Lenore didn’t, of course, stay to see the hordes clamber out of manholes. By the time the first of them drew breaths of clean air, she was on the top of an apartment building, over on James Street, not far from the Golf Course.
The CD rescue men were using the roof to get people out of a burning hospital building beyond, a hospital for chronics who could not be moved (until now) and the mentally disturbed.
They were coming over on ropes to the apartment; but the roof there, broad and Bat, had been covered two inches deep with a curious dust, a fall-out from the bomb-cloud. The men working wanted to know if the dust was—as usual, Lenore thought—“killing them.”
It showed only twenty mr’s—very weak radiation.
She went down by the freight elevator—with men wearing miners’ lights on their hats and CD brassards who were obliged to keep fighting with two women maniacs—down to the ground, out to the yard, into her Ford and on to the next call.
6
Toward eight o’clock they brought food to Henry. He had not left the room, had scarcely moved from his desk.
He had been aware for some time, subconsciously, of the smell of hot food. In his mind, he had ticked that off as one more thing going according to plan. Plenty was not. But the mobile kitchen, earmarked for his headquarters, had evidently come up; the women volunteers were heating beans in cauldrons, firing up the coffee makers, opening stacks of gallon fruit cans, running bread through the slicer.
The high school’s windows had been boarded up with plywood. A large kerosene stove was shedding heat and smoking slightly in the corner. Canvas had been nailed temporarily across the big crack in the roof. An engineer had made his inspection and assured everybody the high school wouldn’t collapse. There were plenty of kerosene lamps. For people in other rooms who didn’t have heaters, there had been an issue of coats and sweaters, collected from God knew where by God knew whom. A bevy of determined housewives, wearing arm bands and having nothing better to do, had come in with brooms and dustpans, raised a fearful dust, and cleaned out the plaster and loose debris.
At a desk pushed up to face his, Eve Sanders, acting as secretary, kept typing out notes-summaries of word that came over the walkie-talkies, and from the few ham radio stations still operable; and from runners from all parts of the area: boys on bikes, mostly. But the Motorcycle Club, having cleaned up the preliminary search and police auxiliary work in Henry’s sector, was checking in now in numbers, for message work.