“Yes, sir.” Masterson looked relieved. So did the others. They’d been used to taking orders from Sharps for years; and it felt right to have him in command again. They wouldn’t obey him like soldiers, but they needed to be told to do what they wanted to do anyway.
“Dan, you’ll come on the caravan with us,” Sharps said. “You wouldn’t be much use down below—”
“No,” Forrester said.
“What?” Sharps was certain he’d misunderstood. The thunder was continuous, and now there was the sound of rising wind.
“Can’t,” Forrester said. “Need insulin.”
It was then that Sharps remembered that Dan Forrester was a diabetic. “We can come by your place—”
“No,” Forrester screamed. “I’ve got other things to do. I’d delay you.”
“You’ve got—”
“I’ll be all right,” Forrester said. He turned to walk off into the rain.
“The hell you will!” Sharps screamed at Dan’s retreating back. “You can’t even get your car started when the battery’s dead!”
Forrester didn’t turn. Sharps watched his friend, knowing he’d never see him again. The others pressed around. They all wanted advice, orders, some sense of purpose, and they expected Charles Sharps to provide it. “We’ll see you at the ranch!” Sharps called.
Forrester turned slightly and waved.
“Let’s move out,” Sharps said. “Station wagon in the middle.” He looked at his tiny command. “Preston, you’ll be with me in the lead car. Get that shotgun and keep it loaded.” They piled into their cars and started across the broken lot, moving carefully to avoid the huge cracks and holes.
Forrester’s car had survived. He’d parked it at the very top of the lot, well away from any others, well away from trees and the edge of the bluff—and he’d parked it sideways to the tilt of the hill. Sharps could just make out Forrester’s lights following them down to the street. He hoped Dan had changed his mind and was following them, but when they got to the highway, he saw that Dan Forrester had turned off toward Tujunga.
■
The fire road narrowed to a pair of ruts tilted at an extreme angle, with a sloping drop of fifty feet or more to their right. Eileen fought for control of the car, then brought it to a stop. “We walk from here.” She made no move to get out. The rain wasn’t quite so bad now, but it was colder, and there was still continuous lightning visible all around them. The smell of ozone was strong and sharp.
“Let’s go, then,” Tim said.
“What’s the hurry?”
“I don’t know, but let’s do it.” Tim couldn’t have explained. He wasn’t sure he understood it himself. To Hamner, life was civilized, and relatively simple. You stayed out of the parts of town where money and social position weren’t important, and everywhere they were, you hired people to do things, or bought the tools to do them with.
Intellectually he knew that all this was ending as he sat. Emotionally…well, this couldn’t be Ragnarok. Ragnarok was supposed to kill you! The world was still here, and Tim wanted help. He wanted courteous police, briskly polite shopkeepers, civil civil servants; in short, civilization.
■
A towering wall of water sweeps eastward through the South Atlantic Ocean. Its left-hand edge passes the Cape of Good Hope, scouring lands which have been owned in turn by Hottentots, Dutch, British and Afrikaaners, sweeping up to curl at the base of Table Mountain, foaming up the wide valley to Paarl and Stellenbosch.
The right-hand edge of the wave impacts against Antarctica, breaking off glaciers ten miles long and five wide. The wave bursts through between Africa and Antarctica. When it reaches the wider expanse of the Indian Ocean the wave has lost half its force: Now it is only four hundred feet high. At four hundred and fifty miles an hour it moves toward India, Australia and the Indonesian islands.
It sweeps across the lowlands of southern India, then, focused by the narrowing Bay of Bengal, regains much of its strength and height as it breaks into the swamplands of Bangladesh. It smashes northward through Calcutta and Dacca. The waters finally come to a halt at the base of the Himalayas, where they are met by the floods pouring out of the Ganges Valley. As the waters recede, the Sacred Ganges is choked with bodies.
■
They trudged through the mud, climbing steadily. The fire road went over the top of the hill in a saddle, not far below the peaks, but far enough; the lightning stayed above them.
