BUD
Sounded like gunfire. Rattling. Sharp and hard.
I figure it was the bolts connecting the steel wall panels—they’d shear off.
I could hear the concrete floor panels rumble and crack, and spandrel beams tear in half like giant gears clashing with no clutch.
Came down slow, leaving an arc of debris seeming to hang in the air behind it.
Met the ground hard.
Slocum Towers was the name on her.
JOHNNY
Against the smashing building, I saw something standing still in the air, getting bigger. I wondered how it could do that. It was bigger and bigger and shiny turning in the air. Then it jumped out of the sky at me. Hit my shoulder. I was looking up at the sky. Angel cried out and touched me and held up her hand. It was all red. But I couldn’t feel anything.
BUD
Damn one-in-a-million shot, piece of steel thrown clear. Hit the boy.
You wouldn’t think a skycraper falling two miles away could do that.
Other pieces come down pretty close, too. You wouldn’t think.
Nothing broke, Susan said, but plenty bleeding.
Little guy don’t cry or nothing.
The women got him bandaged and all fixed up. Ackerman and Turkey argue like always. I stay to the side.
Johnny wouldn’t take the painkiller Susan offers. Says he doesn’t want to sleep. Wants to look when we get across the bay. Getting hurt don’t faze him much as it do us.
So we go on.
JOHNNY
I can hold up like any of them, I’ll show them. It didn’t scare me. I can do it.
Susan is nice to me, but except for the aspirin, I don’t think my mom would want me to take a pill.
I knew we were getting near home when we got to the causeway and started across. I jumped up real happy, my shoulder made my breath catch some. I looked ahead. Bud was slowing down.
He stopped. Got out.
’Cause ahead was a big hole scooped out of the causeway like a giant done it when he got mad.
BUD
Around the shallows there was scrap metal, all fused and burnt and broken.
Funny metal, though. Hard and light.
Turkey found a piece had writing on it. Not any kind of writing I ever saw.
So I start to thinking how to get across.
TURKEY
The tidal flats were a-churn, murmuring ceaseless and sullen like some big animal, the yellow surface dimpled with lunging splotches that would burst through now and then to reveal themselves as trees or broken hunks of wood, silent dead things bobbing along beside them that I didn’t want to look at too closely. Like under there was something huge and alive, and it waked for a moment and stuck itself out to see what the world of air was like.
Bud showed me the metal piece all twisted, and I say, “That’s Russian,” right away ’cause it was.
“You never knew no Russian,” Angel says right up.
“I studied it once,” I say, and it be the truth even if I didn’t study it long.
“Goddamn,” Bud says.
“No concern of ours,” Mr. Ackerman says, mostly because all this time riding back with the women and child and old me, he figures he doesn’t look like much of a leader anymore. Bud wouldn’t have him ride up there in the cabin with him.
Angel looks at it, turns it over in her hands, and Johnny pipes up, “It might be radioactive!”
Angel drops it like a shot. “What!”
I ask Bud, “You got that counter?”
And it was. Not a lot, but some.
“God a’mighty,” Angel says.
“We got to tell somebody!” Johnny cries, all excited.
“You figure some Rooshin thing blew up the causeway?” Bud says to me.
“One of their rockets fell on it, musta been,” I say.
“A bomb?” Angel’s voice is a bird screech.
“One that didn’t go off. Headed for Mobile, but the space boys, they scragged it up there—” I pointed straight up.
“Set to go off in the bay?” Angel says wonderingly.
“Musta.”
“We got to tell somebody!” Johnny cries.
“Never you mind that,” Bud says. “We got to keep movin’.”
“How?” Angel wants to know.
SUSAN
I tell Gene how the water clucks and moans through the trough cut in the causeway. Yellow. Scummed with awful brown froth and growling green with thick soiled gouts jutting up where the road was. It laps against the wheels as Bud guns the engine and creeps forward, me clutching to Gene and watching the reeds to the side stuck out of the foam like metal blades stabbing up from the water, teeth to eat the tires, but we crush them as we grind forward across the shallow yellow flatness. Bud weaves among the stubs of warped metal—from Roosha, Johnny calls up to me—sticking up like trees all rootless, suspended above the streaming, empty, stupid waste and desolating flow.
TURKEY
The water slams into the truck like it was an animal hitting with a paw. Bud fights to keep the wheels on the mud under it and not topple over onto its side with that damn casket sitting there shiny and the loony girl shouting to him from on top of that.
And the rest of us riding in the back, too, scrunched up against the cab. If she gets stuck, we can jump free fast, wade or swim back. We’re reeling out rope as we go, tied to the stump of a telephone pole, for a grab line if we have to go back.
He is holding it pretty fine against the slick yellow current dragging at him, when this log juts sudden out of the foam like it was coming from God himself, dead at the truck. A rag caught on the end of it like a man’s shirt, and the huge log is like a whale that ate the man long ago and has come back for another.
“No! No!” Angel cries. “Back up!” But there’s no time.
The log is two hands across, easy, and slams into the truck at the side panel just behind the driver, and Bud sees it just as it stove in the steel. He wrestles the truck around to set off the weight, but the wheels lift and the water goes gushing up under the truck bed, pushing it over more.
We all grab onto the Isolate thing or the truck and hang there, Mr. Ackerman giving out a burst of swearing.
The truck lurches again.
The angle steepens.
I was against taking the casket thing ’cause it just pressed the truck down in the mud more, made it more likely Bud’d get stuck, but now it is the only thing holding the truck against the current.
The yellow froths around the bumpers at each end, and we’re shouting—to surely no effect, of course.
SUSAN
The animal is trying to eat us, it has seen Gene and wants him. I lean over and strike at the yellow animal that is everywhere swirling around us, but it just takes my hand and takes the smack of my palm like it was no matter at all, and I start to cry, I don’t know what to do.
JOHNNY
My throat filled up, I was so afraid.
Bud, I can hear him grunting as he twists at the steering wheel.
His jaw is clenched, and the woman Susan calls to us, “Catch him! Catch Gene!”
I hold on, and the waters suck at me.
TURKEY