War Day

by Whitley Streiber; John Kunetka

  The KFM was made in a Folger's coffee can and consisted of two leaves of aluminum foil hung side by side on strings inside the can. It was covered by the clear plastic top from a Tupperware container in which the fourth grade had been hatching frog eggs. The bottom of the can held crushed gypsum, used as a drying agent because humidity can affect the ability of the foil strips to respond to the presence of radiation. Mrs. Dannay had dug the gypsum out of the wall in the lab. It was just ordinary wallboard.

  She could tell by the way the leaves of foil spread apart or came together how much gamma radiation was present in a given area.

  It wasn't accurate enough to measure hot spots on people, but it 16

  INTRODUCTION

  did help us to confirm that our water was not highly contaminated and that our top two floors and the area of the church closest to the main doors were, as well as all areas on the main floor of the school near doors and windows, and the whole central foyer.

  That Kearney Fallout Meter probably saved the lives of most of the people in our School. It also enabled Mrs. Dannay to develop a rough estimate of ambient radiation outside. She told us that trips out were safe only for fifteen or twenty minutes, and that no individual should make more than one trip.

  It was on the third day that I began to have symptoms. My head had become infected despite copious applications of Betadine and plenty of soap and water. Of course, I had been exposed to radiation and that had lowered my resistance to disease. (Lowered resistance caused by the combination of radiation and starvation is undoubtedly the reason that the Cincinnati Flu took so many lives the year before last.) In any case, I began to get symptoms of radiation poisoning and infection. My head hurt terribly.

  When I started vomiting, Anne and Andrew took me off to a corner of the hall and tended me there. They did not want to put me in the parents' lounge, which had become a virtual dying room.

  Just about everybody who went in there died within a few hours.

  Of course, people had no notion of how to protect themselves from radiation, and many of them had gotten very severe doses. I hoped that my dose wasn't too terrible, but I also suspected that, combined with the head wound and the rough conditions, it might weaken me enough to threaten my life.

  We prayed a good deal. Over the past few years we had gone from being agnostics to becoming Christians again. We had been parishioners at Grace for about six months. I am a Roman Catholic by birth, and have had a stormy relationship with my Church. During the early eighties I went through a period of what could be described as confused neutrality. By Warday, I was temporarily uninterested in religion, though I felt comfortable with my son in an Episcopal school. Since the Reunion of '90,1 have been a Catholic worshiping in the Episcopal rite.

  It was the prospect of death that brought me back once and for all to the Church. I am not a strong man, spiritually. I returned because I was facing pain and destruction and I was scared. Since

  INTRODUCTION

  17

  Warday my faith has become so essential to me that I can hardly imagine being without it. When I thought I was dying, I began to pray to the Blessed Virgin, to whom I used to turn in times of childhood crisis. I was not afraid to die, but I felt awful that I must leave Anne and Andrew at such a time.

  The sickness grew in me until it was an invincible horror, a devastating, agonizing thing that wracked me with convulsion after convulsion and left me so weak I could not even move my hands, let alone talk. Our rector came and gave me the last rites. With my wife and son at my side, I waited for death.

  By this time Dr. Leo Stein had arrived. Leo's son Jeremy and my boy were best friends, and Leo and I had gotten to know each other pretty well. He had been working since Warday. The moment he heard the explosion, he had simply packed up what he had on hand in his office and hiked to the nearest hospital, which was Bellevue. The hospital had reeled under the strain, but Bellevue was a powerful institution and had managed to organize itself well enough to provide at least routine care to every serious case that presented itself. This was before triage, and doctors were still treating people on a most-serious-first basis. Best-prospect-first classification was still six months away. When Leo had been relieved after seventy hours of work, he had put on a whole-body radiation suit from the hospital's stores, acquired a gun from its armory, and come down here on foot, bringing what medicines he could.

  He treated me with ampicillin for my infection, then dressed the head wound. To replace electrolytes lost in vomiting and diarrhea, he prescribed the now-familiar salt, baking soda, and potassium solution that is routinely used in such cases. We managed only the salt and baking soda. I recovered without the potassium. Nine days after Warday I was on my feet again. I weighed a hundred and thirty-one pounds. In nine days I had lost forty-six pounds.

  Since then, my lifedose level has been diagnosed as terminal, so I am on the triage, waiting for the inevitable outbreak of cancer. It could start tomorrow, or next year, or in five years. It might never start, but the odds in favor of that are very small.

  By the time I recovered, the radiation level in the streets was not detectable on our Kearney Fallout Meter. Our food supplies 18 INTRODUCTION

  were dwindling, and water was strictly rationed. About a third of the families had left the school.

  On November 6, 1988, Anne and Andrew and I started out on our own journey home. It was to be a long and bitter trip, ending in sorrow.

  Home is where one's family lives. For Anne and Andrew and me, this was San Antonio. Not until ten hard days of traveling later, when we were on a bus in Arkansas, did we learn that it had suffered the same fate as Washington and was no more.

  Jim

  What's It Like Out There?

