1945

Seconds later, the fist of a shock wave hurled him against a wall and covered him with debris. He later thought he might have lost consciousness. When he did revive to the point where thought was possible, he began to dig himself out, knowing only that the proper direction was up.

It might have taken him hours, but he finally broke through to fresh air and to sights that stunned him. All about him, Nagasaki was destroyed, buildings flattened and burning. Then he looked up and saw a black storm cloud of immense fury churning and roaring above him as it fought the winds that sought to push it away.

Then he knew. Rumors had been rife in the camp of a superbomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima. Most people dismissed it as the hallucinations of starving men, just like the ones that had thousands of Negro cavalrymen on white horses riding to free them. Now he knew the stories of the bomb were true and that it had now decimated Nagasaki.

The bomb had freed him. There was no sign of his guards or his fellow prisoners. If they were dead, it was a shame, but he was alive and he intended to stay that way. If he stuck around, he might get lynched by an angry Japanese mob. There would no longer be any small kindnesses from the Japanese civilians. They would want revenge and he wasn't certain he blamed them. His plans for waiting out the end of the war had suddenly changed. He had to run for his life and hide.

He'd gathered his thoughts. It was reasonable to conclude that no one would ever look for him, and the Japanese people he saw milling about were distracted and would ignore him for the time being.

He was covered with dirt and most of his clothes had been shredded by the blast and the effort of digging himself out. Dennis looked no different from any of the scores of others who milled about him aimlessly and in shock.

Alone in a sea of Japanese people, he'd seen that many had been horribly burned. Some were nothing more than walking corpses who stumbled along on charred limbs before they pitched over and died. Many of the normally modest Japanese people were naked and seemingly unaware of it as the blast had seared clothing right off their backs or burned the fabric into their flesh. Many of them had folds of flesh dangling from them as if someone had tried to skin them and then, for some demented reason, stopped.

In front of him, a specter reached its clawed hand for Chambers. It might have been a man once. Its teeth were visible as stumps in a lipless mouth, and it tried to speak but only a gurgling growl came forth. The thing had no face, and white liquid was where the eyes once were. Dennis realized that the creature couldn't see or hear him, but reached with blistered hands for anything in its mindless path. Dennis stepped aside and let the horror pass. He had to get the hell out of Nagasaki right away.

He selected the corpse of a man who still had most of his clothing and pulled the body out of the roadway. No one noticed him. Then he stripped the body and put on the dead man's Japanese clothing. They were a little small, but he could make them do. For once he was thankful that he had lost so much weight in the camp. No one paid him the slightest bit of attention as people trudged past, their eyes glazed over with their own shock and horror.

He covered his face and hands with dirt and some grease he found by a ruined car, hoping it made him look less Caucasian. Then he'd joined the torrent of humanity, most of it frighteningly silent, as it flowed out of the ruined city of Nagasaki and into the bleak hills that rose out of the northern part of the island of Kyushu. On his way he saw the shattered hulk of the Catholic cathedral of Nagasaki. However small the numbers of worshipers might have been, the only center of Christianity in Japan had been destroyed by an allegedly Christian United States.

As he walked, it further struck him that no one was doing anything for the people of Nagasaki. There was no plan; there was no government left in the area to start helping its people. All had been destroyed and no one knew where to begin. He looked behind him and saw that the pillar of the cloud had finally begun to stream away, and that it had lost much of its peculiar mushroom shape. It had begun to rain large, warm drops, and he wondered if the explosion had caused rain as well. Could the bomb have been so powerful that it changed the weather?

At a point, he broke away from the main throng and struck out into the more rugged area around Mount Tara, which was to the north of Nagasaki.

Hours later and high on a grass-covered ridge, he found the remains of a farmer's hut that must have been abandoned a few years before. He propped up stones and pieces of wood to keep the rain off him. The weather was warm so he didn't fear exposure, but the efforts of the day had exhausted him. He had to rest and he had to find food and water.