by James Philip
New tracks appeared on the plot; two tracks terminating somewhere in Washington State, and another pair...
A loud bell rang.
“Now hear this! Now hear this! Initial telemetry indicates that we have two incoming tracks targeting THIS area!”
Chapter 4
21:01 Hours MST (23:01 Washington Time)
Saturday 27th October 1962
Bellingham, Washington State
Sam Brenckmann had not objected when Judy had done her best to meld with him beneath the table in the corner of the bar. Her hair smelled good; so good that it had almost, but not quite taken his mind off being terrified until he remembered exactly what the warning sirens meant and what the flash of the distant air burst that had turned night into day inside a building tens of miles away signified.
Is this how the World ends?
Underneath a table in a bar in the boondocks at the back end of nowhere?
Outside in the street a car was cruising up and down.
“All citizens are advised to stay indoors!”
“Stay away from windows!”
“If you have a basement, go to it NOW!”
In the bar those who wanted to had already stumbled and crawled down into the beer cellar, a dank, claustrophobic hole in the ground filled with plumbing and barrels that had not actually been used for years. Breathing the mould-fouled air down there was possibly as hazardous as inhaling low-level atomic fallout.
Or that was what Sam told himself; he hated small, confined spaces especially when he was crammed into them with a lot of other people. He did not even like crowded elevators.
“My place has a basement,” Judy declared in a tiny voice.
“How far away is it?”
“A mile. Twenty minutes. I don’t have a car.” She thought about this. “No, that’s wrong. Mikey left his old Plymouth in the garage when he went away. But I never learned to drive.”
This made up Sam Brenckmann’s mind.
If they stayed here much longer they would be frozen with fear like practically everybody else in the bar; and helpless.
“You want to get out of this place?”
“Isn’t it dangerous outside?” Judy realised how dumb this sounded, sniffed a half-hearted, very nervy giggle.
“Yeah!” The man grunted wryly.
They scrambled to their feet. Sam paused only to grab the handle of his guitar case in his right hand. Curious, dead looks followed the couple out of the bar. They hesitated on the boardwalk, their eyes adjusting to the relative gloom. Surreally, the street lighting was still on.
“We keep close to the houses,” Sam suggested. “Try not to look at anything above the roof lines. We don’t want to be out in the open, okay?”
“Okay,” the woman agreed. She took a deep breath, clasped his left hand in her right hand. Everything that would have seemed bizarre, unlikely and stupid a few minutes ago now seemed like the natural, normal thing. The most complicated things were now horribly, contrarily simple. A single flash in the sky had turned the World upside down and nobody was going to be putting it back the way it was any time soon. “Where were you staying?”
“A hostel down by the waterfront,” Sam replied, the words choking in his throat. He had been travelling light so there was nothing he needed or wanted to collect from the less than genteel, falling down old hotel which had creaked in the wind and resonated with the groans and complaints of the local hookers and their clients at odd hours throughout the night. “They wouldn’t let me take all my stuff this morning unless I paid for last night’s room. So I left it. I was doing my best to drown my sorrows when you arrived.”
Not that he would have succeeded in drowning much of anything in particular with the small change he still had in his pockets. Never mind; as his Ma always said, ‘it is the thought that counts’.
“How come you know so much about this?” Judy asked breathlessly as they ran across the street and hurried east hugging the sides of buildings.
“What to do if the World ends, you mean?”
“Yes!” She retorted tersely.
“My Pa was in the Navy in the War. He was a destroyer skipper during the Korean War. My brother, Walter Junior, he’s in nuclear submarines.”
“Oh.” Judy hadn’t expected that. “How come you’re...”
The woman’s voice trailed off because she thought better of what she had been about to say.
Sam chuckled.
“A drop out musician?”
“No, well,” Judy honestly did not know what she meant, “not exactly...”
“My other big brother is at Yale. The klutz wants to be a lawyer like Pa. My little sister went up to Buffalo this fall. She wants to be a teacher. I’m kind of the black sheep of the family!”
They had stopped in a narrow gap between two houses.
“What?” The man asked. The woman was giving him a really weird, questioning look and he did not know what to make of it. The night was strange enough without trying to fathom somebody else’s special weirdness. And besides, he was suddenly scared shitless.
Judy let go of his hand.
“I don’t know! The thing is I just started feeling crazy yesterday. Then I saw you in town. Mooching around. And busking outside the Mount Baker Theatre before the Bellingham PD moved you on.”
Sam smiled at the memory. The cops out in the boondocks tended to come in one of two varieties: jerk or human being. The cop who had moved him on yesterday afternoon had been a reasonable guy. He had looked at the blue jeans, at his faded and threadbare army surplus greatcoat, his crumpled shirt and at the growth of stubble on Sam’s chin and still seen the man beneath. The cop had definitely been a fellow member of the human race.
‘Son, why don’t you just get a regular job?’
It could have been his Pa talking. In his adolescent years he longed to have a father at whom he could rage, who would shout at him or raise his hand but Pa had never been like that even though Sam knew, in retrospect, he must often have driven him to despair.
