The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (58 page)

Behind him he could hear his son beginning to cry.

“Goddamn it! Goddamn it! If there’s blood on my hands...all of you—all of you put it there!”

And then he began to tremble. Fatigue struck him like a blow; he felt as if he could no longer stand up, and he sat down on one of the cots.

Far off there was the sound of the siren.

Bill Stockton closed his eyes tightly and tried to make his mind go blank. But the sound persisted, and he felt a massive pain.

A group of neighbors collected outside Bill Stockton’s house. One of them carried a portable radio, and the voice of the Conelrad announcer supplied an urgent background to the whispered questions and the occasional cry of a child or a woman.

Harlowe came out from the house and stood on the front porch. Marty Weiss and his wife followed him.

Martha Harlowe pushed her way through the group, holding tight to the hands of her children. “Jerry,” she called toward the porch,” what happened?”

Harlowe shook his head. “Nothing happened. I think we all better go back and try to fix up the cellars.”

“That’s crazy!” a man’s voice said. “There’s no time for that. Bill’s got the only place on the street that would do any good.”

A woman cried out, “It’ll land any minute!” Her voice was frantic. “I know it—it’s going to land any minute!”

“This is Conelrad,” the radio announced. “This is Conelrad. We are still in a state of Yellow Alert. If you are a public official or a government employee with an emergency assignment, or a Civil Defense worker, you should report to your post immediately. If you are a public official or government employee...” The voice continued underneath the flood of voices.

A big, burly man who lived on the corner started up the steps to Stockton’s porch. Jerry Harlowe stood in his way.

“Don’t waste your time,” Harlowe said. “He won’t let anyone in.”

The man turned helplessly toward his wife, who stood at the foot of the steps.

“What’ll we do?” the woman asked, panic building in her voice. “What are we going to do?”

“Maybe we ought to pick out just one basement,” Many Weiss said, “and go to work on it. Pool all our stuff. Food, water—everything.”

“It isn’t fair,” Martha Harlowe said. She pointed toward the Stockton porch. “He’s down there in a bomb shelter—completely safe. And
our
kids have to just wait around for a bomb to drop!”

Her nine-year-old daughter began to cry, and Martha knelt down to hold her tightly to her.

The big man, on the porch steps, turned to survey the group. “I think we’d better just go down into his basement—break down the door!”

In the sudden silence the siren wailed shrilly across the night, and the ten or twelve people seemed to draw closer to one another.

Another man took a step out from the group. “Henderson’s right,” he said. “There isn’t any time to argue or anything else. We’ve just got to go down there and get in!”

A chorus of voices agreed with him.

The big man walked down the steps and started around the yard toward the garage.

Harlowe shouted at him. “Wait a minute!” He raced down the steps. “Goddamnit—wait a minute! We all wouldn’t fit in there. It’d be crazy to even try!”

Marty Weiss’s voice called out plaintively, “Why don’t we draw lots? Pick out
one
family.”

“What difference would it make?” Harlowe said. “He won’t let us in.”

Henderson, the big man, looked unsure for a moment. “We could all march down there,” he said, “and tell him he’s got the whole street against him. We could do that.”

Again, voices agreed with him.

Harlowe pushed his way through the group to stand near Henderson. “What the hell good would that do?” he asked. “I keep telling you. Even if we were to break down the door, it couldn’t accommodate all of us. We’d just be killing everybody, and for no reason!”

Mrs. Henderson’s voice broke in. “If it saves even one of these kids out here—I’d call that a reason.”

Again, a murmur of assent came.

“Jerry,” Marty Weiss said, you know him better than any of us. You’re his best friend. Why don’t you go down again? Try to talk to him. Plead with him. Tell him to pick out one family—draw lots or something—’’

Henderson took a long stride over to Marty. “One family—meaning yours, Weiss, huh?”

Marty whirled around toward him. “Well, why not? Why the hell not? I’ve got a four-month-old baby—”

“What difference does that make?” the big man’s wife said. Is your baby’s life any more precious than our kids’?”

Marty Weiss turned to her. “I never said that. If you’re going to start trying to argue about who deserves to live more than the next one—”

“Why don’t you shut your mouth, Weiss!” Henderson shouted at him. In wild, illogical anger he turned to the others. “That’s the way it is when the foreigners come over here. Pushy, grabby, semi-Americans!”

Marty’s face went white. “Why, you garbage-brained idiot, you— There’s always one person—one rotten, unthinking crumb, who suddenly has to become the number-one big straw boss and decide what ancestry is acceptable that season—”

A man at the back shouted out: “It still goes, Weiss. If we’ve got to start hunting around for some people to disqualify—you and yours can go to the top of the list!”

“Oh, Marty!” Rebecca sobbed, feeling a surge of a different fear.

Weiss threw off her restraining arm, and started to push his way through the crowd to the man who had spoken. Jerry Harlowe had to step between them.

“Keep it up—both of you,” he said, tautly. Just keep it up we won’t need a bomb. We can slaughter each other.”

