As distasteful as it was for Keene to have to admit it to himself, having the numbers reduced did simplify things. The normal load for a minishuttle of the type at Montemorelos was twelve persons—which had been the size of the party that visited the Osiris. As things were, they had fifteen adults plus Robin. By throwing out inessential equipment and eliminating fuel for reentry, Joe felt they could accommodate the extra. But he wouldn’t have wanted to push things any further than that.
While the others were loading the last items, Keene went out the back of the admin building to stare one last time over the landing field and toward the pad area, where so much of the latter years of his life had been invested. Although night was coming on, the flaming sky was creating enough of a lurid light to see. The scene looked like the aftermath of a battle with the litter of abandoned military equipment, vehicles, and a number of wrecked aircraft, including a cargo plane that had been picked up by the wind and cartwheeled into one of the heavy transporters on the tracks bordering the landing field. As he watched, something burst like a falling bomb somewhere near the far end of the main runway, toward the ruins of the pads. Boots crunched on the concrete behind him. It was Mitch.
“We’re ready to go, Lan.” He stopped beside Keene and followed his gaze. “End of the dream, eh?”
“Maybe the beginning of another,” Keene said.
“You mean out at Kronia?”
“That’s where the ball will be for a while now.”
Mitch looked at him. “Is the Osiris still going to be up there, really?”
Keene sighed. That was something he hadn’t wanted to think about. It wasn’t on the list of things he could change. “Let’s just play things the way that’s got us this far, Mitch,” he answered. “One crisis at a time.”
They walked back through the building to the waiting truck. Keene decided to let Vicki spend some time introducing herself to the others and rode up front again with Legermount and Mitch.
For once, fortune seemed to have worked in their favor, and on regaining Highway 281 they found that the tide had cleared it rather than introducing new obstacles. Although the meteorite bombardment continued to increase, they made the sixty-odd miles to the border in close to two hours and, setting the last of their immediate worries to rest, the bridge across the Rio Grande at Reynosa was still passable. And more, the coastline now to the east of them bulged seaward, taking it farther away, which would give them an additional margin of distance when the tide returned to its next high point.
51
They were a few miles into Mexico, when the entire western sky lit up for ten or twenty seconds in a sheet of yellow that illuminated the surroundings like an eerie, off-color dawn coming from the wrong direction. It could only be what the scientists had feared early on: A huge area of hydrocarbon-vapor-saturated atmosphere had ignited. Legermount halted to stare incredulously. Mitch was equally stupefied. Keene felt as if his insides were turning cold. “Get out of here!” he shouted at them. “We can’t stay exposed out here. Get under a bridge or something.”
Mitch shook himself back to reality. “How long have we got?”
“If that thing is a hundred miles away . . . maybe ten, twelve minutes.”
They pressed on, but nothing like a bridge or flyover materialized. When they had left it as long as they dared, Keene directed Legermount to steer off the highway at the bottom of a cutting they were in, and to park as close as he could get against the rock face forming its side. Keene ran around to the back and threw open the door. “Everybody get out and get down! Cover your heads and your ears! There’s a shock coming in, and it’s going to be a big one!”
Bodies tumbled out and scattered to find niches among the rocks and sand gulleys along the verge. Keene waited to help Vicki and Robin down, and then guided them to a muddy fissure near the base of the cutting face, which Colby and Reynolds were hastily scraping deeper with entrenching tools. They threw themselves in, hands and whatever padding they could find clamped over their ears, Keene using his body to shield Vicki protectively. Even so, the pressure wave when it arrived was excruciating, and he heard Cynthia scream with the pain. In its wake came a howling wind that tore dust off the ground in sheets, blowing branches and whole trees past the end of the cutting and pinning the truck on two wheels against the rock. Out in the open, they wouldn’t have stood a chance. As things were, it was two hours before the tempest fell sufficiently for them to risk moving again.
When they emerged from the cutting, the sky to the west had dulled to a red maelstrom boiling along the horizon, shimmering with lightning that was all but continuous. With the wind, they would not be able to maintain the rate they had managed from San Saucillo to the border. It was ninety to a hundred miles to Montemorelos, the last stretch being uphill into the highland beyond Cruillas. They had something like eight hours in which to get away, racing against not only the water on one side now, but a wall of fire advancing from the other.
They did well for the next sixty miles. While the din of bolides passing through the atmosphere, and of airborne and impact detonations, grew to terrifying dimensions, the rising tidal incursions had emptied the coastal region of population, and the road remained free of traffic. And grotesque though the images were that they fashioned from the landscape, the fire to the west and the incendiary skies illuminated the way ahead and gave early warning of obstructions.
But past the San Fernando River, things changed. Emergency evacuation plans had evidently been less advanced south of the border, or less vigorously implemented, and the truck began running into the stragglers still heading for the high ground. Although relatively few in number, they were the slowest and most heavily laden, creating agonizing moving bottlenecks, seemingly at every narrowing of the road or uphill stretch. And crossing over the road to try and pass was invariably frustrated by another driver swinging out ahead and moving only slightly faster than the obstruction, and who once in possession of the passing space, stayed there.
