War Day

by Whitley Streiber; John Kunetka

  electronic ignitions and microchip-controlled carburetion systems, were rendered inoperable. Jim says that there was an AP wire story to the effect that fourteen million electronic ignitions were destroyed on Warday. Since Warday, an average of a million replacements have been made each year. At this rate, close to half of the disabled cars will have been ruined by weathering long before they get new ignitions.

  Our precious Dodge cost us twelve gold dollars, a sum it took me two years to raise. But it runs, and the highways aren't crowded, and sometimes in the dead of the night one or the other of us has the trapped dream, and then we like to get in it and drive westward, toward cleaner land, along the dark, empty Interstate.

  I am leaving the car behind. It is too expensive and difficult to journey by private vehicle.

  "You've got a dozen hardboiled eggs in your backpack," Anne says. "It's all I could get out of the banties."

  "It's a lot."

  "I made some bread." She hands me a loaf, and my heart almost breaks. Flour is hard to get these days, and she must have THE WEST 29

  hoarded this carefully. It's quite a surprise.

  "What a nice gift. I had no idea."

  "Just remember that there's more where that came from."

  All her life, Anne's been insecure about her ability to keep me.

  But it is I who should worry. I feel she is a better wife than I am a husband. We kiss and she is fervent. Her fingers are linked at the back of my neck. "I love you so," I whisper into the soft white hair.

  We stop at last.

  I take the bread and put it in my backpack.

  Andrew has washed his hands and sat down at the table. He is a tall, rangy thirteen-year-old. His memories of prewar America are fading, and I regret that. On Warday he was six weeks away from his ninth birthday. He remembers New York chiefly as a place where you could get a chocolate-chip cookie or a danish at Cake Masters whenever you wanted it. I know that this is an awfully small memory of that glorious place, but so far I have been unable to discuss with him the true nature of our loss. That city was part of my soul. Despite its size, its loss seems a deeply personal thing. I did not lose the towers but the view of them from the roof of my building, not the museums but my own personal experience of the great works there, the paintings that were looted from Manhattan museums or rotted there, and the ones that burned in Brooklyn.

  I felt comfortable working in New York. I wrote all my prewar novels there. My films were set there.

  How anachronistic those books seem now, those light entertainments that were my life's work in the last days of the old world.

  I was rich in New York, and there also I knew the shuddering poverty of starting out. I find, though, that my memories return to it less and less often now. As I grow older, my mind jumps back further, to the San Antonio of the 1950s and 1960s, in the fine days of my boyhood.

  Andrew is looking at me. Our eyes meet. For a moment he is grave, his face full of unexpected tension. "Good luck, Dad," he says. We have talked at length about my journey, and he approves.

  He also knows the risks. "I'll take care of Mom," he says. "I can do it." I believe that. At the age of ten, this young man kept his head 30 WARDAY

  about him when he was starving. He organized midnight forages to abandoned warehouses, learned at the library how to recognize edible plants, and never spoke a word of complaint through all those terrible months. At twelve he helped on a disinfecting crew during the flu, then faced that disease himself, and lay hi this very house between life and death. "What happens, happens" he said then. "I know that God'll keep me." He has seen the dead stacked in heaps, being dealt with by bulldozers and lime; he has lost friends many times, and seen this neighborhood all but emptied, then refilled again by people more like us than the original residents who had been here before the war. Our newer neighbors are leather-hard.

  I reached my maturity in a world of electronic ease. Andrew remembers my Apple and our RCA TV, but he is saving for a radio and eagerly awaiting the day we get listed for a Japanese computer. He has it all picked out: an Epson 221 with so-called artificial intelligence. But he has little concept of the electronic village. When he wants to reach a friend, he is more likely to write a letter than to try to telephone. It isn't that Andrew is totally deprived of the advantages of electronics now, but that they were unknown to him during his most impressionable years. Until this year he has experienced telephones as balky, unreliable things. Before the war, we placed what now seems a fantastic level of reliance on the most fragile electronic webbing.

