There Will Be War Volume VIII, page 2
He hurried to the master bedroom, pulled all of the clothes out of the closet and piled them on the bed. The closet was built of reinforced concrete; it served as the airlock for the Hutchins’s shelter, a four hundred square foot bunker equipped with hand-operated air and water pumps and a six month supply of dried food. At the back of the closet, surrounded by old shoes, was a green overnight suitcase. Quinn carried it to the kitchen table and unlocked it. Inside were three respirators, a radiation counter, several personal dosimeters, some canisters of mace and two guns. He loaded the thirty-eight special, slipped it into its shoulder rig and strapped it on. The semi-automatic twenty-two caliber lightweight rifle was knocked down and stored inside its waterproof stock. Quinn had trouble reassembling it; he had not practiced for a long time. Judy hated guns.
In his haste to leave he could find nothing to wear over his revolver but an old yellow rain parka. The day was clear and hot but he pulled on the heavy parka anyway. He hid the rifle under the seat of his rusty Toyota pickup, swiped the sweat from his eyes and backed down his dirt driveway onto Flatrock Road.
Once Quinn had owned a Porsche. He had lived within walking distance of Boston Common, bought Medoc wines by the case and earned his luxuries designing shopping malls and corporate headquarters. But Quinn only got to initial the working drawings while the senior partners ate lobster with the clients. His insomnia was just starting then. The nightly news made it worse. When his mother died he sold her house for one hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars—enough to buy his freedom from the unnerving city. He proposed to Judy that they move to New Hampshire. She could finally go back to work; he would stay with the baby and build a house. A house with his name on it, a single-family fortress secure from the madnesses which men were wreaking on the world.
The Merrymeeting Children’s Center was located in the basement of the Congregational Church. Quinn was one of its founders; it had been under his direction that a group of parents had worked over several weekends to transform the place with secondhand rugs, temporary partitions, and buckets of bright paint. He had also served on the committee which had chosen Rachel Kerwin as director.
She had shoulder-length red hair and bad teeth. Her wardrobe consisted of a variety of floppy men’s clothing culled from second-hand stores. Although she was thirty-seven years old, time had yet to crack her bone-headed idealism. She was a marcher, a letter-writer, a collector of causes. It had not bothered Quinn at all to find out that she had been arrested several times while protesting; it was good for little children to be around people like that.
He had no time for her today. “Where’s Kitty?”
“Out.” She stooped to pick up a snuffling infant, Billy… somebody. “We sent the big kids out on a nature walk. Should be back soon.” She tugged at his rain parka and chuckled. “Where you been getting your weather reports from, the Amazon?”
Quinn stepped to the window and scanned the nearby woods. “Damn!” He patted the revolver hidden beneath the parka; it helped steady him. “Do you think I could find them?”
“Why, Quinn?”
“No other parents have come in yet?”
“Why?”
Now she was scared; everyone in Merrymeeting knew that he was a survivalist. “The politicians are scurrying out of Washington like rats leaving a sinking ship.”
Billy started to fuss; she jiggled him. “So?”
“So it’s coming!” Her obtuseness made him angry. “Turn on the radio and wake up, Rachel! The bombs, don’t you understand? We’re set to blow ourselves to hell.”
“I can’t believe…” She shook her head numbly. “There should’ve been more demonstrations. If people like you had marched instead… instead of…”
“Jesus.” He glared at the woods. No sign of his daughter. “I’ll wait outside.”
She barred his exit. “What’s going to happen to these children, Quinn?”
“If we’re lucky there should be time for everyone to go home.” Quinn liked Rachel Kerwin; when he saw that she was crying he almost fell into the trap of pity. “Look, the nearest target is the Air Force Base in Portsmouth. Forty miles away; the blast effects shouldn’t be too bad here. Just start filling every container you have with water. Your biggest worries are fire and fallout…”
The phone rang. Billy Somebody began to cry too. Rachel answered. “Hello. Oh God, Judy. It’s horrible, I can’t believe it; yes, yes, he’s here.”
