Triumph (19 page)

"Schultz managed to reach the airfield he had expected to leave in mid afternoon, much later and on foot, carrying his film but not his camera. The air terminal was in chaos as tens of thousands of persons tried to get passage south, from their dying nation and murderous city. No planes were arriving and few were leaving; the operating personnel had, by and large, fled the ticket booths, control tower, hangars, maintenance shops, and so on. Schultz therefore simply reconnoitered the smaller planes standing, in some numbers and still unused. He managed to start one and flew to San Juan, after landing for gasoline in Merida, Mexico.

"His film was contained in tight, metal cans which were further protected by the metal sides of the airplane luggage compartment. Schultz himself, however, had no such protection. He flew with the cockpit windows open and at only modest altitude. In consequence he passed through some areas of invisible and therefore unsuspected radio contamination-the drift of hot, isotopic debris from hits on other cities than the one where he began his flight. He saw distant evidence of those strikes, including at least three firestorms, but he did not consider himself to be in any danger. Four days ago, however, like the United States Air Force men, Waldermar Schultz died of radiation sickness.

"The first of his dramatic, and horrible, pictures follows. It was taken from a high window in a downtown office building and shows some of the events around a large, marked air-raid shelter designated by the federal government and reinforced by the state.

The shelter is underground, beneath a skyscraper hotel."

What appeared was a wide street filled, building-to-building and for the two blocks visible each way, with people. They seemed to be compressing.

Next came a closer view of the thousand or so persons nearest to the entrance of the hotel. The camera panned, as if sardonically, to show a sign over the heads of the jam-packed mob. It read "Shelter Area," and an arrow under the words pointed to the hotel entrance.

Now the camera returned to the mob and it could be seen that there was a strangeness about its members. That strangeness was explained by a cut to a still-closer view.

The people nearest the entrance, which was barred and boarded, were being literally squeezed to death. Many, already limp and motionless, were being supported by the press of those around them. From the mouths and nostrils of some-both the dead and the living-blood trickled redly.

Soon, individual faces were picked out and the agony, where they were the faces of the still-living, was as sickeningly fascinating as hideous. They were cheek by jowl with the dead but could not get clear an inch from the upright cadavers. These living, too, were being tortured. Where an arm or leg of a man, woman, or child had been allowed to stray free among the mass in some less-compressed time, or where a limb had been pulled or pushed away from its owner into the melée--they were being broken, dislocated, even pulled out at their roots. It seemed, in the minute or so of camera search, that the pressure grew greater, the blood-flow swifter, the agony more terrible.

Rib cages cracked with suddenness, like crates under trip-hammers, and people thus slaughtered were lucky, for they died quickly, in gouting blood-vomits or a last explosive belch of red-frothed air.

The announcer spoke, gently, Connie suggested by her tone:

"This shelter was well known, of course, and also known to be commodious and strong. Across the street some hour and a half before this picture was taken, people had formed a crowd owing to the announcement that a bargain sale in the store beneath the photographer was to open that day. The bargain-hunting multitude made the nucleus of the self-killing crowd you see. The shelter they seek to enter, of course, was filled within minutes of the first word of the national attack. Realizing that the almost-instantly crammed shelter would be subject to further assault, the hotel management put in effect a scheme readied for that possibility.

"Planks, backed by steel bars that fitted into prepared holes in the terrazzo entrance and overhead girders, were hastily emplaced. To no avail. For you will soon see the human ram break down planks, steel bars, and all, just as now you can see the tide of humanity pour, bleeding, against and through the great plate-glass windows of the hotel."

They saw that.

Next they saw another, similar mob trying to force impossible entrance into a different shelter that, lucklessly, had lost its portal, or, perhaps, never got it closed. A ramp-like street led to an opening big enough to admit a truck. Now, however, the pressure of the mob on the ramp, against those in the shelter (fortunately, Ben felt, only dimly-visible) was so immense it was reasonable to assume (and the announcer did) that all those who had gained entrance to the shelter were lost. It had been built to accommodate nine hundred persons but now contained, the announcer said, five to six thousand or even more. These were already dead of suffocation, de-limbing, crushing, trampling, smashed chests, and blood-loss.