  I think of the Japanese. Even their immense productive capacity has not been enough to rewire the United States.

  There is a sound of footsteps outside, and Jim Kunetka comes in the back door. He is blade-thin, smiling, looking rather haggard.

  When I ask if he slept last night, he only smiles more. Anne gives him oatmeal and grapes, and he eats eagerly. He has been my friend since we were children. Lately he has been working as a journalist, while I have gone into microfarming and indoor garden design. I can build you a hydroponic garden sufficient to supply a family of four with vegetables year-round, and locate it indoors so you don't have to worry about fallout or residual buildup. Before the war I was a middle-range novelist. We were happy and fat then. My horror stories were successful, because happy people crave the luxury of artificial fear. I wouldn't write one now—the THE WEST 31

  very idea is loathsome. (Although, I must admit, I've begun to get a trickle of royalties from Europe and Japan. It is strange to see the computer printouts from my British agent, like ghostly documents from a world that is gone.)

  "Our appointment is at eight-thirty," Jim says in his most brisk manner.

  I swallow the last of my milk and get up. Anne and Andrew and I hold each other for a moment, our faces touching, our arms around one another's shoulders. We have always hugged like this, the three of us. For me it is a symbol of our endurance as a family and as civilized people, and of the truth of our love.

  We say good-bye in the hug. Anne's expression remains firm and calm. It's not that we ignore our tears. I remember a time when people were embarrassed by such displays of emotion, but no more. We need our luxuries, and tears are cheap, but this is not the moment for them.

  Jim and I leave. The hourly Dallas Transit bus will stop out on Forest Lane in ten minutes. We refuse Andrew's offer of a ride to the bus stop. I'd rather he and Anne stayed together, and, in truth, I don't think I can bear to prolong this parting.

  The sun is already hot. We pass through the neighborhood and turn onto Piano Road. Abandoned condominiums line both sides of the street. Chateau Versailles, Woodridge, Oak Park II—names from the past. There is no longer a housing shortage in this country, not with a thirty-percent population decline in five years.

  Our little nuclear war was not about ultimate and final ends at all. The issue was not Armageddon, it was consequences. Seven million people died on Warday. My family and I were twelve miles from Ground Zero of one bomb, and we survived.

  We are used to death, though. All of us know how easy it is to die. Not an American lives who has not lost somebody—friend, family member, lover. More than sixty million people have died in the years since Warday, of malnutrition or diseases brought on or made worse by weakness. Some have died from radiation poisoning. Others have given their lives to cancer and the new disease, NSD.

  Jim tells me that the British Relief estimates that there are still a quarter of a million war-related deaths every month. If I die of 82 WARDAY

  cancer, I will be counted among them one of these days. Warday was a flicker of hell. The rest has been consequences.

  Only the first ragged salvos of missiles were actually fired. Immediately upon their detonation, both sides experienced the collapse of their elaborate command, control, and communications nets, and the war went out like a carelessly struck match.

  I don't think anybody ever seriously considered that a limited nuclear war would be as brief as
it actually was. God knows what would have happened to us if there had been another exchange, or if the two sides had been able to carry out even the smallest part of their plans for each other. Consequences only have meaning when you are living in them.

  In New York I learned how it felt to get caught in a "trivial"

  nuclear war. Here in Dallas I have learned every agonizing detail of the consequences—the long, unforeseen drama of the aftermath.

  No planner ever dreamed that it would be as small as it was. No doubt some prewar strategists would have felt confident about a nuclear exchange like the one we had. I can see the memo now:

  "As minor a megadeath level as six is sustainable, and planning must include the possibility of even greater losses within the parameters of acceptability."

  As many died on Warday in this country alone as in all of Hitler's gas chambers. And afterward—all I can say is that the death of friends no longer surprises.

