Worlds in Chaos

by James P. Hogan

  “How far inland could the next one go?” Cavan asked, looking alarmed.

  Charlie showed his hands in what could be the only honest answer. “How can I tell you? Maybe to Saucillo.” In which case, he didn’t have to add, there would be no point in spending maybe all day tomorrow looking for a long way around. It would achieve only the guarantee of their getting trapped also. Cynthia moved closer to Keene and squeezed his arm as if in a gesture of sympathy for how he must be feeling.

  “You people talk much longer, and we’re gonna need that boat up there anyway,” the leader called over at them.

  Mitch looked away, indicating that as far as he was concerned there was nothing more to be said. Cavan stood waiting for Keene to acknowledge the inevitable. Alicia shook her head protestingly but could add no words that would change anything. Even Colby was reduced to an awkward silence. Keene stared across past the bridge; unrealistic, romanticized images poured into his mind of Vicki, Robin, others, waiting somewhere. Everything in him rebelled at the obscenity that was being forced upon him. His gaze came back to the battered green truck, weighed down by its almost comical burden of accoutrements. And finally, the obvious dawned on him.

  He stabbed a finger, pointing. “There’s your answer!” he threw at the rest of them. Their eyes followed, then came back to him disbelievingly.

  “What are you talking about?” Mitch asked uncertainly. Keene was past debating; in any case, there was nothing in the way of reason or logic left for him to debate with. He turned and began shouldering his way back between the others.

  “What are you asking us to do?” Alicia pleaded as he passed her.

  “I’m not asking anyone to do anything. I just know what I’m doing.” Keene walked to the end of the truck, climbed up into the shelter, and began collecting a share of rations, water, and other oddments to fill his pack. They had brought spare rifles and magazines. He selected a standard Army pattern and a pouch filled with clips. Alicia and Colby arrived as he clambered back down off the tailboard, Cavan not far behind. Alicia gaped at him for a moment, then grabbed his jacket with both hands, pulled him close, and kissed his cheek.

  “Have you gone completely mad, Landen?” Cavan called ahead.

  “Why me? Wasn’t it you who was mad a short while ago?” Keene gestured the way ahead. “You said it yourself. There’s people depending on us. You change your mind if you want, Leo. I’m going on.”

  “But . . . you heard Charlie.”

  “All the more reason to get moving, then.”

  Alicia started saying something to Cavan. Keene came back to the leader, who was watching, confused. “How far did you come in that?” Keene asked him.

  The leader waved vaguely. “Was a long way from south, a place you never heard of.”

  “It runs? It’s got gas?”

  The leader made a face, shrugging. “Well, is like you expect, you know. We take some from a car we find here, a truck there. But is good for a few miles yet, sure.”

  “Okay. Then I need the keys.” The leader seemed to hesitate reflexively. “Hell, come on! It’s not going to be any more use to you.” Keene said.

  The leader stared at Keene for a moment longer as if confirming that he was dealing with someone crazy, then shrugged and looked away. “Augusto. Come here,” he called, and followed it with something in Spanish. One of the men came forward and produced a set of keys. He removed a couple carefully and presented them to Keene. God alone knew what he thought he’d need the rest for.

  Keene looked quickly around the rest of his party, the troops, Buff and Luke still standing together. More than anything, he was conscious of time relentlessly passing. “I would have wanted a better way to do this, but it’s what we’ve got,” he told them. “You’re all great people. It’s been a privilege. Let’s consider the rest all said, eh?” Some of them managed a response; others just stood mutely, as if unable to believe it was happening. Keene glanced back at the leader and indicated the green truck with a wave. “And if you want any of that stuff off there you’d better get your people moving, because I’m dumping it.” Slinging the rifle around behind him to leave both hands free, he moved onto the bridge. Behind him, the leader’s voice launched into a tirade at the others.

