War Day

by Whitley Streiber; John Kunetka

  Because the bus was broken down, the driver gave us all transfers, and we filed off. A few people went to the Twentieth Street bus stop to wait for another bus. The wind was gone, its roar replaced by the sound of glass still raining down from above, the screams of the injured and the terrified, and a complex mix of car horns, sirens, the hissing of a broken fireplug, and the blue-streak cursing of a hot dog vendor whose cart had exploded.

  Suddenly all I could think about was my boy. I started off down Fifth Avenue at a trot. It wasn't long before I was turning east on Fourteenth. I knew by then that things were terribly wrong. Peo-

  8 INTRODUCTION

  ple were lying everywhere, in every condition. Lots of them were bloody from flying glass, many more livid with flash burns. I did not know it, but I was bleeding too, the blood running down my neck and soaking my shirt like sweat. I'd had a slice taken out of my scalp that I wouldn't feel until much later.

  I saw gangs of kids coming out of the Fourteenth Street stores with everything you could name in their hands: radios, records, clothes, candy bars. They were laughing and shrieking. I saw one of them get blown almost in half by a storekeeper with a shotgun.

  My mind was still far from clear. I just couldn't seem to grasp what had happened. There was no reason to think that there had been a nuclear attack, though I kept considering and then rejecting that thought. U.S.-Soviet tensions weren't high. There'd been no sign of impending conflict, none at all. In fact, the news was full of the reestablishment of detente.

  It was the sky over Queens and Brooklyn that enforced the notion of a nuclear bomb. Through the dusty air I could see ash-black clouds shot through with long red flames. These clouds were immense. They stretched up and up until they were lost in their own expanding billows. There was no impression of a mushroom cloud, but I knew that was what it was, a mushroom cloud seen so close that it didn't look like a mushroom. The coldest, most awful dread I have ever known came upon me then.

  I knew it for certain: a nuclear device had been exploded at the eastern edge of the city. I thought, My God, the lives. Later it was estimated that a million people had died in the instant of the explosion. Hundreds of thousands more were dying right now.

  I was walking on a grate above the Fourteenth Street subway station when a blast of dank, dirty air from below practically blew me off my feet. It was accompanied by the most horrible screaming I have ever heard, then the nasty bellow of water. Though nobody knew it then, the tidal wave caused by the bombs that had detonated at sea had arrived and was filling the subway system.

  Those screams still come to me in the night.

  A man came up out of the station, wet from head to foot, his right arm dangling. "Agua," he kept saying, "agua!" Then he made a bleating noise and staggered off into the swaying crowds.

  INTRODUCTION 9

  My mind said: Grace Church School, Grace Church School, Grace Church School. I ran.

  My greatest fear was fire.

  I found the school closed and locked. There were lots of broken windows, but the lower floors were barred. I shouted and the Latin teacher opened the front door for me. Inside, the kids were sitting quietly in the great hall with their teachers. "What's going on?"

  Mr. Lewis asked me. "I think we've been hit by an atomic bomb," I replied. He nodded. "We all think that."

  I went to my boy. He jumped up and flew into my arms, and then started screaming because he saw all the blood on my back.

  The school nurse came over to tend the wound. She said I needed at least five stitches. But what could we do? I ended up with a brushing of Betadine and a bandage.

  The phones weren't working, so I couldn't call Anne. It was then that I made the decision that saved my life.

  I didn't know it at the time, but like all people caught outside during the initial stages of the disaster, I had received a radiation dose. If I had gone out even another fifteen minutes at the height of the fallout period, I would have quickly dosed red and then lethaled. What kept me from doing so was my belief that my wife's in-stinct would also be to come to the school and I was more likely to find her by waiting than by searching.

  Not ten minutes later she appeared. She was wearing my felt hat and carrying an umbrella. I will never forget how it felt to kiss her at that moment, to feel her in my arms. And then Andrew said,

  "Let's have a family hug." We held each other, and I told them both what I thought had happened.

  Anne is a practical person. She had no idea what had happened—in fact, her theory was that a volcano had erupted—but she suspected that in any case we might get hungry, so she'd brought a box of freeze-dried food we had put aside years ago for a camping trip and never used. She'd also brought a little news of home: the power was out, the radio and TV were dead, the phones weren't working, and there was hardly any water pressure. Every window in the apartment was broken. The dishwasher was stopped on rinse and the clothes washer on spin. She reminded me that I 10

  INTRODUCTION

  had the video recorder set to tape a movie on HBO at five o'clock, and the power failure was going to mean that I would miss it.

  Other parents were now arriving at the school The Head moved the children into the gym, which had no windows, and we decided to make that a shelter for all the families who wanted to stay. Anne and I went to the locker room and took long showers.

  Some of the parents who did not take this precaution died in days.

  Others were unaffected. For the most part it depended on how long they had been outside, and whether or not they had been shielded from the initial burst of gamma rays from the blast We had the church right there, of course, attached to the school. Grace is probably New York City's most beautiful church, and it served us well in the next few days. It could be reached from the school without going outside. While the city died, we prayed there. At that time I wondered if humanity would prevail. Despite what was happening, I found myself trusting the goodness in us more than hating the violence. I still feel that way.

