His terror was glue, he could not budge. The Wiskatonic seeped into his boots and through his socks. From somewhere far away a voice cried, over and over, ‘Find Justine! Find Holly!’ For nearly thirty minutes George could focus on nothing but those cries, which he did not realize came from himself.
Pieces of Wildgrove protruded from the silt – chairs, tables, lamps, bureaus, television sets. A smoke detector lay buzzing on a rock. George was fairly certain he saw Emily McCarthy’s birdbath and Clarence Weatherbee’s ceramic Negro. He would have to tell his neighbors where these belongings were.
A logjam of corpses spanned the Wiskatonic. Their scopas suits were in a dreadful state. The material was mutilated, Winco Synthefill VII leaking through split seams. Most of the helmets were shattered, so that the corpses wore jagged fiberglass clown-collars.
Townspeople marched down to the river – fractured helmets, mangled fabric, torn backpacks – walking stiffly, arms outstretched to lessen the weight of their burned hands. Many lacked hair and eyelashes. Synthefill bits were fused to their skin. A white lava of melted eye tissue dripped from their heads; they appeared to be crying their own eyes. Driven as lemmings, graceless as zombies, the marchers tumbled over the banks and splashed into the water, rising to the surface as buoyant, lifeless hunks of local citizenry. All about, the upheaved earth was settling – dust, dirt, ashes by the ton – a radioactive rain on the final parade: the drum majors were skeletons; the baton twirlers tossed human bones. Vomitus and diarrhea gushed from most of the marchers. George, who not long ago had felt hated, now felt hatred instead. He hated these survivors with their worthless suits, their unsanitary behavior, their junk strewn across creation, their agony. They really made him mad.
The van sat under the bridge. A lunatic had gone after it with a large can opener. Mud slopped out of the shaggy metallic wounds. Thrown from the infant car seat, the golden suit lay loose-limbed against the front bumper like a marionette awaiting animation.
The Hatter’s masterwork! Holly’s Christmas present! The one suit in the world that would work! George’s paralysis ended. Hobbling forward, he recalled some points from John Frostig’s sales pitch: fire, poison fumes, fallout… If I get the suit home, he thought, she’ll be able to leave this mess by any route she wants, walking through flames if need be, crossing fields of deadly vapor, free as a bird.
Golden suit draped across his arms, George started for town. The terrain was like some enormous gas stove, its countless burners turned up high. In the soot-soaked heavens, the mushroom cloud had become a wide gray canopy.
A mass of shocked and rubble-pounded refugees wove among the fires, improvising roads. George moved against the tide. Was Justine in this retreat? Holly? Find my family, God! (There are no Unitarians in thermonuclear holocausts.) Please, God! Justine! Holly! No. Nobody but ambulatory cadavers ruined by unbelievable burns and implausible wounds. This cannot be happening, this cannot be happening, this cannot… He saw torsos more cratered than the surface of the moon. Skin fell away like leaves of decayed wet lettuce, spirals of flesh dangled like black tinsel. He got angrier and angrier, he really couldn’t forgive these people for having ended up so badly. What had they been doing, fooling around with his sandblaster? Fragments of the refugees’ possessions – metal, wood, glass – had been driven into them like nails. One woman lacked a lower jaw. An old man held his left eyeball in his cupped hands. Damn them – how dare they come out in public like this? Tearful parents carried dead children. The sound of mass weeping engulfed him like a horrible odor. And still another variety of suffering – thirst. Acute, cruel, infinite, radiation-induced thirst. Cries for water rose above the sobbing and the shrieks and the bellowing fires. Damn them all to hell.
The roads belonged to the walking wounded. The rest of Wild-grove belonged to the immobiles. Keep going. Don’t stop for anything.
A six-year-old girl lay in a ditch, clutching a teddy bear and whimpering, ‘I’ll be good.’
A fat man sat on an overturned federal mail deposit box, gripping a stack of Christmas cards. He kept trying to pull back the lid, but it was melted shut.
A seeing-eye dog, its scopas suit and fur seared away, licked the face of its dead master. ‘Somebody put the fur back on that dog!’ George shouted.
A middle-aged plumber held his wrench toward the sky and made twisting motions, as if trying to stop the dust leaks.
At the base of a charred, blasted tree, a boy of about two snuggled against his dead father and pressed a candy cane to the corpse’s lips. ‘Daddy, food?’ he asked.
Several children gathered around a man whose tattered scopas suit was in the Santa Claus style. The man sang snatches of ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’ One little girl was telling Santa Claus to find her parents. Another was saying she wanted a sled. A boy with a mangled hand was asking Santa Claus for a thumb.
Why wasn’t anybody helping these people? Somebody should be doing something!
A horse blocked George’s path. Once it had sat outside Sandy’s Sandwich Shop. GIANT RIDE. 25 CENTS. QUARTERS ONLY. INSERT COIN HERE. The chances of Holly not getting an extra ride were equal to those of the sun not… Previously the horse had lacked an ear. Now it lacked both ears, its left front leg, and its hindquarters. The horse’s name, according to Holly, was Buttercup.
The third-degree burn victims lay on their sides, backs, and stomachs, quivering piles of excruciation, daring not to move, naked beyond flesh. A cyclone made of screams moved across the land. As the mobile survivors passed by, the third-degree burn victims begged to be shot to death with scopas suit pistols, their own hands (weeping, pulpy rubble) being useless to the task. ‘Somebody please kill me,’ the third-degree burn victims gasped with curious politeness.
God, make this stop. Help them, God.
George began to run, desperate to reach a place, any place, where indecent death was not. He dodged fires, circumvented walls of smoke, leaped over corpses. Large sections of Wildgrove had become beaches of broken glass; it would take a thousand years to put the town together again. He went past burning houses, pulverized automobiles, stray toilets, lost sinks, fallen traffic lights, smashed STOP signs, wayward CHILDREN – DRIVE CAREFULLY signs, severed water mains, uprooted fire hydrants, and telephone wires lying on the ground like dead pythons.
The stones of Rosehaven Cemetery had survived the disaster splendidly. Most had been torn from the earth, but George could find no gouges or fissures. A familiar place. A place to get one’s bearings. Granite is truly forever, he thought.
Dead Wildgrovians were sprawled on the grave sites as if seeking admittance. To George’s left lay old Mrs Mulligan’s stone, Design No. 2115 in Oklahoma pink. He remembered inscribing ASLEEP IN THE ARMS OF JESUS on it. To his right was a memorial to the Prescotts, Louis and Barbara. ERECTED IN LOVING MEMORY BY THEIR CHILDREN, the stone said. (In truth, only their daughter Kathy had erected the stone; their deplorable son Kevin, who had wanted little to do with his parents while they were alive, wanted even less to do with them dead.) The blast had opened a ravine from one end of Rosehaven Cemetery to the other. Several previously interred Wildgrovians had fallen into it; they were mainly bones. Such was the extent of observable resurrection.