  Picking his way over the chunks of broken concrete was trickier than it had looked. The sloping surfaces were slippery, making it necessary to find footholds in the breaks and where possible hold onto the jagged edges higher up. In places he had to move on exposed steel reinforcement, greasy and treacherous, causing his body to tense involuntarily as when sensing insecurity walking on ice. All the time, the wind gusted and raged around him in its attempts to pluck him off. He was perhaps a quarter of the way across when Alicia’s voice floated through from behind. “Lan!” Holding tightly to the stance he was on, Keene raised his head to look back. She was coming around the truck, lugging a pack in one hand and what looked like a medical kit in the other. Cavan was behind her with another pack and his submachine gun. “We’re coming with you.” Such was Keene’s concentration at that moment, that the message only partly sank in. He kept his head turned for a few seconds, letting the gesture say what his position prevented him from articulating, and then looked back to his task.

  Near the midpoint, he came to a section where the group crossing the other way had tied ropes as improvised handrails—the worst part, with all the pavement gone and the creek visible below, from where the smell of decay reached his nostrils. Clutching the ropes and the girders, he had no defense against the flies. The sky to the west lit up with an incoming fireball landing closer than most. Keene braced himself for the boom and the shock wave, waited until they had passed, and carried on.

  Then he was once again among flakes of shattered concrete, and by comparison the going seemed easy now. The last few yards, and he was standing on unbroken roadway again, in front of the green truck. At close range it looked even more antique than before. He walked up to it. All the glass was gone from the passenger side of the cab, and what looked like the rear window from a different vehicle had been lashed in place of the truck’s absent windshield. The sides were dented everywhere and missing a few panels. Keene picked out a scattering of what looked suspiciously like bullet holes. Grunting to himself, he turned back to look for Alicia and Cavan. They were close together on the bridge, Cavan helping Alicia at the awkward center section.

  But that wasn’t all. There was another figure some yards behind them . . . and another two farther back still, just moving onto the first stretch. Keene peered, and after a few seconds made them out to be Colby, followed by Charlie and Cynthia. A tall figure that had to be Mitch was walking from the truck, at the same time slinging a large pack over a shoulder; as Keene watched, two more jumped down from the rear of the trailer and followed. They were all coming! Keene wiped the grime and perspiration from his face. It felt sticky and stubbly, but all of a sudden none of the discomfort mattered. Something warm and uplifting, brushing a depth of the spirit that in his life had seldom stirred, flooded through him. He rubbed an eye with a knuckle. More than just the fumes, he realized, was causing his vision to blur. He turned away and climbed up into the cab.

  He first tried the engine. After a couple of backfires and two unsuccessful attempts at starting with different setting of the choke, which was manual, it finally coughed into life with a celebration of blue smoke from the tailpipe, indicating burning oil. Looking out through the improvised windshield, Keene saw the figure of the leader on the far side, beaming and giving him an enthusiastic thumb’s-up as if to say, See, I wouldn’t fool you. For what it was worth, the gas gauge claimed almost half a tank. Check with a dipstick before setting off, Keene told himself.

  By the time the others began arriving off the bridge, he was already tossing out filthy blankets, piles of clothes, and pots of partly eaten food from the back. The inside stank of tobacco and pot, too many unwashed bodies crowded together for too long, and fear. While he was still clearing space, he heard the s
ounds of the rest of the baggage being cut free from the roof. Legermount and Dash appeared at the doors and began heaving in packs and equipment. Keene climbed out and found Cavan and Mitch poring over a map that they’d brought from the other truck. “Come on, we need you, Lan,” Cavan said. “This is your country we’re in now.”

  “Buff and Luke aren’t coming?”

  “It appears not,” Cavan said. “Perhaps they decided that trucks, not spacecraft, were more their line.” Keene realized that for some reason he had half expected it.

  “Here,” Mitch said, handing Keene his radio. “You want to wish them luck?” There was still a set programmed to the same frequency in the cab. Keene took the unit and pressed the call button. Across the bridge, one of the figures near the truck turned around and walked back to the driver’s door.

  “Yeah?” a voice answered in the radio that Keene was holding. It sounded like Buff.

  “Lan Keene here. So you guys aren’t coming along after all?”

