“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
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 bluewhite 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 TravelAII 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 TravelAII 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 TravelAII 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 and 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.