The Second Cylinder

I did not sleep. At my house the door was unlocked and the lights were off and Nora's beans were still in their bowl on the counter, and I stood in the kitchen with Okafor's notebook under my arm and listened to the county die by telephone.

The calls came in a certain order, and I wrote the order down, because order was all I had. First the county emergency line went busy. Then the hospital called its night staff in. Then the school district, which at midnight was deciding by text message whether Friday would be a school day. Then Fort Mercer, the Guard post east of Dozier, and the state police, and by two in the morning a voice on every band was saying the same words, stay off the roads west of the river, which meant that everyone in the county got in their cars and went west of the river.

I filed what I had. It sounds obscene, typing a dispatch while the flats burned, but the dispatch was the only tool I owned, and Kessler was screaming down the phone for it, and I have made a life out of the belief that someone, somewhere, needs the details written down. Twenty-four hours later there was no one left to print it. The details are the memorial. The people of the flats deserve more than the word incident.

Here are the details, then, since this is the vault where I keep them. The flats at midnight smelled of sage and scorched iron and, under that, faintly, of the sea, though the sea is four hundred miles away, and old ranchers swore afterward that the smell was the same as the air before a thunderstorm breaks over the horse pens, a smell of pressure. Every dog in Ash Grove was out by four, sitting, not barking, facing west, and the sight of a thousand dogs sitting in the dark in one direction went into my notebook as exactly what it was. The milk trucks ran their full rounds at dawn, because the milk trucks were on a schedule, and the dairies were on a schedule, and a schedule is the last thing a civilization lets go of. The paper came. Nobody read it. I read it. It said the weather would be fair and warm.

The second cylinder fell at eleven minutes past three in the morning.

I heard it come in: the tearing sound again, further off, southwest, and the shockwave rolling through the floorboards, and the dogs of Ash Grove all going off at once, hundreds of voices in the dark. The glow of its impact lit the curtains of every house on our street. In the morning there were two of them, the first thing out on Hartwell Flats and a second one down in the broken country near Dozier, four miles closer to the river, and between the two of them a flight of military helicopters making cautious orbits at a distance that told everyone watching exactly how afraid the pilots were.

The Guard convoy arrived at noon. I watched it pass the end of our street, trucks and gun trucks and a column of armored cars, mud-colored, forty vehicles at least, with the sleepy competence of men who had been told they were deploying for a disaster relief exercise. A corporal at the corner told us the west side was being evacuated, mandatory, and pointed east, and there was something in the way he pointed that made my stomach drop, as you would point at a hornet's nest, not toward it.

"You'll want to be gone by dark, sir," he said. "That's not a suggestion."

I packed in twenty minutes. What do you pack for the end of the world? In the event: Okafor's notebook, two of my own, Nora's grandmother's ring from the dresser, the archive drives from my office, a change of clothes, and, in a fit of practicality I have blessed ever since, a first-aid kit and every calorie of food in the house. I left a note on the kitchen table for Nora, in case she came back before the lines came down, though the phone was already dead, the landline dead, the cell service dying in gusts, and the note said: Gone east. Find me at Danner. I love you. I love you. I love you.

I did not go east. I told myself I was going east. What I actually did at the last junction, with the evacuation crawling past me and the sun going down, was turn west toward the flats, because a police captain I knew from the volunteer fire service had told me there was a forward command post at the fairgrounds and they needed "anyone who can write straight." That is the true account. The country has agreed to tell itself that its scientists and its soldiers and its writers behaved well that week, and mostly they did, but I was none of those things that evening. I was a man who could not stand not knowing, which is the least forgivable thing a man can be, and it very nearly killed me, and worse, it made me a witness, which is its own kind of survival debt.

I will write down what I saw from the fairgrounds water tower, because I was one of the last people to see it whole and alive.

The second cylinder, the Dozier one, had finished cooling in the afternoon, and at dusk its top unscrewed with the same shriek and the same golden light. The Guard had ringed it at eight hundred yards. There were gun trucks on the levee, and a battery of self-propelled howitzers dug in among the stock pens, and a line of engineers with mine detectors who were, I learned later, trying to guess at buried machinery. The crowd was gone this time; the rope had held; there was only the military and a few idiots like me on rooftops.

The fairground command post had been laid out by a textbook and manned by men reading it for the first time. Maps of three counties on plywood, grease pencils, a major named Quint who had been told that morning that his engagement authority began at eight hundred yards and his retreat authority had not been printed yet. I watched a lieutenant brief him on the cylinder's cooling curve while a sergeant behind them negotiated the siting of the howitzer battery with a farmer for the price of his hayfield, on a handshake, with the artillery still on the road. Nobody was panicking. That is the thing the films never hold. The post ran on coffee and competence right up until the moment competence ran out of things to be competent about, and the last sentence I heard spoken in the old world was Major Quint asking his fire officer, in the flat tone of a man approving leave, whether the guns could depress far enough for something that close. They could not.

Out of the pit, standing up in stages like something being lifted on a crane, rose the first walker.

I have decided to call them walkers because that is what everyone ended up calling them, but the word is wrong, and the wrongness belongs in this account. A walker implies a body with legs. This had legs, three of them, articulated and preternaturally long, and from where I watched it walked like a heron fishing, each foot coming down with a delicacy that was worse than stomping. Its body was a hooded mass, perhaps ninety feet up, and on its front, under the hood, hung a system of braided metal and lenses that clenched and unclenched. The sound it made walking was a rhythmic groan of metal, and its shadow went across the whole fairground and up the levee grass.

The command post had a name for the standing order. I heard it repeated on the radio all night: engaged at range. The howitzers fired before the walker had taken its fourth step.

I have watched the gun-camera footage like every citizen of what is left of the country, the silent climbing shells, the blossoms of black air, and the walker standing in all of it with its hood swinging slowly toward the guns. Six shells hit it while it turned. It did not fall. What happened next happened to the battery positions first, all of them inside two seconds, a set of straight incandescent lines drawn across the stock pens, the levee, the water tower where I stood, which is why I am alive: my line was two degrees off its path, and the man next me, a fire captain named Sy Grover, was not, and there is no more to say about that than that.

The heat ray, the hearings call it. A beam that did not burn so much as erase, that turned steel into spray and water into steam and people into their outlines. The walker swept the riverbank twice, took the bridge at Dozier out from under a freight train, and then, this was the part that broke the command post, it just stopped. It stood among the wreckage it had made, half lit by the fires, and it began, unmistakably, to eat.

The hood swung down over a pallet of machinery that had been thrown up out of the pit, and there was a sound like a syringe, and then a sound like no other sound, a sustained, ghastly inhalation, and the thing fed. The federal physicians wrote four hundred pages on that mechanism. I only know what I saw from four hundred yards: it was in no hurry. It was at its supper, and supper, for it, was a settled matter. We had stopped being a nation to it somewhere around the fourth shell, and become a landscape.

I came down off the water tower with the taste of copper in my mouth and did the last correct thing of my old life. I did not go back for my car, which was boxed in. I walked east out of Ash Grove on the rail spur, ahead of the fire that was coming down the wind from Dozier, and I did not look back at the town until the top of the grade, and there it lay under the smoke with all its streetlights on, burning and lit, like a cake with candles.