Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) (12 page)

Partially completed
Armchair Double Novel cover

Armchair Fiction
Paperback Edition, 2011

 Artist Unknown

The First
Twelve Hours

I. The City—Thursday, 6:50 P.M.
 
Dr. Stewart Roswell

THERE were no crowds in the churches, no
mobs in the bars.
 
People did what they
always had.
 
It was an amazing strength
of mind or a terrifying blindness:
 
I
didn’t know which.
 

Half an hour before the broadcast, I
drove downtown.
 
I parked my car and
walked toward the big hotel on the beach.
 
Two women came out of a beauty parlor; I heard one of them whisper,
“They say Dr. Clapper took off for the hills early this afternoon.
 
He has a cabin up there, stocked with enough
food to last him ten years.”
 

On the terrace of the hotel I stopped to
light a cigarette, shielding my face from the cold sea wind.
 
The sun flamed red on the Pacific
horizon.
 
In the harbor I saw the dark
silhouettes of freighters at anchor.
 
At
noon the navy had sailed for Hawaii.
 

A girl, as dream-like as the yellow
organdy she was wearing, sat alone on a stone bench at the far end of the
terrace.
 
She was twenty, perhaps.
 
Black hair framed her face like an ivory
cameo.
 
Her lips were very red, her eyes
large and dark, her cheeks cold marble.
 

“I shouldn’t have come,” she said,
smiling at me.
 
“I wanted—I wanted something;
it isn’t here.”
 

“My dear, no one can live a lifetime in
an hour.”
 

“The truth is
,
I was afraid.”
 

“We all are tonight.”
 

“I thought it would be easier if I could
be where there were other people.
 
It
doesn’t help.”
 

I tossed my cigarette over the railing
and sat on the bench beside her.
 
“There’s nothing to be afraid of yet.
 
Perhaps they’ve found a way to work it out.”
 

“Not this time; they
can’t.”
 

“They always have before.”
 
I glanced at my watch.
 
“It’s almost time for the broadcast.”
 

She put her hand on mine.
 
It was long and graceful, as cold as alabaster.
 
“Wait a little longer, please; I can’t go
back in there yet.
 
I felt as if the
walls were closing in on me, choking me; that’s why I came out here—” She was
suddenly shy, like a small child.
 
“But
I shouldn’t be talking to you like this.
 
I don’t even know your name.”
 

“Dr. Stewart Roswell,” I told her.
 
“I teach history at the State College.”
 

“
The
Stewart Roswell?
 
I’ve
read your books.”
 

That surprised me.
 
My half-dozen books, warmly reviewed in the
scholarly publications, gave me prestige but skimpy royalties.
 
They were not what a young girl would pick up
for light reading.
 
The style was
pedantic
;
the theme, international relations.
 

“I’m Maria D’Orlez.”
 
She held my hand gravely.
 
“I was going to enroll at State next fall,
Dr. Roswell.
 
I counted on taking your
classes.”
 

Inside the hotel the throb of the dance
orchestra stopped.
 
I heard the sharp
static of a public address system and the muffled voice of a radio
announcer.
 

“The broadcast is beginning,
Maria.”
 

“Don’t go in!”
 
She drew me down on the stone bench.
 
“We know what he’s going to say—what he has
to say.”
 

For a time we sat together in
silence.
 
The girl was tense and her body
trembled.
 
I heard no sound but the
muffled voice of the broadcast and, farther away, the rhythmic washing of
waves on the beach.
 
Even the traffic on
the boulevard was still.
 

Suddenly people erupted from the hotel,
running toward the street.
 
Maria D’Orlez
pulled me close.
 

“Stay with me,” she whispered.
 
“Stay with me.”
 

II
.
 
The
Highway—Thursday, 7:00 P.M.
 
Jerry
Bonhill

MOM stood in the doorway, twisting her
hands in her apron.
 
Dad sat on the
couch, his face blank as if he were asleep with his eyes open.
 
Mom gave him his usual glass of beer, but it
stood untouched on the end table.
 
We
were watching the last part of “Doodle-Dan the Indian Man,” kid stuff with a
lot of old cartoons squeezed between the interminable commercials.
 
But the program didn’t matter.
 
Not then.
 

Mom asked in a whisper, “Do you think
he’s worked something out?”

Dad shrugged and ran his hand through
his gray hair.
 
“We’ll know in a few
minutes, Abby.”
 

I’m the baby in the Bonhill clan,
nineteen last March.
 
Dad sometimes
calls me Postscript because I was born fifteen years after my sister Jane.
 
I would have been in the army the way her
husband Ronny was, but instead I joined the R. O. T. C. at the university.
 

“Doodle-Dan the Indian Man” ended with a
trumpet fanfare.
 
A flag came on the TV
screen; we heard the national anthem.
 
A
network announcer said,
 

“We take you now to a government
shelter somewhere near the nation’s capital for this special report to the
American people.
 
Ladies
and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”
 

Visual static disturbed the image for a
moment.
 