Their shoes picked up huge gobs of mud, and soon weighed three or four times what they should. They fell in the mud and got up again, helped each other when they could, and staggered up over the top and down the other side. The world condensed into a series of steps, one step at a time, no place to stop. Tim imagined the town ahead: undamaged, with motels and hot water and electric lights and a bar that sold Chivas Regal and Michelob…
They reached blacktop pavement, and the going was easier.
“What time is it?” Eileen asked.
Tim pressed the button on his digital watch. “Just about noon.”
“It’s so dark—” She slipped on wet leaves and tumbled onto the blacktop. She didn’t get up.
“Eileen…” Tim went over to help her.
She was sitting on the pavement, and she didn’t seem hurt, but she wasn’t trying to get up. She was crying, quietly.
“You’ve got to get up.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t carry you very far.”
Almost she laughed; but then her face sank into her hands and she sat huddled in the rain.
“Come on,” said Tim. “It’s not that bad. Maybe everything’s all right up here. The National Guard will be out. Red Cross. Emergency tents.” He felt it evaporating as he named it: the stuff of dreams; but he went on, desperately. “And we’ll buy a car. There are car lots ahead; we’ll buy a four-wheel drive and take it to the observatory, with a big bucket from Colonel Chicken sitting between us. You buying all this?”
She shook her head and laughed in a funny way and didn’t get up. He bent and took her shoulders. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t help. Tim lifted her, got his arms under her legs and began staggering down the blacktop road.
“This is silly,” Eileen said.
“Damn betcha.”
“I can walk.”
“Good.” He let her legs drop. She stood, but she clung to him, her head against his shoulder. Finally she let go. “I’m glad I found you. Let’s get moving.”
■
“Count off,” Gordie called.
“One,” Andy Randall answered. The others sang out in turn: “Two.” “Three.” “Four.” “Five,” Bert Vance said. He was a little late, and glanced up nervously, but his father didn’t seem to have noticed. “Six.”
“And me,” Gordie said. “Okay, Andy, lead off. I’ll play tail-end Charlie.” They started down the trail. The cliff was less than a mile away.
Twenty minutes, no more. They rounded a bend and had a magnificent view stretching eastward across the tops of the pine trees. The morning air was crystal clear; the light was…funny.
Gordie glanced at his watch. They’d been hiking ten minutes. He was tempted to skip his compulsory halt for bootlace adjustments. What difference would it make? Nobody would have blisters, not in another half-mile, and walking along, trying to be natural, was harder than the decision had been.
There was a bright flash to the east. Brilliant, but small. Much too bright to be lightning, and out of a clear sky? It left an afterimage that blinking couldn’t get rid of.
“What was that, Dad?” Bert asked.
“Don’t know. Meteor? Hold up, up in front. Time for boot adjustments.”
They dropped their packs and found rocks to sit on. The bright afterimage was still there, although it was fading. Gordie couldn’t look directly at his bootlaces. Then he noticed that the wind had died. The forest was deathly still.
Bright flash. Sudden stillness. Like—
The shock wave r
umbled across them with a thunder of sound. A dead tree crashed somewhere above them, thrashing in final agony among its brothers. The rumbling went on a long time, with rising wind.
Atom bomb at Frenchman’s Flats? Gordie wondered. Couldn’t be. They’d never test anything that big. So what was it?
The boys were chattering. Then the ground rumbled and heaved beneath them. More trees fell.
Gordie fell onto his pack. The other boys had been shaken off their rocks. One, Herbie Robinett, seemed to be hurt. Gordie crawled toward him. The boy wasn’t bleeding, and nothing was broken. Just shaken up. “Stay down!” Gordie shouted. “And watch for falling limbs and trees!”
The wind continued to rise, but it was shifting, moving around to the south, no longer coming from the east, where they’d seen the bright flash. The earth shook again.
And out there, far beyond the horizon, rising high into the stratosphere, was an ugly cloud, mushroom-shaped. It climbed on and on, roiling horribly. It was just where the bright flash had been.
