted foot caught the other man square in the crotch. Papanin squealed again, on a higher note this time, and folded up like a concertina.

Another kick, this time in the pit of Papanin’s stomach. Had Vasili had such footwork all the time, he might have played forward for ChSKA Moscow or Dinamo Kiev. Papanin sagged down to the dusty street.

Nobody sprinted out of the shops and cabins to either side, screaming for Vasili to stop beating up that poor man. Nobody yelled for the militia to come arrest him. That silence told him everything he needed to know about how popular Grigory Papanin was in Smidovich.

Once Papanin went down, Vasili booted him in the ribs three or four times. He hoped he broke some of them. He thought he did. He didn’t believe in anything so stupid as a fair fight. He fought to win, and to teach a lesson the other guy would never forget.

Papanin was tough. Battered as he was, he tried to reach into his own jacket pocket for whatever equalizer he stashed there. Vasili stomped on his hand. Papanin screamed. Vasili plucked out the toy himself: a Tokarev automatic, Red Army issue.

“Naughty,” he said mildly. “Mine now-spoil of war.”

What Papanin called him then was a minor masterpiece of mat. Vasili gave him the critical acclaim it deserved: another kick in the ribs. He flipped his razor open and let the steel glitter.

“Now listen to me, you dumb pussy,” he said. “You fuck with me again, you try telling me how to run my business, next time you’re dead. Not just messed up-dead as your nose. I’ll gut you like a hog, too, and use you for sausage casings. You hear what I’m telling you?”

When Papanin didn’t answer fast enough, Vasili kicked him one more time. “I hear you,” the local choked out, and was noisily sick.

“Khorosho,” Vasili said, and then, “You’re disgusting, you know that?” Shaking his head, he walked away.

Papanin wouldn’t bother him for a while. He’d be weeks getting over what he’d walked into this morning. After that? He was tough, but how tough was he really? If he didn’t kill Vasili, he’d be dead himself. He had to see as much. He might leave bad enough alone. Vasili could hope so. If not, he’d deal with it.

As he walked back toward the center of Smidovich, a plump man came out of a shop that sold fur hats and mittens. He looked at Grigory Papanin, who was up on his hands and knees but not making any effort to get back on his feet. His eyes were wide as millstones as they swung back to Vasili. “You-did that?” he asked.

“I sure did,” Vasili answered. He hadn’t expected to come away with a pistol, but he wasn’t complaining.

“But-But-” The plump man groped for words. At last, he found some: “But he was the toughest guy in town.”

“Maybe he used to be,” Vasili said, “but he isn’t any more. I don’t like starting fights. If somebody else does, though, he’d better know I’ll finish them.”

“Bozhemoi! I guess so!” The man who sold fur hats looked at Papanin again. With puke and blood all over his face and with his nose mashed flat, he wasn’t an appetizing sight. “He’s lucky you didn’t finish him, though I’m not so sure he’d call it that right now.”

“If he leaves me alone, I’ll leave him alone, same as I would anybody else,” Vasili said. “If he doesn’t, it’s the last stupid stunt the fucker ever pulls.”

“Are they all like you in Khabarovsk?” the hat-seller asked-like most of the townsfolk, he’d already heard about Vasili’s story.

“Nah.” Vasili shook his head. “I’m one of the soft ones. Why do you think the Yankees bombed us?” He laughed out loud when the plump man crossed himself.

–

Aaron Finch used plenty of Mum before he put on his Blue Front shirt. “It won’t help,” he said resignedly. “A day like this, I’ll be shvitzing all over, not just under my arms.”

“So I’ll wash the shirt after you get home,” Ruth said. “I still don’t think this is as bad as St. Louis weather.” With her brothers and sister, she’d come out to Los Angeles when her mother and father died within months of each other right after the war. Aaron understood that. Staying where they were would have been like living in a haunted house.

“St. Louis never gets this hot,” he said, trying not to let her remember the bad times. “It’s supposed to be 105 today. Just what I want to do-shlep stoves and iceboxes and washing machines around.”

“But St. Louis is so muggy,” Ruth said with a twisted civic pride. “This is dry heat. It doesn’t feel as bad.”

