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escape the impact. The last Guardsman on the heavy machine gun rolled off the Humvee just in time to avoid a series of cars that crashed into the vehicle, and each other.
     
    “Idiots!” My dad said through clenched teeth. He was trying to watch everything at once.
     
    One of the cars burst into flames right at the gate, and the fire spread quickly. We ducked instinctively, expecting a big fiery explosion. We got the fire, all right, but the TV style explosions we expected turned into deep “whump” sounds as tanks ignited and sprayed fire all over the gate area. The Humvee loudspeaker inside the fence was still yelling for calm, and amazingly, it worked. I guess the sight of people burning to death made a big impact. This wasn’t a TV show anymore.
     
    “The safest place to be is inside the building, people!” The loudspeaker yelled.
     
    Since it was perfectly clear that no one would be getting through the gate, what with the huge fire and all, the majority decided to go back inside, and maybe watch some TV. A couple of guys tried to scale the fence. The Guard soldiers just watched. Thanks to the level of American fitness in those days, they didn’t even make it to the barbed wire across the top. They climbed back down and slunk into the school building. Thinking about the escape hatch, I gained a new understanding of my dad’s brains in those brief, disastrous moments.
     
    Dad was telling us to stay down behind the car. I was wondering why we weren’t in the building if that was the safest place. It never occurred to me that the government might lie to us or give us bad information. The radio announcer was still talking fast. We heard a litany of government pleas to stay in our homes and to seek shelter in the basement if possible. We learned that twenty-nine missiles were in the air, after Navy ships managed to knock down sixteen. We listened as reports described the missile strikes on the West Coast cities and military bases, and the reports of our own second strike heading in the other direction. We learned that Israel was practically bristling with nuclear missiles, firing at targets everywhere, even as they were overrun by Muslims enraged by their first strike. The last thing we heard was that the remaining missiles targeted at us were harmless, clearly off target, heading for space. Then the radio stopped talking. We saw the sunny day get much brighter, and a weird sensation of multiple shadows on the grass.
     
    Our first urge was to look up, but Dad cried, “Don’t look! Whatever you do, don’t look!”
     
    We huddled on the ground expecting, I guess, to be blown to smithereens, but it never happened. The light went back to normal daylight and we never heard a sound. It still seems strange to me that the entire world can end without a sound.
     
    It only lasted for an eternal second or two. We heard a lot of nearby explosions; some like firecrackers and some with deep thundering echoes. They seemed to come from everywhere.
     
    “Transformers,” Dad said.
     
    Then a new swell of panic and outrage came from the school. Schools built in that era were not much for windows. It must have been cave-dark in there when the emergency lighting failed to activate. Dad opened the back door, frantically threw the packs out, ran over to the hole in the fence and shoved them through. He held the wire back as we all scrambled into the brush. Then he went back to the car, and pulled out some guns from under the front seat. We had never known they were there. He tucked two pistols into his belt, and handed the long guns through the fence to Mom.
     
    “Be careful. They’re loaded,” he said, and crawled through himself. He shoved us back into the bushes, and threw the packs in after us. He went back to the fence and clipped the bottom closed, twisting the wire to make it hard to remove. We all huddled in the little clearing while dad strapped packs onto our backs. Mine was much heavier than we had ever taken