New York was the first city to stampede.
Before the S in BASTARDS! was completed, a loft caught fire in Seventh Avenue. The engines were unable to reach it, the fire spread, a wall fell into the crowd, and horrified survivors pressed both north and south in the thoroughfare, screaming. Their hysteria went ahead of them and, since the neck-craning throngs could not know the cause of it, they interpreted the oncoming roar in the wildest fashions. They, also, turned to run. Central Park furnished a place in which one-half of this tumultuous and trampling herd was able to spread out and regain some composure, though it had left the streets behind dotted with the maimed and slain. There was no sizable park to the south, however, and those who took that direction (save for a few thousands who sought shelter in the Pennsylvania Station) built up an avalanche of humanity which pelted and thundered clear to the Battery, itself its own Juggernaut.
The infection spread to side streets and to other avenues, inevitably. Within an hour, a great part of middle and lower Manhattan became such an abattoir as history has no record of. The show-windows along Fifth Avenue were burst in by the push of people who were then sliced and guillotined by the cascading glass. Wooden buildings were knocked askew in places.
Nobody could cope with such a situation but the mayor did his resourceful best. He ordered airplanes equipped with loud-speakers of great power to fly over the self-beleaguered city and explain what the source of the great stampede had been. Every morgue and hospital in the city and in its environs was mobilized. All bridges and tunnels were instantly cleared for the transport of the injured, as Manhattan's hospitals could not handle five per cent of the casualties. Police, using pistols with little ceremony, brought to a partial halt the epidemic of looting that occurred in the early afternoon. People were commanded to take the equivalent of air-raid shelter and to stay there.
The military, acting with their usual belated but firm ineffectuality, again essayed the problem of the Word itself. Unveiling a new weapon—a rocket adapted for air-to-air combat, with a warhead of a secret explosive—the Army launched squadrons of fighters and bombers to the attack. A great cannonade over the city began near five o'clock. It was futile: the blasts disrupted edges and fringes of the letters in the sky but they mended themselves as fast as they were tattered. Army Ordinance then tried its supersecret, twenty-four-inch rockets. Careless fusing caused one of these to explode at a low level, destroying the upper stories of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building—but subsequent accurate salvos of the tremendous weapon merely caused the letters to undulate.
Shortly after six o'clock the Navy, carrying out a suggestion of Cardinal Bleatbier, tried a new tactic—the interposition of a smoke screen between the abomination and the desolated city. The idea was greeted by officers with enthusiasm. The effect of it was not. For, after some fifty Navy planes had laid a great, brown carpet underneath the Word and above the buildings, there came new and hitherto unobserved eddyings of the air and the Navy smoke was drawn into the writing on the heavens—not only fortifying and clarifying what it had been intended to obscure but also giving the letters a phosphorescent glow which became visible as soon as twilight descended.
That night, as electricity began to fail in the city, the surviving people undertook to leave en masse. They had no stomach for another day such as they had passed through. An additional factor urged them on. During the years of the Atomic Age they had been living—like people of every city—with keen, increasing queasiness. It is not conducive to urban content to know that any of a dozen foreign governments can, or potentially can, blot out you and yours in an eye-twinkling. Indeed, for many years, people had been trickling away from cities everywhere—either openly giving their reason or offering some excuse.
Finally, from the very onslaught of B Day, there had poured forth a succession of orders setting up various official hierocracies for the emergency—deputy police, wardens, and so on, along with the rationing of gasoline, restrictions on subway use, abrogation of power supply, and other such matters. Americans are not a patient people and of all Americans, New Yorkers are the most impatient. Unlike Britains, Russians, and Europeans, they had never accepted the brash contempt of the public exhibited continually both by government and industry after World War II. Nor had they become reconciled to bureaucratic rule. They had resented the multiplication of authorized agents and official personnel. Hence, not being schooled to such vicissitudes at the time of B Day, they lost their tempers. They left town. By midnight, the tunnels, bridges, and ferries could no longer be held open for the evacuation of casualties. By three in the morning, every bridge and every tunnel and every boat was swarming with one-way, antlike movement as New Yorkers abandoned New York. All the next day the human tide welled into metropolitan environs.
The contagion spread to other cities as words began to form above them and in some instances even before their skies developed a C or a J or a P or an A or the like. Terror begat terror. Various metropolises were soon without electricity, water, food, gasoline, and so on. Fires began to rage in them. In no time, Cleveland, Detroit, Birmingham, Boston, Los Angeles, and other centers were in a condition like that of cities over which a powerful enemy has gained absolute control of the air.
There is, of course, no general record of the total effect of this exodus. Towns, villages, hamlets, and lone farms were unprepared to house or to feed the scores of millions who descended upon them—rich refugees in limousines piled high with canned foods and guns—slum masses in rags and on foot, with nothing but fear and hunger to drive them ahead. Here and there some man of feudal abilities organized bands of the fugitives and these forcibly evacuated whole communities, taking possession of them—only to be driven out by bands better armed and more ruthless. Theft and violence became the national way of life; and murder—murder that took the lives of millions—the means to obtain a meal or a woman or a bauble in some as yet unsmashed village store window. City people had become the sworn enemies of country people—and vice versa. The Hindus and Mussulmans of India on the days after its liberation were more kindly disposed to one another than these—and dealt more mercifully.