“It gets past 105, it’s bad any which way,” Aaron said. He’d been in the black gang aboard a Liberty ship in the South Pacific, so he wasn’t a virgin when it came to heat and humidity. He did marvel that the L.A. area often got its hottest weather a week or two after fall officially started, but he’d seen before that that was how things worked around here.

“Well, come on to the kitchen and I’ll fix you breakfast.” Ruth didn’t have the relentless Finch urge to grab the last word. Aaron sure did; his brother Marvin had an even worse case. She was easier to get along with the way she was. He did wonder now and then how she put up with him. Sometimes, though, you just had to count your blessings.

Breakfast was two eggs fried in the grease from sausages, with buttered toast and jam and coffee. If you were going to shlep appliances, you needed some ballast in there. And a cigarette was extra nice after food.

Leon came out of the bedroom right before Aaron took off for work. He was carrying his Teddy bear. He’d got Bounce for his second birthday, and ever since had had to be forcibly separated from the bear. He would have taken it into the bathtub if Ruth had let him get away with it.

Stooping to kiss him, Aaron said, “See you tonight, Leon. I’ve got to go to Blue Front.”

Leon held out the Teddy bear. “Say bye-bye to Bounce.”

“So long, Bounce.” Aaron shook hands with the fuzzy plush toy. He was damned if he’d kiss it. Luckily, Leon seemed satisfied.

As soon as he went out the front door, Ruth locked it behind him. His hand went into the right front pocket of his gabardine work pants to pull out his keys. He was halfway down the concrete walk, the keys in his hand, before he looked up toward the old Nash parked in front of the house.

Except it wasn’t parked in front of the house. It was gone.

He looked up the street and down the street, as if he could have left it in front of some other house by mistake. He hadn’t, of course. Not only was it gone, it had had somebody else’s help in going.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. Glendale didn’t have any refugee camps, but it was full of people who’d fled north after the A-bomb hit downtown L.A. Some filled cheap hotels and roominghouses. Others slept in their cars or on bus benches or in the bushes in parks.

Some of them peddled whatever they had. Some did such odd jobs as they could find. Aaron didn’t look down his nose at those people; he’d lived that way himself during the Depression. Some of the women hustled, more because they had no other way to get money than because they wanted to.

And some people stole. Crime in town had zoomed up like a V-2 the past few months. If your choice was between going hungry or seeing your kids go hungry and lifting what didn’t belong to you, you’d steal, all right.

Shaking his head, Aaron turned around and went back to the house. “Daddy!” Leon said when he opened the door. He was gladder to see Aaron than Aaron was to be seen.

“What did you forget, honey?” Ruth asked.

“Gurnisht,” he answered. “Look out the front window. What don’t you see?”

She looked. For a second, it didn’t register, as it hadn’t with him. Then her hands flew to her face. “The car!”

“Right the first time,” he said. “You win sixteen dollars. Wanna try for thirty-two?”

“It’s not funny!”

“No kidding, it’s not.”

“What are you going to do?”

Aaron had been working that out for himself. He ticked things off on his fingers. “Call the boss, tell him I’ll be late. Call the cops. Get through the rest of the week somehow. If the car isn’t back by Friday, go buy one Friday night or Saturday morning.”

“We can’t afford it,” Ruth said, which was true.

“We can’t afford to be without one,” Aaron said, which was also true. He feared he’d never see the Nash again. Odds were it already sat in some shady garage, getting butchered for spare parts. With a sigh, he went on, “I’ll get something cheap, something where I can do a lot of the work myself.”

“Okay.” Ruth stopped. “No, it’s not okay. The nerve of that SOB!” That was about as close as she ever came to really cussing.

“Uh-huh.” Aaron went to the phone and dialed the Blue Front warehouse. He got the switchboard girl. “Hi, Lois, it’s Aaron. Put me through to Mr. Weissman, will you?”

“Hang on a second,” she said.

After a few clicks and pops, a man’s voice came on the line: “Weissman here.”

“Boss, it’s Aaron. I’m sorry, but I’ll be late today. Some mamzer went and swiped my car.”

“Gevalt!” Herschel Weissman said, which was just what Aaron was thinking. “Okay. Try and get in as soon as you can, will you? Looks like things are finally picking up a little.”

“Alevai omayn. I’ll do my best. Thanks. ’Bye.” Aaron reached for the phone book to find the number for the Glendale police. That one he didn’t have memorized. He got transferred to a sergeant in the robbery detail.

