by Greg Bear
“Please, get off,” she demanded, her voice muffled.
Stella was in pain. She thought for a minute she was going to panic, but she closed her eyes and made that go away. She could not bring her hand around to feel her shoulder, but she thought it might be bleeding, and her blouse seemed to be ripped. She could feel gravel or something sharp against her bare skin.
Outside, she heard some voices, men talking, one man yelling. They seemed far away. Then a door squealed open. The knee on her chest drew up and a foot came down hard on her ankle, pressing it into the frame of the seat in front. She screamed; that really hurt.
“Sorry,” a boy said, and the foot was lifted. She saw shadows moving over her, clumsy, dazed, pressing against the plastic curtain. Will’s face seemed to blur and fade, and he was gone. The curtain lay lightly around her. Something sighed, a brake cylinder maybe, or a boy. She rolled enough to finally touch her shoulder and lifted her hand against the curtain to see a bit of blood there, not a lot. Light filtered around the seat back behind her. Someone had opened the bus’s rear emergency door, and maybe a ceiling hatch as well.
“We’d better get you out of there,” a man called congenially. “Everybody hear me?”
Stella lay on her back now against the gravel and the dirt and the side of the bus. She rolled over completely and did a kind of knee-up, arm-up between the seats, which were jammed together closer than they had been before the crash. A feathery, leafy branch somehow got into her mouth and she spit it out, then finished wriggling until she was on her knees.
She had cuts all over, but none of them were bleeding a lot. Stella flailed against the plastic curtain until someone pulled it away with a jingle of hooks.
“Who’s in here? LaShawna? You in here?” A man’s voice, deep and distinct.
And someone else, “Celia? Hugh Davis? Johnny? Johnny Lee?”
“It’s me,” Stella said. “I’m here.”
Then she heard LaShawna call out. The girl began crying. “My leg is hurt,” she wailed.
“We’re going to get you, LaShawna. Be brave. Help is coming.”
Someone cursed loud and long at someone else.
“You just back off. You stay away from here. This is horrible, but you back off.”
“You drove us the fuck off the road!”
“You went into a skid.”
“Well, what the hell else could I do? There were cars all over the road. Jesus, we need an ambulance. Call an ambulance.”
Stella wondered if perhaps she should just stay where she was for the time being, in the half-dark, and nobody knowing she was there.
Suddenly, someone was pulling on her arm, tugging her out from between the seats and into the space between the top of the seats and the roof of the bus, now a kind of hallway with windows on the floor. It was Will. He crouched and peered at her like a frazzle-haired monkey, his face smeared with blood.
“We can go now,” he said.
“Where?” Stella asked.
“It’s people coming for us. Humans. They want to rescue us. But we can leave.”
“We have to help.”
“What can we do?” Will asked.
“We have to help.”
For a passing moment, she wanted to smear her hand on his face. Her ears felt hot.
Will shook his head and scrambled in a half-hunch to the front of the bus. He looked for a moment as if he were just going to climb out through a window, but then two pairs of arms stretched down, and he glanced back at Stella. A sour look came to his face.
“There’s a girl back there; she’s okay,” he said. “Take care of her, but leave me alone.”
Stella sat by the side of the long two-lane highway with her face in her hands. She had banged her head pretty hard in the wreck and now it throbbed. She peeked between her fingers at the adults walking around the bus. About twenty minutes had passed since the crash.
Will lay beside her, hand tossed casually over his eyes as if he were taking a nap. He had ripped his pants and a long scratch showed through. Otherwise, they both seemed to be okay.
Celia and LaShawna and the three other boys were already sitting in the backs of two cars, not the escort cars. Both of the escort cars had run off into a culvert and were pretty banged up—crumpled grilles, steam hissing, trunk lids popped.
She thought she heard the two security guards on the other side of the bus, and possibly the bus driver as well.
