I can tell Bud is afraid to gun it and start the wheels to spinning ’cause he’ll lose traction and that’ll tip us over for sure.
Susan jumps out and stands in the wash downstream and pushes against the truck to keep it from going over. The pressure is shoving it off the ford, and the casket, it slides down a foot or so, the cables have worked loose. Now she pays because the weight is worse, and she jams herself like a stick to wedge between the truck and the mud.
It if goes over, she’s finished. It is a fine thing to do, crazy but fine, and I jump down and start wading to reach her.
No time.
There is an eddy. The log turns broadside. It backs off a second and then heads forward again, this time poking up from a surge. I can see Bud duck, he has got the window up and the log hits it, the glass going all to smash and scatteration.
BUD
All over my lap it falls like snow. Twinkling glass.
But the pressure of the log is off, and I gun the sumbitch.
We root out of the hollow we was in, and the truck thunks down solid on somethin’.
The log is ramming against me. I slam on the brake.
Take both hands and shove it out. With every particle of force I got.
It backs off and then heads around and slips in front of the hood, bumping the grill just once.
ANGEL
Like it had come to do its job and was finished and now went off to do something else.
SUSAN
Muddy, my arms hurting. I scramble back in the truck with the murmur of the water all around us. Angry with us now. Wanting us.
Bud makes the truck roar, and we lurch into a hole and out of it and up. The water gurgles at us in its fuming, stinking rage.
I check Gene and the power cells, they are dead.
He is heating up.
Not fast, but it will wake him. They say even in the solution he’s floating in, they can come out of dreams and start to feel again. To hurt.
I yell at Bud that we got to find power cells.
“Those’re not just ordinary batteries, y’know,” he says.
“There’re some at DataComm,” I tell him.
We come wallowing up from the gum-yellow water and onto the highway.
GENE
Sleeping…slowly…I can still feel…only in sluggish…moments…moments…not true sleep but a drifting, aimless dreaming…faint tugs and ripples…hollow sounds…. I am underwater and drowning…but don’t care…don’t breathe…. Spongy stuff fills my lungs…easier to rest them…floating in snowflakes…a watery winter…but knocking comes…goes…jolts…slips away before I can remember what it means…. Hardest…yes…hardest thing is to remember the secret…so when I am in touch again…DataComm will know…what I learned…when the C31 crashed…when I learned…. It is hard to clutch onto the slippery, shiny fact…in a marsh of slick, soft bubbles…silvery as air…winking ruby-red behind my eyelids…. Must snag the secret…a hard fact like shiny steel in the spongy moist warmness…. Hold it to me…. Something knocks my side…a thumping…. I am sick…. Hold the steel secret…keep….
MC 355
The megatonnage in the Soviet assault exploded low—ground-pounders, in the jargon. This caused huge fires, MC355’s simulation showed. A pall of soot rose, blanketing Texas and the South, then diffusing outward on global circulation patterns.
Within a few days, temperatures dropped from balmy summer to near-freezing. In the Gulf region where MC355 lay, the warm ocean continued to feed heat and moisture into the marine boundary layer near the shore. Cold winds rammed into this water-laden air, spawning great roiling storms and deep snows. Thick stratus clouds shrouded the land for at least a hundred kilometers inland.
All this explained why MC355’s extended feelers had met chaos and destruction. And why there were no local radio broadcasts. What the ElectroMagnetic Pulse did not destroy, the storms did.
The remaining large questions were whether the war had gone on, and if any humans survived in the area at all.
MR. ACKERMAN
I’d had more than enough of this time. The girl Susan had gone mad right in front of us, and we’d damn near all drowned getting across.
“I think we ought to get back as soon’s we can,” I said to Bud when we stopped to rest on the other side.
“We got to deliver the boy.”
“It’s too disrupted down this way. I figured on people here, some civilization.”
“Somethin’ got ’em.”
“The bomb.”
“Got to find cells for the man in the box.”
“He’s near dead.”
“Too many gone already. Should save one if we can.”
“We got to look after our own.”
Bud shrugged, and I could see I wasn’t going to get far with him. So I said to Angel, “The boy’s not worth running such risks. Or this corpse.”
ANGEL
I didn’t like Ackerman before the war, and even less afterward, so when he started hinting that maybe we should shoot back up north and ditch the boy and Susan and the man in there, I let him have it. From the look on Bud’s face, I knew he felt the same way. I spat out a real choice set of words I’d heard my father use once on a grain buyer who’d weaseled out of a deal, stuff I’d been saving for years, and I do say it felt good.
TURKEY
So we run down the east side of the bay, feeling released to be quit of the city and the water, and heading down into some of the finest country in all the South. Through Daphne and Montrose and into Fairhope, the moss hanging on the trees and now and then actual sunshine slanting golden through the green of huge old mimosas.
We’re jammed into the truck bed, hunkered down because the wind whipping by has some sting to it. The big purple clouds are blowing south now.
Still no people. Not that Bud slows down to search good.
Bones of cattle in the fields, though. I been seeing them so much now I hardly take notice anymore.
There’s a silence here so deep that the wind streaming through the pines seems loud. I don’t like it, to come so far and see nobody. I keep my paper bag close.
Fairhope’s a pretty town, big oaks leaning out over the streets and a long pier down at the bay with a park where you can go cast fishing. I’ve always liked it here, intended to move down until the prices shot up so much.
We went by some stores with windows smashed in, and that’s when we saw the man.
ANGEL
He was waiting for us. Standing beside the street, in jeans and a floppy yellow shirt all grimy and not tucked in. I waved at him the instant I saw him, and he waved back. I yelled, excited, but he didn’t say anything.
Bud screeched on the brakes. I jumped down and went around the tail of the truck. Johnny followed me.
The man was skinny as a rail and leaning against a telephone pole. A long, scraggly beard hid his face, but the eyes beamed out at us, seeming to pick up the sunlight.
“Hello!” I said again.
“Kiss.” That was all.
“We came from…” and my voice trailed off because the man pointed at me.
“Kiss.”
MR. ACKERMAN
I followed Angel and could tell right away the man was suffering from malnutrition. The clothes hung off him.
“Can you give us information?” I asked.
“No.”
“Well, why not, friend? We’ve come looking for the parents of—”
“Kiss first.”
I stepped back. “Well, now, you have no right to demand—”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bud had gotten out of the cab and stopped and was going back in now, probably for his gun. I decided to save the situation before somebody got hurt.