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.