The center of the blast was said to have been Gramercy Park, probably the Players Club. It was estimated that three hundred thousand people were killed. Another half-million people were wounded by flying debris or burned in varying degrees. A tiny blister, however, proved as bad as a serious burn: There was no case of recovery from a burn of any size. The patient simply appeared to dissolve slowly from the nucleus of the wound. The deaths were extremely painful, and since there were neither sufficient hospital facilities nor enough drugs of any kind to stifle pain, thousands committed suicide, while others were killed by their friends in mercy killings.
All public services broke down, including fire and police, key men having been killed, water mains destroyed, telephone and telegraph communication ruined beyond repair. Our technological back was broken; our civilization writhed like a wounded snake, unable to advance and incapable of retreat. We were too complex to return to simplicity; and only then, when it was too late, did it become apparent to the man in the street on what a fragile base his life had rested and how tenuous had been his hold upon existence. “One world or no world,” our greatest men had said, but no one had believed them. Having refused one world, we now had no world, and each man reacted according to his nature. Some, as I say, committed suicide, not merely because they were wounded or burned but because they were terrified. They bolted like animals, leaping from the housetops of the vast circle of buildings that surrounded the empty center of devastation. Some prayed, some cursed, some raped and murdered, their lusts liberated in final orgy. The police tried in certain parts to keep order, and shot looters and assassins till their ammunition gave out, when they were lynched by police-hating mobs. All the jewelry stores were broken into, and rings and ornaments were scattered everywhere. But now, of course, diamonds and gold were useless.
For forty-eight hours, there was madness and murder, screams, shots and shouts; the parading of loose women in stolen ermine cloaks, mink coats, stone marten stoles, with diamond tiaras on their bleached blond hair. For forty-eight hours, cars roared through the streets and tommy guns spat from the cars. Then the gasoline began to give out in the filling stations, and the ammunition began to give out for the tommy guns as it had earlier for the police, and there was no one to hold up. Gangsters could go into any store and take anything. Their women dripped with jewels, their cars were stacked with valuable furs and piled with cases of Scotch and gin and rye. They had eaten their fill of steak cooked by trembling chefs at the point of a gun. But now there were neither steaks nor chefs left, and there was no water to wash the grime from their faces and the blood from their hands. And then, as suddenly as their reign of terror had begun, it ended in terror on their part. Here was a new world that they could not understand, where all that they had ever wanted was theirs and they were carrying it off. But to where, and for what? In this world they were the suckers, and, like wild animals betrayed by this new environment, they turned upon one another in a kind of gang war of extinction.
This, of course, is all somewhat academically stated, the drama having lost its sharp cutting edge with the passing years. But there are incidents, vignettes that still stand out, separated from the general mass of somewhat amorphous memory and theory and rationalization, like the red-capped figure to be found in almost every Corot landscape. There was the girl who ran into Grand Central Station pursued by two men, whom I shot. It was as simple as that. I was going out to get canned goods from the basement of a ruined store and had a rifle in my hand. I knew the girl by sight; she was a dancer in a nearby musical show. She smiled at me and said thank you as if I had opened a door for her. And I, regretting the expenditure of my two shells, wondered if it had been worthwhile. The shots on my part, and the smile on the girl’s, were out of their context here.
In a book published a few years before it happened, a number of scientists had predicted what might occur, and one of them had explained what would take place if an atomic bomb were dropped in Gramercy Park. The fact that the explosion actually did take place in Gramercy Park could have been a matter of coincidence, or luck, or it might have been suggested by the chapter in question. The depositor of the bomb may have said, “Well, if they want it there, let them have it there.” He may even have had a kind of perverted sense of humor, like the guards at Buchenwald who gave towels to those of their victims who were about to be gassed, telling them the Murder House was for baths; or again, with that tidy Nazi mind, he may have wished to make fact conform to fiction. The point, however, is that the explosion did not operate quite as was expected, because, for some unknown reason, the blast did not fade out and get weaker and weaker as the distance from its center increased. Instead, it ended as if it were cut off by an invisible wall.
The best way to describe it would be to imagine the force of the blast as something tied to a string that was being swung round and round. Everything within the area covered by the string was destroyed, and everything only a few yards beyond it was left—with the exception of such minor damage as some broken windows—intact. The blast at that point appeared to take an upward direction, so that in the area beyond the destroyed center there was no further destruction except that due to fires caused by the falling debris. This destruction was somewhat haphazard; certain buildings escaped all damage while whole areas were completely gutted.
After the original reign of disorder and mayhem, the city started to reorganize itself. Emergency repairs were effected to water supplies, and local authorities were linked by provisional army field telephones. Citizens formed themselves into troops of vigilantes, and though there was some street fighting between different groups which took each other for bandit bands, order was in some degree restored. But there was no sense of security or continuity, for if there is no reason to expect tomorrow to dawn, today loses its validity. Were more bombs going to go off? What was going to happen about food, or work, or money?
People began to evacuate the city in cars, on foot, on bicycles. They left the island of Manhattan, endless black caterpillars of humanity creeping over every bridge, appearing from under the ground in every tunnel. They were migrating like lemmings. Driven by fear, they were going into the unknown where they would inevitably die.
They swarmed over the land like locusts, devastating it, marching till they were halfway to Canada. Some even reached the Canadian border, where they met Canadians marching down from Montreal and Toronto. What had taken place in New York was not an isolated phenomenon. Every big city in North America had suffered the same experience. No city except Washington was completely destroyed, but the population of all had been panicked, and the cumulative effect of these multiple bombings was much more serious than the total destruction of any single city, because all the urban populations fled to the country—which they destroyed; to the small towns and villages where, when once what was happening was understood, the villagers defended themselves with guns and even pitchforks, ex-soldiers fighting from tractors as if they were tanks. It was civil war, mass suicide. North America as a power, as a civilization, ceased to exist.
But as if even this were not enough, disaster was piled upon disaster, and the sickness hit us. First came diseases that were caused, it was said, by radioactivity. Then came the Red Death. The Red Death appears to have been general all over the civilized world.
The news of the period, naturally, was garbled; but there was some news. A few radio hams were able to receive messages. Ships at sea relayed frantic and conflicting reports. Naturally, within hours of the disaster, our air fleets set out for Europe and in a series of retaliatory raids blotted out many centers of military and industrial strength. Every big town in England had been blown up at the same time that ours were: London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, all had ceased to exist. But fortunately the United States, anticipating the possibility of such an attack, had the foresight to be ready for it and had several fleets of immense bombers, complete with atomic bombs and personnel hidden in secret underground hangers. Anticipating the destruction of central authority, the commanding officers of these areas had sealed instructions to be opened if communication broke down.