Quinn grabbed the phone from her. “What?”
“Thank God I caught you.” Her voice trembled. “The car is dead. I’m at Miller’s Drug in Farnham.”
He could hardly hear her over little Billy’s caterwauling.
“I don’t know, I don’t know what to do, Quinn. The traffic is all going north; no one is taking the turnoff for Merrymeeting. Should I try hitching anyway?”
“No, don’t hitch.” He did not want her riding with some panicky loser on a blind run. “Can you steal a car?”
“Quinn!”
“Look, sugar, everything is falling apart. Nothing, nobody matters but us.” Rachel tried to butt into the conversation and he turned away from her, twisting the handset cord around his shoulders.
“You’re wrong, Quinn,” Judy said firmly. Despite all their arguments, she had yet to accept the first law of survivalism.
“Daddy!” Kitty scooted through the door. “I saw your truck, Daddy, look what I found.” She waved a blue jay feather at him. “Why are you here so early, can we stop for ice cream on the way home?’’
Quinn was momentarily dizzy; he shut his eyes. He was at the edge of control and unless he could slow down he would certainly make the mistake that would kill them all. “Kitty, go to the truck. Now!’’ There was no time; he wished that someone would strangle little Billy Somebody so that he could think. “Judy? Stay where you are. I’m coming for you. Twenty minutes.” He hung up.
Kitty was dawdling by the door. He scooped her up and carried her to the truck. Rachel followed him like a watchdog nipping at the heels of a mailman. She lectured him as if he were responsible for the war.
“It’s not fair. You can’t just leave these children to die. You’d better stop and think about what you’re doing, Quinn Hutchins. You’d better hope that everyone who survives isn’t as selfish as you.”
As he loaded Kitty into the truck he saw that her chin was quivering. Although he had been able to ignore Rachel, his daughter had been wounded by her rage.
“Will it be worth it?” Rachel grasped the door handle to keep him from leaving. “Do you think Kitty will thank you tomorrow for saving her life?”
Quinn unsnapped his parka and pulled out the thirty-eight; he did not release the safety. “You want to save those kids inside some misery, Rachel? Shoot them. Now.” He offered the butt end of the revolver to her. “You’re so damn sure it’s not worth living anymore?” He shook it at her and she shrank from him. “Go ahead!”
She turned and ran back to the church.
It seemed quieter than it was inside the truck. The engine boomed, the suspension clattered, the wheels shrieked at the corners but nobody spoke and the radio was broken. Quinn had forgotten the Sony in the wheelbarrow.
Farnham consisted of a boarded-up brick schoolhouse, Ben’s Bait and Fruit Stand, Miller’s Drug and a scattering of musty cottages. The most direct route climbed over the mountain and passed Quinn’s house on Flatrock Road. A tourist from Ohio might finish this scenic drive in forty-five minutes; a drunken teenager with a death wish could do it in a half hour. Quinn thought twenty minutes was about right.
Kitty had tucked her legs beneath her and was scrunched into the far comer of the cab. She was chewing on strands of her long black hair, a habit which usually annoyed Quinn. But she was so pale and wide-eyed that he did not bother her. At least she was not crying. Her father’s daughter.
They were about a mile from the house when he finally broke the silence. “I’m letting you off at the driveway, honey. Get into the shelter as fast as you can and wait for us. I’ll be back with Mommy in two shakes.”
“I won’t.”
“Kitty.”
“I don’t want to stay all alone with the bombs.”
“I’m not arguing, Kitty. You do it.” He downshifted as the truck approached the driveway. “I’m letting you out.”
“I won’t go in. I’ll stand by the mailbox until you come back.”
He had slowed enough to glance at her and gauge her determination. She stared back fiercely, her jaw set. She was six and a half years old and already she had all the pluck she would ever need. He stepped on the accelerator and the truck shot past the driveway.
“Am I going to die, Daddy?”
“Of course not.”
“Are Grammy and Grampy going to die?”
“I hope not.”
“Lisbeth? Maggie?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about Rachel?”