That worthy took his name and address and the car’s license number and description. Then he said, “Well, Mr. Finch, we’ll do the best we can.” His voice trailed away on the last few words.

“What do you think my chances are?” Aaron asked.

A pause. A sigh. “I’ll tell you, they aren’t great,” the sergeant said. “These stolen cars, most of the time they don’t get left on the street.” He figured the Nash was in one of those garages, too.

“Okay,” Aaron said, though it wasn’t. “Let me know if you find it, that’s all.” He hung up, then checked the phone book for another number.

“Now who are you calling?” Ruth asked.

“Yellow Cab.” Aaron didn’t even think about Glendale’s creaky bus system. It didn’t deserve thinking about, either. Nor did walking, not in weather like this, not when he was going to be doing hard physical work all day. Maybe tomorrow, if it cooled down some.

“You could call Marvin and Sarah,” Ruth suggested. “A cab’s expensive.”

“No, thanks. This won’t be too bad-it isn’t that far.” He dialed for the taxi. “Besides, a cab just costs me money. If I go and call Marvin, I guess he’ll be there, yeah.” Marvin often found himself “between projects,” as he put it. But…“He’ll cost me aggravation, though, and he never lets me forget when he does me a favor.”

The cabbie showed up ten minutes later. “Yeah, I know where Blue Front’s at,” he said when Aaron told him where he needed to go. He eyed Aaron’s shirt. “Looks like you know where it’s at real good.”

“You might say so,” Aaron answered. “I would’ve gone there on my own this morning, only somebody took off with my car.”

“Ouch! That stinks, buddy,” the cab driver said as he put his Plymouth in gear. “It’s all that riffraff from Los Angeles, is what it is. Them bums, they’d steal the paint off a stop sign if they could work out how to pry it loose.”

Aaron had come to the same conclusion himself. It sounded uglier the way the cabbie put it. Well, he couldn’t do anything about that. All he could do was lean back in the seat and let the other man get him to work.

–

Daisy Baxter found herself humming a silly love song as she cleaned the toilets after closing time at the Owl and Unicorn. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that. After thinking for a moment, she couldn’t remember ever doing it before.

She didn’t need long to figure out why she was humming it, either. Before, she’d been getting through the days one after another. What else were you supposed to do-what else could you possibly do-when, with the war as good as won, they told you your husband would never come home again?

She’d pulled into a shell after they told her Tom was dead, pulled in and done her best to close off the opening between herself and the outside world, the world of feeling. If she didn’t feel anything much at all, she wouldn’t have to feel quite so empty.

“I didn’t even know how empty I felt,” she said, as if someone standing behind her in the small, smelly space had claimed she did. But after a while, you didn’t just get used to something-or to nothing-you started taking it for granted without knowing you were.

One kiss from Bruce McNulty had changed all that. It had suddenly given her a standard of comparison. Before, she’d had only the emptiness. Now, she could see that caring about somebody else, and having somebody else care about you, was better than not.

She laughed at herself as she washed her hands with strong soap under the hottest water she could stand, and then did it again. Like Lady Macbeth, if for different reasons, she never felt she could get them clean. As she dried them, she laughed again. It all sounded like something out of a soppy, sentimental film.

But why did soppy, sentimental films so often turn out to be hits? Surely because they showed something people wanted to find in their own lives, even if they didn’t very often.

Daisy was walking up the stairs to the flat when the deep-throated rumble of bombers taking off from Sculthorpe made her stop and cock her head to listen. Even from two or three miles away, the noise could rattle her fillings. It surely woke some of the people in Fakenham lucky enough to have already gone to bed.

“Luck, Bruce,” she whispered. She didn’t know he was flying one of those Superfortresses, but that was the way to bet. And if he was, what kind of devastation did the big plane carry in its bomb bay? B-29s flying out of Sculthorpe had been striking targets in Eastern Europe-for all she knew, in Russia itself-since the early days of the war. She’d listened to McNulty and other pilots talking with a few, or more than a few, pints in them.

They talked more than they should have. Some of the stories they told chilled her blood. How could you do-that-to a city and sleep at night or look at yourself in a mirror afterwards? But then, most of these pilots had bombed Germany and Japan in the last war. They had bigger and more terrible bombs now, but how different was it in principle?