  On this fine Dallas morning Jim walks along beside me, silently. He was like this years and years ago, on patrol in Vietnam, his eyes seeming to look inward, his face in almost meditative repose.

  I remember the day we got on that Pan Am jet to come home. The moment the plane was in the air he changed back to his old self, voluble, full of laughter, his wit at turns fierce and gentle. Now the silence is customary. Jim has killed to stay alive, and he has seen hard things. Because he got the flu early, he was able to come and go as he pleased during most of the epidemic. To this day he is short of breath from the scarring on his lungs, but he survived. A week after his recovery he took his camera and notepad and traveled through the Midwest on behalf of the Dallas News Herald. It was the height of the epidemic. He walked the streets of Cincinnati THE WEST 33

  during the Ten Days, and saw what a modern American city in the grip of an uncontrollable plague was like. He took the classic photograph of the stacks of dead burning in Eden Park. Never once has he spoken about his experiences there, and nobody asks him to.

  His pictures and published account are sufficient testimony.

  People greet us at the bus stop. Winnie Parker embraces me, so does John Gordon. I can understand why modern custom has replaced the handshake. To hold others is to maintain something. A handshake confirms distance, and we don't need that anymore.

  The bus comes at 8:12, right on time. We get in, jamming to the back as best we can. Because of the cost of parts, it can be very expensive to run a car, but the bus fare is two cents here in Dallas.

  The bus soon reaches the Central Expressway and turns in toward the downtown area. The only time it leaves the expressway is to stop at the Meadows Building, where the Centers for Disease Control has its regional office. I suppose that it is the largest non-military agency of what remains of the United States Government.

  Maybe the Agriculture Department is larger, but I doubt it. CDC is heavily supported by the British. U.S. tax collection procedures are still too minimal to guarantee the kind of budgetary consistency a massive operation like CDC requires. What the English do is simple: they pay CDC's salaries out of their general exchequer, then bill the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta, which transfers gold down at Fort Knox from the American pile to the British pile.

  Half the passengers on the bus get off at CDC. The rest of us continue on into downtown. A group of girls in Rat Patrol uniforms sing a familiar song, made popular by the rock group Sunshine.

  "Earliest morning, hour of sweetness

  Surely begotten just to remind us

  That night is completed

  And we can begin now, a brand new day."

  I must confess that I don't like Sunshine's relentless good cheer any more than I liked the facile anger of The Bad back before the war. I was a Bach fan back then, and I am a Bach fan now.

  But the Rat Patrol girls are fresh-faced and full of the winsome 34 WARDAY

  joy of their song. To a man my age, the young are so beautiful to see.

  "Hey, Whitley, we're here."

  "Sorry." I follow Jim out of the bus. We are at the Adolphus Hotel, which is the Southwestern headquarters of the British Relief. And some say, also, the true seat of government of the Southwestern United States.

  The Adolphus is in superb repair, unlike many Dallas structures, which have suffered mainly from this country's continuing glass shortage. There are no cracks in the facade of this beautifully restored old hotel. I can remember, dimly, coming here with my father, driving up from San Antonio in his black Cadillac, when he was doing business with a prewar billionaire named H. L. Hunt.

  Dad and his partners were trying to interest Hunt in drilling for oil in Lavaca County in South Texas, but I don't think they ever succeeded.

  The Adolphus of today is much more elegant We pass through big doors elaborate with polished brass, and confront at once a receptionist behind a wide desk. To her right is a Phillips computer, its screen glowing. To her left is a communications console. She is wearing the summer uniform of the British Emergency Medical Relief Organization, a white peaked cap with blue trim, white shirt with blue-and-gold epaulets, white skirt, and white shoes. Altogether, she radiates health and a kind of deep, interior confidence I remember well. It was commonplace in the prewar United States.

  Behind her, two blue-uniformed bobbies stand at parade rest in front of the elevators.

  "May I help you, please?" she says quickly.