The cop had sat beside him on the boardwalk.
‘It ain’t nothing personal, son,’ the cop had explained slowly, patiently, ‘but you can’t play your music here. The patrons will complain. They’ll start up on my boss and then he’ll start up on me. That’s the way things work. I don’t like it any more than you do but the long and the short of it is that you’ve got to move on.’
The cop had been middle-aged, running to fat, tired, paternal.
Sam had moved on.
“Do you get crazy very often?” He asked Judy.
“No. I just felt it,” she confessed uncomfortably. “Maybe it was all the stuff about Cuba on the TV and the radio. Oh, and the President’s speech last week. I just knew something bad was going to happen. And now it has!”
Sam had not been listening to the news – he did not as a rule – but even he had known something bad was in the wind; like an approaching storm cloud circling on the horizon.
“That doesn’t make it your fault.”
There was a distant flash like fork lightning. Far away, the sky flickering, returning to black in a moment. Instinctively, the man and the woman flattened themselves against the nearest wall.
They said nothing, waiting.
Then there was another flash in the southern sky.
“How far south is Seattle?” Sam asked hoarsely. He was thinking about the Boeing Plants and the giant Bremerton Navy Base. Seattle had actually been in ’the news’ that he affected not to care about a lot that year. Century 21 Exposition, popularly known as the Seattle World’s Fair had been winding down when he and the Limonville Brothers had stopped over in the city the week before last. They said ten million people had visited the ‘exposition’, mainly to enjoy the fairgrounds or to see the view from the top of the futuristic looking Space Needle tower, or to browse the new art galleries, or take in a show at one of the new theatres. Seattle had used Century 21 Exposition to rebrand itself, to shrug off its mid-twentieth
century reputation as a drab hub of the war industries that had helped to beat Hitler and Japan; and to shout to the World that there was more to Seattle than the Puget Sound navy yards and the Boeing bomber factories. Unfortunately, while the Soviets would not care about some latter-day cultural civic renaissance; they probably cared quite a lot about the Navy yards and the Boeing aircraft plants.
“Eighty, maybe ninety miles,” the woman replied in a whisper.
“The wind is from the north-west. Fallout should be blown inland away from us,” Sam said, thinking aloud. “The best thing,” he went on, “would be to hunker down for a day or two, just in case.”
“What if they drop a bomb on Bellingham?”
The man smiled. It was impossible not to smile.
“Then we’re all dead,” he shrugged. “So we don’t have to worry about anything anymore.”
A police car drew up alongside the couple as they walked through the empty streets.
Sam recognised the weary middle aged cop behind the wheel.
“I thought I told you to move on, son?”
“Sorry, officer. I never was too good at taking orders.”
“That wasn’t an order, son. It was a recommendation.” The cop fixed Judy in his stare. “Hi, Judy. What are you doing with this guy?” The cop thought better of it. “Naw, forget I asked that. It ain’t none of my business just because I remember you in diapers. You want a ride someplace?”
“Sure, Jake,” Judy chirped without hesitation.
Sam thought he was dreaming.
He could not remember the last time he had felt so disconnected with what was going on around him. His guitar case was perched alongside the cop in the front passenger seat and he and Judy were side by side in the back seats behind the Bellingham Police Department cruiser’s wire mesh partition.
The car radio crackled and hissed with static.
“Is the radio still working, officer?” He asked, knowing that big bombs were likely to burn out most circuits in radios, televisions, could take down telegraphs, and were capable of shorting out over-ground power lines and transformers – tens and hundreds of miles away - in some circumstances.
“Naw. But I’m leaving it on in just in case it comes back on.”
The car rolled to a halt a couple of times on the short drive through the mostly deserted streets. The cop rolled down the window and called to people; politely and firmly advising, not ordering people to go inside. He seemed to know everybody’s first name.
The cruiser pulled up outside a house that looked like all the other houses around it in the darkness. Farther down the road the street lights had gone out.
“This is bad,” the cop said, cranking up the handbrake, turning to the man and the woman in the back of the car. “You kids take care now.”
Sam and Judy got out and watched the vehicle drive away.
“That was cousin Jacob on my Ma’s side of the family,” the woman announced.
“Nice guy for a cop.”
“Yes, he is.”
The man and the woman looked at each other in the darkness.
“You don’t know me,” Sam said lowly.
Judy dropped her keys on the ground; instinctively they both squatted down and groped around for them.
“I’ve got them,” she declared. They stood up. “I know I don’t know you,” she added, a little vexed. “But I don’t think that matters tonight.”
The door opened and he followed her inside. The light came on. The lobby was cramped, tidy, with everything in its place. Sam suspected that the rest of the house would be the same.
“Wait here,” Judy directed, her voice quivering a little. She rustled up the narrow stairs and Sam heard her moving around on the boards above his head. She returned almost immediately, her arms full of multi-coloured quilts. It was a minor miracle she did not trip over because she could not possibly have seen where she was going. “The basement is through the door in the kitchen.” She thrust the quilts into his arms. “There is no heating down there. Take these; I’ll get more blankets and pillows.”
Sam Brenckmann hesitated.
