And with the land here still more or less dry, this was probably the one shot they would get at recharging the cars before the land was drenched and flooded.
Salvation was spotted a little over half a mile ahead: a multi-stall charging station covered with a green awning.
Chris grabbed the radio and shouted, "Get ready to stop!"
He screeched the tires of the SUV as he made a hard right into the station and slammed on the brakes at the first charger clock he saw. Terry made a jolting stop at the adjacent stall and everyone piled out of both vehicles.
Chris had considered stopping on the highway and trading their transportation for other abandoned cars, but there was no guarantee any of those vehicles would have any charge left in their batteries either. And they didn't have time to conduct a search.
"If anyone has to go to the bathroom," Trisha said loud enough for everyone to hear, "this will be your last chance for a while. And you better do it fast!"
Chris connected the generator plug to his car and then ran inside the small convenience store and behind the counter, looking for the manual release that would start the charger. He spotted it quickly and pressed it down. Most modern charging stations could repower a car's fuel cells in under five minutes.
He just hoped they had that long.
Back outside, he noticed Owen standing outside of the truck, laptop perched on the rear truck bed door, pointing out something on the screen to Trisha. Terry was standing beside the charging pump by the front of truck.
Once again, a certain someone was missing.
"Where's Mae?!" he shouted.
Terry turned around. "Oh, man-she was right here!"
"Chris, we've got a matter of minutes .. " Owen shouted, not looking up from his laptop.
"You two get back in the truck!" Chris barked, running out into the street. Just across the road was a parking area for heachgoers, and beyond that was the Gulf Coast. "Trish, get behind the wheel and start her up!"
Chris looked to his right and saw the road continue on, the usual empty cars stopped in the road or run off it. No sign of the girl. He spun left and a few hundred feet away stood a stark white lighthouse in the median of the road. It appeared to he some sort of historical monument, and its plain white color contrasted sharply against the ominous gray sky.
Silhouetted against the base, Mae strolled casually around the near side of the lighthouse, gazing up at it in curiosity.
Hey." he shouted. "Get back in the car! We don't have time for-"
He stopped when he realized that when she'd turned at the sound of his voice, she wasn't looking at him, but past him. The change was subtle, but he saw it. A hint of color drained from her face, and her eyes widened.
Chris watched in stunned silence as, ever so slightly, Mae took a few small steps backward, her eyes fixed on whatever she saw over his shoulder.
Chris' breath caught in his chest as he turned, bracing himself...
A mile or so in the distance, he could see trees and other foliage shaking violently or falling altogether, and the ferocity was moving in their direction like a ripple in a pond. A sound reached his ears, a rushing sound of incredible magnitude. It reminded him of a childhood trip to Niagara Falls.
Terry disconnected his truck and was closing the battery cover when Chris screamed at the top of his lungs, "Out of the cars!"
The tone of his voice was all they needed; the three of them were at his side in seconds.
With Owen, Terry, and Trisha paralyzed as the mountain of water rushed their way, Chris scanned the area, searching for something, anything ... something high enough ...
"The lighthouse! Go!" he shouted.
In a heartbeat they'd crossed the parking lot, closing quickly on the lighthouse and its cast-iron door. Chris paused a second to snatch Mae by the arm and drag her along, and by the time he'd turned, Trisha made it to the door.
Locked!
Down a street perpendicular to Highway 90 and past the far side of the fuel station, the water rushed into view. It was the swell of a raging river flow that had absolutely nothing holding it back. It was less than three hundred feet away from them and it was stampeding toward the coastline.
"Get hack!" Terry shouted. He withdrew the same pistol he'd aimed at Mae a few days before and fired a single shot at the lock on the door. The iron door threw off sparks but the lock fell away.
"Inside!" Chris screamed, watching the raging water come closer and closer.
Terry led the way, followed by Trisha and Owen. Chris all but threw Mae through the door as the water surge was less than ten feet away. He jumped through the porthole after her and pulled the door shut behind him. It slammed up against the iron structure with a terrible clang thanks to the rushing water, which immediately began spraying through the doorway's edges even after Chris secured the door.
He heard Trisha shouting, "Faster!" and turned to see all four of his companions running up the cramped spiral staircase that led to the top. He finished securing the door but already the water was calf high and rising and his clothes were soaked from the spray. The only place to go was up and Chris climbed.
By the time he'd reached the top, the others were outside, standing on the tiny black balcony with a black railing that circled the top of the tower like a dark ring around a pale finger.
Chris joined them, awkwardly bending through the window-sized hole in the round light room that opened onto the balcony.
What he saw when he stood to his full height took away whatever breath remained in him.
The flood surged like white-water rapids all around the lighthouse and emptied into the coast in both directions for as far as he could see. The water lapped up around the base of the white tower, and Chris estimated it had to be ten feet above the ground already, and still rising.
"No ..." Trisha said, and he followed her gaze.
"The cars!" Terry cried.
The pickup truck and the SUV were half floating in the water like so much flotsam, and were being carried along in the raging current. In less than a minute they were washed out to sea, where they sank out of view.
