War Day Read online
October 28, 1988. Warday.
It lasted only thirty-six minutes and when
it was over, much of the earth remained
untouched.
But in those thirty-six minutes, a world had
been destroyed.
•
Seven million Americans died in the immediate
blast. Millions more would die of radiation,
famine, and disease during the next five years.
Millions also lived, strung out across a
country that knew it had been hit—but not
why. Or where. Or how.
•
In the days and months that followed, an
America blacked out by the breakdown of its
communications systems and wrestling with
the demands of an unprecedented emergency
struggled first for survival.
Later it would seek answers—seek to find
out how it had happened, who had survived,
what was left.
•
Five years after Warday, the answers have yet
to be found. America is still a strange place,
filled with haunting relics of the past, constant reminders of what was lost. But survival is no
longer in question. It is time to take stock.
And so, five years after the missiles deto-
nated, two survivors set forth on a trek across
America. Determined to find out what has hap-
pened to the rest of the country, theirs will be a journey of discovery filled with pain and hope.
From Texas to California, across the vast dis-
tances of the Great Plains, into the once-bold
centers of commerce and power along the
eastern coast, and through the small cities and
(Continued on back flap)
(Continued from front flap)
rural hamlets of the South—amid pockets of
resurgence and remnants of destruction, they
will hear America speaking: remembering the
past, willing the present, longing for a future.
Warday: It takes you into a world you
couldn't imagine.
A work of fiction that reads like fact, Warday is the result of a skillful blending of the talents of Whitley Strieber (author of The Wolfen and The Hunger) and James W. Kunetka (author of City of Fire: Los Alamos and the Atomic Age,
1943-1945 and Oppenheimer: The Years of
Risk). Texans by birth, best friends since childhood, and well-versed in the scientific and
technological data underpinning the novel,
they unite in one voice to depict an America in
the aftermath of nuclear war. Though Warday is set in 1993, nothing in it is beyond the
possible, technologically or politically. This is what gives the novel its terrifying truth.
Jacket design by Robert Reed
Jacket typography © copyright 1984
by Andrew M. Newman
Front jacket photograph by
Gary Gladstone/The Image Bank
Back jacket photograph by
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON
383 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10017
WARDAY
BOOKS BY WHITLEY STRIEBER
The Wolfen Black Magic
The Hunger Night Church
BOOKS BY JAMES W. KUNETKA
City of Fire: Los Alamos and the Atomic Age
Oppenheimer: The Years of Risk
Whitley Strieber and James W. Kunetka
WARDAY
AND THE JOURNEY ONWARD
HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON
New York
Copyright © 1984 by Wilson & Neff, Inc. and James W. Kunetka All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof to any form-Published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
383 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10017.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada, Limited.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Strieber, Whitley.
Warday and the journey onward.
l.Kunetka, James W., 1944- . II. Title.
PS3569.T6955W3 1984 813'.54 83-18678
ISBN 0-03-070731-5
Design by Amy Hill
Maps by David Lindroth
Printed in the United States of America
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the following works:
"Sailing to Byzantium" reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Company from Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats.
Copyright 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1956 by Georgie Yeats.
"The Charge of the Bread Brigade," from Personae by Ezra Pound.
Copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
The lines from "Goodbye Iowa," from What Thou Lovest Well Remains American, Poems by Richard Hugo, are reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. Copyright © 1975
by W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.
"I Remember," by Joe Brainard. Reprinted by permission of Joe Brainard.
"Howl," from Howl & Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright
© 1956,1959 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by
permission of City Lights Books.
"On living," from Things I Didn't Know I Loved by Nazim Hikmet, translated by Randy Biasing and Mutlu Konuk. Copyright ® 1975
by Randy Biasing and Mutlu Konuk. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books, Inc., 225 Lafayette Street, New York, N.Y. 10012.
"An inexpressible sadness . . . b y Osip Mandelstam.
Reprinted by permission of Granada Publishing Limited.
ISBN 0 - 0 3 - 0 7 0 7 3 1 - S
This book is respectfully dedicated to
October 27, 1988,
the last full day of the old world.
Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
Whitley: A Survivor's Tale
Jim: What's It Like Out There?
PART ONE: THE WEST 25
The Journey Begins
Interview: Charles Shandy, U.K. Relief Official
Poll: What We Expect, What We Fear: American Opinion in 1993
Documents from the Emergency
Interview: Wilson T. Ackerman, Undersecretary of Defense (Ret.) Zone of Nowhere
Rumors: The Road to Aztlan
Interview: Oliver Parker, Governor of Texas
Documents on the Triage
Interview: Hector Espinoza, Aztlan Leader
El Paso
The Dream Bandidos
Los Alamos
CONTENTS
PART TWO: CALIFORNIA DANGERS 111
California P.O.E.
