But he couldn’t speak or wave or make any coherent gesture before Abby opened her mouth in an O of dismay and clutched at the door of the motor home.
Matt supposed—much later—that there must have been a sinkhole under the RV, some old hollow in the bedrock that had been opened by the violence of the quake. All he knew as it happened was that the big Glendale tilted leftward, and the camper in front of it—Mart’s camper—tilted right; one tumbled frontward into a sudden depression that might have been five or ten feet deep; the other tumbled back. The two vehicles collided, made the shape of a flattened V, and the Glendale began to slide sideways.
Abby fell back into the dark interior. Jacopetti’s strained shouting ceased abruptly.
The exposed engine of the Glendale ground against a torn flank of Mart’s camper and sparks fountained into the night air. “Christ, no,” Matt whispered.
The motor home was on fire as soon as that terrible possibility entered his mind.
Events were outrunning him. The fire didn’t spread. It was much quicker than that. There was no fire—and then the fire was everywhere. The side door of the Glendale rolled up to an impossibly steep angle.
Matt vaulted through the window and ran across the Connors’ dry garden to the burning vehicles. Both were on fire now. A propane tank popped, and Matt heard shrapnel scream past his ear.
The subsidence wasn’t deep. He scrambled down toward the Glendale just as flames licked up the undercarriage, forcing him back.
He called Abby’s name. She didn’t answer. He ran to the rear of the Glendale. There were no flames here—not yet—but the paint was peeling off the aluminum, and when he tried to climb up to the window, the skin of his hands sizzled on the metal.
* * *
He dropped to the ground and crawled away until the heat from the burning vehicles was no longer painful.
The Artifact, shrunken by altitude, dropped away beyond the western horizon. Its light faded.
It left behind the light of the burning campers, and a more baleful light from the caldera far away, a column of smoke impossibly wide, fan-shaped where it had risen into the dark sky.
The prairie was still undulating, Matt thought. Long, low-frequency waves. Like the swell of the ocean on a gentle night. Or maybe it was his imagination.
There might be stronger aftershocks.
He thought about Beth. Still work to do.
* * *
Time lurched forward in a drunkard’s walk. Somehow, he dragged Beth away from the Connor house. Somehow, he went back for Tom Kindle, who had pulled himself most of the way to the door before passing out.
He remembered Miriam. The old woman had been too sick to be sequestered with the others. Her small camper was still intact. Matt hurried to the door and forced it open.
But Miriam wasn’t inside—only a relic of Miriam. Only her empty skin.
* * *
In that interval, the sun had risen.
The southern horizon was a bank of roiling gray smoke larger than the Artifact had been. The sky was grayer by the minute and a gray ash had begun to fall like snow.
Beth continued to breathe. But each breath was a miracle; each breath was a victory against great odds.
Somehow, he lifted Beth and Tom Kindle into the coach of an undamaged camper.
Somehow, he began the longest journey of his life.
Chapter 38
Eye of God
It was cold in the shadow of the volcanic cloud.
The sun was a tenuous brightness in a dark sky, pewter or brass on a field of featureless gray. Matt drove with the camper’s high beams on.
He drove toward Cheyenne on 1-80. The place where the Artifact had been anchored to the Earth was sometimes visible on his right—not the caldera itself, but the glow of distant fires, of lava flows, a second brightness, not sunlight. Periodically, the road shook under his vehicle.
The road was difficult to follow. Ash fell from the sky in a continuous sheeting rain. It collected on the tarmac and drifted across the highway in charcoal dunes. At times the road seemed to disappear altogether; he navigated by the vague shapes of retaining walls, by road signs and mile markers transformed into gray cenotaphs. The camper’s wheels spun in the drifts, grinding for purchase on the buried blacktop. Progress was slow and painful.
He passed through Laramie, a landscape of hopeless ruins. At noon—he supposed it was noon—he stopped at a gas station that had lost its windows but was otherwise reasonably intact. He fought through a drift of ash, his shirt tied over his mouth and nose. The volcanic ash was a fine-textured grit that smelled a little like rotten eggs. He stepped through the space where a window had been, and in the meager shelter of the depot he located a road map of Colorado and Wyoming.
The camper could have used some gas, but the pumps were dead.
Matt shivered in the cold. Across the highway, a charred frame building smoldered. All else was ash, a concealing darkness, a smudged snowfall. Time to check on Kindle. Time to check on Beth.
* * *
He had left them in the coach, bandaged and wrapped in blankets against the cold. All his medical supplies, carefully hoarded, had been destroyed in the fire. But he had treated both patients with the antibiotics in his bag.
Kindle was occasionally conscious. Beth was not. Her breathing was terribly, desperately faint. Her pulse was rapid and weak. She was bleeding internally, and she was in shock.
He checked her bandage, decided it didn’t need changing. There was so little he could do. Keep her warm. Keep one shoulder up so her good lung wouldn’t fill with blood, so she wouldn’t drown in blood.
He worked by the light of a Coleman battery lantern. The daylight that penetrated the ash-caked windows was powerless and bleak.