  I was forty-four years old on Warday. By prewar standards I had lived somewhat more than half of my life.

  I was forty-nine when I left with Whitley on an adventure through postwar America. I was very conscious that the five years that had just passed had been the equivalent of at least twenty prewar years. I kept wondering how many more I would use up on the journey.

  And I wonder now how many are left.

  War is about death and change, but it is also about numbers, about counting. Because there was a war, our numbers have changed. If it did nothing else, the war and its aftereffects have aged us. But how do we measure an epidemic of shortened lives?

  Whitley and I have been friends a long time. We went to grade school together. Our prewar literary careers certainly didn't paral-lel, but they happened in tandem. I was writing Oppenheimer while he was doing The Wolfen, for example. I doubt that those books are even known now.

  (It makes me feel terribly uneasy to think of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has appeared from time to time in my dreams. He stands there, silent. When I realize who it is, I wake up with a shout.)

  But beyond friendship or an interest in writing, there was a 19

  20 INTRODUCTION

  shared vision. Two men in their forties, white-haired, thick of voice, slowed, but wanting to find out what is happening in ordinary, ev-eryday America. Poor communications have made a secret of experience we all need and deserve to share.

  When Whitley and I first considered the notion behind this book, my impulse was protective: I wanted to stay right here at home and cling to what life I have left. But then I began to wonder: What is the country actually like now? Everything certainly seems different. If there has been fundamental change, is it productive? Or is cultural psychosis threatening us?

  At first, I must admit, even my curiosity was not enough to move me. Even in tranquil times, one tends to hold on to anything definite and stable, and my job with the Dallas Herald News was a good one. Whitley and I talked about the book needing to be written, but I'm not sure I buy that. I don't think there is such a thing as a book that needs to be written.

  But the question of the state of the country—the way it feels for ordinary people to live in its various regions—wouldn't go away. Since the wi
re services were reconstructed in '90, we have all been getting a certain amount of outside news. But facts can't reveal the things that are really important: how it feels and tastes and smells in America, what work is like and what hopes are general. The only way to find such things out is to walk the streets and talk to the people.

  Travel is not easy, and in many places it's far from safe.

  I live in a nice house and, with two others, I own a fairly good car. I cherish my safety passionately. On Warday both my wife and my mother disappeared, my mother in the maelstrom of San Antonio, my wife in Austin. Mother I know is dead. But my wife—

  there is always the chance she remains alive, caught in the great shuffling departures that have marked the famine and the flu. I wrote only my mother's name in the Governor's Book of the Dead.

  I ate dandelion leaves during the famine. I know what it is to have the flu and get told to leave the hospital or face arrest. I know what it is to lose relatives, home, possessions, friends.

  And I know how I feel when I watch the sunset over the roofs of the neighborhood and hear the snick of the scythe as my neighbor cuts his lawn.

  INTRODUCTION 21

  But the things I did not know seemed to me more important.

  What, for example, was life like in the least affected parts of the country, such as California? How was the federal government functioning now, with its new capital in Los Angeles and a whole new breed of bureaucrats? Have they documented the history of the war, and what are they saying about it now?

  More importantly, what do ordinary people know about the war, and what have they learned from it? Will we ever rebuild the old "United States," or is that as much a part of history as the USSR?

  So curiosity became interest and I found myself drawn into working on the book. We both knew it couldn't be done from Dallas, that we would have to do our research by traveling, talking with people, getting in touch with the landscape, gathering the vitally important personal stories and sensations even more than the official facts.

  There would be risks, of course. We could get hurt or even killed. We could run out of money. Whitley would be away from his family for an indefinite time. Travel is not easy. We would have to do a lot of walking. We might, in fact, end up for a while in one of the civilian detention centers the Army uses to control migration.

  We would have to use every contact we had and all the salesman-ship we could muster to go where we wanted and meet the right people.

  I also wanted to gather government reports, documentary evidence. Not to place blame, but to see and perhaps understand.

  Transportation was the most immediate obstacle. Air travel is quick, but there isn't much chance of doing it on a regular basis without government approval or foreign papers, unless you are willing to wait months for a reservation. Also, you don't meet ordinary people on planes. We would go TBF—train, bus, and foot.

  Just like everybody else.

  Travel passes aren't commonly needed except, as we found out, in California. Washington State and Oregon also have stringent immigration restrictions. War Zones were off limits, of course, but my government contacts could help us there.

  Whitley is in somewhat more jeopardy than I. He is triaged because of his high lifedose. His chances of getting cancer in the next 22 INTRODUCTION

  five years are seventy percent. His ten-year survival probability is zero. This comes from his living through Warday and the week after in New York.

  I have lost so much: wife, mother, friends, expectations. All of my references are to the here and now, and I found I wanted to expand and enrich them. The trip would do that.

  Besides, I remember something my grandfather used to say whenever someone would offer him a scotch and water. "Why not, I can't dance."

  As much as any, that was a good reason for doing this.