“Marty!” Rebecca Weiss’s voice came from the darkness near the porch. “Please. Go down to Bill’s shelter again. Ask him—”

Marty turned to her. “I’ve already asked him. It won’t do any good!”

There was the sound of the siren again—this time closer. And far off in the distance, a stabbing searchlight probed the night sky.

The Conelrad announcer’s voice came up again, and they heard him repeating the same Yellow Alert announcement as before.

“Mommy, Mommy!” a little girl’s voice quavered. “I don’t want to die, Mommy! I don’t want to die!”

Henderson looked at the child, then started to walk toward the garage. Gradually, in little groups, the neighbors followed him.

“I’m going down there,” he announced as he walked, “and get him to open that door. I don’t care what the rest of you think—that’s the only thing left to do.”

Another man called out: “He’s right. Come on, let’s do it!”

They were no longer walking. Now they were a running, jostling group, linked by positive action. And Jerry Harlowe, watching them run past him, suddenly noticed that in the moonlight all their faces looked the same—wild eyes; taut, grim, set mouths—an aura of pushing, driving ferocity.

They slammed their way through the garage, and Henderson kicked open the door leading to the basement. Like a mob of fanatics, they shouted their way into the basement.

Henderson pounded his fist on the shelter door. “Bill? Bill Stockton! You’ve got a bunch of your neighbors out here who want to stay alive. Now you can open that door and talk to us and figure out with us how many can come in there—or else you can just keep doing what you’re doing—and we’ll bust our way in!”

They all shouted in agreement.

On the other side of the door, Grace Stockton grabbed her son and held him tight. Stockton stood close to the door, for the first time unsure and frightened. Again he heard the pounding this time by many fists.

“Come on, Stockton!” a voice called from the other side. “Open up!”

Then there was the familiar voice of Jerry Harlowe.

“Bill, this is Jerry. They mean business out here.”

Stockton wet his lips. “And I mean business in here,” he said. “I’ve already told you, Jerry—you’re wasting your time. You’re wasting precious time that could be used for something else...like figuring out how you’re going to survive.”

Again Henderson smashed at the door with a heavy fist, and felt the unyielding metal. He turned to look at his neighbors. “Why don’t we get some kind of a battering ram?” he suggested.

“That’s right,” another man said. “We could go over to Bennett Avenue. Phil Kline has a bunch of two-by-fours in his basement. I’ve seen them.”

A woman’s protesting voice, somehow petulant and ugly, broke in. “That would get him into the act,” her voice said. “And who cares about saving
him
! The minute we do that, then we’ll let all those people know that there’s a shelter on this street. We’d have a whole mob to contend with. A whole bunch of outsiders.”

“Sure,” Mrs. Henderson agreed. “And what right do they have to come over here? This isn’t
their
street. This isn’t
their
shelter.”

Jerry Harlowe stared from one silhouette to another and wondered what insane logic possessed them all.

“This is our shelter, huh?” he cried fiercely. “And on the next street—that’s a different country. Patronize home industries! You idiots! You Goddamn fools! You’re insane now—all of you.”

“Maybe you don’t want to live,” Rebecca Weiss’s voice cried out. “Maybe you don’t care, Jerry.”

“I care,” Harlowe said to her. “Believe me, I care. I’d like to see the morning come, too. But you’ve become a mob. And a mob doesn’t have any brains, and that’s what you’re proving. That’s what you’re proving right at this moment—that you don’t have any brains.”

Henderson’s voice spoke—harsh, loud. “I say let’s get a battering ram!” he shouted, like a cheerleader. “And we’ll just tell Kline to keep his mouth shut as to why we want it.”

“I agree with Jerry.” Marty Weiss’s voice was tentative and diffident. “Let’s get hold of ourselves. Let’s stop and think for a minute—”

Henderson turned to face Weiss’s small dark form. “Nobody cares what you think!” He spit it out. “You or your kind. I thought I made it clear upstairs. I think the first order of business is to get you out of here.”

He moved in on Marty and lashed out with the force of two hundred pounds. His fist smashed against Marty Weiss’s cheek and Marty fell backward, landing first against a woman, then stumbling against a child, and finally winding up on his back. His wife screamed and started running toward him—and the whole dark basement echoed and re-echoed with the sound of angry shouts and frightened cries, sparked by the wail of a terror-stricken child.

“Come on!” Henderson’s bull voice carried over the noise. “Let’s go get something to smash this door down.”

They were a mob, and they moved like a mob. Fear had become fury. Panic had become resolve. They stormed out of the basement onto the street. Each was willing to follow his neighbor. Each was content to let someone else lead. And while they marched wildly down the street, the voice of the Conelrad announcer darted like a thin menacing needle in and out of their consciousnesses.

“We have been asked to remind the population once again,” the announcer’s voice said, “that they are to remain calm. Stay off the streets. This is urgent. Please remain off the streets. Everything possible is being done in the way of protection, but the military cannot move, and important Civil Defense vehicles must have the streets clear. So you’re once again reminded to stay off the streets.
Remain off the streets
”

But the crowd continued down the block. They were not listening to the words that the radio said. There was an emergency, and the radio made it official.