He turned to Kindle next. Kindle opened his eyes as Matt examined the leg wound.
The injury didn’t appear serious but the bullet might have taken a chip from the fibula—and this was the leg Kindle had broken last fall. It would need to be immobilized until he could make a more thorough evaluation.
He looked up from his work and found Kindle staring at him. “Jesus, Matthew—your hands.”
His hands?
He held them up to the light. Ah—his burns. He had burned his hands trying to get Abby out of the Glendale. The palms were red, blistered, peeling—weeping in places. He took a strip of clean linen and tore it in half, wrapped a piece around each hand.
“Must hurt like hell,” Kindle said.
“We have painkillers,” Matt said. “Enough to go around.”
“You been driving since last night?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Taking painkillers, and you can drive like that?”
“Painkillers and amphetamines.”
“Speed?” He nodded.
“You carry amphetamines in that black bag?”
“Found them in Joey’s trailer,” Matt said.
“You crazy fucker. No wonder you look like shit.” Kindle moaned and moved a little under his blanket. “Beth alive?”
“Yes.”
“Where are we?”
“A few miles out of Cheyenne.”
Kindle turned his head to the window. “Is it dark out?”
“Day.”
“Is that snow?”
“Ash.”
“Ash!” Kindle said, marvelling at it.
* * *
But Kindle was right: he had gone without sleep for too long. When he looked at the map, all the names seemed obscurely threatening. Thunder Basin. Poison Spider Creek. Little Medicine Creek.
We have very little medicine at all, Matt thought.
Progress was maddeningly slow. The ash continued to fall. Hard to believe the earth could have yielded so much ash, the refuse of such an enormous burning.
Volcanic ash was rich in phosphorous and trace elements. He had read that somewhere. The rangeland would be fertilized for years to come. He wondered what might grow here, next year, the year after.
The speedometer hovered around ten miles per hour.
* * *
He was overtaken by a thought as the afternoon lengthened: Beth might die.
He had hesitated at the brink of this idea for hours. He was afraid of it. If he allowed the thought into his head, if he spoke the words even to himself—would it affect the outcome? If he named death, would he summon it?
But in the end it was unavoidable, a contingency that demanded his attention. Beth might die. She might die even if he found a source of whole blood, even if he found a functional hospital… and those things seemed increasingly unlikely.
He should be ready for it.
After all, he had chosen to live in this world: a world where people not only might die but inevitably, unanimously, would die. The mortal world.
He remembered Contact. The memory came back easily in this desolate twilight. He could have chosen that other world, the world of mortality indefinitely postponed, the world of an immense knowledge… the Greater World, they had called it.
The world of no murder, no fatal fires, no aging, no evil. There was a poem Celeste had loved. Land of Heart’s Desire. He couldn’t remember who wrote it. Some sentimental Victorian. Matt gripped the steering wheel with bloody hands, and the memory of her reading it aloud took on a sudden tangibility, as if she were sitting beside him:
I would mould a world of fire and dew
With no one bitter, grave, or over wise,
And nothing marred or old to do you wrong…
He guessed that was what they had built out on this prairie: their curious round mountain, their world of fire and dew.
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song…
It was tempting, Matt thought. It was the ancient human longing, a desire written in the genes. It was every dream anyone ever hated to wake up from.
But it was bloodless. Not joyless, nor sexless; the Contactees had preserved their pleasures. What they had given up was something more subtle.
It had taken Matt most of his life to learn to live in a world where everything he loved was liable to vanish—and he had never loved that vanishing. But he had learned to endure in spite of it. He had made a contract with it. You don’t stint your love even if the people you love grow old or grow apart. You save a life, when you can, even though everyone dies. There was nothing to be gained by holding back. Seize the day; there is no other reward.
But the price, Matt thought. Dear God, the price.
All our grief. All our pain. Pain inflicted by an indifferent universe: the cruelties of age and the cruelties of disease. Or pain inflicted, as often as not, by ourselves. Grief dropped from the open bays of bombers, grief inflicted by scared or sullen young men coaxed into military uniform. Grief delivered by knife in dark alleys or by electrode in the basements of government offices. Grief parceled out by the genuinely evil, the casually evil, or such walking moral vacuums as Colonel John Tyler.
So maybe they were right, Matt thought, the Travellers and Rachel and the majority of human souls: maybe we are irredeemable. Maybe the Greater World was better for its bloodlessness, its exemption from the wheel of birth and death.
Maybe he had made the wrong decision.
Maybe.
* * *
He came into Cheyenne at what he calculated was nightfall.
The streets were all but impassable. In this darkness, it was too easy to lose the road. He turned off 80 onto what he guessed was 16th Street and faced the necessity of stopping for the night.
But then, as he was ready to switch off the engine, he peered up at the sky and saw, by some unanticipated miracle, the stars.
A wind had come up from the north. It was a cold wind, brisk enough to stir these ashes into more dangerous, deeper drifts. But the ash itself had ceased falling. There was a little light, blue shadows on a gray landscape.