  Of that night there remains with me the memory of a particular noise: footsteps on pavement. It was persistent thunder, and mixed with the cries of the hurt and desolate, it defined those hours.

  By 6:00 P.M. the sky was black, the air very still, the sun a life-less maroon shadow on the western horizon. Many parents were at the school, but not many families were complete. Some of the kids were still waiting. Some had left. They didn't come back. Every so often another mother or father would appear out of the gloom, and we would count a victory.

  By now it had occurred to us that there must be dangerous radiation, so we were trying to keep trips outside to a minimum, and had hung blankets over the windows.

  Throughout the night, the rattle of walking continued as people crossed Manhattan, heading for the tunnels and bridges, trying to get out of the city on foot. Once we saw a fire truck—obviously too old to have an electronic ignition and so not immobilized by the electromagnetic pulse—making its way down Fourth Avenue, trying to negotiate a path among the reefs of stalled cars. It was soon lost in the gloom. The eastern sky glowed like the inside of a furnace, a deep, fearsome orange. Toward midnight it began to rain

  INTRODUCTION 11

  pieces of burning tar. They looked like meteors coming down into the streets and onto roofs. I thought then that this was the beginning of the end—the firestorm was crossing the river.

  By this time the little group at Grace had become a community of sorts. We organized ourselves as best we could, trying to find our way to survival. There was no information, only the crowds and the confusion and the burning streaks of tar. Two of our group went to the roof to put out any fires that might start there. They held plastic dropcloths from the art room over their heads as protection from cinders and radiation. The fallout worried us even more than the fire. We knew little about it. Was there still too much radiation in the air, or should we join the exodus west instead of trying to fight the fire? We just couldn't recall. On balance, most of us dec
ided to remain at the school a little longer. At least we were reasonably safe there for the time being. We also had light from church candles, food from the school's larder, and water from the tower, which we hoped wasn't contaminated by radiation.

  Our first case of radiation sickness started at about eleven that night. Meg Parks began sneezing. She had walked down First Avenue all the way from Eighty-ninth Street, where she had her office.

  She was a psychiatrist, and her two girls were in the school. By 2:00 A . M . , Meg had fever and was breaking out in a rash. She was vomiting and suffering from severe diarrhea. We tried to get water into her, and the school nurse gave her Kaopectate. But it was all quite useless. Her husband, Peter, still had not appeared, and by morning we decided to take her over to St. Vincent's Hospital.

  Bob Tucker and Fred Wallace volunteered to be stretcher bearers.

  We suspected that the streets might be dangerous, so three more of us went along: Jerry Fielder, Tom Roote, and myself. As Tom had a .38, we considered ourselves relatively safe.

  We were less concerned about radiation now. A brisk west wind had come up about midnight, blowing not only the firestorm away from Manhattan, but the fallout as well. As we went down the street, though, I wondered; our feet crunched on a thick dusting of ash. We kept on—it was unthinkable that we should just let Meg die because we were afraid to go out.

  We carried her in a hammock made from a blanket. She lay 12 INTRODUCTION

  quite still. She was coherent and she joked that swinging her in a hammock had to be the hardest labor any of us had done in years.

  She was having frequent convulsions, and she looked very weak.

  To the east the sky was now filled by a massive gray-white cloud. Closer, there were tall columns of smoke.

  On our way across Thirteenth Street we counted many dead.

  Forty, I think, all shot or beaten or, in one particularly horrible case, burnt. There were fires smoldering here and there, but nothing devastating. We didn't know it, but at this time hundreds of thousands of people were dying on Long Island as the firestorm swept eastward.

  We were a block away from St. Vincent's when we understood our mistake. The crowds were so thick we couldn't move a step forward. There was the disgusting tang of vomit on the ah*, and many people were lying in the street, sick to death and helpless. There were burned people everywhere, many of them also suffering from radiation sickness. We could hardly stand to see it. We fell silent, we turned away.

  It was like the aftermath of a great battle. The hospital itself must have been a scene of unspeakable horror.

  We took Meg back to the church, where she expired at four o'clock that afternoon, after a very hard five hours. The father of her daughters never showed up. I do not know what happened to the two Parks girls.

  As soon as we were back at Grace, we all took long showers.

  Anne and Andrew and I decided that we would remain inside this building, away from the windows, for as long as we could. We did not know then that the hot cloud from Washington was on its way up the seaboard, spreading extinction. If we had tried to leave then, we would have been caught in it with the millions whose footsteps still had not stopped.

  The teachers organized activities. The children threw themselves into work on a folk song festival. Along with myself and Tucker and a couple of others, the rector of the church and the Head formed a survival committee. We inventoried the food and discovered that we could do about a thousand calories a day per person for two more weeks. We wouldn't starve, but as far as quality was concerned, we were going to have protein problems.