“Kitty, anyone who wants to live and tries hard enough will make it.”
She considered. “But some people are going to die?”
“Yes.”
As they crossed the southern ridge of Flatrock there was a flash of light that overwhelmed the sun. Quinn felt the mountain tremble beneath him. The truck veered toward the shoulder and he slammed it to a skidding stop. Below them were the tidy orchards surrounding Farnham, less than three miles away. In the distance to the southeast was what had once been Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
He had a glimpse of hell out of the corners of his eyes. The fireball was dazzling; it rose with the stately grace of a hot air balloon at a country fair. It seemed to draw the land directly beneath it toward the sky; farther out it cast a shadow of flame. In four thousand million years the dull stones of the planet had never witnessed quite so ravishing a spectacle.
But one glimpse was enough for Quinn; he was nearly blinded. He made a screeching U turn and raced back the way he had come. He hoped that the top of the ridge might afford some protection from the shock wave. He saw a dirt track running into a rock-strewn pasture and pulled onto it, crashing through the wooden gate. Safe from falling trees.
“Out!” He flung open his door and, dragging Kitty with him, flopped face-down behind a desk-sized boulder.
The thunderclap sounded as if the shout of an angry god had split the sky open. Immediately afterward came a terrible pressure on Quinn’s back, as if that same god meant to squash him into the dirt for the sin of being a man. His ears popped; he could not breathe.
He was not sure how long he lay there; he was revived by Kitty’s crying. “…hurts.”
“What hurts?” He rolled her over. “Kitty!”
“The air hurts.”
She had to shout to be heard. A roiling black cloud had filled the sky and a gale blew from the north, stripping the trees. A white birch toppled onto the road as he watched. But his lightweight truck was still upright.
“Let’s go.”
He opened the green suitcase and they both slid respirators over their faces. He clipped a dosimeter to Kitty’s blouse and pushed another into his shirt pocket. Kitty hooked her canisters of mace to her belt without being told. Quinn marvelled at his calmness as he waited for the counter to warm up.
Click, click. Of all his survival gadgets, he trusted this one the least. The instruction booklet, translated from the Japanese, had been nearly incomprehensible with its jabber of phosphors and photocathodes. Click. The liquid crystal display read four-tenths of a millirem per hour, thirty times the normal background. Nowhere near lethal levels yet; still an hour, maybe two, before the killing dust began to sift out of the sky. Click, click, click. Either way he went, the road might be blocked. A dose of four hundred and fifty rems kills half the population; at six hundred, everyone dies. Click. Even now, a few of Quinn’s cells were shrivelling, exploding, spewing poisons. Judy. The invisible seeds of cancer.
Even though Quinn’s grip on the steering wheel was painfully tight, his arms trembled. He was sucking huge amounts of air through his respirator and still felt out of breath. The wind shrieked at the truck. He blinked, blinked again, and realized that he was crying.
“What am I going to do?” He was thankful that the respirator filtered the sob out of his voice.
Kitty slid across the seat and hugged him. “First we have to get Mommy.” She spoke impatiently, as if she thought he had merely forgotten the plan. “Then we stay in the shelter until it’s safe to come out.”
He pulled back from her so that he could see her face. The rubber mask concealed her nose and mouth but her eyes… the eyes. He drew strength from her ignorance.
“Buckle your seat belt.” He pulled onto the highway, swerved around the fallen birch and headed for Farnham.
It took twenty minutes to reach the end of Flatrock Road. Quinn had to ram one tree out of his way. He passed a wrecked station wagon without stopping. The count was up to six rems an hour and was climbing rapidly.
Route Sixteen was a two-lane highway with big shoulders; four lanes of northbound cars now spilled across it. Most were creeping along; a few had stopped, smoke and steam hissing from under the hoods. Quinn saw one angry driver crash his Trans Am into the rear of a stalled Rabbit. He repeated the attack several times until he had nudged the crumpled Volkswagen down an embankment into an apple orchard. The driver of the dead car scrambled onto the road with a rock, leapt onto the hood of the Trans Am and started smashing the windshield.