Poll: Opinions from the Two Americas
Los Angeles
A Statement by an Anonymous Member of the Conspiracy of Angels Fugitives
Interview: Reverend Michael Dougherty, Catholic Priest-Documents from the Civil Defense
Rumors: Mutants and Super-Beasts
The Immigrant Quickstep
Documents from the Acting Presidency
Coast Daylight to San Francisco
Golden City
Interview: Walter Tevis, Economist
Documents—California Dreams
The Prison Bus
Interview: Captain Malcolm Hargreaves, Sub-Popper Poll: The Grand Old Feud—Do We Still Believe in It?
PART THREE: ACROSS AMERICA 219
Jim: Prairie Notebook
Documents on the National Condition
The Rising of the Land
Kansas
City—Children's Thoughts
Documents on Limited War and the Limited Economy
I Will
Interview: P. Chandler Gayle, NSD Specialist
Interview: Rita Mack, Professional Rememberer
Anger
Interview: Terry Burford, Midwife and Witch
Rumors: The Garden of Eden
Interview: Amy Carver, Teacher
Interview: Charles Kohl, Student
A Wanderer
CONTENTS ix
PART FOUR: NEW YORK 305
The Approach to New York—Ghosts
Rumors from the Northeast
Interview: General George Briggs, New York Military Area Documents from the Lost City
New York, New York
Interview: Morgan Moore, Salvor
PART FIVE: RETURNING HOME 351
The Children's Train
Jim: My Final Image
Georgia Patrol
Interview: T. K. Allerton, Funeral Director
Whitley: Dallas, October 10, 1993, 2:15 A.M.
Introduction
However and wherever we are
We must live as if one never dies.
—Nazim Hikmet,
"On Living"
Whitley
A Survivor's Tail
The survivor's tale is the essential document of our time. All of us have them; even babies have them. To be born now is no guarantee that you will not be touched by Warday. Indeed, birth makes it certain.
So we are all survivors, and those of us who actually lived through that day carry our histories with us, our stories of how we did it, of what particular luck or strength or cleverness saw us through.
We are not the people we were on that sharp October day in 1988. I see the change in my wife and son, certainly in my collabo-rator, Jim Kunetka. And in all whom I know. Sitting here with my pad and paper, I find that writing about it evokes obscure and powerful feelings. Am I bitter, or angry, or simply sad? So much of what I saw as basic to life is gone; what I counted valuable, worthless.
I have my own particular artifacts of that time, mostly small things and mostly relating to the security of my former life. I have been marked by the economic disaster as much as, or more than, by the radiation. In the final analysis, for so many of us, the closed bank and the worthless money are truer expressions of Warday than is some distant mushroom cloud. My last stock statement from Shearson/American Express, for example, is probably my 3
4 INTRODUCTION
most treasured talisman of the past. It reminds me of the fragility of complex things. Somehow, age has given it beauty. I can imagine that such a thing, covered with symbols and symbolic numbers, associated with a mythical time of plenty, could one day become an object of worship.
I open the document, smooth it out. My feelings about it are so strong that they are almost silly. I have sat staring for hours at the anachronistic names: Raytheon, General Foods, American Motors, Dow Chemical. I got eighteen gold dollars in the distribution of '90. How ironic that nine hundred paper dollars will now buy a house. In 1987 you could spend more on a suit.
More even than to this paper, though, I cling to the memories of my family. These five years later I still find myself waiting for the phone to ring, expecting my younger brother, Richard, to be on the other end of the line. Richard, the determined, tiny rival, the childhood enemy who became as an adult my best friend, who understood me and whom I understood. Whom I loved. We talked every afternoon, no matter where we were in the world. So now, each day at four, I remember. That is my monument to him.
New York was my home in the eighties, and I was there on Warday. We remained there through the dangerous twilight that followed. In fact, the only reason I am alive now is that we stayed as long as we did.
I saw New York in her gaudy evening, and I saw her dead, and so—a little bit—I comprehend. My difficulty is with my childhood home, San Antonio. How a whole place, all of its people, all the details of its life, could just disappear is beyond my understanding.
Nobody would have put San Antonio on a list of prime targets—nobody except the Russians.
They thought not of the quiet streets or of the fun we had, but of the repair and refitting facilities at Kelly Air Force Base and of the burn center at Brooke General Hospital, and of the massive concentration of spare parts and equipment in the area. But they did not think of kids running through sprinklers, or of the River Walk or the genteel silence of the McNay Art Institute, or of the enormous, vital, striving Chicano population.
My family had a history in San Antonio. I was deeply connected to the place; in so many ways, my identity flowed from it. Though I
INTRODUCTION 5
lived in New York, I kept a membership in the San Antonio Writers' Guild. When I was there I used to walk by the river for hours, and then eat Mexican food at Casa Rio. At age ten, I would sit in my father's office in the Alamo National Bank Building and look out over the flat, smiling land and dream boy's dreams, of having wings, or of riding shotgun on the stagecoach to Dallas.