Chris leaned back against the lighthouse wall, both physically and emotionally spent as he watched the devastation unfold below. He could think of nothing to say, and no one else spoke either.
At least, he reminded himself, we're alive.
The thought had no sooner entered his mind when a powerful crack of thunder let out directly above them.
The storm they'd outrun before had found them.
SIX
Buckets of fat, wet raindrops poured from the sky and their clothes were soaked in seconds. The menacing clouds overhead were building, the sky growing darker by the moment.
"This is it," Terry said. "We're dead."
Everyone looked at him, but he watched the skies.
"Not dead," Mae said. "Still breathin'."
"It doesn't-" Terry sighed, rolling his eyes. "We're going to die. Here. Right here! We're going to die on top of this stupid lighthouse, and the whole human race is going down with us."
"Calm down," Trisha said over the gushing river waters below, the pouring rainfall pelting them from above, and the howling wind bearing down on the lighthouse.
"Don't tell me to calm down! Look around; this is not coming to an end anytime soon!"
"Then we'll swim-" Chris began.
"Swim to what, Chris?" Terry shouted. "Where? Everything I see is either buried underwater or too far away to swim. The sky's only getting worse, and if this rain keeps up, the water will rise even farther!"
"The water is a surge. It'll go down," replied Chris. "We just have to ride it out."
"And what if it doesn't go down?" Terry yelled. "I don't see anything to eat up here, do you? How long do you think we can last before we starve?"
"An average human can survive ten days without food," Owen answered. "Although there have been instances of people surviving nearly three weeks on water alone. The effects are devastating of cour
se."
"Oh, thank you for that ray of sunshine, Beech!" shouted Terry. "I don't know what you're doing in the space program when you should be writing greeting cards!"
"That's enough!" Chris said, raising his voice for the first time.
"Hey, I'm sorry, Chris!" Terry said. "I'm sorry you're under the impression that you're still commanding a mission here! Guess whatwe're not on Mars, NASA doesn't even exist anymore, and you're not in ch. ar~~e! In case you hadn't noticed, we're the only people left in the world! None of us has to do anything we don't want to do, and that includes taking orders from you!"
Chris started to respond, but Trisha stepped in, and very nearly got right in Terry's face. "I love you like a brother, Terry. We all do. So as someone who cares about you, I'm telling you that right now you're going to walk around to the other side of this tower. You're going to take several very deep breaths. And you're going to keep doing that until you remember who you're talking to."
Terry took several very fast breaths as he stared Trisha and Chris down, his face red, water soaking his crew cut and running down every side of his head. No one made a sound.
"Whatever," he said angrily. "I gotta take a leak anyway."
He scooted carefully around the tiny balcony, which wasn't quite wide enough to walk on at a normal gait.
Chris shared a tired glance at Trisha, who returned the expression before turning to Owen. "Got any ideas for getting us out of this?"
Owen seemed to have deflated a bit at the sight of what was happening around them. He scratched his bald, wet head and examined their predicament with a tired face. "Just ... give me a little peace and quiet to think," he said bitterly, turning away and following Terry. But he stopped just a few feet away and sat down on the balcony, threading his legs through the iron gate and letting them dangle in the air. He was getting drenched in the hammering rain, but apparently didn't care.
Chris turned to speak to Trisha, but Mae stood in front of him, those haunting silver eyes stabbing at him like daggers. Her red hair was matted to her scalp, and her baggy clothes hung heavy from her slight frame. It was an arresting transformation, and made her appear more frail than before. She looked at him without the slightest hint of apprehension.
"We gonna die?" she asked plainly.
He eyed her thoughtfully, wondering how much of the casual fearlessness she displayed was a way of keeping others out, and how much was about keeping the truth buried deep within. For the first time since he met her, he wondered about what road had brought her to the life she led. Somehow, despite the astronauts' years of training and conditioning, this homeless girl seemed to be the least afraid of them all.
He placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
"We most certainly are not," he replied in as kind a voice as he could muster amid the cacophony of noise caused by the rain and the flood.
Her head swiveled and tilted down until her eyes fell upon the hand he'd placed on her shoulder. "Don't like touchin'. Or bein' touched. Germens and stuff"
Before he could pull away, she turned and pushed past Trisha to go around the opposite side of the tower from the way Owen had gone.
Chris looked up at the storming sky and immediately fell backward onto his rear with a thump. His eyes were glued upward; instead of the black rain clouds, he saw the void. It was floating a few feet above the lighthouse, and it spiraled slowly in place, suspended there above their heads without a sound.
He tried to say something, wanted to ask the others if they saw it too, but couldn't find his voice. It wasn't fear that kept him quiet, but a strange mesmerized paralysis. He couldn't look away.
Chris peered into its charcoal depths, his mind flitting from notion to notion about what it was. Some kind of miniature black hole, trying to suck him in? Maybe it had vacuumed up the world's population, and that was where they all went. Or maybe it was an Einstein-Rosen Bridge-a wormhole or pathway to another dimension. Maybe it was technology of some kind, belonging to an alien race. Or just some kind of gigantic, evil floating eyeball, like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, following Chris' movements and trying to instill fear in him while he went about his business.