Then we saw the face of the
President.
 

“Forty-eight hours ago,” he said, with
none of the usual boom you expect from a politician, “Enemy troops occupied
Paris.
 
The government of the United
States submitted a formal protest to Moscow, which has been ignored.
 
This afternoon the Soviets proposed a
high-level diplomatic conference for the negotiation and readjustment of our
differences.
 
We have conferred before and
the agreements have been subsequently violated by Soviet arms.
 
We have lost Asia to Moscow at the conference
table; we have lost Africa; one by one we have lost our allies in Europe, until
today only England remains beyond the Iron Curtain.
 

“I speak tonight fully conscious of the
unspeakable horror of atomic war.
 
I give
you my solemn assurance that your government has explored every honorable means
for keeping the peace.
 
If we are to
survive as free men, we have no recourse left to us but war.
 

“Tonight I have asked Congress for a
declaration of war—a holy war and a just war, to free the uncounted millions
who are now enslaved by the Communist dictatorship.
 
Many of you who are listening to me will
die; many of our cities will be destroyed.
 
But victory, when it is ours—”

The screen went suddenly dark.
 
We heard another voice, a machine-gun burst
of words.
 

“Red Alert, Pacific
Coast.
 
At five-fifty tonight enemy planes crossed
the radar defense screen in Northern Canada.
 
Estimated number, five thousand heavy bombers.
 
Following this announcement, all television
channels will go off the air.
 
Tune to
local radio stations for additional directions.”
 

For more than a minute we sat looking
blankly at the screen.
 
Mom clenched her
fist against her mouth.
 
Her shoulders
were shaking.
 
Dad got up and put his
arm around her.
 
Neither of them seemed
to know what to do.
 
I went to my room
and brought out my portable.
 
Only one
Los Angeles station was still broadcasting.
 
We were prepared for that.
 
It was
part of the C. D. plan, which had been discussed for weeks in all the
papers.
 

As I tuned in, the announcer was
repeating the Red Alert.
 
He was choked
off before he finished, and we heard a second voice, rasping and shrill with
fear:
 

“The Civil Defense Organization orders
the evacuation of Los Angeles.
 
Use
private vehicles as much as possible.
 
Municipal buses will be available at terminal points.
 
Speed is essential; the city must be cleared
within four hours.
 
Safe evacuation areas
are designated as the Mojave or the Owens Valley.”
 

The order was repeated over and
over.
 
I snapped off the radio to save
the batteries.
 

In five minutes we were ready.
 
I strapped our warmest clothes into a bundle
and I scared up two flashlights.
 
I
crammed the medicines from the bathroom chest into a beach bag.
 
I took an axe, a hammer, and a couple of
screwdrivers, as well as my hunting rifle.
 

As Dad backed our car out of the drive,
I saw cars leaving other houses along the street.
 

“They always told us the shelters would
be safe,” said Mom.
 
“It’s sabotage,
Chris; I’m sure of it.
 
Subversives took
over the station and made that announcement, just to get everybody on the
street when the bombers came.”
 

Dad snapped on the car radio.
 
“In that case, there should be a correction
by this time.”
 
He tuned in the proper
band, but all we heard was the same evacuation bulletin.
 

“Dr. Clapper said it would happen like
this,” Mom persisted, “if we kept coddling our subversives.”
 

“Clapper!”
 
Dad spat the word like profanity.
 
“That’s all we need right now—advice from
that knuckle-headed half-wit.”
 

Willie Clapper was Mom’s knight in
shining armor.
 
Lots of people—women,
particularly—fell for his line.
 
He had
once been a minister of a reputable church, but the congregation had kicked him
out.
 
Every Sunday, for more than five
years, Willie Clapper had put on a half-hour TV network show; the time was paid
for by an anonymous millionaire.
 
Almost
everybody made Clapper’s subversive list:
 
businessmen, professors, priests, writers.
 

Dad pulled the car to a stop when we
were on the freeway and asked me to drive.
 
“We have to make time, Jerry,” he said.
 
“You handle the car better than I do.”
 

It was the first time he ever made that
concession.
 

From time to time I snapped on the car
radio.
 
Once I picked up the whisper of a
San Francisco station, but that was all.
 
The San Francisco announcer was reading an official bulletin.
 
The invading fleet was close to the U.S.-Canadian
border, still flying high in the stratosphere.
 
The Nike and interceptor fighters had brought down better than a third
of the bombers, and the government
was
confident that
none of the enemy ships would reach any important targets.
 

The bombers, which had fallen, carried
H-bombs built to explode on contact.
 
A
gapping wound had been torn across the face of Canada; most of the peripheral
defense positions were wiped out; fire on a fifteen-hundred-mile front swept
the north woods.
 
Scattered information
from the surviving radar outposts reported a second enemy fleet had crossed
the Arctic Circle shortly after seven o’clock.
 

“They’re gambling everything,” Dad said
as the broadcast faded under a blanket of static, “on knocking us out with one
sneak attack.”