“This isn’t looking good,” Keene announced over the noise as he checked his watch. “We made pretty good time for a while. Now we’re losing it all again.”
“What do you want us to do, shoot ’em?” Mitch yelled back.
Stalled vehicles were also an impediment. At one point, a car right in front of the truck lurched to a halt suddenly, hit by a falling rock, and Legermount was only just able to avoid hitting it as figures tumbled from the doors. A mile farther on, a group of people by a stranded van were waving frantically, several of them running out into the traffic lane and trying to grab the doors of anything that slowed close to walking speed.
“How is it back there?” Keene shouted back over his shoulder through the hole Mitch had cut in the cab wall.
“Bumpy, but we’re surviving,” Cavan’s voice answered. “We’ve felt a couple of hits on the roof. Let’s just hope we don’t collect a big one. What’s it looking like outside?”
“Grim.”
A big explosion occurred a mile or more to the left. The shock came, followed by a volley of debris. There was sharp crack from somewhere near Legermount’s head, and the side window shattered. A truck a hundred yards or so ahead slewed off into the ditch. Legermount gripped the wheel tighter and kept going.
The new site at Montemorelos was up on the plateau away from any major route, and Keene had hoped that they would lose the other traffic when they left the highway. But it didn’t work out that way. Word of the likely size of the impending tide must have gotten around, for everyone was turning off to follow any road leading in an upland direction. Congestion built up, and it seemed that everything would come to a standstill. But though it brought greater immediate hazard, the increasing intensity of the bombardment proved to be the saving factor. Few of the other vehicles had protected roofs, and as the hail of stones from above grew heavier, more of them pulled off the road for the occupants to scramble out and seek shelter underneath, enabling the truck to pass through.
The makeshift w
indshield exploded inward, covering Keene and the others with rivers of shards; Mitch knocked out what was left with the butt of his rifle and yelled at Legermount to keep going. A tracer of flaming naphtha hissed down and draped across the road ahead of them, but they carried on over it, bucking and bouncing to the smell of burning rubber from the scorched tires. To the right a hillside was on fire, showing the forms of trees as blazing silhouettes.
The village of Montemorelos lay among scrubby hills at the top of a long rise from the coastal plain, a few miles before the launch site itself. There was no route farther inland, and by the time the truck arrived, lines of vehicles were jammed around the outlying area. Maybe their intention had been to sit out the high tide here, and then descend again to the highway and get to the main Sierra Madre range during the next period of low tide. Very likely, many of the refugees hadn’t thought beyond simply getting to the nearest high ground. But now, with nothing but a wall of flame to the west, they were choked along the lanes and pulled off into the surrounding fields under the increasing downfall, with nowhere to go. Some were trying to improvise shelters out of the vehicles or farm buildings, while others seemed to have lost their heads and were running around aimlessly or just sat immobile as if seized by a stupor. The spotlight that Keene was directing from the cab window picked out people struggling to get others out of a crumpled car, more falling out in the open. Ahead, one side of the village was in flames; even as Keene watched, something landed among the houses, throwing up a shower of debris in the glow.
The main thoroughfare through the center was jammed with vehicles, wreckage, and milling people, and several times Legermount had to stop and back up to find a way around the alleys between the houses. People pressed around constantly, either trying to stop the truck to get help or to gain access to it after losing their own transport. It would have been suicidal to stop. There was no way of telling if any of the cries, angry shouts, and thuds of fists and other objects beating the sides were due to the truck’s hitting any of them; there was nothing to be gained from thinking about it.
Keene had worried that some might have taken it into their heads to look for shelter among the launch site constructions, even though there was nothing else beyond the village in that direction and no route inland. However, past the village center the way became clearer, and as they came to the outskirts it began to look as if they might have a clear run for the last few miles. Then, as it rounded a bend in the road, the truck came upon several cars and a van pulled over to the side with a cluster of figures apparently trying to repair something.
At the truck’s approach, several of them stepped out in front of it, waving it down with flashlamps, giving Legermount little choice but to brake or run right over them. There was just time for Keene’s spotlamp to pick out the stove-in side of the van and the mixture of capes, parkas, and uniforms—whether police or some kind of military, it was impossible to tell—when a harsh voice barked something on the driver’s side. A figure outside grabbed for the door, but Legermount had already locked it. An arm came in through the broken window to seek the inside handle; Mitch lunged at it with his rifle butt. At the same time, another figure twisted the lamp from Keene’s grasp and opened the passenger door. Whoever they were, they were desperate and panicking. Their van was out of commission, and they wanted the truck. There was more shouting, and Keene felt himself gripped by the jacket and pulled from his seat. He managed to produce his automatic, but a gloved hand swiped it aside. For an instant he was looking at a swarthy, mustached face framed by a parka hood pulled up over a peaked cap, eyes wide, teeth bared; he saw a pistol coming up toward him and knew that moment of slow-motion awareness, like the split-second before a car crash when what’s about to happen is clear but a dreamlike paralysis makes it impossible to intervene. . . . And then Legermount fired three times in quick succession across the cab with a handgun, and the figure cried out and recoiled backward.