It was beautiful in a frightening kind of way, like staring into the depths of the forbidden, and wondering if something terrible might be staring back. He found that more than anything in the world, he wanted to know what was beyond it, on the other side. If he could just get close enough to touch it ...
"Chris?" Trisha called out, loud enough that he knew it wasn't the first time she'd said it. `Are you all right?"
Her voice seemed to break its hold on him, and his eyes flickered for a second to her. And when he glanced back, the void was gone.
"Heads up," called a voice.
Sitting inside the lighthouse, on a rung about halfway down the stairwell where it was still dry, Terry looked up and reflexively caught the object that was dropping through the air. It was a banana. He looked up at Mae, who stood just above him, and formed a question with his face.
"No starvin' today," she declared, satisfied with herself. She whipped open her oversized coat and revealed a surprising selection of fruits and vegetables that easily fit inside the large inner pockets. There were cucumbers, carrots, bunches of grapes, and more.
"Thanks," he said, his gaze shifting back down to a hopeless focus on the water leaking through the metal seams below. The sound of the water seeping in was drowned out only by the pelting of bulky raindrops on the roof and the wind driving rain into the sides of the round, iron structure. He'd traded the outside balcony for this inner sanctum only minutes ago, but decided this was an improvement only in being drier.
Surrounded by a deepening gray as night fell, Terry felt like he did when sitting out in the country, far away from artificial lights and anything resembling civilization, with nothing but soft moonlight to push back the darkness.
Terry felt foolish for his blowup with Chris. He knew better than to get so caught up in his emotions. But he couldn't shake the hopelessness that now gripped him. Everything seemed so futile, so dire and pointless. There wasn't one thing right now that didn't remind him about how alone they were. About how alone he was.
"Whatcha thinking?" Mae asked.
Terry replied slowly, "I was thinking about the sound of peoplelots of people, and how much I missed that sound on Mars. A couple years before we left for Mars, I went to this huge tennis match-not the final or anything-in the U.S. Open and I scored tickets to see it live.
`And I remember being struck by the sound of all twenty-six thousand people in that arena during the match. It was like a chorus, breathing in and out, rising and falling. A hush would fall as the ball was served, and then as each player returned it to the other, the crowd would react with this chorus of muttering sounds-louder, almost cheering, if the advantage shifted, and softer if the tension evened out. I was so awed by the sound that I went straight home and wrote a poem about it."
Mae was taken aback. 'A poem?"
Terry thought for a second that she might laugh at him, but she merely stared in surprise. He nodded sheepishly in response to her question. `Oh yeah, I ... I've written poems since I was a teenager. I've got notebooks full of them. Most of them are crap."
"What about?"
"Well, uh, all sorts of things. Silly things. Stuff that moves me. My first car ... The rush of going supersonic ... Girls."
Terry thought he saw a hint of a smirk play at her lips at the mention of girls. "Ever got published?"
"I, uh ... I've never let anyone read my poems."
"Never?" Mae asked.
"Did you miss the part about them being crap? I guess I'm waiting until I really have something worth sharing."
Mae looked away, thoughtful, and took a long time to respond. She was watching the water trickle through below, hypnotized, when finally she said, "Might'a waited too long."
It was an extraordinary thing, watching the world come crashing down from a vantage point just above it, but low
enough that they could nearly reach down and touch the devastation. Trisha sat next to Chris, their legs dangling through the balcony's rails, watching the thunderous whirlpool of rushing water no more than twenty feet below their perch.
They were soaked through every layer of clothing they wore, but neither of them minded. It was the middle of summer and still warm enough that hypothermia wasn't a risk. Besides, showers hadn't been available on the Ares, so neither of them had felt the water pelting them for years. But this was too much. The rain was coming in sheets, blowing harder and harder against their flesh, and both of them knew without saying that they couldn't sit here forever.
Still, the moment lingered peacefully.
Trisha decided that if the story of Noah's Ark was real, then this is what Noah must have felt like when the flood began, watching it happen from a place of tenuous safety, but barely missing being touched by it.
"Do you really think we could swim it?" Trisha asked.
"Well, you and I could," Chris said.
It was ridiculous. With a quick glance at each other, they chuckled quietly.
The levity lasted only a moment.
So much refuse and wreckage and bits and pieces of the world were floating by below, rushing out to sea. There were cars and furniture and toys and mailboxes and lamps and everything else under the sun, and she wondered what story each item carried with it.
Whose baby once slept in that broken crib? How long had it been alive before it disappeared along with everyone else on D-Day? She couldn't stop herself from looking past Chris to several feet over, where Owen sat alone and quiet; he was watching the crib as well, with sad, vacant eyes.
A grandfather clock drifted by, its wooden surface heavily scratched and scraped. Did it come from a wealthy person's house, or was it a sentimental heirloom of a low-income family, unwilling to sell the ugly nonfunctional thing, no matter how much they needed the money?
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