Parked by the side of the road about a hundred yards behind were two law enforcement vehicles. She could not see the insignia but their emergency lights were blinking. Why weren’t they helping out, getting ready to take the children back to the school?
Would there be an EMAC van coming soon, or an ambulance?
A black man in a rumpled brown suit approached Stella and Will. “The other girls and boys are pretty badly bruised, but they’re going to be fine. LaShawna is fine. Her leg is okay, thank God.”
Stella peered up at him doubtfully. She did not know who he was.
“I’m John Hamilton,” he said. “I’m LaShawna’s daddy. We’ve got to leave here. You have to come with us.”
Will sat up, his cheeks almost mahogany from the combination of sun and defiance. “Why?” he said. “Are you taking us to another school?”
“We have to get you to a doctor for checkups. The closest safe place is about fifty miles from here.” He pointed back down the road. “Not back to the school. My daughter will never go there again, not while I’m alive.”
“What’s Sandia?” Stella asked John, on impulse.
“It’s some mountains,” John said, with a startled expression, and swallowed something that must have been bitter. “Come on, let’s get going. I think there’s room.”
A third car pulled up, and John talked to the driver, a middle-aged woman with large turquoise rings on her fingers and brilliant orange hair. They seemed to know each other.
John came back. He was irritated.
“You’ll go with her,” he said. “Her name is Jobeth Hayden. She’s a mom, too. We thought her daughter might be here, but she isn’t.”
“You ran the buses off the road?” Stella asked.
“We tried to slow down the lead car and take you off the bus. We thought we could do it safely. I don’t know how it happened, but one of their cars spun out and the bus plowed into it and everyone went off the road. Cars all over. We’re damned lucky.”
Will had retrieved his battered and torn paperback book from the dirt and clutched it in his hand. He peered at the rip in his jeans, and the scratch. Then he stared back down the road at the cars with the emergency lights. “I’ll just go by myself.”
“No, son,” John Hamilton said firmly, and he suddenly seemed very large. “You’ll die out here, and you won’t hitch any rides because they’ll know what you are.”
“They’ll arrest me,” Will said, pointing at the blinking lights.
“No, they won’t. They’re from New Mexico.”
Hamilton did not explain why that was significant. Will stared at Hamilton and his face wrinkled in either anger or frustration.
“We’re responsible,” Hamilton said quietly. “Please, come with us.” Even more quietly, focusing on Will, his voice deep, almost sleepy, Hamilton said again, “Please.”
Will stumbled as he took a step, and John helped him to the car with the orange-haired woman, Jobeth.
On the way, they came close to the red Buick that carried Celia, Felice, LaShawna, and two of the boys. LaShawna leaned back in the rear seat, in the shadow of the car roof, eyes closed. Felice sat upright beside her. Celia stuck her head out the window. “What-KUK a ride!” she crowed. A white bandage looped around her head. She had blood on her scalp and in her hair and she clutched a plastic bottle of 7-Up and a sandwich. “I guess no more school, huh?”
Will and Stella got in the car with Jobeth. John told Jobeth where they were going—a ranch. Stella did not catch the name, though it might have been George or Gorge.
“I know,” the woman said. “I love there.”
Stella was sure the woman did not say “live,” she said “love.”
Will leaned his head back on the seat and stared at the headliner. Stella took a bottle of water and a bottle of 7-Up from John, and the cars drove back on the road, leaving the wreck of the bus, two guards, and three drivers, all neatly tied and squatting on the shoulder.
The official vehicles turned out to be from the New Mexico State Police, and they spun off in the opposite direction, their lights no longer flashing.
“Won’t be more than an hour,” Jobeth said, following the other two cars.
“Who are you?” Stella asked.
“I have no idea,” Jobeth said lightly. “Haven’t for years.” She glanced back over the seat at Stella. “You’re a pretty one. You’re all pretty ones to me. Do you know my daughter? Her name is Bonnie. Bonnie Hayden. I guess she’s still at the school; they took her there six months ago. She has natural red hair and her sparks are really prominent. It’s her Irish blood, I’m sure.”