One of the boys had a radio. He had it to his ear. “Nothing but static, Mr. Vance. I keep thinking I hear something else, but I can’t make out what.”
“Not surprising. We almost never get anything in the mountains in daytime,” Gordie said.
But I don’t like that wind. And what was that thing? A piece of the comet? Probably. Gordie laughed bitterly. All that fuss about the end of the world, and it was nothing. A bright flash out there in Death Valley—or maybe it wasn’t the comet at all. Frenchman’s Flat was that way, a hundred and fifty miles or so…
The ground had stopped shaking. “Let’s move on,” Gordie said. “On your feet.”
He pulled on his pack. Now what? he asked himself. Can I…will the boys be all right without me? What’s happening out there?
Nothing. Nothing but a goddam meteor. Maybe a big one. Maybe as big as that thing in Arizona, the one that made a half-mile crater. An impressive thing, and the boys saw it fall. They’ll talk about it for years.
But it doesn’t solve my problem. The bank examiners will still be around next Friday, and—
“Funny clouds up there,” Andy Randall said. There was worry in his voice.
“Yeah, sure,” Gordie said absently. Then he noticed where Andy was pointing.
Southwest. Almost due south. It was as if a pool of black ink had been poured across the sky. Huge, towering black clouds, rising higher and higher, blotting out everything…
And the wind was howling through the trees. More clouds, and more, seeming to form from nothing, and racing toward them at terrific velocity, faster than jet planes…
Gordie looked frantically along the trail. No good place to hide. “Ponchos,” he shouted.
They scrabbled their rain gear out. As Gordie flipped his poncho open, the rain came like a torrent of warm bathwater. Gordie tasted salt.
Salt!
“Hammerfall,” he whispered.
And the end of civilization. The paper shortages at the bank: gone, washed away. They weren’t important now.
Marie? The clouds were building above Los Angeles—and it was a long way to the nearest car. Nothing he could do for her. No way to help Marie. Maybe Harvey Randall would look out for her. Right now, Gordie’s problem was the boys.
“Back to Soda Springs,” he shouted. It was the best place, until they found out just what was going to happen. It was sheltered, and there was a clearing and a flat.
“I want to go home!” Herbie Robinett screamed.
“Get ’em moving, Andy,” Gordie called. He waved them ahead of him, ready to shove them if he had to, but he didn’t. They followed Andy. Bert went past. Gordie thought he saw tears in his son’s eyes. Tears through the dirty rainwater that hammered at them.
The trails will all be flooded in no time. Washed out, Gordie thought. And this warm crap will melt all the snow. The Kern’s going to be up over its banks, and all the roads will be gone.
Gordie Vance suddenly threw back his head and yelled in triumph. He was going to live.
Hot Fudge Tuesdae: Three
When Adam farmed and Eve span,
Kyrie Eleison,
Who was then the gentleman?
Kyrie Eleison.
Marching song of the Black Company
during the Peasant Revolt,
Germany, 1525
Harvey Randall had been fifteen minutes from home…until Hammerfall.
It was day turned night, and the night was alive with pyrotechnics. If daylight still leaked through the black cloud cover, the lightning was far brighter. Hills flashed in blue-white light and vanished, now a white sky over jagged black skyline, now a look into the canyon on his left, now blackness lit only by the headlamps of cars, now a nearby blast that clenched Randall’s eyelids in pain. The wipers were going like crazy, but the rain fell faster; it all came through in a blur. Randall had rolled down both side windows. Wet was better than blind.
To drive in such conditions was madness, yet the traffic was still heavy. Perhaps they were all mad. Through the thunder and the drum of rain on metal came the bleat of myriad horns. Cars shifted lanes without warning; they drove in the oncoming lanes, and butted their way back into line when oncoming lights faced them down.
Randall’s TravelAll was too big to challenge. Where a landslide had blocked half the road and a coward had stopped to let oncoming traffic through, Randall drove the TravelAll over the slide—it tilted badly, but held—and in front of the coward and straight at the traffic, and butted the lead car until it backed up.