  "James Kunetka and Whitley Strieber to see Mr. Shandy."

  Jim's voice is smooth, his manner calm and affable. He comes here often, looking for news. I cannot help but be uneasy in this foreign-controlled enclave. Like most Americans, my trust in massive central governments is nil. I am uneasy around these British civil servants with their paramilitary pretensions, though I know that their contributions to our welfare have been enormous.

  The receptionist types our names into the computer. In a moment the communications console beeps. She picks up the receiver, listens, puts it down. "You can go right up." She presses a buzzer THE WEST 35

  and one of the bobbies steps forward. By the time he reaches us, she has filled out two green tags. We are expected to put them in our shirt pockets so that, folded out, they can be seen at all times.

  We are accompanied to the sixteenth floor by the other bobby.

  There, a third policeman shows us to Room 1620, which is marked simply CONTAGIOUS DISEASES. There is a faint smell of sausages and coffee in the hallway.

  Another secretary shows us into a cramped outer office, which is dominated by a communications console and computer identical to the ones downstairs. The next moment Jim is introducing me to the inhabitant of the more commodious inner office, a man of medium height with a badly sunburned bald head and a sort of blustering joviality about him. He is in a summer uniform with large wet spots under the arms. He gets right down to business. "I can give you an hour," he says.

  Jim takes off his backpack and pulls out his recorder. "The idea is that you simply talk. We won't ask many questions. Just tell about your job. Your life here. Whatever you want."

  Shandy regards us. "I'd anticipated questions."

  "Do you feel you need them?" Jim asks.

  "Well, I suppose not. It's just—more convenient, you know."

  His eyes meet mine. His gaze is blue and direct. "Before we start, I want to know a little bit about your plans."

  Jim smiles. "We're still going to Aztlan, Mr. Shandy."

  Shandy's lips tighten. "We don't recommend it."

  The Hispanic Free State that has come into being around El Paso is notorious in this part of Texas. People are terrified of Aztlan. Our visit there will be the first great challenge of our journey.

  "Aztlan is extremely dangerous," Shandy says. "We'd really prefer that you stay in Texas."

  "Who is 'we'?" I ask.

  "The U.K. contingent," he snaps. Then he picks up the little Sanyo recorder. "You have a disk in this thing?"

  "All set. Just start talking."

  Shandy settles back. Af
ter a moment, he begins.

  Interview

  Charles Shandy, U.K. Relief Official

  My work as a public health officer has taken me to many parts of the United States, but I have spent most of my time in Texas, being attached to the United Kingdom Emergency Medical Relief Organization, Southwest Region (HQ) in Dallas, as Director of Contagious Disease Control. I have been here in an official capacity for three years. Prior to the war, my experience in America was limited to a three-week vacation in San Francisco. We exchanged our house with a couple living there, the Mannings. I remember it as being a beautiful city and formed a very favorable impression of the American people from my experiences in California. When the King and the Prime Minister described the situation in America on the telly in the winter of 1988,1 was among those who volunteered for the relief effort. One cannot fail to remember the American response during and after World War II, or the close ties between the two countries. I was then assistant managing director of the Albert Doring Company. We specialized in the transport of live vaccines to tropical areas, so I knew a good deal about contagion.

  At least, that was what I thought at the time.

  During our prewar vacation, my wife and I traveled up and down the West Coast on a train called the Starlight, and really had a great deal of fun. California was beautiful, and the Queen's having been there the previous spring—that was the summer of '83—

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  meant that the people were more than usually kindly disposed toward us English.

  I have been once to San Francisco since the war, and found it quite a tattered and crowded version of its old self. But certainly recognizable. I went to call on the Mannings, but nobody in the road knew what had become of them. The family occupying their house would not talk to me.

  My primary job is to identify outbreaks of treatable contagious disease and allocate appropriate Relief resources to them so that the problem will be minimized. It is not generally understood, but our main function is to supplement existing American services.