You can't know what it's like when all the people you've worked with, intelligent people who were nice as pie before, they turn mean and angry and filled up with grief for who was lost. Even then I could see Gene was the best of them.
They start to argue, and it runs on for days, nobody knowing what to do because we all can see the walls of the Center aren't thick enough, the gamma radiation comes right through this government prefab-issue composition stuff. We take turns in the computer room because that's the farthest in and the filters still work there, all hoping we can keep our count rate down, but the radiation comes in gusts for some reason, riding in on a storm front and coming down in the rain, only being washed away, too. It was impossible to tell when you'd get a strong dose and when there'd be just random clicks on the counters, plenty of clear air that you'd suck in like sweet vapors 'cause you knew it was good and could taste its purity.
So I was just lucky, that's all.
I got less than the others. Later some said that me being a nurse, I'd given myself some shots to save myself. I knew that was the grief talking, is all. That Arthur was the worst. Gene told him off.
I was in the computer room when the really bad gamma radiation came. Three times the counter rose up, and three times I was there by accident of the rotation.
The men who were armed enforced the rotation, said it was the only fair way. And for a while everybody went along.
We all knew that the radiation exposure was building up and some already had too much, would die a month or a year later no matter what they did.
I was head nurse by then, not so much because I knew more but because the others were dead. When it got cold, they went fast.
So it fell to me to deal with these men and women who had their exposure already. Their symptoms had started. I couldn't do anything. There was some who went out and got gummy fungus growing in the corners of their eyes-pterygium it was, I looked it up. From the ultraviolet. Grew quick over the lens and blinded them. I put them in darkness, and after a week the film was just a dab back in the corners of their eyes. My one big success.
The rest I couldn't do much for. There was the T-Isolate box, of course, but that was for keeping sick people slowed down until real medical help could get to them. These men and women, with their eyes reaching out at you like you were the angel of light coming to them in their hour of need, they couldn't get any help from that. Nobody could cure the dose rates they'd got. They were dead but still walking around and knowing it, which was the worst part.
So every day I had plenty to examine, staff from the Center itself who'd holed up here, and worse, people coming straggling in from cubbyholes they'd found. People looking for help once the fevers and sores came on them. Hoping their enemy was the pneumonia and not the gammas they'd picked up weeks back, which was sitting in them now like a curse. People I couldn't help except maybe by a little kind lying.
So much like children they were. So much leaning on their hope.
It was all you could do to look at them and smile that stiff professional smile.
And Gene McKenzie. All through it he was a tower of a man.
Trying to talk some sense to them.
Sharing out the food.
Arranging the rotation schedules so we'd all get a chance to shelter in the computer room.
Gene had been boss of a whole Command Group before. He was on duty station when it happened, and knew lots about the war but wouldn't say much. I guess he was sorrowing.
Even though once in a while he'd laugh.
And then talk about how the big computers would have fun with what he knew. Only the lines to DataComm had gone dead right when things got interesting, he said. He'd wonder what'd happened to MC355, the master one down in DataComm.
Wonder and then laugh.
And go get drunk with the others.
I'd loved him before, loved and waited because I knew he had three kids and a wife, a tall woman with auburn hair that he loved dearly. Only they were in California visiting her relatives in Sonoma when it happened, and he knew in his heart that he'd never see them again, probably.
Leastwise that's what he told me-not out loud, of course, 'cause a man like that doesn't talk much about what he feels. But in the night when we laid together, I knew what it meant. He whispered things, words I couldn't piece together, but then he'd hold me and roll gentle like a small boat rocking on the Gulf-and when he went in me firm and long, I knew it was the same for him, too.
If there was to come any good of this war, then it was that I was to get Gene.
We were together all warm and dreamy when it happened.
I was asleep. Shouts and anger, and quick as anything the crump of hand grenades and shots hammered away in the night, and there was running everywhere.
Gene jumped up and went outside and had almost got them calmed down, despite the breach in the walls. Then one of the men who'd already got lots of radiation-Arthur, who knew he had maybe one or two weeks to go, from the count rate on his badge-Arthur started yelling about making the world a fit place to live after all this and how God would want the land set right again, and then he shot Gene and two others.
I broke down then, and they couldn't get me to treat the others. I let Arthur die. Which he deserved.
I had to drag Gene back into the hospital unit myself.
And while I was saying good-bye to him and the men outside were still quarreling, I decided it then. His wound was in the chest. A lung was punctured clean. The shock had near killed him before I could do anything. So I put him in the T-Isolate and made sure it was working all right. Then the main power went out. But the T-Isolate box had its own cells, so I knew we had some time.
I was alone. Others were dead or run away raging into the whirlwind black-limbed woods. In the quiet I was.
With the damp, dark trees comforting me. Waiting with Gene for what the world would send.
The days got brighter, but I did not go out. Colors seeped through the windows.
I saw to the fuel cells. Not many left.
The sun came back, with warm blades of light. At night I thought of how the men in their stupidity had ruined everything.
When the pounding came, I crawled back in here to hide amongst the cold and dark.