David picked his way carefully over the rubble. He avoided large piles that might
collapse further. Pausing for the hundredth time to listen for sounds of other
life, he soon resumed walking. He had no idea where he was trying to walk to. The
thought of "getting out of town" put a momentary smile in front of his generally
stunned expression. He wished there was still a town to get out of.

He couldn't believe it. After all the warnings, the scary false alarms, he had
come to think the war would never come. Those damned Canadians. He swore foully.
At least we're probably giving it back to them. Eat fallout, Mounties! He amused
himself again mentally pronouncing "fall-ote" in a Canadian accent.

He altered his path again to avoid another body. Looked like everybody who'd been
outside had been incinerated by the flash and blast. Everyone inside had been
crushed under collapsed building materials. Except himself, it appeared. He'd
been retrieving a lost billiard ball under a heavy pool table, and suddenly the
world made no sense. When his body stopped spinning, followed by his mind a few
minutes later, he and the table were leaning against a wall that had been in
another room. The table had given him protection as the ceiling fell in all
around him. His hearing seemed to come back slowly. It was hard to tell; by this
time there wasn't much to hear. The useless air-raid sirens had long since
stopped. He'd ignored them. Lot of good it would have done if he'd paid any
attention. Maybe his decision not to seek shelter had saved his life.

He had pushed the rubble away, finally, that surrounded the table, and walked a
few steps out into daylight. A large, angry cloud a little to the east was
starting to disperse under the ministrations of the winds aloft. Somehow the
cloud made it seem real. Never mind the collapsed city all around; there's a
mushroom cloud! It had really happened.

He had started stumbling down the street. That had been twenty minutes ago. He
had thought at first he should see if he could find some rescue operations going
on, maybe help out. Sirens were one of the things he was listening for: they'd
help him figure out where to go. Meanwhile he wandered aimlessly.

He wondered briefly about radiation. Probably enough to kill me, he thought,
except I understand it takes awhile. Possibly he had a week. Who knows what could
happen in that amount of time. Maybe they'll find a cure.  A lot of the
surroundings were still smoking. In fact, he could see a number of fires going,
still fairly confined. He started heading in a direction where there seemed to be
less smoke.

Good thing it was a warm day. Indoors, he'd been walking around in his boxer
shorts, nothing else. He hadn't anticipated walking down the street that way. As
it was, it was comfortable enough.

He was entering a nicer section of town, where the piles of rubble were a little
farther apart, separated by smoking brownery that had recently been greenery.

Trees on both sides of the street were burning. He moved out into the middle of
the street, and froze when he heard a muffled moan.

He waited at least a minute, convinced at last that it must have been his
imagination, before hearing it again. There, in that house to the left. It had
collapsed like all the others, but someone was alive in there. Running widely
around some smoking shrubbery, he reached the foundation of the house and
listened again.

There was a wall, what was left of it, about five feet high around twenty feet in
front of him. The moaning was issuing from just the other side of it. He picked
his way through what may have been a living room, towards an opening in the wall.

There was a bed, a large brass arch at its head to his right, a large section of
ceiling now leaning across the foot of the bed and the arch. In the narrow
triangle formed by the ceiling, the bed, and the arch, a woman lay, struggling.

She was lying on her side, facing away from him. At the sound of his footstep,
her head spun around towards him, her body not able to follow.

He gulped and nearly backed around the corner, apologizing, before he realized
her modesty was probably not a major concern at this point. She was naked, and
from all appearances had been involved in some sort of sexual game at the time of
the blast. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her, and thick metal shackles held
her feet together. A short chain, only a few inches long, connected the handcuffs
and shackles. She looked at him in terror, straining every part of her body to
try to escape from the bondage that had been a game until a short while ago, and
was now a horrifying handicap in a world where there were no games any longer.

She tried to talk to him, possibly to beg or plead, or explain, but her gag
prevented it. It was a cylinder of plastic, her lips a wide O around it, held in
place by a chain that ran through holes in the front of the cylinder and wrapped
around her head.

He wasn't sure how he could tell, maybe from his eyes tracing the lines of her
face and his brain mentally reconstructing how she would look under normal
circumstances, but his impression was that she was an exceptionally pretty girl.
In spite of her face being coated irregularly with what he assumed was
tear-streaked plaster-dust, her short brown hair being matted with sweat and
tears, he felt she could easily play a leading role in his sex-fantasies. It was
purely an intellectual observation; he didn't have sex on his mind at the moment.

The smell of smoke was getting stronger, accompanied by a crackling sound. He
couldn't see flames at the moment from where he was standing, but he remembered
clearly there were some nearby.

He looked back at her. "Are you hurt anywhere? Can you move?" She just stared at
him, and he realized belatedly he was going to have to keep it to a single
yes-or-no question at a time. "Are you hurt?"

She looked towards her knees, which seemed to be wedged in the narrowest space
between the ceiling section and the mattress.

"Do you think anything's broken?"

She shrugged, and shook her head.

"Can you get loose by yourself?" He felt hesitant to touch her; it was enough of
a violation of her privacy just to be looking at her.

She renewed her attempts to tug herself free, but gave up in a minute and looked
back at David, the tears flowing again, and shook her head.

"Look, don't worry, I'm going to try to get you out." He stood upright and
surveyed the wreckage. He thought he might be able to lift the ceiling section
off, but as he got his shoulder under it and pushed upward, nothing happened. He
looked towards the front of the bed: jagged pieces of the section seemed to be
wedged within the upright supports of the brass arch. He might pull the section
outward away from the bed. . . no, then it would slip down and might be heavy
enough to crush her, and anyway, there was too much fallen junk at that end for
him to get over there.

