It was still dark. A heavy rain fell. Before us lay a scene of panoramic disorder. Cars trapped in mud, cars stalled, cars crawling along the one-lane escape route, cars taking shortcuts through the woods, cars hemmed in by trees, boulders, other cars. Sirens called and faded, horns blared in desperation and protest. There were running men, tents wind-blown into trees, whole families abandoning their vehicles to head on foot for the parkway. From deep in the woods we heard motorcycles revving, voices raising incoherent cries. It was like the fall of a colonial capital to dedicated rebels. A great surging drama with elements of humiliation and guilt.
We put on our masks and ran through the downpour to our car. Not ten yards away a group of men proceeded calmly to a Land-Rover. They resembled instructors in jungle warfare, men with lean frames and long boxy heads. They drove straight into dense underbrush, not only away from the dirt road but away from all the other cars attempting shortcuts. Their bumper sticker read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL. In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups. They've practiced staying alive. I followed with some difficulty, our smallish wagon jouncing badly in brush tangles, up inclines, over hidden stones. Inside five minutes the Land-Rover was out of sight.
Rain turned to sleet, sleet to snow.
I saw a line of headlights far to the right and drove fifty yards through a gulley in that direction, the car heeled like a toboggan. We did not seem to be getting closer to the lights. Babette turned on the radio and we were told that the Boy Scout camp evacuees were to head for Iron City, where arrangements were being made to provide food and shelter. We heard horns blowing and thought it was a reaction to the radio announcement but they continued in a rapid and urgent cadence, conveying through the stormy night a sense of animal fear and warning.
Then we heard the rotors. Through the stark trees we saw it, the immense toxic cloud, lighted now by eighteen choppers- immense almost beyond comprehension, beyond legend and rumor, a roiling bloated slug-shaped mass. It seemed to be generating its own inner storms. There were cracklings and sputterings, flashes of light, long looping streaks of chemical flame. The car horns blared and moaned. The helicopters throbbed like giant appliances. We sat in the car, in the snowy woods, saying nothing. The great cloud, beyond its turbulent core, was silver-tipped in the spotlights. It moved horribly and sluglike through the night, the choppers seeming to putter ineffectually around its edges. In its tremendous size, its dark and bulky menace, its escorting aircraft, the cloud resembled a national promotion for death, a multimillion-dollar campaign backed by radio spots, heavy print and billboard, TV saturation. There was a high-tension discharge of vivid light. The horn-blowing increased in volume.
I recalled with a shock that I was technically dead. The interview with the SIMUVAC technician came back to me in terrible detail. I felt sick on several levels.
There was nothing to do but try to get the family to safety. I kept pushing toward the headlights, the sound of blowing horns. Wilder was asleep, planing in uniform spaces. I hit the accelerator, jerked the wheel, arm-wrestled the car through a stand of white pine.
Through his mask Heinrich said, "Did you ever really look at your eye?"
"What do you mean?" Denise said, showing immediate interest, as though we were lazing away a midsummer day on the front porch.
"Your own eye. Do you know which part is which?"
"You mean like the iris, the pupil?"
"Those are the publicized parts. What about the vitreous body? What about the lens? The lens is tricky. How many people even know they have a lens? They think 'lens' must be 'camera.'"
"What about the ear?" Denise said in a muffled voice.
"If the eye is a mystery, totally forget the ear. Just say 'cochlea' to somebody, they look at you like, 'Who's this guy?' There's this whole world right inside our own body."
"Nobody even cares," she said.
"How can people live their whole lives without knowing the names of their own parts of the body?"
"What about the glands?" she said.
"Animal glands you can eat. The Arabs eat glands."
"The French eat glands," Babette said through gauze. 'The Arabs eat eyes, speaking of eyes."
"What parts?" Denise said.
'The whole eye. The sheep eye."
'They don't eat the lashes," Heinrich said.
"Do sheep have lashes?" Steffie said.
"Ask your father," Babette said.
The car forded a creek which I didn't know was there until we were in it. I struggled to get us over the opposite bank. Snow fell thickly through the high beams. The muffled dialogue went on. I reflected that our current predicament seemed to be of merely glancing interest to some of us. I wanted them to pay attention to the toxic event. I wanted to be appreciated for my efforts in getting us to the parkway. I thought of telling them about the computer tally, the time-factored death I carried in my chromosomes and blood. Self-pity oozed through my soul. I tried to relax and enjoy it.
"I'll give anybody in this car five dollars," Heinrich said through his protective mask, "if you can tell me whether more people died building the pyramids in Egypt or building the Great Wall of China-and you have to say how many died in each place, within fifty people."
I followed three snowmobiles across an open field. They conveyed a mood of clever fun. The toxic event was still in view, chemical tracers shooting in slow arcs out of its interior. We passed families on foot, saw a line of paired red lights winding through the dark. When we edged out of the woods, people in other cars gave us sleepy looks. It took ninety minutes to reach the parkway, another thirty to get to the cloverleaf, where we spun off toward Iron City. It was here that we met up with the group from the Kung Fu Palace. Tooting horns, waving children. Like wagon trains converging on the Santa Fe Trail. The cloud still hung in the rearview mirror.
Krylon, Rust-Oleum, Red Devil.
We reached Iron City at dawn. There were checkpoints at all the road exits. State troopers and Red Cross workers handed out mimeographed instructions concerning evacuation centers. Half an hour later we found ourselves, with forty other families, in an abandoned karate studio on the top floor of a four-story building on the main street. There were no beds or chairs. Steffie refused to take off her mask.
By nine a.m. we had a supply of air mattresses, some food and coffee. Through the dusty windows we saw a group of turbaned schoolchildren, members of the local Sikh community, standing in the street with a hand-lettered sign: IRON CITY WELCOMES AREA EVACUEES. We were not allowed to leave the building.
On the wall of the studio there were poster-size illustrations of the six striking surfaces of the human hand.
At noon a rumor swept the city. Technicians were being lowered in slings from army helicopters in order to plant microorganisms in the core of the toxic cloud. These organisms were genetic recombinations that had a built-in appetite for the particular toxic agents in Nyodene D. They would literally consume the billowing cloud, eat it up, break it down, decompose it.
This stunning innovation, so similar in nature to something we might come across in the National Enquirer or the Star, made us feel a little weary, glutted in an insubstantial way, as after a junk food spree. I wandered through the room, as I'd done in the Boy Scout barracks, moving from one conversational knot to another. No one seemed to know how a group of microorganisms could consume enough toxic material to rid the sky of such a dense and enormous cloud. No one knew what would happen to the toxic waste once it was eaten or to the microorganisms once they were finished eating.