Jeanne was driving the station wagon through the darkness on Route 5 south toward Point Lookout, having already traveled more than forty of the seventy miles from Washington. Lisa was sitting silently beside her, Skippy sprawled asleep in the rear with the dog, when a brilliant flash of light filled the car, as if some enormous vehicle with its brights on had suddenly come up fast behind them. When Jeanne glanced in her rearview mirror, the brightness was more like a gigantic, diffuse searchlight on the horizon, aimed at her. Lisa turned to stare back out the rear window, and then, her face glimmering in the light, looked fearfully at Jeanne.
“What is it, Mother?” she asked.
Jeanne, following fifty yards behind a blue pickup truck, didn’t reply. The inexplicable and terrifying brightness had numbed her mind.
Then her car suddenly went out of control, picked up by an invisible hand and flung forward at ten or fifteen miles faster than she’d been going, the rear end swinging sickeningly to the left, then gliding back as if they’d hit a patch of ice. The pickup truck had swerved into the ditch on the right, then careened back across the highway into the other lane. Finally, wobbling as if all four tires had gone flat, it steadied in the center of the highway, with Jeanne following it, almost oblivious of what was happening to her own car. When the pickup’s brake lights glowed, she began to slow her wagon, both vehicles quickly reducing speed.
When Jeanne glanced at Lisa, she saw her daughter staring speechlessly at her in wide-eyed horror. Still not thinking, she slowed down, letting the pickup disappear ahead of her into the eerily lit night. When she saw a turnaround in front of a fruit stand, she pulled the car off the road and stopped.
“I’m trembling” was the first thought she had, and she gripped the steering wheel tighter, trying to control the incredible vibrations of her arms. Yes, trembling was what it was called, she thought stupidly.
“Oh, Mommy, Mommy, what’s happening?” Lisa cried, and Jeanne felt her daughter pressing against her, gripping her arm, her face against Jeanne’s shoulder. Jeanne raised her head to look back into the rearview mirror, which was still filled with light. She glanced to her left and watched two cars speed by, lit by the yellow glow from behind. Then she turned to look back: a light was ballooning outward and upward, the central brightness growing dimmer as more and more of the sky was lit up. Lisa’s fingers dug into her still-trembling arm, and Jeanne thought simply, “A nuclear bomb has hit Washington.” There was no conscious terror or fear, only the simple fact. “And this is what it’s like forty miles away.”
Two more cars sped past toward Point Lookout. No one was now heading back toward Washington. She closed her eyes and lowered her head to the wheel.
“Mommy… Mommy…” Lisa pleaded beside her, but Jeanne couldn’t seem to function, couldn’t seem to think anything. She had a sudden image of the house in Alexandria being shattered into tiny pieces by the blast, but she felt nothing. The wheel was cold against her forehead. From the backseat the dog barked twice nervously, apparently disturbed by the light.
Jeanne raised her head and sat up straight, staring forward. She turned the engine back on. She shifted into forward, swung the car in a U, and began to drive back toward Washington.
Beside her Lisa began to whimper.
“Where are we going, Mommy?” she gasped out between low moans.
Ahead of them a bell-shaped clump of light expanded into the sky, its upper rim rising but growing dimmer, the lower part spreading out horizontally and retaining its brightness. When the car headed straight toward it, Jeanne had trouble seeing the road. When an oncoming car honked its horn at her and she swerved to the right, her right wheels slid off the shoulder, skidded, then climbed back onto the road.
“Oh, Mommy, Mommy.”
How long it’s been since Lisa has called me Mommy, she thought, driving unthinkingly onward.
And then she saw a fire. Two cars tangled by the other side of the road, one of them engulfed in flames. She slowed down as she passed them and then after a minute stopped the car at the side of the road. From the slight rise, she could see ahead for miles, where several other small fires were burning in the half-darkness, whether cars or houses she couldn’t tell. Off to the right a whole village seemed to be burning. The landscape was otherwise obscure.
“You’re in shock. Get the children to safety. You’re in shock, get the children to safety, you’re in shock…” She was experiencing her mind as some alien machine functioning mechanically and improperly, while she herself was dumb, helpless.
“Mommy, let’s go the other way,” Lisa whispered against her shoulder.
“Yes, sweetheart,” she found herself saying calmly, her arm still trembling. “We’d better get down to Point Lookout.”
She swung the car a second time in a U, almost colliding with a van that was already speeding southward, which she had seen and yet not seen. Then she was in line with the other vehicles, speeding through the night away from Washington.
Neil ran down the dock and began casting off Vagabond, feeling vulnerable, naked. Leaving the Tangier bar, he’d seen the glow to the northwest and known what it meant, but had not broken stride toward the boat. As Jim leapt onto Vagabond and ran aft to descend into the inflatable dinghy that was tied off between the hulls Neil sensed that now that Jim’s nightmare had come true he was acting with unpanicked calm. With the wind still light out of the east Jim would have to tow them out to the bay before they could pick up a breeze. But even as Neil was making active preparations to get them to their rendezvous with Frank at Crisfield, a part of his mind was still focused on the problem of heading the boat south, out of the Chesapeake and onto the open sea.
When Jim came sliding between the hulls in the dinghy, Neil dropped him the towline. The glow to the northwest was brighter now, and a surge of panic forced Neil to steady himself, holding on to the forestay and staring at the glow on the horizon.
“Get going,” he said sharply to Jim and ran aft to raise the sails.
Five minutes later Vagabond was out of the cove and sailing northward behind her dinghy at almost four knots. Neil knew Frank might be on some late ferry to Tangier, so he was keeping his boat in the marked channel. As they moved forward he realized that there was not a single light showing on Tangier and Smith islands or the entire Eastern Shore. The battery-operated buoy lights were working, but the rest of the world was in darkness.
Some twenty minutes out into the bay he spotted the ferry closing on them fast and bearing away. He put the spreader lights on, so that Frank, if he was aboard, would be certain to recognize his trimaran. When he trained his glasses on the passengers, some of whom were visible in the ferry’s lights, he saw Frank standing on the stem waving his arms at them like a drowning man.
Neil signaled Jim to drop the towline and get over to the ferry. When he looked back through the binoculars he saw Frank standing on the ship’s side, a duffel bag in each hand; after staring dubiously at the widening gap between the ferry and Vagabond and then at the water, the tall gangly figure stepped awkwardly off the boat and disappeared into the blackness, the ferry speeding on to Tangier. While Neil watched—feeling both fear and admiration for Frank—it took Jim only a half-minute to reach Frank and another two to bring them both back to the trimaran. As Neil let Vagabond come up into the wind and rushed over to the port cockpit Frank tossed his two wet bags on deck and prepared to swing himself up.