He could see flames, now, from the next yard over. His stomach flopped around and
sent chills through his body. Shit, he thought, I can't spend much time fooling
around here. Lucky for her she wasn't in a position to see the fire yet.

"I'm going to have to try to pull you out. I think I can push the mattress down a
little and get your knees free. I --- I'll have to touch you, you know." With as
little time as there was left, he still felt he needed her permission.

She closed her eyes and shook with an apparent spasm of pain. Opening them again,
she nodded at him.

He bent down and reached into the small space next to her knees. He couldn't seem
to find anything that worked: reaching in from the side like that, he couldn't
manage to push down very hard once he got his hand next to her knees, and for him
to actually touch her knees required that he get his head in under the ceiling
section, and there wasn't quite room for it. He gave up for the moment and looked
into the yard again. Flames still closer. Muttering, "Shit, shit, shit. . ."
under his breath, he tried the only other thing he could think of that might
work. There was more room under the ceiling section towards the head of the bed.
He crawled in underneath it towards her. There is no other way, he told himself,
to get a firm enough hold on her. He wriggled his left hand between her thighs,
pushing through until he felt her crotch against the crook of his elbow, drawing
his forearm flat against her stomach. He reached with his other arm under her
head, bent it around her shoulder, his right hand reaching to clasp his left just
below her breasts. He bent at the waist then, pushing as hard as he could with
his thighs against the edge of the bed, trying to pull her towards him. She
whimpered with pain as her knees were slowly drawn out of their trap, the skin on
the side of her left knee scraping painfully against the ceiling. Suddenly she
was free, and he backed out of the small space with her in his arms.

He set her on the floor, and looked at the scrape on her knee. "That's going to
hurt awhile, but it's not too bad. I'll try to clean it later." The rush of
success had momentarily driven the fire out of his mind, but he glanced behind
him and saw it creeping towards the house. "Keys! I'll get you out of this stuff
as soon as I get a chance, but there's no time right now. We'll take the keys
along with us. Where are they?"

She gasped with her first unobstructed view of the rest of the room. She jerked
her head towards the impossible pile of rubble beyond the foot of the bed.

"Jeezus. They're under there somewhere?" She nodded, starting to cry again.

"Look, we'll have to try to come back for them later. It's. . . ohmigod." He had
just noticed a puddle of blood seeping out from under the wreckage. Somebody was
under that. There was no way he was alive. Chalk up another point for Canada.

Flames had reached the house and were starting to creep around it. "We've got to
get out of here. Sorry, this won't be too comfortable." He reached down to help
her onto her knees on the floor. His first intention was to rest the weight of
her legs and back on his arms, but her hogtie prevented her from bending much at
the waist, and he'd have to keep his arms too far apart or else risk having her
fall out to one side or another. He decided he'd have to carry her upright.
Reaching down, he put his hand between her thighs again, and grunted as he picked
her up, her crotch resting on his forearm, and he wrapped his other arm around
her to steady her as he started to pick his way out of the house and into the
yard, away from the fire. She let out an inarticulate screech as she saw the
flames for the first time, and he saw her close her eyes. She pressed her head
against his, and he could feel their hearts thundering together.

There was still a clear path out to the street, and he chose that instead of
going into a wooded area behind the house --- he had a feeling the fire could get
through it faster than he could. Reaching the street, he started walking down it,
grunting periodically and trying to shift his burden without taking the time to
stop and put her down for a better grip.

The street was a cul-de-sac. At the end, an area had been cleared for the homes
that would go there --- would have gone there, would never now be built. He
suspected property values hereabouts had just about hit rock bottom.

Behind the clearing, the land dropped off abruptly into a ravine. He looked back
in the other direction: fire was creeping ahead on both sides now, slowly. It
wasn't a towering blaze; the area had had several inches of rainfall in the last
week, and the vegetation was a little too moist to burn very well, but burn it
did. It seemed possible he might be able to wait this out if he stayed in the
middle of the street.

He laid her down carefully on her side, and sat down next to her. She had
momentarily stopped crying, and simply lay looking stunned. He stroked her
shoulder in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. Down the street, the house she
had been in was now engulfed in flames.

"Did you live there?"

She shook her head tiredly.

"Did --- Do --- Ah, did you know him?"

She glared at him with a what-do-you-think-I-am kind of look, then her face
seemed to crumple as she began sobbing louder than ever. She nodded her head, and
kept nodding and crying.

"I'm sorry, I'm really sorry. I just. . ." He couldn't decide whether touching
her now would seem the ultimate boorish maneuver. But she just seemed so lost and
alone, and he shuddered as his imagination succeeded, just for an instant,
telling him what it would be like to be alone, helpless, naked, and chained in
the middle of a street in a world gone loony. He lifted her upper body off the
ground and wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight and stroking her back
gently, as he crooned, suspecting it to be the most whopping lie he'd ever told,
"Everything'll be all right. Everything's okay now. Don't worry, we'll get out of
this." He continued stroking her as she sobbed, sensing it was time to shut up.
Her skin felt soft and warm next to his, and as she rested her chin on his
shoulder and pressed herself harder against him, he let his mind drift and go
blank, as he watched the late-afternoon sun gradually sink below a horizon
notched with vertical bars of smoke all around.