Men lived, too: lived blind and wounded and lamed and torn asunder, lived without minds and minds strangely contorted and warped. No one who had been in Manhattan that day survived without scars of body and brain left by the death of the city.
The golden egg had hatched its chick of death at eight-fifty-three of a Friday morning in June of 1970.
After a while, when the hurricane had dropped away and the earth had stilled its shaking, Alan sat up and looked toward the heart of the city. The disks were gone—and so were the people and the buildings, the life and the fine aspiring skyline of Manhattan. Nothing was left but a leveled, broken, sawtoothed waste, over which hovered the direful mushroom cloud.
Grotesquely, irrelevantly, all his mind could focus on in that moment of near-insanity was his cat. "Where's Unquote?" he asked harshly. "Where's little Unquote?"
The cat spoke furiously above his head. She had flown into a tree at the blast. He coaxed her down as the others stood and brushed themselves off and stared at the atomic cloud. At last she bounced from a crotch of the tree into his arms. She was shivering with terror.
Bill said urgently, his voice no more than a croak, "Let's make tracks. Lord knows what scuds of radioactivity will be blowing our way soon, if that wind didn't bring 'em already."
"All those people," whispered Win. Now the screams and howls of survivors could be heard where they stood. "All those poor people."
"The wagon's liable to be stolen if we don't get to it," said Don. "Come on. Please."
There were still men and women running through the park, some shouting with fear, some white and sick and mute. A couple passed them, their eyes round and horrified, the man's coat torn and the girl's green dress ripped off one shoulder. They must have fallen, or been caught in a fight. There were two men brawling over by the reservoir.