  “Well, you know how it is. . . . I could never really see me up in one o’ them spaceships, anyway. And these people aren’t so bad. Someone’s going to have to get them to San An or wherever they want to go. And then Luke and me figured that if it works out that it’s possible, we might try heading back east when the worst is over, and try to find our folks—just the way you’re doin’. I reckon like maybe you gave us some inspiration. Anyways, we’re set on giving it a try.”

  Keene swallowed. There wasn’t a lot left that he could say—or the time to say it in. “Well, you’ve been a big help to us. Good luck.”

  “We’ll take whatever comes. Hope it all works out for you.”

  Keene clicked off the radio. The others were already aboard, Legermount waiting on the driver’s side of the bench seat. Keene and Mitch squeezed in with him, while Cavan went around to the rear. Nobody else from across the bridge was coming back to collect any belongings. Evidently, the things they had found in the larger truck would suffice. Legermount fought the shift into reverse with a frightful grinding of gears, backed around onto the shoulder, then engaged forward and turned onto the highway. A series of blasts from the other truck’s horn sounded behind.

  As they lurched their way among the washed-up debris, broken paving, and fallen rock rubble, Mitch nudged Keene’s arm and pointed ominously in the seaward direction to their left. Through the patches of brown haze twisting in convolutions with clearer air drawn in off the sea, a line of fuzzy whiteness had become visible, extending as far as they could see to the south ahead of them and northward behind, paralleling the coast.

  49

  They had to get back across to Highway 281 running parallel with them farther inland, and then south along it to the San Saucillo site. The road they were on ran a little above the flat expanse of land to their left, stretching away twenty-five miles to the coast. Watching the approaching line of foam as it appeared and disappeared in the murk, Keene put it at two miles away at most. If Charlie was right about progressive tides getting higher, and they took 281 as a likely guess for the next high-water mark, the water’s average rate of advancement from the former coast would be between six and seven miles per hour. That meant it would reach Highway 77, the one they were on, in around twenty minutes. Timing the truck’s odometer with his watch told Keene that they were averaging close to twenty-five miles per hour, and with the state of the road and the obstacles, Legermount wasn’t going to push any more. The turnoff that Keene normally took when driving to San Saucillo was fifteen miles farther south, which at this rate would take them thirty-six minutes. They weren’t going to make it. It was as simple as that.

  He looked up at Mitch after timing another mile and shook his head. “Scratch the plan for taking the exit that I said. It isn’t going to work.”

  “Great. So what do we do?”

  “A few miles ahead, the road goes down into a dip where it crosses a valley with a creek—kind of wide and shallow. You come up the other side onto a ridge that extends west. Our only chance is to try and pick up a farm track or something going that way. We’d be running ahead of the tide and should gain on it. Saucillo’s on high ground too, so if we can make 281 with time to spare we should be okay.”

  Mitch turned to Legermount, relaying the proposition unvoiced. Legermount nodded and said nothing as he wound the wheel around and then back, keeping his eyes on the road.

  They passed a succession of overturned vehicles, carried off the roadway and containing disheveled, water-sodden corpses, that looked as if they had been caught in a previous tide. As the truck began descending into the dip that Keene had mentioned, a bus filled with people, its roof loaded up the way the truck’s had been, appeared going the other way. “We can’t stop,” Mitch said sharply. Legermount didn’t have to be told. He slowed down enough to gesture back with a thumb and wave his hand negatively. After the bus had passed, he took his eyes off the road intermittently to glance at the mirror, finally shaking his head. “They’re not turning.” Keene sighed, but there was nothing to be done. God knew what those people were doing here in the first place.

  Looking to the left as the ground began to slope, Keene could see the approaching front plainly now, still maybe a half mile off but with a tongue surging ahead into the valley that the road descended into. It was not a placid, beachlike rising of the tide accompanied by rolling breakers, but an angry, boiling wall of foam, flailing the land ahead with wreckage, debris, and pieces of uprooted trees as it advanced, while behind, the ocean rose and heaved in impatiently jostling hills of water and wind. Keene felt a coldness at the base of his spine and a sweaty slipperiness in his palms. The tension of the other two in the cab communicated itself palpably. A wheel hit a rock, and the truck bounced sickeningly. Legermount swore under his breath.

