"Thank Christ for small favors." He turned back to his driving, following Burnfingers’s impressions and Mouse’s hunches, trying to stick to those streets where the paving was relatively intact.
They were traveling through the western part of the city. Not every building had been flattened. A few structures boasted flimsy new roofs. Most had not been touched, remained eviscerated hulks that gazed with vacant window-eyes at the empty streets.
"How can we be sure we’re not driving off onto another reality line?"
"We can’t," Mouse told him.
"You know, you ain’t very reassuring sometimes."
"I’m sorry. It’s not easy to predict how reality is going to behave under present circumstances."
"Something moving." Burnfingers pointed forward.
Tall, gangly figures were emerging from some of the ruins flanking the road. People, Frank thought. Or, rather, things that might once have been people. A few still resembled human beings. Most were shambling, stumbling nightmares plucked from some demented biologist’s fevered brain.
Some of the mutants scuttled about on all fours. Others had no legs and traveled on their turned-under knuckles, like amputee apes. The faces were worst of all because expression is the last refuge of humanity. They’d been gathered up and dumped in a genetic Mixmaster, beaten and pounded and jumbled together only to be poured out still alive. Many wore clothing, though they saw nothing that was not ragged or torn.
Neither attacking nor fleeing, they gathered to gape at the pristine, undamaged motor home. It must look like a figment from a dream to them, Frank knew. He wondered how long ago the cataclysm had taken place and how many, if any, of these poor creatures remembered it. Had they ever seen a functional piece of machinery, much less anything as elaborate as the motor home? Maybe in old books, if any had survived. If reading had survived.
He found himself slowing, not wanting to hit any of them. "What now?" There were dozens of the troglodytes packing tight around the Winnebago. The numbers made him nervous even though he saw nothing more threatening than an occasional club.
"Stop," Burnfingers ordered him.
"Here?"
"We must find out where your family has been taken. We cannot continue simply to follow our feelings. That means we should ask possible witnesses. What is wrong? Does their appearance make you nervous?"
"Damn straight it does."
"It shouldn’t." Burnfingers rose and moved to the side door. "I have spent nighttime at Piccadilly Circus in London. In the tube tunnels beneath the square dwell humans stranger than these."
Frank turned to Mouse. "Do as he says, Frank."
"Can’t you still sense which way they’ve gone?"
"It is thin, very thin. Far better to have their presence here confirmed."
"Have it your way. But I’m staying inside."
He hit the brake. The instant the motor home halted, the crowd of pitiful humanoid shapes surged toward it.
Frank kept his foot on the brake and the transmission in gear, ready to burst forward at the first hint of trouble. He heard the door open, heard Burnfingers Begay talking and something cackle a reply. It didn’t sound like English, or any other language Frank could recognize. That didn’t slow Burnfingers, who kept chatting steadily with the crowd.
Those who hadn’t gathered by the open door surrounded the motor home. A dozen or more stood in front, running their fingers silently over the hood and headlights, caressing and marveling. A few tears dribbled from damaged eyes.
There was nothing to be afraid of here, he decided. Only things that had once been men and women, creatures more deserving of pity than disgust. He wondered what had precipitated the dropping of the Big One on this reality line, prayed the people on his own line could avoid it. The Anarchis’s influence, Mouse had hinted. For the first time he began to really understand what was at stake in all this.
Alicia and Steven and Wendy concerned him more than history. The sooner he got them back and away from this place, the better for their health and sanity. Already the children might have suffered serious psychological damage.
The door closed with a click and Burnfingers rejoined them.
"You were able to understand them?" Mouse asked him.
"All language is a variant of some other. You just have to learn to listen close and pick out the significant parts." He bent to point through the windshield. "Your woman and children were taken that way. They were not hard for these people to spot. Operative vehicles are as scarce here as clean drinking water. A mutant named Prake and his gang took them."
"The Anarchis has allies everywhere," Mouse murmured grimly.
"According to the locals, this Prake is one pretty tough sumbitch. When I told them we had to go after him, they tried to talk me out of it. Civilization may be dead here, but courtesy and humanity survive. There is hope yet for this line."
"Which way?" was all Frank said.
"Keep going north, then there’s an avenue that angles northwest. Funny how certain things never die. Like street names. Like the Appian Way." He gestured a second time. "Three quarters of a mile that way, then we turn up Grand. Go all the way to the end of it."
"Got it." Frank moved his foot from brake to accelerator. The sorrowful crowd of mutant humanity parted to make way for him. They moaned and gesticulated, trying to dissuade their visitors from going. Our sheer normalcy must be a relief to them, he mused.
Maybe the locals wouldn’t mess with this Prake, but he sure as hell intended to. "Did they actually see Alicia and the kids?"
Burnfingers nodded. "Around here an ordinary human being would attract more attention than this vehicle. They saw them, all right."
Grand Avenue was a mass of broken, twisted concrete. It took them most of the day to negotiate the tormented pavement. The sun was setting by the time they drew near the section of the city that was dominated by Prake and his followers.
They’d also been slowed by a brief but violent attack by a roving band of unfriendly mutants. During the assault the motor home sustained one cracked window. Saving his precious ammunition, Burnfingers had climbed onto the roof and used Steven’s baseball bat to knock off the attackers one at a time.
When it was over and Burnfingers had rejoined them, Frank asked Mouse why she hadn’t simply sung their assailants away.
"Not everyone or everything responds in the same way to my singing," she explained. "People, even altered people, are not rat-things or demons."
"Different approach for different folks." Burnfingers held a wet washcloth to a bruise over his left eye. The bloody bat lay near the side door. "Hey, don’t look at me like that. You’re not afraid of me, too, are you?"
"I fear anything I cannot understand," Mouse replied, "because there is so little I do not. You are one of those incomprehensible encounters, Burnfingers Begay. You confuse me, therefore I am wary."
"I confuse me, too." He leaned forward. "Whup! Better slow down, Frank."
"Why? What’s the matter?"
"You’ll see in a minute."
He did. The cityscape remained unchanged but not the road. Directly ahead, it was submerged beneath a film of scum-laden liquid. No isolated puddle, the water extended between the buildings as far to north and west as they could see, forming a cinnabar mirror that threw back the light of the setting sun.
"I was right," Burnfingers declared. "The lake has risen even more on this line than on ours. It has invaded the city. It may happen on our line, too, some day soon." He put his washcloth aside. "This is the old lake coming back to reclaim its territory. Lake Bonneville. After the last Ice Age it covered all of Utah, reached into Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Now it is growing again."