"To get beyond such often repeated scenes in the city's center," the evidently quiet voice went on, "scenes of stampede wilder and more deadly than any eruption of cattle herds, Schultz said that at several points he climbed out of second-floor windows, dropped on solid human masses and, in his own words, 'walked on shoulders and heads, being careful to try to pick dead stepping-stones where I could, as the live ones sometimes bit.' Fortunately for Schultz, he wore Western boots. These, however, plainly were badly torn by human teeth when he landed outside San José."

A series of not-dissimilar scenes followed.

Then the camera and its apparently nerveless (or unhuman) operator had reached the suburbs. A shot of a clock on a church spire established the local time: three-five, and afternoon.

Next came a private-shelter version of the awfulness just witnessed in the downtown area.

First, they beheld a horde of persons--women in slacks, men in sports shirts, children in light clothing, the boys often shirtless--a typical hot-summer-day suburban group, of some hundreds. The crowd had gathered on the extensive front and side lawns of a large, handsome, modernistic mansion that immediately suggested Uxmal to the beholders. This mass of persons was motionless, or nearly so; it looked forward, as if waiting intently for some unguessable event. Then the camera moved and showed a face-on view of the stagnant, slack-jawed, irresolute, but strangely grim people. A third angle revealed the cause of their hesitation:

It disclosed a smooth, high rise of lawn and planted shrubs that covered with greenery and some feet of earth what plainly was a back-yard shelter of considerable size.

Its access door was battened tight, and looked formidable. In front of that was a kind of earthwork and, peeping over its grassy verge, the muzzle of a machine gun. Now and again the face of a man, tense, middle-aged, and sweating popped up for a brief look at the crowd that coveted the safe, or presumedly safer, refuge of whomever this man was ready to defend, behind him in the shelter. At intervals a younger man, resembling the elder, also bobbed up for a look and to call out what evidently were warnings to the crowd.

The camera, as before, now examined individuals along the front edge of that ominous multitude. They were, by dress and general look, ordinary, middle-class suburbanites and, in some cases and by the same tokens, quite well-to-do people. People no doubt like the owners of the mansion and its commodious-looking, earth-and-grass-shielded, semi-buried shelter. But there was nothing ordinary either in their silence and watchfulness or in the emotions on their faces. Some women fell to their knees and folded their hands to entreat, pointing afterward at children beside them. Schultz had no sound-recording equipment but this tableau was self-describing.

Rightly or wrongly, these gathered neighbors and neighborhood people felt the builder and owner of the shelter--who now stood ready to defend it--could, or should, give admittance to a larger number of persons than those now behind its steel portal. As rightly, or as wrongly, the two defenders were adamant.

"Schultz," came the announcer's words by way of Connie, "says he was told by a number of people who weren't actually part of the crowd gathered on the lawn, that the owner was not liked, a 'mean type,' and that only his wife, two daughters, and three servants were behind that door . . . in a shelter large enough, the bystanders insisted, 'to hold a hundred people, standing, anyhow.' Whatever the fact, as you will see, the crowd decided, like others, to take matter into its own hands."

The ensuing shots showed a slow advance, perhaps owing, mainly, to pressure from behind but, somewhat, to hateful and visible belligerence. It moved perhaps twenty feet before the camera switched to the redoubt. From it, with no further warning, the machine gun commenced to fire. In a dizzy blur the camera swung back and showed men and women and two or three small children as bullets hit them and sent them pitching backward, dancing in pain, bleeding, with battled looks on their faces, or collapsing in weakening-jointed death.

The mob retreated some ways. As it did, men went back and snatched up prone or writhing infants and youngsters.

Then, however, gunfire came from the crowd, as some few of the householders drew pistols and tried to hit the two defenders. After a time, since the machine gun remained silent and the youth did not appear above the green-grass parapet, the mob once more edged forward.