“Different enough,” she said, there on the stairs. She’d seen what the Russian A-bomb did to the outskirts of Norwich. The army and police made sure nobody from outside got closer than the outskirts. That told her what she hadn’t seen was bound to be worse than what she had.

One bomb. One city. That was all it took. One bomb had been plenty to rip the heart out of Paris. Norwich, smaller to begin with, was pretty much gone.

She cleaned her teeth and got into bed. It was still too early for her to need to huddle under blankets and quilts with a hot-water bottle at her feet. Her long flannel nightgown hadn’t changed, though. She smiled to herself as she got comfortable. One of these times, with Bruce, she might lie down on this bed wearing nothing at all.

She took that thought into sleep. Her dreams were warm, warm enough to wake her for a little while. But she soon slept again. Minding the pub would have worn out a mechanical man, let alone a flesh-and-blood woman.

In the wee small hours, she woke once more, this time from a dream full of howling dogs. The howling didn’t fade, though, after her eyes opened in the dark bedroom. It rose and fell, rose and fell, wailing like a damned soul.

“Oh, bloody hell! The air-raid siren!” Daisy said as she hopped out of bed and hurried for the stairs. The Russians had dropped that A-bomb on Norwich. And they’d struck Sculthorpe with ordinary high explosives-conventional bombs, people had taken to calling them, as if they were cozy and normal. Stalin’s flyers knew where the planes that tormented them came from, all right.

Now they were hitting Sculthorpe again, or the air-raid wardens thought they were. Daisy tried not to break her neck on the pitch-black stairs. If the Russians missed, or had to dump their bombs in a hurry because fighters were on their tails, some might come down on Fakenham. You wanted to be down in the cellar in case that happened.

As she went down there, jet engines screamed, seemingly right above the roof. Ordinary airplane motors were loud. Jets were ridiculous.

That was the last thought Daisy had before the world ended.

She was in the cellar, in a building with all the windows covered over by blackout curtains. The sudden glare was so savage, she wailed and clapped her hands over her eyes just the same. A few seconds later, the bricks and plaster shook and groaned, as if in an earthquake. She’d never felt an earthquake in her life, but this didn’t seem like anything else.

The Owl and Unicorn did more than shake. Things fell down and fell apart. Tinkling mixed with the rumble said the windows and the pint mugs and the mirror behind the bar were smashing themselves to hell and gone along with everything else in the place.

As soon as Daisy smelled the first whiff of smoke, she knew she had to get out of there right now. She’d bake if she stayed. She just prayed she wasn’t already too late.

Up the stairs she scrambled. That was the word, all right, because chunks of the smashed pub had fallen down them. Her bare feet took a beating. She didn’t care. A roof beam blocked the way up to the ground floor. She shoved it aside with panic-given strength. It wasn’t quite a mother lifting the front end of a motorcar off a trapped child, but it came close.

The stumbling dash across the floor tore up her feet even worse. She fell once or twice, too, when she tripped on overturned tables and chairs she couldn’t see-and on chunks of the ceiling and the first floor and the roof that had also come down. She was lucky (she supposed she was lucky) the whole thing hadn’t collapsed and trapped her down below.

A glimmer of light showed her a way out. It wasn’t the door; it was a rent in the front wall that ran from a corner of the window frame down to the ground. Afterwards, she never knew how she squeezed through it, but she did.

A brick fell down and smacked the sidewalk a few inches from her bleeding feet. She stumbled farther away from the shattered Owl and Unicorn. Would she ever be able to go back in there? Right this second, she didn’t give a damn.

High into the sky towered a mushroom cloud-not just high but higher, highest. She’d seen the one above slaughtered Norwich, of course, but that had been well off to the east, a safe thirty miles away. Nothing about this one seemed safe. She guessed that the bomb had burst right over Sculthorpe. Had it gone off a little east of the air base, nothing would have been left of Fakenham.

Not much was left of the small town as things were. By the hellish light from the cloud, she saw that at least half the buildings had fallen down. Other people were crawling out of the ruins, all of them bloody and battered-she realized she had to look bloody and battered, too. Some had useless, probably broken, arms and legs. And how much radiation had they taken?

For the time being, none of that mattered. People were screaming for help. Not everyone had got out, and the fires grew. Daisy started digging through the rubble, doing what she could.