The policeman waved, then turned back to the wreckage of the hospital.
Tim stared moodily at the swirling smears on the windshield. He blinked back tears of his own.
Eileen had a moment to glance at him. Her hand touched his before returning to the wheel. “We couldn’t have helped. They’ve got cars, and enough people…”
“I guess.” He wondered if he meant it. The nightmare ride went on, as the car climbed toward the Verdugo Hills, past wrecked stucco houses, a fallen school, burning houses and intact houses. Whenever they saw anyone, Tim screamed warning. It made him feel a little better for not stopping.
He glanced at his watch. Incredibly, less than forty minutes had passed since he’d seen the bright flash. He muttered it: “Forty minutes. H plus forty minutes, and counting.”
The wave rushes outward from the center of the Gulf of Mexico, moving at 760 miles an hour. When it reaches the shallows along the coast of Texas and Louisiana, the foot of the wave stumbles. More and more water rushes up behind, piling higher and higher until a towering monster half a kilometer high falls forward and flows up onto the land.
Galveston and Texas City vanish under the pounding waves. The water that flows westward through the swamps into El Lago, further west into Houston itself, is now filled with debris. The wave strikes all along the arc from Brownsville, Texas, to Pensacola, Florida, seeking lowlands, rivers, any path inland and away from the burning hell at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.
The waters pile high along the Florida west coast; then they break across, carrying with them the sandy soil. They leave behind channels scoured clean, a myriad of passages from the Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean. The Gulf Stream will be cooler and much smaller for centuries to come.
The waters crossing Florida are capricious. Here a reflected wave joins the main body of rushing water to build even higher; there a reflection cancels, leaving parts of the Okefenokee Swamp untouched. Havana and the Florida Keys vanish instantly. Miami en joys an hour’s respite until the waves from the Atlantic strikes rush down, meet the outrushing waves from the Gulf, overpower them, and crash into Florida’s eastern cities.
Atlantic waters pour into the Gulf of Mexico through the newly formed cross-Florida channels. The saucer bowl of the Gulf cannot hold it all, and the waters once again flow west and north, across the already drowned lands. One wave rushes up the Mississippi. It is forty feet above flood level when it passes Memphis, Tennessee.
Fred Lauren had been at the window all night. The bars didn’t hide the sky at all. They’d put him alone in a cell after they photographed and fingerprinted him, and they left him. At noon he’d be taken to the Los Angeles Jail.
Fred laughed. At noon there wouldn’t be a Los Angeles Jail. There’d be no Los Angeles. They’d never get a chance to put him in with those other men. Memories of another prison came, and he swept them away with better thoughts.
He remembered Colleen. He’d gone to her door with presents. He only wanted to talk. She’d been afraid of him, hut he was inside before she could bolt the door, and he’d brought very nice presents for her, nice enough that she’d let him stand by the door while she stood on the other side of the room and looked at the jewelry and the gloves and red shoes, and then she’d wondered how he knew her sizes, and he told her.
He’d talked and talked, and after awhile she was friendly and let him sit down. She’d offered him a drink and they’d talked some more, and she had two drinks for herself, and then another. She’d been pleased that he knew so much about her. He didn’t tell her about the telescope, of course, but he’d told her how he knew where she worked, and where she shopped, and how beautiful she was…
Fred didn’t want to remember the rest of it. How she’d had one drink too many, and told him that even though they’d just met she felt she’d known him a long time and of course he really had known her even if she didn’t know it, and she’d asked if he wanted to stay…
Tramp. Like all of them. A tramp. No, she couldn’t have been, she really loved him, he knew she did, but why had she laughed, and then screamed and told him to get out when—
NO!
Fred always stopped remembering then. He looked up at the sky. The comet was there. Its tail blazed across the sky just as he’d seen in the paintings in the astronomy magazines, and when the sky was blue with hidden dawn, brightening in that tiny patch of western sky that Fred could see, there were still the wisps of comet among the clouds, and people moved on the streets below, the fools, didn’t they know?
They brought him breakfast in his cell. The jailers didn’t want to talk to him. Even the trustees looked at him that way…
They knew. They knew. The police doctors must have examined her, and they knew she hadn’t been, that he couldn’t, that he’d tried but he couldn’t and she laughed and he knew how he could do it, but he didn’t want to, and she laughed again, and he bit her until she screamed and then he’d be able to only she kept on screaming!
He had to stop thinking. He had to, before he remembered the shape on the bed. The cops had made him look at her. One had held his hand in a certain way and bent his fingers until he opened his eyes and looked and he didn’t want to, didn’t they understand that he loved her and he didn’t want…?
The sky glowed strangely through the cracks of the buildings across the street. Somewhere to the left, far south and west. The glow died before he’d seen anything at all, but Fred smiled. It had happened. It wouldn’t be long now.
“Hey, Charlie,” the drunk across the block called. “Charlie!”
“Yeah?” the trustee answered.
“What the fuck was that? They making movies out there?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about. Ask the sex maniac, he’s got western exposure.”
“Hey, Sex Maniac—”
The walls and floor jerked suddenly, savagely. He was flying… He threw out his arms to ward the wall from his head. The stone wave broke against his arms, and Fred howled. Agony screamed in his left elbow.
The floor seemed to stabilize. The jail was solidly built. There’d been nothing damaged. Fred moved his left arm and moaned. Other prisoners were shouting now. One screamed in agony. He must have fallen from an upper bunk. Fred ignored them all and moved again to the window. He felt real fear. Was that all?
One ordinary day, with… clouds. Jesus, they were moving fast! Churning, forming and vanishing, streaming north and west. A lower cloud bank, calmer and more stable, began moving south and west. This wasn’t what Fred had expected. One wave of fire, that was what he had prepared for. Doomsday was taking its own sweet time.
The sky darkened. Now it was all black clouds, swirling, churning, flashing with continuous lightning. The wind and the thunder howled louder than the prisoners.
The end of the world came in blinding light and simultaneous thunderclap.
Fred’s mind recondensed to find him on the floor. His elbow was shrieking agony. Lightning… lightning must have struck the jail itself. There were no lights in the corridor, and outside was dark, so that he could see only in surrealistic flashes like a strobe-lit go-go bar.
Charlie was moving along the cellblock. He carried keys. He was letting the prisoners out. One by one. He opened the cells and they came out and moved down the corridor — and he had already passed Fred’s cell. The cells on either side were open. His was locked.