  INTRODUCTION 13

  There were cans of beans and soup, but the only meat was the six freeze-dried hamburgers Anne had brought. There was no longer any gas pressure, but we worked out a method of using the stove anyway. We found that we could heat food by building a fire from paper and pieces of chairs on top of the burners and hanging the pots up in the exhaust flue.

  Our first meal consisted of spaghetti with marinara sauce from cans, and pork and beans. It was washed down with fruit juice. Not much, but I suspect that it was better than many got in New York on that day. We ate in the gym, off paper dishes saved from last year's May Fair and intended for use at the Christmas party.

  All during that day, neighborhood people had been congregating in the church. Our food situation improved rapidly. Everybody brought canned goods, so the increasing numbers were no drain on those resources. We began to worry instead about water, and drew up strict regulations about those long showers we had been taking.

  No baths unless you made an "approved excursion."

  We were determined to live through this, somehow, even though most of us felt that the rest of the world had been destroyed.

  Falling water pressure rapidly became a more and more serious problem. Already high-rise apartment buildings were uninhabitable above the sixth floor because of a lack of electrically pumped water. Low-rises were suffering too, as was Grace Church School.

  Broken mains in the bombed boroughs were draining the system dry. Soon our rooftop tank would be all we had left.

  More even than the lack of water and power, though, people were scared because of the lack of news. Those who had ventured as far east as the river confirmed that there was a holocaust going on in Brooklyn and Queens. They had been able to feel the heat on their faces even on this side of the river, and the wind being pulled into the fire was stiff enough to make it hard to stand up. People reported that the conflagration made a great, hissing roar. They described it variously as sounding like a railroad train, a hurricane, or the voice of an angry crowd.

  The electromagnetic pulse generated by the huge bombs the Soviets had detonated in near space was the answer to the mystery of why even portable radios wouldn't work, and why people with 14 INTRODUCTION

  recent-model cars couldn't get them started. The vast majority of electronic devices—computers, televisions, radios, microwave stations, radar, avionic devices on airplanes, electronic car ignitions—

  had been shorted out by Soviet bombs detonated in outer space.

  The explosions had been invisible and had had no effect except to blanket the country with a brief, massive burst of electromagnetic energy. Certain military equipment had been shielded, and even some computers owned by big banks and corporations.

  They shielded such devices, during the mid-eighties, to resist a 50,000-volt pulse. So the Soviets simply generated a larger one. Recent estimates are that it exceeded 150,000 volte. Thus they overcame billions of dollars' worth of shielding with bombs worth at

  most a few million. An efficient means of destruction.

  Because of the electromagnetic pulse, we had no access to broadcast news.

  I will never forget the moment when somebody outside started yelling about the Times. The next thing I knew, there was a man coming in with a paper. It was the famous sixteen-page extra, which was the last news we were to see for a long time. I still don't know how the Times managed to get that paper out. Someone told me it was produced in New Jersey before local electric power was lost.

  I remember the headline: NUCLEAR ATTACK BY A T LEAST THREE

  MISSILES DEVASTATES CITY. And the lead: "Nuclear weapons detonated over Queens and Brooklyn on October 28 at approximately 4:45 P.M., causing catastrophic devastation and leaving both boroughs in flaming ruins. An estimated two million people lost their lives."

  It was there also that we read of Washington. We were stunned, confused. Washington no longer existed. There was no President, no Vice-President, no Congress, nobody. We had no government.

  "Washington, D.C., the seat of government of the United States of America since 1800, has been destroyed by a surprise nuclear air tack. Reports from the area indicate catastrophic destruction on a scale previously unknown in human affairs. The city was swept away in a sea of Are. Not a building remains standing, not a monument intact. Observers are unable even to approach within ten miles of the city. Baltimore, Maryla
nd, is also burning, as are the

  INTRODUCTION 15

  majority of smaller communities surrounding the District of Co-lumbia." It went on, but I find that my memory does not serve me to quote the rest.

  The paper recommended that people stay indoors, reported the flooding of the subway system, and announced that the police department had opened Madison Square Garden, the Armory, and the Convention Center as protected public shelters.

  I would say that the appearance of that newspaper was one of the few good things that happened in those terrible days. It served first notice that humanity still existed, that we had been hurt but we were not going to give in just yet. I know that people lost their lives doing the reporting that went into it, not to mention transporting and delivering it. Not only Times people were involved in the edition, but also news crews from the television networks and the staff of the Daily News, which was without power to run its own presses.

  Still, reading in black and white that Washington was gone made me frantic.

  Until that moment I hadn't thought beyond the immediate situation: how to live through the next few hours, and would I come down with radiation sickness? Every passing moment of queasiness or faint chill was terrifying. We had set up a hospital in the parents' lounge, which was also an interior room, and there we attended the sick and dying as best we could. The school's science teacher, Mrs. Dannay, had managed to rig up a thing called a Kearney Fallout Meter, and was engaged in dividing the school into safe and unsafe areas.