Chuck gave a worried glance at the Williams kids, saw that Ruth was still merely scornful, and opened the door. “Promise?”
“Sure,” Jim said negligently. “ Gosh! I never realized I had such spooky, damned fool relatives.”
In the Williams car, Beth said, “It’s real, isn’t it, Charles?”
“Damned real.”
“You were told—more than you can tell us?”
He turned into Willowgrove, avoided a speeding truck, and started south. “This is for you, Mother—and only you. Dad will get it shortly beyond doubt. The whole area, I guess. There are two… three waves of bombers on the way and one’s corning from the south—God knows why or how.”
She didn’t answer. He looked around. His mother had bowed her head and shut her eyes and he realized, at first with a sense of shock and then with a sense of its fitness, that she was crying.
6
It wasn’t the dead, Nora realized as she looked in fixed horror. The dead didn’t wear hip boots. It was just some sewer men carrying lanterns. Her relief was overwhelming.
Almost any adult who had passed through such a series of ideas and corresponding nervous and visceral shocks would have folded up quietly on the curved cement. But Nora, relieved of the infernal terrors, now faced terrors common to persons of her age: the terrors of angered adults.