Shouts were coming from inside the rear of the truck. Looking back through the cutout in the cab wall, Keene saw light flooding in as the doors were torn open and more figures appeared, waving rifles. Somebody fired a shot from inside but without effect. The ones outside began raising their weapons to aim into the truck.
Mitch yelled “Down!” and fired a burst back through the length of the truck from the cutout. Keene slammed the passenger door. A form loomed toward him; he aimed the automatic, and the shape ducked away as Legermount hit the gas pedal.
But as the truck pulled away, a bright lamp from outside illuminated the interior to show Cavan trying to untangle his gun from a pack, Dash reeling off-balance and tumbling from the sudden jolt, with the others frozen in confusion. It would be a slaughter in there. The truck would never pull away fast enough, and Mitch, blinded by the light shining in from outside, couldn’t see to protect them.
Legermount hit the brakes, and even while Keene and Mitch were slamming into the dash panel, crashed the shift into reverse and gunned the truck backward. A series of sickening thuds accompanied by screams came from the rear end. The light disappeared abruptly, and Keene felt a wheel lurch over something. Legermount braked and reengaged forward gear. Again, the gruesome lurch, and they picked up speed. Shots followed, a few hitting the bodywork, but the truck was away by now. Keene put his face close to the cutout. “Anybody hurt back there?” he called through.
Cavan appeared outlined against the frame of the still-open door a few seconds later. “No . . . I think we’re all okay. Would you believe it, Landen? The first chance I get to actually use this bloody thing, and it gets caught up in the straps. Maybe the desks were more my line after all.”
The last stretch of road up to the launch site was clear and deserted. From the final bend at the top of the slope, the view to the side looked down over the direction they had come, visibility being better now as a result of the conflagration to the west, drawing in clearer air from the Gulf. Several new craters glowed below on the plain, while beyond, shining pink in the ghastly light, the line of the inrushing tide was already visible as an immense wall dwarfing the scale of the previous one.
52
Finally, they came within sight of the launch facility. Apart from the ubiquitous rock debris and some superficial damage in places, the structures stood intact. The gates were still locked. Jason and Joe ran forward and severed the padlock hasps with bolt cutters. Legermount took the truck through, waited for them to reboard, and Keene pointed the way to the access building serving the silo that had been made operational. Again, Jason and Joe came around with tools to force open the doors. As the last lock gave, they waved the others out from the cover of the truck. Legermount gave it a friendly parting slap before grabbing his kit and hastening away.
While Jason and Joe disappeared inside with Legermount, Keene and Mitch stood by the doorway ushering the others through while Cavan saw them down from the truck: Cynthia and Charlie; Colby with Vicki, helping Robin; Alicia, followed by Dash; Birden and Reynolds. . . .
“There’s one more,” Keene called. Cavan looked momentarily uncertain. “Where’s Sid?” Cavan turned back toward the truck. Keene went over as Cavan shone his flashlamp inside. Sid Vance was still sitting at the far end, his back to the wall, his face blank. Keene threw Cavan an ominous look and climbed in. “Sid?” He nudged Vance’s shoulder cautiously. Vance keeled sideways silently, then doubled over. Keene lifted him back up while Cavan played the flashlamp from the door. Sid’s head lolled limply to one side. There was a single bullet hole in the front of his jacket, hardly any blood. Keene checked his face and raised an eyelid with a thumb, then turned away, shaking his head.
“I never really found out who he was,” Cavan said as Keene got back down.
“Just a kid who always hit lucky—until this time,” Keene said. He looked past Cavan and stiffened suddenly. Cavan turned and looked back. Three sets of headlights were coming up the road from the village.
“It seems that our friends back there don’t intend letting the score
go unsettled, Leo,” Keene said. “You might get a chance to use that gun yet.”
They went in, found Mitch, and set him about organizing some defense while Keene, Jason, and Joe went on down to the service bays adjoining the silo to check the situation. Only dim emergency lights were on, running off a battery system in the generator room that had also been left driving the refrigeration plant for the liquid oxidizer portion of the hybrid fuel mix. That was the most crucial part. It meant that the oxidizer storage tank was ready to deliver to the shuttle now—the operation had to be done at the immediate prelaunch phase. Had the refrigeration been turned off, liquefying the oxidizer would have taken hours. With a supply ready to flow, transfer could be accomplished in about fifteen minutes. Keene breathed a silent prayer of thanks to whoever the engineer had been who allowed for this kind of situation.
Jason threw switches along a panel and started the standby diesel generator. They had power. Keene heard him go into the control booth, and moments later lights started coming on in the concrete-walled rooms and equipment bays, through the stairwells and corridors, and among the ramps and service platforms around the silo above. Keene went through to the pump room and ran quickly over the valve settings. As he started up the oxidizer transfer process, Jason’s voice came from the general address system serving the area. “Okay, Joe, you should have power. The access hatch should be at green, bridge extended.”
“Right. That’s what we’ve got,” Joe’s voice shouted down from the access bridge to the shuttle, higher overhead.
Worlds in Chaos Page 44