  Dallas to Aztlan to California, then back across the continent to New York, then home through the old South. A call to Amtrak confirmed that the rail service is not only running but somewhat expanded since prewar times. Amtrak's diesels did not suffer from the effects of EMP because they have no delicate electronic parts like airplanes.

  We made phone calls and sent letters. The telephone system is quixotic. Some large areas are still completely without service.

  Others were never affected at all. To find out if a place has service, it is easiest just to call. Austin is as easy to reach as ever. A call to Los Angeles was interrupted by an operator asking us to state our business—our first taste of California's raging paranoia about outsiders.

  When you call San Antonio, a recorded voice says, "We're sorry, but the number you have called does not exist in the 512 area code. Please consult your directory and try again."

  Each regional telephone company has dealt with its destroyed areas in different ways. Call Cheyenne and you'll get an announcement that the number has been disconnected. New York clicks on the third ring, and returns silence.

  As we called here and there, we found that our reputations opened some doors and closed others. But I'm a decent enough reporter, and I felt confident that I could overcome even the resistance of the military authorities and the federal government to letting their documents out.

  I'm organized. Whitley is a narrative writer, a storyteller. I have a more technical bent, and a reporter's knowledge of whom to approach for documents. I made a list of people we should talk to

  INTRODUCTION 23

  in government agencies, and drew up an assessment of the ease or difficulty we could expect with each one. Then I mapped out our journey, assessed transportation problems, estimated expenses, and evaluated expected roadblocks of both the human and highway kinds, identified radzones on our path, and marked out areas of the country where there might be bandits or aggressive surviv-alist bands.

  Both Whitley and I wished that we could have organized all our data on our lost computers. He was rich before the war; he had an Apple. I had an old Osborne. They are missed accomplices, the best tools either of us ever had.

  Families and friends had mixed reactions to the trip. Whitley's wife, Anne, and his son, Andrew, hated it, but in the end they accepted it. One of my friends called it "difficult." I suppose he was trying for understatement. My editor at the paper was excited.

  Given no city or state censorship problems, he would print our reports in serial fashion, assuming we were able to mail them back to him. And he'd pay. Not much, but it would help.

  After our final planning session together, I left Whitley to a day alone with his family. I spent it packing, thinking about places and people.

  Sometime after dark there was a knock at my door. Nobody was there; instead, on the doormat was a bottle of bourbon—very valuable—and a small unsigned note reading Good luck. We are more furtive now, we Americans. I never found out who cared so much about me that they would give me something as precious as that.

  The next morning, waiting outside Whitley's house, I thought how hard it must be for him to leave a real, functioning family. But we've all left people before, and we've all experienced hard moments.

  Our journey began in morning and sun. By some miracle, an old aunt of mine managed to catch up with us at the British Relief HQ

  in Dallas and give me her St. Christopher medal, which she'd carried for more than seventy years.

  I did not tell her that the Church removed Christopher from the calendar of saints years ago. And I wore the medal all the way.

  PART ONE 1

  The West

  That is no country for old men. The young

  In one another's arms, birds in the trees

  —Those dying generations—at their song,

  Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

  Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

  —W. B. Yeats,

  "Byzantium"

  The Journey Begins

  It is a bright August morning, the air dense and full of the smell of the wisteria that grows around our back door. I have been up
since five-thirty, watching the sky go from gold to white. Jim will soon arrive, and I am beginning to count my minutes. There has been wind from the west, dusty wind, but I don't mind; west of Dallas lie the South Plains, and, unlike the Corn Belt, their dust is low-content.

  Anne has given me a breakfast of eggs and a glass of goat's milk. Our eggs are small and brown, from our own bantam hens.

  Good town birds. The goat's milk is from the Perrys, across the street. Their son Robert keeps three goats. On the table there are hard, tart grapes from our arbor.

  Anne sits across from me, her chin in her hands. Though she is only forty-six, her hair is white and as soft as down. There is about her face a nervous look that is new. It comes, perhaps, from the difficulty she has believing that our life will remain as tolerable as it has recently become. But there is also hardness in that look, a kind of determination that has developed over the years. You can see it in her eyes, a sort of flintiness. We have been married for twenty-three years and we know that our remaining time together is quite limited, and so she sees my jour-27

  28 WARDAY

  ney as a family tragedy. But she understands my motives. I was a writer for many years, and I did not voluntarily give that up.

  Anne will not stop me from doing something of real value with my skill.

  "I'm going to miss you," I say. She smiles, tight-lipped. "I'll write," I add. Her hand comes up, touches my face. "I'll be back as soon as I can."

  Loving and being loved is the great thing, I think. My love for Anne is as much a part of me as my eyes or my voice. For the first time in perhaps ten years, I will not tonight sleep in the same bed as she. After all we have been through to get to this peaceful corner of the world, it seems almost a travesty to leave her bed, no matter what the reason.

  Andrew comes in, his eyes alight, his hands and T-shirt smeared with grease. He is really an artist with machines, my son, and he has kept our ancient Dodge in superb order since we bought it in '90. It is a '75 model with a beautiful old-fashioned electric ignition of the type that survived EMP. More modern cars, with then*