Judy was already rustling upstairs.
That was when the lights went out.
Chapter 5
23:05 Hours Eastern Standard Time
Saturday 27th October 1962
Yale, New Haven, Connecticut
Gretchen Betancourt was angry. Up until a couple of hours ago she had had her life mapped out; things to do, objectives to be attained, the ways and means clearly established, the challenges she intended to confront and the experiences she planned to enjoy to the fullest possible extent meticulously lined up ahead of her down the coming years, like so many obedient ducks paddling upstream in a nice neat row. She was the daughter of a Democratic Party doyen, born into a wealthy New England family, aware that she had been given the best education available to any woman on planet Earth and she was going to go places where no woman had gone before and had vowed to bring down – crashing down, ideally - whatever male shibboleths stood in her path. The World was her oyster and she had been the mistress of her own destiny. And then the air raid sirens had begun to sound and she had ended up sitting beside mild-mannered no-hoper Daniel Brenckmann in a crowded, sweaty cellar beneath a small provincial theatre listening to young children crying while she waited for the World to end!
Gretchen sighed loudly.
She sighed so loudly, and so often that people turned to look at her.
“What?” She demanded. Although she was not yet twenty-five Gretchen Betancourt had acquired a propensity to wrap herself in a mantle of ferocious matriarchal authority at the drop of a hat. At such times her voice became haughty and her manner prickly; strong men glimpsed the tall – she was very nearly five feet ten inches in her stockinged feet - elegant, perfectly manicured raven-haired young woman and blanched at what they imagined they were seeing in her grey blue eyes. She had qualified for the Bar Association of Massachusetts and joined a prominent Boston law firm last year; now she was half-way through a post doctorial degree in corporate litigation which saw her living and working in Boston one week and studying in Connecticut the next. It was all part of her grand plan. She was content to make her way in the law partnership’s ‘boiler room’ back in Boston for a couple of years while she accumulated the qualifications, expertise, experience and additional connections which would inevitably guarantee her a lucrative full partnership before she was thirty. After that she would focus on her family’s plethora of political contacts, and set about the sordid business of building a rock solid platform within the New England Democratic Caucus. At some stage she needed to get married and her family had already lined up a suitable candidate; two children would be enough sometime in the next ten years, any more and her career would have to go on the back burner for far too long and that would never do. She was in a hurry but not a reckless rush; her father was a distant cousin of the President and the jury was still out on whether JFK would be the first one-term Chief Executive since Herbert Hoover.
Gretchen had not actually met Jack Kennedy since she was a gawky thirteen year-old and she had been hopelessly infatuated that afternoon at Hyannis Port. Not so much with the man but with the idea of the charismatic then mere Congressman for the 11th District of Massachusetts. JFK had so obviously been ‘going places’; and there had been a palpably seductive air of certainty about his rise and rise. It was only much later that she had realised that her infatuation was also intensely, achingly erotic. They said JFK ‘played the field’, bedding movie stars and debutants, that no woman was safe around him. If she was Jackie, Gretchen would not have stood for that. However, she was not Jackie, and anyway, Jackie was entitled to live the marriage she wanted not the one that other people thought she had. Besides, who was she to judge the First Lady? Jackie was married to the master of Camelot; all she had was a loser like Dan Brenckmann!
She had met Dan at one of those dreadfully dreary Partnership ‘socials’ in the summer. The Senior
Partner, Theodore Adolphus Hyde, threw two or three ‘at homes’ at his mansion in the hills behind Quincy every summer and attendance was de rigor for partners and associates alike. Walter and Joanne Brenckmann, Dan’s parents, were old friends of Theo’s – Theo’s son had served with Brenckmann senior’s ship in the Korean War – and on the last ‘at home’ of the summer Dan and his older brother, a lady killer in a crisp Navy uniform, the gleaming dolphin badge on his left breast denoting that he was in the Submarine Service, had tagged along with their parents. Gretchen had been tempted to hit on the older of the two brothers, Walter junior, and made the normal subtle exploratory moves only to be politely, firmly, charmingly rebuffed. Notwithstanding, Dan had followed her around all afternoon like a lost puppy, the way guys do despite knowing, deep down, that they are totally wasting their time.
“The all clear will sound soon,” Dan Brenckmann offered.
Gretchen resented the way in which he was calm and unruffled and could be so utterly non-confrontational in exactly the way she was not and never, ever would be.
“That’s a great help!” She hissed.
The man did not rise to the bait.
“There ain’t no call to get panicky, girly,” an older man complained gruffly from the safety of the gloom across the basement.
Girly!
Gretchen was on her feet before she had had time to consciously register her own motor functions switching into overdrive. She had stumbled several steps towards the exit door before knowing it. By the time she was standing on the empty street staring at the lights of the deserted New Haven waterfront and out across the bay to Sandy Point protruding from the eastern end of West Haven, her panic had peaked and her mind was slowly, slowly, belatedly rationalising what had just happened.
“Are you okay, Gretchen?” Dan Brenckmann asked his quiet concern anything but cosmetic.
She turned on him, eyes blazing.