Although it reached nearer to the defense position--which looked like a golf-course bunker--the reaction there was sudden and formidable. The machine gun's jumpy bursts began, and went on. And the camera tilted up to catch a series of objects hurtling through the air, then tilted back to watch them explode: grenades. They left, with the machine gun, a gory havoc that set the unhurt attackers running in all directions: a wriggling, tottering, yowling scrabble of people, of women without clothes, of a child crawling as its knees pulled out its own intestines, of a mother hugging a headless baby to a shot-off breast. . . .

Then it was later, and without comment from the narrator in Costa Rica they saw a lovely girl running down an empty suburban street, with an occasional backward glance of sheer horror. Three plainly drunken white men rose in her path and grabbed her. They commenced to strip off her clothes as she screamed and fought. But before she was quite naked, a Negro of great size, with the name of a Moving and Storage firm on his clean, white coveralls, ran into the scene carrying a heavy wrench. He began a quick, grim skull-splitting.

He then helped the girl to her feet and she ran on, nearly nude, blonde, fawnlike.

But that was not the end.

The end was, perhaps, predictable.

The Negro, smiling a little, giving a kick of disgust at one of the downed assailants, suddenly sagged and a rose of scarlet opened on his coveralls. A slug had hit him from behind and expanded as it went through heart and rib cage, chest muscles, ebony skin, and his white garment. He fell.

A young man with a revolver in each hand tore into the scene, leaped the heap of dead drunks and the Negro savior, and stopped. He looked directly into the camera, his longish, curly hair falling back in place, his eyes narrowing as he raised a weapon. There was an instant in which his expression, incredibly ferocious and yet, more incredibly, smiling, looked off in the direction taken by the girl. Then, his smile gone, the weapon steadied and bucked, with the result that the camera shimmied from a hit. Then the handsome, quite-young pursuer regained his unholy look of glee and recommenced his chase. But he did not get far.

Quite suddenly, he grabbed his abdomen and his body could be seen, as it toppled, to flinch from well-aimed bullets.

"Our cameraman, Schultz," Connie translated.

The photographer and his equipment had not, evidently, been seriously injured.

For the lens swung up the street and showed that the running girl was not running any more. She lay, stripped, on a lawn near a flagged sidewalk and hardly had breath or strength left to fight the two men, then three, who had emerged from somewhere and caught her. Others were running up, grins on their faces . . . such grins as no one in the Sachem's Watch shelter had ever before seen.

At that point Farr shouted, "For the love of God, Ben! George! Cut it off!"

Ben did so.

Somebody switched on lights.

The stricken viewers looked, slowly, at each other.

They said nothing.

By-and-by, in ones and twos, they rose and left the Hall for their own rooms, still wordlessly.

Finally, only Farr, George Hyama, and Ben remained.

They looked at each other.

Nothing to say.

All questions answered.

They had overwhelming cause to believe, now, that they were practically alone, among the living, in all their once-fair, utterly-desolate nation.

They knew the answer, even to what "good citizens" would do if ever "the whistle blew."

And it was nothing to discuss at all.

Something to forget, as much as a man could.

Ben shrugged, realized his cheeks were wet with unnoticed tears, uttered one violent oath, and started away.

Farr said,
"Right."

George Hyama, usually so buoyant, made the only complete comment that night, a single sentence: "I feel less bad, now, about the outrages my fellow Japanese committed in wars in years past."

He bowed then, ceremoniously; both men, without any sense of novelty or any self-consciousness, returned the bow.

Ben switched the lights off, leaving only a few dim night-bulbs to illumine what otherwise would be the total blackness of a hole, five hundred feet down, in a rock mountain.

CHAPTER 11

For the next several days, the deep-dwelling survivors went about their tasks of housekeeping, cooking, furniture-making, machine maintenance, and the complex rest in a withdrawn manner. Laughter, which had become superficial but frequent, and had occurred over trifles, was not heard. Even Faith and Kit lost the unexplained coolness they had shown earlier in each other's presence. Not the mere abstract knowledge that the world--their half of it, anyway--was dead, but the dramatic display of how horribly and on what a colossal scale it had perished, left them stunned.