Farnham was less than a mile south of the junction of Flatrock Road and Route Sixteen. As luck would have it there was just enough room for Quinn to squeeze by near the southbound shoulder, two wheels on gravel, two wheels cutting through tall weeds. He ignored the chorus of honks and curses from the refugees and sped on.
He quickly discovered, however, that it was the state police, not luck, which had kept the lane clear. A patrol car was blocking his way into town; an angry trooper waved for him to stop. The man had a cut over his right eye and a spatter of dried blood matted to his face. He kept his hand on the butt of his pistol as he approached the truck but he seemed dazed, like a fighter waiting to be knocked out.
“Where the hell you going, Mr. Gas Mask?”
“Farnham, officer. My wife…”
He had already turned away, not listening. He held up his hand to stop a blue van in the nearest lane of traffic. Slowly a space opened in front of it. Northbound.
“You, in there.” He waved Quinn toward it.
“Please, officer, my wife is in Farnham and I…”
“Burning.” The wind whipped at his hair. “Everything. Get your ass turned around right now.”
The space the trooper had created expanded to two, three car lengths and those behind the van began to honk impatiently. The trooper spun away from Quinn’s truck and shook his fists at the faces staring from behind closed windows. “Shut up, shut up!” The gale overpowered the hoarse voice; only Quinn could hear. “It’s too late, damn you! You’re all dead anyway.”
The revolver seemed to jump into Quinn’s hand. He released the safety and held the gun in his left hand just under his open window so that the trooper could not see it.
He did not want to shoot. He was not turning back.
“No, Daddy.” Kitty slid across the seat and tugged at his shirt. The look on her face scared him; he thought she might try to interfere. Get them both killed. He shoved her to the floor on the passenger side. Again she reached out to him, offering her mace. “Please.”
“Listen buddy, I’m not going to tell you again…”
Without thinking, Quinn closed his right hand around the cannister, thrust it at the trooper and sprayed a burst into his eyes. He screamed and clutched at his face as if trying to tear it off. Quinn fired another burst, and another, until the trooper had staggered out of range.
Quinn whipped the truck through the space in front of the blue van and managed to scrape between it and the patrol car before the refugees could react. He raced down the shoulder toward Farnham.
He knew that he had taken a foolish risk. The policeman had a gun. And a radio. The effects of the mace were temporary. Quinn should have used the thirty-eight. Kitty climbed back onto the seat, slipped her mace cannister into its holder and hugged him.
Not a single window remained unbroken in Farnham. The wind carried the acrid smell of electrical fire but Quinn could see no flames. Only the old schoolhouse still squatted intact on its stone foundation; its boarded-up facade and rusty civil defense sign seemed to mock the devastation. Ben’s Bait and Fruit was a jumble of broken timbers. Miller’s Drug had been a ramshackle Victorian roadhouse just waiting for a reason to collapse. The bomb had provided reasons aplenty. The roof had vanished entirely; the front had fallen back into the building, bulging the side walls out at crazy angles. He was astonished to see two women in street clothes, totally unprotected against fallout, standing next to the ruin.
He parked beside them. The counter read thirty-six rems per hour; he shut it off. According to his own dosimeter he had already absorbed a dose of between twenty and thirty rems. Not much time left.
“Lock the doors; I’ll be right back.”
Kitty watched him take the revolver from the seat and tuck it back into his shoulder rig. He mussed her hair. “It’s okay,” he said.
The two women were gazing at a broken window. A paint-spattered step ladder was propped against the wall directly beneath it.
“Anyone in there?”
They looked at him blankly; he could not be heard speaking through the mask into the wind. Reluctantly he pulled the respirator down and let it dangle around his neck.
“We heard shouts before the wind picked up,” the younger woman said. “My husband’s inside trying to help.”
The older woman, who wore a calico kerchief over her mouth like a bandit, approached him as he stepped onto the ladder. “You send my Frank out. He’s got a bad heart, you hear? And the traffic—we gotta go.”
