They did not drive into Chicago. Gary drove near the metropolis, moving slowly and incredulously through the small fringe-area towns which infest every major highway leading into the city. He was turned back by the fire and the smell of death borne on the night wind. The wind whipped the odor south, to where he finally stopped the car on the highway and got out to stare at the flames in the night sky. The fire had evidently been burning for days and now it was eating rapidly toward them, pushed on by the torrid winds. The unholy red glow of it stretched from one horizon to the other, indicative of methodical and widespread bombardment, making the city a vast crematorium. Chicago: bottleneck and major target, terminus of every railroad north of Saint Louis, possessor of the only waterway connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi and the Gulf, headquarters of a vast defensive ring designed to protect the nation from invasion from the north. Chicago: obsolete now in the strictest sense.
Gary clung to the car door and stared at the fiery spectacle in the sky, unable even to utter the curse on his tongue. It shocked him as that first city never had.
“Russell…” the girl inched toward him on the Seat, staring forward through the windshield. “Russell, isn't it dangerous? If atom bombs did that, isn't is dangerous for us to be here?”
He shook his head. “I don't know. The radiation is supposed to disappear after a few days… but I don't know. Mother of Moses! What they must have poured on that place!” He had read descriptions, had seen the army films of the destruction caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki… and as he remembered it, something like sixty percent of the cities were obliterated and over a hundred thousand had died in those two places. One bomb on each city. And Chicago with a population of almost four million had quite apparently received many direct hits.
“Let's leave, Russell. I'm afraid.”
He slowly turned the car around, staring first through the open window and then in the rear-vision mirror at the towering flames. Driving south again, away from the vanishing city, he couldn't help from turning his head to look behind. The glow persisted, hung in the sky after they had traveled many miles. It left him with a deep sense of despair that he could not shake off, plunged him into a mood and a silence so deep that the girl was forced to speak twice to make herself heard.
“Russell! I said, where shall we sleep?”
“I don't know. Anywhere.”
“We passed some motor courts.”
“I'm not turning around. Find another one.”