There was less rubble and there were fewer fires up that way and they began to see a lot of people who weren’t hurt at all, just running around. Many were going in and out of houses, carrying things, and some families already had beds and bedding and trunks and suitcases and piles of clothing out on the street. Quite a few had put things in handcarts and even on children’s wagons, and they were hurrying along, pushing and pulling and carrying babies. All the windows were broken and all the sidewalks were littered with glass and there were very few parked cars.
Willis noticed that, too. “People that could,” he pointed out, “grabbed a car and beat it.”
When they crossed Market Street—which changed its name from Central Avenue at the bridge which Nora rightly supposed was now vaporized—they could see hordes of people everywhere, nearly all of them running north with something in their arms or on their backs, and children. But some blocks down, where the big Cathedral was plain to see because it was on fire and half-mashed anyhow, firehoses were shooting up and fire trucks were all around.
“That’s what comes,” Willis said, “of having all Harps in the Fire Department. Save the Catholic church and let the city go.”
Jeff said, haughtily, Nora noticed, “I guess it isn’t important. Half the fire companies must have been wiped out and the rest couldn’t do much. The flood that floated Noah couldn’t put this out!” He laughed a little; cackled, Nora called it to herself.
They covered about three miles to go about one straight mile and often they had to back out of streets because they could see they couldn’t go through. Sometimes people tried to stop them; and always people begged for rides and once some foreigners yelled a lot of words they couldn’t understand and threw stones at them.
When it got quite dark and when they were out of the region where the fires made it possible to see their way, Willis found a bigger car with locked doors and windows. He broke the windows with bricks and he raised the engine hood and fiddled under it and they moved Mrs.
Sloan, though it seemed all they could do. Nora took her pocketbook along, carefully. But the car lights helped a great deal when they finally got the other car moving, and some teen-age boys came shooting past them in the car they’d abandoned and hit a fire plug not three blocks away.
Once, when they were on the other side of Market Street, a plane went over, out toward Ferndale. It was flying terribly low and terribly fast and it was a very big plane. But only Nora bothered to wonder what it was doing there. She thought maybe it was a drone, sampling the atomic dust, but she decided there was no way to tell. She realized that Chuck would be at Hink Field in all probability and he could tell her, later, when she got home. If she ever did get home.
By the time they got to where they could see the Infirmary, the fire storm was really going full blast. It made one big blaze right in the middle of the Sister Cities about five miles high and maybe, Nora decided, two miles across. Since she had expected it, she took it for granted exactly as she did all other A-bomb phenomena: it impressed her without unduly astonishing her. But she could observe that Jeff and Willis were simply appalled. Several times, flicking his eyes up at the rising tower of sheer flame, Willis bumped into things with the car.