He took his hands off the steering wheel, an experiment. It didn’t hurt. He was beyond hurting. But he left some skin behind.
* * *
Much of the city had burned.
He passed ash-shrouded rubble, strange columns of brick like broken teeth, the shells of empty buildings.
Two hospitals were marked on the map. De Paul Hospital: a smoking ruin.
And the V. A. Medical Center, not far away. It hadn’t burned—but the earthquake had shaken it to the ground.
* * *
He checked on Beth and Kindle once more.
Kindle drifted up from sleep and nodded at him. Kindle was okay.
Beth, on the other hand—
Was not dead. But he couldn’t say why. Her pulse was impossibly tenuous. She wasn’t getting much oxygen; her lips were faintly blue. Her pupils were slow to dilate when he lifted her eyelids.
Still, she continued to breathe.
There was something awe-inspiring about each breath. For Beth, each breath had become a challenge, a kind of Everest, and it seemed to Matt that she met the challenge bravely and with a fierce resolve. But no single breath would meet the needs of her oxygen-starved body, and each breath must be followed by the next, a new mountain to scale.
She wasn’t dead, but she was plainly dying.
What city might have an intact medical center? He looked at the map. His eyes seemed reluctant to focus. Somewhere beyond the range of the ashfall. But what was beyond the range of the ashfall? Denver? No: He would have to travel too close to the caldera itself; the journey might be impossible and would surely be too long. North to Casper? He wasn’t sure what he might find in Casper; it was still a long distance away.
Everything was too far away.
She might not last another hour. Two hours would surprise him. “Sleep,” Kindle said. “I know how it is, Matthew. But you won’t gain anything by killing yourself. Get some sleep.”
“There isn’t time.”
“You’ve been looking at that map for a quarter hour. Looking for what, someplace to go? Someplace with a hospital? Not finding it, I bet. And you can’t drive in this.” He had pulled himself to a sitting position. “Looks like Armageddon out there.”
Matt folded the map meticulously and put it aside. “Beth is badly hurt.”
“I can see that. I can hear how she breathes.”
“I don’t have what I need to help her.”
“Matthew, I know.” Gently: “I’m not telling you to give up. Just we can’t work a miracle. And it does no good to beat yourself for it. Look at you. You’re a mess. Lucky you can walk.”
It was true that they couldn’t reach a hospital. He might as well admit it.
But something pushed forward in his mind, an idea he had not wanted to entertain.
“There’s another possibility,” he said.
* * *
He explained to Kindle, and listened to Kindle’s objections for a while, but grew impatient and fearful for Beth and hurried back to the cab of the vehicle and turned it around.
He glimpsed the new Artifact as it finished a quick eastward transit of the sky. But the sky was closing in again; most of the stars had disappeared; and it was not ash that began to fall but a brutally cold rain.
The ash on the ground absorbed the water and became a slick, intransigent mud. He was forced to drive even more slowly, and even so, the rear end of the camper fishtailed now and then on what seemed like a river of liquid clay.
But he didn’t have far to go.
He found the state capital building, or what was left of it, at the end of a broad avenue lined with ash-coated trees and fallen limbs. Three-quarters of the dome had collapsed. One section of it, like an immense splinter, remained in place, lit from below by fires still burning in the shell beneath. The broad space in front of the building was a field of ash, and the rain had given it a wet sheen, and the firelight was reflected there.
Matt wasn’t certain he would find what he wanted. But the capital buildings were the centerpiece of the city, like Buchanan’s City Hall, the most logical place, th
erefore, to find a Helper.
He parked and climbed out of the cab. There was blood on the steering wheel, blood on his pants.
He struggled for footing on the slick, compressed ash beneath his feet. The rain on his skin was not only cold, it was dirty. It carried soot out of the air. It turned his skin black. Matt realized he had left his jacket in the coach, with Kindle. He went to fetch it.
Beth’s breathing was barely audible.
“Don’t do this,” Kindle said.
Matt shrugged into his jacket.
Kindle sat up and took his arm. “Matthew, most likely it won’t work. And that’s bad enough. But if it does—have you thought about that?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not a hospital out there. That’s not a doctor. It’s something from outer space. Something we never did understand. And that thing in orbit isn’t humanity. How could it be? And what you’re doing, it’s not asking for help. It’s praying.”
“She’ll die,” Matt said.
“Christ, don’t I know she’ll die? Haven’t I been listening to her die? But she’s dying like a human being. Isn’t that what we decided to do last August? When it comes down to it, what we said was no thanks, I’ll die like a human being. You, me—even Colonel Tyler. Even Beth.”
“That’s not the issue.”
“The hell it isn’t! Matthew, listen. The Travellers left. They went away. Best thing that could happen. And that new Artifact, probably it’ll go away too. Go star-chasing or whatever it is they do. And that’s fine. Because we’ll be left here with some human dignity. But if you go out and pray to that thing for help—my fear is that it will help, and it won’t stop helping, and we’ll have a new God in the sky, and that’ll be the end of us, one way or another.”
The Harvest Page 43
