He kissed her. And he kissed her gently, as he had never kissed Madge.
They got breakfast. After that, Fallon knew, they should have gone east, with the tense, crawling hordes of refugees. But somehow he couldn't go. The distant gunfire drew him, the stubborn, desperate planes.
They went back, toward the hills of Bel Air. After all, there was plenty of time to run.
Things progressed as he had thought they would. Martial law was declared. An orderly evacuation of outlying towns was going forward. Fallon got through the police lines with a glib lie about an invalid brother. It wasn't hard—there was no danger yet the way he was going, and the police were badly overburdened.
Fallon kept the radio on as he drove. There was a lot of wild talk—it was too early yet for censorship. A big naval battle east of Wake Island, another near the Aleutians. The defense, for the present, was getting nowhere.
Up on the crest of a sun-seared hill, using powerful glasses from his car, Fallon shook his head with a slow finality.
The morning mists were clearing. He had an unobstructed view of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, the vast bowl of land sloping away to the sea. The broad boulevards to the east were clogged with solid black streams. And to the west....
To the west there were barricades. There were clouds of powder smoke, and fleets of low-flying planes. And there was something else.
Something like a sluggish, devouring tide, lapping at the walls of the huge M-G-M studios in Culver City, swamping the tarmac at Clover Field, flowing resistlessly on and on.