“Eighty, maybe ninety miles,” the woman replied in a whisper.
“The wind is from the north-west. Fallout should be blown inland away from us,” Sam said, thinking aloud. “The best thing,” he went on, “would be to hunker down for a day or two, just in case.”
“What if they drop a bomb on Bellingham?”
The man smiled. It was impossible not to smile.
“Then we’re all dead,” he shrugged. “So we don’t have to worry about anything anymore.”
A police car drew up alongside the couple as they walked through the empty streets.
Sam recognised the weary middle aged cop behind the wheel.
“I thought I told you to move on, son?”
“Sorry, officer. I never was too good at taking orders.”
“That wasn’t an order, son. It was a recommendation.” The cop fixed Judy in his stare. “Hi, Judy. What are you doing with this guy?” The cop thought better of it. “Naw, forget I asked that. It ain’t none of my business just because I remember you in diapers. You want a ride someplace?”
“Sure, Jake,” Judy chirped without hesitation.
Sam thought he was dreaming.
He could not remember the last time he had felt so disconnected with what was going on around him. His guitar case was perched alongside the cop in the front passenger seat and he and Judy were side by side in the back seats behind the Bellingham Police Department cruiser’s wire mesh partition.
The car radio crackled and hissed with static.
“Is the radio still working, officer?” He asked, knowing that big bombs were likely to burn out most circuits in radios, televisions, could take down telegraphs, and were capable of shorting out over-ground power lines and transformers — tens and hundreds of miles away — in some circumstances.
“Naw. But I’m leaving it on in just in case it comes back on.”
The car rolled to a halt a couple of times on the short drive through the mostly deserted streets. The cop rolled down the window and called to people; politely and firmly advising, not ordering people to go inside. He seemed to know everybody’s first name.
The cruiser pulled up outside a house that looked like all the other houses around it in the darkness. Farther down the road the street lights had gone out.
“This is bad,” the cop said, cranking up the handbrake, turning to the man and the woman in the back of the car. “You kids take care now.”
Sam and Judy got out and watched the vehicle drive away.
“That was cousin Jacob on my Ma’s side of the family,” the woman announced.
“Nice guy for a cop.”
“Yes, he is.”
The man and the woman looked at each other in the darkness.
“You don’t know me,” Sam said lowly.
Judy dropped her keys on the ground; instinctively they both squatted down and groped around for them.
“I’ve got them,” she declared. They stood up. “I know I don’t know you,” she added, a little vexed. “But I don’t think that matters tonight.”
The door opened and he followed her inside. The light came on. The lobby was cramped, tidy, with everything in its place. Sam suspected that the rest of the house would be the same.
“Wait here,” Judy directed, her voice quivering a little. She rustled up the narrow stairs and Sam heard her moving around on the boards above his head. She returned almost immediately, her arms full of multi-coloured quilts. It was a minor miracle she did not trip over because she could not possibly have seen where she was going. “The basement is through the door in the kitchen.” She thrust the quilts into his arms. “There is no heating down there. Take these; I’ll get more blankets and pillows.”
Sam Brenckmann hesitated.
Judy was already rustling upstairs.
That was when the lights went out.
Chapter 5
Gretchen Betancourt was angry. Up until a couple of hours ago she had had her life mapped out; things to do, objectives to be attained, the ways and means clearly established, the challenges she intended to confront and the experiences she planned to enjoy to the fullest possible extent meticulously lined up ahead of her down the coming years, like so many obedient ducks paddling upstream in a nice neat row. She was the daughter of a Democratic Party doyen, born into a wealthy New England family, aware that she had been given the best education available to any woman on planet Earth and she was going to go places where no woman had gone before and had vowed to bring down — crashing down, ideally — whatever male shibboleths stood in her path. The World was her oyster and she had been the mistress of her own destiny. And then the air raid sirens had begun to sound and she had ended up sitting beside mild-mannered no-hoper Daniel Brenckmann in a crowded, sweaty cellar beneath a small provincial theatre listening to young children crying while she waited for the World to end!
Gretchen sighed loudly.
She sighed so loudly, and so often that people turned to look at her.
“What?” She demanded. Although she was not yet twenty-five Gretchen Betancourt had acquired a propensity to wrap herself in a mantle of ferocious matriarchal authority at the drop of a hat. At such times her voice became haughty and her manner prickly; strong men glimpsed the tall — she was very nearly five feet ten inches in her stockinged feet — elegant, perfectly manicured raven-haired young woman and blanched at what they imagined they were seeing in her grey blue eyes. She had qualified for the Bar Association of Massachusetts and joined a prominent Boston law firm last year; now she was half-way through a post doctorial degree in corporate litigation which saw her living and working in Boston one week and studying in Connecticut the next. It was all part of her grand plan. She was content to make her way in the law partnership’s ‘boiler room’ back in Boston for a couple of years while she accumulated the qualifications, expertise, experience and additional connections which would inevitably guarantee her a lucrative full partnership before she was thirty. After that she would focus on her family’s plethora of political contacts, and set about the sordid business of building a rock solid platform within the New England Democratic Caucus. At some stage she needed to get married and her family had already lined up a suitable candidate; two children would be enough sometime in the next ten years, any more and her career would have to go on the back burner for far too long and that would never do. She was in a hurry but not a reckless rush; her father was a distant cousin of the President and the jury was still out on whether JFK would be the first one-term Chief Executive since Herbert Hoover.
Gretchen had not actually met Jack Kennedy since she was a gawky thirteen year-old and she had been hopelessly infatuated that afternoon at Hyannis Port. Not so much with the man but with the idea of the charismatic then mere Congressman for the 11th District of Massachusetts. JFK had so obviously been ‘going places’; and there had been a palpably seductive air of certainty about his rise and rise. It was only much later that she had realised that her infatuation was also intensely, achingly erotic. They said JFK ‘played the field’, bedding movie stars and debutants, that no woman was safe around him. If she was Jackie, Gretchen would not have stood for that. However, she was not Jackie, and anyway, Jackie was entitled to live the marriage she wanted not the one that other people thought she had. Besides, who was she to judge the First Lady? Jackie was married to the master of Camelot; all she had was a loser like Dan Brenckmann!