Will ripped a page out of his paperback and crumpled it, then waggled it under his nose. He grinned at Stella.
32
OREGON
T hey’ve been out hunting, the men, taking along the younger males, those near or beyond puberty; heading up to the high ground to see where there might be some game left after the ash fall. But the ash has covered everything with grit for a hundred miles and the game has moved south, all but the small animals still quivering in their burrows, in their warrens, waiting…
And then the men hear the lahar coming, see the pyroclastic cloud that has melted all the snow and ice rippling around the base of the mountain like a dirty gray shawl falling from the black Storm Bear whose claws are lightning… or the mountain goddess sitting and spreading her wrap, the edge of the soft skin rushing over the land tens of miles away with a sound like all the buffalo on Earth.
Beneath the wrap, the meltwater has mixed with hot gas and gathers ash and mud and trees, roaring toward where the men stand, pallid and weak with fear.
The chief, with the sharpest eyes, the quickest brain, the strongest arm, the most sons and daughters in this band, yet probably only thirty-five or forty years of age, at the oldest… The chief has never encountered anything like the approaching lahar. The ash was bad enough. The distant wall of gray smudge looks as if it might take days to reach them, rolling over and through the distant forests. How could it ever touch where he stands with his sons and hunters, no matter how furious and powerful?
But, just in case, he walks back to be with the women.
Mitch pushed on his knee to get up and started walking toward the camp.
The men lope down the hills, taking the short route from the high ground, puffs of ash rising around their feet as they run, and the chief looks up above the ash cloaking the tiny crew in a choking haze and sees that the cloud has come that much closer in just a few minutes. He trembles, knowing how ignorant he is. Death could be very near.
Mitch strode down into the swale, across the old mudstone and around the whistling patches of brush.
Big old splash coming. Hot breath out of hell unnamed, perhaps unthought of then. The chief runs faster as the roar grows louder, the sound bigger even than the biggest stampeding herd in the biggest hunt, the wall of cloud rampaging over the land with a swift but lumbering dignity, like a great bear.
For a moment, the chief pauses and points out that the gray cloud has stopped. They laugh and hoot. The gray cloud is thinning, breaking up. They cannot see the flood beneath.
Then comes the biggest ash fall yet, thick curtains and fat billows, blinding, stinging the eyes and catching in the nose and mouth, gritty between lips and gums, choking. They try to cover their eyes with their hands. Blind, they stumble and fall and shout hunting cries, identity cries, not yet names. The roar begins again, grows louder, rhythmic pounding, screaming of trees, ripping.
Mitch stopped briefly on the upslope of the swale, peering at the weathered layers, the broken, crumbling remains of the ancient lahar. He rubbed his eyes, trying to push back a sliver of light in his vision.
From the top of the crest, he half-slid, half-walked down to the edge of the Spent River, a bluff overlooking the dried-up watercourse. They might have been near the river, waiting to cross, in a straight line between the high ground where Mitch (and the chief) had been a few minutes before, not far from where Mitch stood now, his dead arm at his side, ignoring the tingling there as well as the precessing, aching silver crescent.
He walked along the bluff. His eyes swept the ground a few meters ahead, looking for that weathered-out phalange or even bigger bone or chip of bone not worried over by a coyote or hauled off by a ground squirrel, falling out of its little hollow in the ash, that hard little mold of death.
The roar is loud and growing louder, but the cloud seems to be dissipating. What they cannot see, from where they stand, is the lahar breaking up into long fingers, finding channels already carved and ripped in the land, blowing out the last of its energy, reaching, reaching, but growing weaker. What they cannot see clearly is that this new threat is trying with all of its fading might to kill them.
Perhaps they will live.