How can it be that the place where I was formed is gone? The Alamo National Bank Building was a tremendous skyscraper, or so I remember it. Did it fall over at the end, crashing into Commerce Street, or did it simply disintegrate?
My brother had just opened his own law office there, on the eighteenth floor. Did he feel anything? Say anything? I visualize him on the phone, hearing a noise, glancing up, then gone. Or was it horrible and slow? Death by fire in an elevator? Or by suffocation in some sub-basement parking garage?
And my mother. Looking back to the placid life we knew, it seems so impossible that her fate was to be killed in a war. She was seventy-one years old, and for her the end was almost certainly instantaneous. She lived in an apartment house two stories high, of rather light construction. She was either there or at a neighbor's house at the moment of death. Whichever was the case, there wouldn't have been the least protection.
So many bombs exploding simultaneously over such a relatively small area caused the temperature to exceed that of the surface of the sun. People have told me that they heard the explosion in Oklahoma City and Monterrey, Mexico.
We are the first generation to see places instantly vaporized.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, but not so completely as this. In a vaporized place, not even rubble remains.
I understand so very well the thing that impels refugees to cluster at the borders of the San Antonio Red Zone. I myself have thought of going back. And yet the blackened land must be terrible to see, and the smell of it, the stench of millions of tons of rotting ash, almost beyond enduring.
I have thought of memorials. Many times I have copied out the forty-seven names of the members of my family who died in San Antonio. And I have wondered—are they all really dead? Ours was a prosperous clan. Maybe some of them were traveling. One aunt 8 INTRODUCTION
and uncle, for example, often went to Europe in the fall. Are they there now, perhaps engaged in a new life? They had investments in Germany; they could have got a refugee visa if they had applied for it early enough. But the rest—I have a feeling about them that is common to those who lost people close to them on Warday. They disappeared so suddenly and so completely that they don't seem dead so much as lost. My relationships with them continue as if they will sometime soon come back and take up the thread.
We've all read and heard about the details of blast effect. But there is one detail that is usually overlooked: the heart does not understand this sort of death, neither the suddenness nor the scale.
Blast effect has trapped me in a maze of expectancy from which I cannot seem to escape.
I know a little bit more about blast effect. I was riding a Number 5 bus down Fifth Avenue when the New York Pattern detonated. Of course, I have thought many times about the consequences of the miss. I have wondered what subtle imbalance of technology caused it. And I have thought: a nuclear miss doesn't mean much.
The city died of it any
way.
The bomb that would have exploded about eight thousand feet directly over my head detonated instead on the eastern edge of Queens.
As I sit here, my yellow pad in front of me, I find that my mind shifts focus from the broad to the tiny: the shin splints I had that day from too much jogging; the breakfast cereal I had eaten.
October 28,1988.
I was trying to remember to call my sister in Houston, to con-gratulate her on becoming forty-four years of age.
But Pandora's Box was sprung, and nobody was going to be making any phone calls for a while.
October 28, 1988: a clear blue afternoon, just pushing toward five o'clock. While I read the New York Post and sucked a Vela-mint, the world cracked asunder. I was sitting in the bus, just behind the rear exit door. I remember that it was one of the GM
buses, with the darkly tinted windows. All of a sudden it was lit up inside with a chalky brilliance, a strange and unpleasantly hot light that penetrated everything.
Sudden darkness followed—due to our eyes, of course, being
INTRODUCTION 7
stunned by the intensity of the flash. The driver shouted, "Jesus Christ!" and stopped the bus. I just sat there. We all did. We couldn't see a thing. I heard a horn honking.
Then the blast hit. There was no warning, just a sudden cataract of sound and wind. The bus rocked violently. There were deep thuds and shattering noises as pieces of roofing and glass came down. The noise rose and rose until I thought it would never stop.
People were trying to get out of the bus. I crouched down on the floor. My heart was pounding; I was gasping. I had my eyes shut tight. At that moment I was thinking in terms of a terrorist attack or maybe of the Con Ed plant in the East Thirties blowing up. The thought of a nuclear bomb didn't occur to me until the noise subsided and my eyesight got back to normal. Then I looked out.
The chaos was so great that my mind simply went blank. I was vision only. The images swept all thought away. Windows were broken, cars were up on the sidewalk, and people were running, staggering, lying in the street. A dark yellow haze of dust cast everything in eerie light.
My first clear thought was of my family. My son was in the third grade at Grace Church School and taking an after-school gymnastics class. As far as I knew, my wife was at home. I thought I'd better call her and tell her that there had been some kind of an explosion but I was all right and not to worry. By this time the driver had gotten the doors open. He was trying to restart the bus and not getting anywhere at all. Of course, we didn't know a single thing about electromagnetic pulse back then. He had no idea that the bus's electronic ignition had been destroyed.