He didn’t see the people who blocked his way. He saw only barriers: mudslides, breaks in the road, cars. He kept wondering if the house had collapsed, with Loretta inside. Or if Loretta, in blind panic, was about to come looking for him in the car. She’d never survive alone, and they’d never link up. Hell, it was almost an hour since Hammerfall!
The looters would come sooner or later. Loretta knew where to find his gun, but would she use it? Randall turned onto Fox Lane in floodwater that was hubcap-deep, drove to the end, used the remote. All the houses were dark.
The garage door didn’t open.
But the front door was wide open.
The looting couldn’t have started this soon, Randall thought, and he made himself believe it. Just for drill, then, he took the flashlight and handgun with him, and he left the TravelAll in a roll and immediately rolled back under the car, and studied the situation from there.
The house looked dead. And rain was blowing in the door.
He rolled out and sprinted and pulled up alongside the door. He still hadn’t used the flash. First person he saw, he’d flick the beam in her face. It would be Loretta, coming to close the door, and if she had his gun he was going to do a swan dive off the steps, because the way he was behaving she’d be scared enough to shoot.
He poked head and flash around the doorjamb. Lightning only made confusing shadows. Thunder drowned out other sounds.
He flicked on the flashlight.
It jumped at him; it hit him straight in the face. Loretta was lying on the floor, face-up. Her face and chest were a shapeless wet ruin, the kind left by a shotgun blast. Kipling, headless, was a mess of blood and fur beside her.
He walked inside, and he couldn’t feel his legs. Walking on pillows, they call it, the last stage of exhaustion before collapse. He knelt, set the gun down—it never occurred to him that someone might be here—and reached for Loretta’s throat. He drew his hand back, with a rippling shudder, and reached for her wrist instead. There was no pulse. Thank God. What would he have done?
They hadn’t raped her. As if it mattered now. But they hadn’t taken the jewelry off her wrists either. And though the drawers from the buffet had been pulled out and dumped, the good silver was still lying there.
Why? What could they have wanted?
Randall’s thoughts were slow and confused; they took strange paths. A part of him believed none of this: not the body of his wife, flickering in lightning, in a
nd out of existence; not the weird weather, nor the earthquakes, nor the translation of a great light show into the end of the world. When he got up and went into the bedroom for something to cover Loretta, it was because he had been staring at her until he couldn’t stand it anymore.
The dresser drawers were all pulled out. Randall saw cuff links and a gold ring and Loretta’s amethyst brooch and matching earrings in the wreckage. The closets had been rifled too. Where were…? Yes, they’d taken both of his overcoats. He waded through the wreckage.
The bed was piled high with senseless things: panty hose, bottles of cosmetics, lipsticks. He swept it to the floor, pulled the bedclothes off the bed and dragged them behind him into the hall. Something echoed in his mind…but he shied from it. He covered Loretta. He sat down again.
At no time had he wondered if “they” were still here. But he tried to picture the people who had done this. He? She? All men, all women, a mixed group? What could they have wanted? They’d left silver and jewelry, but taken…overcoats.
Randall shambled into the kitchen.
They’d found and taken the beef jerky, and his stock of vitamins, and all of his canned soup. Now he saw it, and he kept looking. They’d taken his canned gasoline from the garage. They’d taken his guns. They’d been ready, they’d planned this! At the moment of Hammerfall they had already known what they would do. Had they picked his house at random? Or his street? They could have raided every house on the block.
He was back in the entrance hall, with Loretta. “You wanted me to stay,” he told her. More words clogged in his throat; he shook his head and went into the bedroom.
He was tired to death. He stood beside the bed, staring at what had been on the bed. This was what didn’t make sense. Panty hose still in the packages. Shampoo, hair conditioner, skin conditioner, nail polish, a couple of dozen large bottles. Lipsticks, eyebrow pencils, Chap Sticks, emery boards, new boxes of curlers scores of items. If he could figure this out, maybe he’d know who. He could go after them. He still had the handgun.
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