Manhunt. Volume 9, Number 1, February 1961

The Alarmist by Donald Tothe

“Let them laugh,” he thought. “Let them laugh now, but they’ll be dead and I’ll be alive.” He dug furiously and each night his bomb shelter became deeper and- more impenetrable.

Ed Manson, the candlelight casting flickering shadows on his tousled, brown hair, listened to the sounds of many excited voices. They were the first voices he’d heard for two days and two nights.

“Ed, listen to me.” It was the irritated voice of Neil Nicholson. “Everything is o.k. Now, come out of there.” The voice was losing its patience, as it pleaded with the man in the dark, cellarlike room.

“Open the door, Mister Manson,” urged the quivering voice of the elderly spinster who lived two houses away.

His eyes formed narrow slits of distrust as he stared at the thin sheet of lead which covered the door leading from the house. There were, in addition to the indestructible-looking hasp and padlock, three formidable bars of steel spanning the door. This was the only entrance to the underground room.

He knew something like this would happen after an attack. They would all change into animals. They would try to break into his shelter — the only one on the block. Probably the only one within miles.

They would kill him for his uncontaminated food and water. That’s why he was ready for them.

“Who’s laughing now?” He demanded, semi-hysterically. “Let’s hear it! Aren’t you folks laughing anymore?”

“No, we’re not laughing, Ed.” Neil was the closest thing to a friend that he had. Neil was a foreman at the Magnesium Products Chemical factory a mile up the street. Ed dropped him off there every morning and picked him up on the way home. The Nicholsons had been his next-door neighbors for five years now. Being a single man, though, he’d never gotten too thick with them — he wasn’t too thick with anyone.

“Ed — you listening? The doctor is here.” Neil’s voice was different, somehow, as he tried to reason with his friend. “It wasn’t a bomb. It was an explosion at the lab. Now, open the door. We’re worried about you.”

Manson waved the high-powered rifle at the door as if they could see it. “Clear out! You’ll get no help from me,” he told them, bitterly. “You all had your chance — same as I did.”

He thought he could hear the shuffling of feet. Then the house above him was silent.

He stumbled away from the door and slumped on the cot. He tried the radio again — but only for an instant — until he remembered his stupidity.

Even with the sound-deadening bags of sand piled around the room, he felt the jar of a battering ram on the door. The cross-bars jiggled. The lead warped and buckled, ringing a short alarm.

He ran back to the door, cursing under his breath as he knocked over the ten-gallon pail which had taken the place of his toilet.

“Don’t do that again!” He shouted at them, desperately. “I’ve got a gun and I’ll start pumping bullets through the door.”

Neil laughed — a low, nervous laugh, barely loud enough to carry into the completely enclosed chamber.

“Take it easy, Ed old boy.” He talked as if to a child. “We’re just doing this for your own good.”

Ed could picture Neil shrugging his broad shoulders and turning up his palms as he lifted his arms to his sides. He could almost see the grin on Neil’s face — the same grin he had seen eight months ago.

Was it that long ago? It seemed like only last week that they were on their way to work when Ed disclosed his idea.

Neil had laughed, heartily. “A bomb shelter? You mean you’re going to build a shelter just because of that program on television?”

The literature from the local Civil Defense office had arrived two days later. It contained all the necessary instructions and plans.

Right from the time he began hauling in the lumber and bricks they laughed at him. At first, just giggles and amused expressions but later they laughed openly to his face.

There was no cellar or basement and he had decided on an underground shelter connected to the house. He also decided to build it himself.

He’d always been considered somewhat of an eccentric and now they were sure there was something strange about him as he dug in the yard until all hours of the night.

He seemed to work with a dreadful urgency. It took him nearly the whole summer to dig the gaping hole. It was a ten foot square and seven feet deep — as long as he was doing it he decided to make it comfortable.

He went a step farther than the pamphlets advised. After building up the eight-inch-thick concrete walls and ceiling he covered the interior with a thin layer of lead, after reading somewhere that it was an excellent shield against radiation.

Then against all the walls, piled to the ceiling, he placed sand bags. Covering one sand-bag-wall was a stack of shelves loaded with canned goods. Another smaller set of shelves was filled with books — he knew his worst enemy would be boredom.

By the time he completed the entrance from inside the house and attached the lead on the inside of the door the immediate usefulness of the shelter had become a foregone conclusion in the mind of Ed Manson. He read the ominous headlines and the pessimistic accounts of the disarmament talks. He saw right through the smoke-screen the Russians were sending up.

He read all the books on atomic warfare, particularly a prophetic novel about how atomic particles, after a nuclear war, were carried by the winds to every part of the earth. He believed the story. He was convinced of its inevitability!

By the time he had the walls of the room half-covered with sandbags his nightly sleep was already being interrupted by vividly horrible dreams of an atomic war.

By the time he had stocked the underground den of salvation with food enough for many months he found pangs of doomful premonition continually invading his innermost thoughts.

