Where was Thermopylae now? Had the waters washed away the grave of the Three Hundred? The waves wouldn’t have reached Delphi, or been as high as the Acropolis. Greece had lived through disasters before.
The road twisted and tilted and Tim eased the Blazer around the turn, using the brakes warily. A long straight stretch was ahead, down all the way, then more downhill on a wet and broken and twisting road, and riding with Eileen had made him realize just how good a driver he wasn’t.
The mountains had shifted.
Here the road ended in space. Tim braked sharply and came to a stop. He walked forward through the soft rain. It tasted sweet. No more salt rain, anyway. The road, and the steep bank of cut rock, and this part of the mountain itself had sheared and dropped twenty feet or more. Mud had piled up below, so that there were places where the drop was no more than four or five feet.
Cars went over longer drops than that in TV commercials. One pickup ad had shown clips from a movie with that truck jumping over ditches, flying over banks, and the announcer had said the truck wasn’t even especially modified…
Would the Blazer take it?
Was there any choice? The drop looked as if it ran for miles. Tim got back in and backed up fifty yards. He thought through the physics of the situation. If the car fell over the edge it would land on its nose, and they’d be dead. It had to go over horizontally, and that meant speed. Easing it over would kill them.
He set the brake and walked back to the edge again. Wake Eileen? She was dead out of it. Headlights behind him, dim in the rain, decided it for him. He didn’t know who that would be and he didn’t want to know. He walked back toward the Blazer. His mind worked the equation: Call the Blazer fifteen feet long; it would fall at one G. He got in and started the car. If the front end shouldn’t fall more than two feet before the rear left the pavement and also began to fall, then the whole car should be over in about a third of a second, which meant fifteen feet in a third of a second or forty-five feet per second, and forty-four feet per second was thirty miles per hour, so about thirty miles per hour ought to do it and here we GO…
The car fell about six feet all told. His instinct was to hit the brake but he didn’t.
They hit hard, landing on the mud, rolling down the-mud ramp onto the road itself. Amazingly that was all. They were rolling down the road as if nothing had ever happened.
Eileen bounced and rolled hard against the seat belt. She shook herself, sat partly upright and looked out. The wet countryside flowed past. She blinked, and then, satisfied, went back to sleep.
Slept right through the best driving I’ll ever do, Tim thought. He grinned at the rain and mud, then switched off the engine to coast downhill.
An hour later she was still asleep. He envied her. He’d heard of people who slept most of the time: shell-shocked, or bitterly disappointed in their waking lives. He could understand the temptation. But of course that wasn’t Eileen. She needed sleep. She’d be all the more alert when she was needed.
Here the road had shattered to discrete plates. Tim switched on the engine and kept the speed up, moving as if from island to concrete island. He remembered a TV program about the Baja race. One driver said the way to take a bad road was fast — that way you didn’t touch the bumps but flew over them. It hadn’t seemed like a very good idea when he heard it, but now there didn’t seem to be much else to do. The plates lurched under the car’s weight and impact. Tim’s knuckles were white on the wheel, but Eileen smiled in her sleep, as if rocked in a cradle.
Tim felt very lonely.
She had not deserted him. At the risk of her life she had stayed with him. But she was sleeping and he was driving, and the rain pounded constantly on metal an inch over his head, and the road kept doing strange things. Here it lifted in a graceful arc, like a futuristic bridge, and a new stream ran beneath it. The concrete ribbon hadn’t shattered under its own weight, not yet, but it for damn sure wouldn’t hold a car. Tim drove around it, through the flood. The wheels kept moving and the motor didn’t die, and he pulled back onto the road where he could.
He had been deserted by everything and everyone but Eileen. He could understand that money and credit cards were worthless; sure. A bullet through the windshield was something else. Driving across the green of a country club felt like vandalism! The observatory… but Tim didn’t want to think about that. He’d been thrown off his own land, and his ears burned with the memory. Cowardice. It felt like cowardice.
The road curled out of the mountains, widened and became a smooth straight line leading away. Where? No compass. Nothing to do but drive on. And the rain became a furious lashing attack. Tim started the motor and dared to increase speed to twenty mph.
Eileen asked, “How are we doing?”
“Out of the mountains. It’s a straightaway, no breaks visible. Go back to sleep.”
“Good.”
When he looked she was asleep again.
He saw a freeway ahead. A sign told him HIGHWAY 99, NORTH, He went up the ramp. Now he could go forty. He passed cars stalled in the rain, both on and off the highway. People, too. Tim hunched low whenever he saw anything that could be a gun. Once it was reaclass="underline" Two men stepped out from either side of the highway and raised a pair of shotguns. They gestured: Stop. Tim hunched low, stamped on the accelerator, aimed for one of the men. The man leaped unhesitatingly into the muddy darkness. Tim listened for the guns with every nerve, but they did not speak. Presently he straightened up.
Now, what was that about? Were they afraid to waste ammunition? Or were the guns too wet to fire? He said to himself, softly, “If you can’t stand not knowing…” Harv Randall’s words.
They still had gas, they were still moving. The highway was awash with water; it must have stopped lesser cars than this one. Tim grinned in the dark. Two hundred and fifty thou for a car? Well, it pays to buy the best.
The rain hurled a sea of water across the land in one ferocious blast, then stopped just as suddenly.
For a long moment Tim had an unbroken view ahead. He hit the brakes as the rain slashed down again. The car achieved a marvelous floating sensation before it coasted to a stop.
They had come to the end.
Eileen sat up. She pulled the seat back up behind her and smoothed her skirt with automatic gestures.
“We’ve hit an ocean,” said Tim.
She rubbed her eyes. “Where are we?”
Tim turned on the roof light. He spread the map across their laps. “I kept working north and west and downhill,” he said. “Until we got out of the mountains. There were a lot of them. After a while I couldn’t tell directions anymore, so I just went downhill. Eventually I came to Highway Ninetynine.” Tim spoke proudly: With his lousy sense of direction they might have ended up anywhere. “Ninety-nine’s been good. No more breaks. You missed a couple of guys with shotguns, and a lot of cars that weren’t running anymore, but no real trouble. Of course there was a lot of water on the road, but…”
She had raked the map with her eyes, once. Now she was peering ahead through the rain, along the beam of the headlamps, piecing out the view from subliminal cues and imagination. For as far as they both could see in the gray twilight there was nothing but a silver-gray expanse of rain-spattered water. No lights anywhere. Nothing.
“See if you can back up,” she said. She fell to studying the map. Tim inched backward, out of the water, until it was only hubcap-deep.
“We’re in trouble,” Eileen said. “Have we passed Bakersfield?”
“Yes.” There had been freeway signs, and the ghosts of dark buildings, a mountain range done all in right angles. “Not long ago.”