They would be on his right, if they were anywhere at all, if they were still here. Their bones might have weathered out and fallen from the bluff centuries ago. He was walking so near the edge that there might be nothing left. The river would have been higher then, its bed not so worn and deep; but the bluff might have been high enough to give them pause…
The chief looks northwest. The leading run of the dying lahar roars down the channel. His eyes grow wide, his nostrils flare in rage and disappointment. It is a fuming, curling, leaping torrent of mud and steaming water. It fills his eyes, his brain. It travels faster than they can run. They hunker down and it roars past, below their feet, digging out the embankment. They crawl up the bank to safety, but the lahar vaults up and the spill catches them as they raise their arms. The thick liquid scalds, and the chief hears the others screaming, but only for a moment.
Mitch’s breath hitched.
Their women must have died at the same moment, or within seconds, across the Spent River.
The chief falls with his arms over his head. He and all his sons and the other hunters struggle for tenths of seconds against the scalding mud and then must lie still. It covers them, a blanket more than two feet thick, larded with sticks and chunks of log and rocks the size of fists, with bits of dead animals.
As Mitch walked, he grew calmer. Things seemed to fall into place. When the search was on, his mind became a quiet lake.
The land is hot and steaming. Nothing near the river lives that stood above ground. Bushes denuded of their leaves crouch smashed and wilted along the river course. Corpses lie baked and half-buried under gouts of steaming mud. The ground smells like mud and steamed vegetables. It smells like cooked herbs in a meaty stew.
The mud cools.
And then comes the third fall of ash, entombing the remains of the men, the women, and the ravaged land along the Spent River and for miles around.
It was over.
Mitch kept his head down and pressed one eye with a finger, but the pain was coming anyway. Price to be paid.
Rod Taylor pushes the lever forward on the old time machine. The mud hardens under the gray pall of falling ash. Time flies past. The bodies decay within their molds, staining the hard mud. The flesh seeps away and the bones rattle with earthquakes and the mud and stone cracks and fresh water and mud enters, filling the hollow with mud of different density, different composition, holding the bones, finally, still.
The men can rest.
Mitch knew they were still here, somewhere.
He stopped walking and looked to his right, into a step cut into the bluff by hundreds of centuries of erosion. At first he could not see what had attracted his attention; it was hidden by the painful little sliver of light.
The top of the mudstone step was at least six feet above his head. A streak of dark gray capped the step beneath a superficial wig of soil and brush. But his vision tunneled into a bright ball and all he saw was the shiny brown prominence lying horizontally in the stone.
He hardly dared to breathe.
Mitch stooped, arm hanging, propping his knees against the mound of weathered-out clods and pebbles. Reached out with his right finger and brushed along the compacted gray ash and caked mudstone.
The prominence was firm in the hardened layer. It could have been a bone from a deer, a mountain goat, or a bighorn sheep.
But it was not. It was a human shin, a tibia. In this layer, it had to be at least as old as the bones in the camp. He reached down with one hand, sparks flying in his right eye, and felt for the small piece he had seen there, a dark brown talus of bone amongst the rocky talus.
He held it up, turning it until he could see it clearly. It was small, but also from a human. Homo at least. He replaced it. Position would be important when they surveyed.
He took a dental pick from his jacket and worked at the hardened mud and ash around the tibia until he was sure, fighting the pain in his cranium for long minutes. Then he sat back and drew up his knees.
He could no longer put it off. The migraine had arrived. He hadn’t had one this bad in more than ten years. The dental pick fell from his hand as he curled up on the ground, trying not to moan.
He managed to reach up with one finger and stroke the half-buried length of bone.
“Found you,” Mitch said. Then he closed his eyes and felt his own lahar wash over him.
33
NEW MEXICO
Dicken’s monitor was filled with comparisons of protein expression in embryonic tissues at different stages of development, looking for the elusive retroviral or transposon trigger that might have crept into a complex of developmental genes, promoting the hymen in human females. Even using prior searches and comparisons—incredibly, he had found some in the literature—it looked as if this would take months or years.