And indeed, by the time everything was in preparedness he found his mind saturated with visions of worldly disaster. Instead of a relaxing effect, the escape chamber had produced an everpresent aura of morbidity — a constant reminder that the earth was one large ball of atomic explosive with a short, highly inflammable fuse.

It happened on a Saturday night. He was in the living room, his head against the back of his chair, which faced away from the window. His eyes were closed. He was thinking about the bomb and its giant, ascending mushroom.

A loud thud in the distance! Then a rumble. The windows in the house shattered. He was lifted from the chair by a great, invisible hand.

He opened his eyes. The room was filled with brilliance.

Pure reflex action took over. He knew he musn’t turn and face the radiation. He ran from the room — through the kitchen to the door leading from the service porch, shielding his eyes as best he could.

He slammed the door behind him. Leaned against the cold metal for only a few seconds, his heart beating, wildly.

There was another explosion — more violent than the first. He felt the ground shake. He clutched at the door. He trembled in the darkness.

He stood, frozen, for what seemed like an hour. But only a minute passed.

His eyes were open but they saw nothing. Groping around in the dark his hands located the large candle. He was half-afraid to strike a match, convinced that the radiation had blinded him. But he felt no different — no burning sensations.

He struck a match and thanked God as the room lit up. He was alone with the slowly quivering flame.

The next explosion nearly toppled the book shelf. A horrible vision of the outside panic raced through his mind.

When everything was still again he went to the door, slid the steel bars over and fastened them in place. He pushed shut the padlock, sealing himself in and everyone else out. It served the stupid fools right — they’d been warned for years.

The portable radio failed to bring in the Konelrad stations — it was dead. He imagined things were pretty bad when there wasn’t even an emergency broadcast.

“How in the hell had they surprised us so?” He asked no one in particular.

The rest of the night was punctuated by wailing sirens, clanging bells, and the raucous blasts of frantic horns. At least there were other survivors.

Outwardly calm, he sealed off the major portion of his mind as he drank a cup of black coffee. It helped to loosen the lead-tight muscles of his stomach.

Surprisingly, he slept through the night.

The next morning he ate a hearty breakfast. He hadn’t depended on it but there was still gas coming through the pipes. He was supposed to have turned off the main valve — it was only one of the many things he had not done.

He spent the day reading and listening. It was much quieter than the night before.

The second night he spent in deathly silence, except for the steady ticking of the clock, which became unbearably loud.

He passed most of the next day reading Shakespeare.

If only he knew what was happening outside. He had never gotten around to installing some sort of radiation detector that would tell him when it was safe to leave the shelter. He had depended on the radio for instructions but he had also never gotten around to putting up an antenna.

Gotten around to it, hell! He told himself. He’d never even tried the radio until it was too late. The portable was useless to him.

It was a quarter past one in the afternoon when he heard the first sounds of the day from the “outside world.” Someone was walking around in his house.

He heard voices calling his name.

“He must be in the bomb shelter. We’ve looked everywhere else,” said Neil’s wife, concernedly.

There was pounding on the door.

He remained silent but alert, his mouth grimly taut but his eyes wide and alive.

“He must be in there. Maybe, he was injured from the explosion and he’s in there, unconscious. We’ll have to break down the door.”

“Stop!” Ed shouted. “Get away from the door and leave me alone.” He would kill every one of them before he’d ever open the door.

They were silent for a moment. “What on earth are you doing in there, Ed?”

“I’m trying to survive. That’s what I’m doing.”

“Survive what? You must have been in there for two days now. Nobody has seen you since the explosions.”

Ed’s laugh was wild. “Why do you think I built this thing? I was in here twenty seconds after the bomb went off.”

“Bomb? What bomb?” Neil’s short laugh caused Ed’s mind to leap forward to the present.

Neil was repeating, for the fifth time, “Those were explosions down at the lab.”

The battering started again.

Ed pulled the trigger of the rifle. He heard a woman scream, then the murmuring of voices.

“You’ve just killed old Miss Willowby, Ed. I don’t know what’s gotten into you.”

He looked at the gun. Dropped it to the floor. Stared at the hand which had fired the shots.

He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, blinked three times.

What had he done?

It was like awakening from a dream. Numbly, he made his way to the door, shoved the key into the lock — it snapped open with a loud click. He slid the bars to the side.

He started to pull the door back when it rushed at him. It knocked him backwards. He heard their low, gurgling mumbles as they rushed in.

He was half-way behind the door so they were able to pass him without trampling him to the floor. But he could see the horrible splotches and burns on their faces and arms. He could see the crazed expressions in their eyes — eyes which had seen unbelievable sights during the past two days.

He wondered how they’d been able to fool him so completely.

He wondered how they’d been able, in their condition, to think so clearly.

He wondered how long it would take for them to contaminate everything in the room; the food, the water... and him.