  As the road leveled, the first fingers of water were streaming across the lowermost point ahead. They were below the level of the oncoming crest, now a churning cliff of water bearing down on them. A building of some kind on the creek bank came apart as they watched and was swept away in pieces. Parts of the roof reappeared again, bobbing and cartwheeling in a surge of whiteness that engulfed the roadway just yards ahead. Then, momentarily, the surge retreated, but the truck slowed as it hit the resistance of water, throwing the occupants forward.

  “Don’t slack off now! Go for it!” Mitch shouted.

  Legermount straightened his leg as if he were trying to push the gas pedal through the floor. Keene felt them sway as a swell caught them on the side, and for a moment he thought they were afloat without traction. Just at that moment, he could have done without being an engineer with the picture in his mind of the probable state of what was under the hood, and what water would do to it. But it was time they were due a small miracle, and somehow the motor shuddered and roared defiantly through to claim a tiny victory of abused technology. The road began rising, and while the land to the left and ahead of them was still being swallowed up, they had gained some margin, however temporary. Keene leaned out and looked back. The water was already far into the valley, cutting off the opposite side like a strait separating an island. He knew that the road dropped again not much farther on. Very possibly, the water would have covered it already. They had to get off the highway before then.

  Beyond the ditch, the road was now bounded by a wire fence strung between wooden posts with a plantation of young firs on the far side, mostly flattened or uprooted and thrown together in tangles. The fence was down in places and sagging in others under debris that had been thrown against it, but there could be no crossing the silt-laden ditch between it and the road. Keene scanned the margin ahead anxiously. Just as it seemed that they were going to have to start descending again, he spotted a shoulder ahead where the ditch disappeared into a pipe under a gravel ramp crossing to what looked like a gate. “Slow down,” he yelled across the cab. Legermount eased off the gas. Below, to their left, a sheet of ocean extended away where there had been nothing but land an hour before.

  There w
as a gate, but it was intact between concrete posts and appeared locked. Behind it, a fire break led away between the trees, offering just a watery, sandy surface littered with branches and downed trunks. “That’s gotta be a way into a trap if I ever saw one,” Mitch said.

  “That’s something we’ll have to risk,” Keene replied. “It’ll be worse farther on.”

  “How do we get past the gate?” Legermount asked.

  Keene took in the situation rapidly. “Forget the gate. We can take out the section of fence next to it.”

  Legermount steered the truck onto the ramp and brought it nose-up to the section of adjacent fence. Before it had stopped, Keene was out of the door and on his way back, hammering on the side with a fist as he ran. Birden opened the rear door from the inside. “Tool bag!” Keene shouted. “We need cutters . . . maybe claw hammer, pry bar.” Colby threw the bag out, then tumbled out himself, along with Birden and Cavan. Keene tore the bag open, took out a large set of cutters, and ran back to begin attacking the fence, snipping the mesh squares vertically down a line by one of the posts. Mitch found a pair of heavy pliers with cutter edges and went to work at the bottom, while the others held the strands back as they parted. Keene looked back across the highway behind the truck. Fountains of white spray were already exploding upward from below the end of the ridge. “That’ll do it!” he yelled at the others. “Let’s get moving.” While Birden and Cavan held the cut section of fence aside, Legermount eased the truck through the gap.

  “We might need help if anything needs clearing,” Mitch told Birden. “You ride shotgun outside Legermount’s door.”

  Keene stepped up into the cab as it passed. Mitch followed him but remained standing, holding the door open. Birden did the same on the other side. The others threw themselves in the rear while Alicia held the door from the inside. Legermount eased the clutch up. For a moment the rear wheels spun and skidded sideways, and then they gripped. They began snaking a way through the fallen trees and heaps of washed-up brush. But the way turned out to be not so bad as they had feared, the fallen branches giving traction in the sandy soil. The soldiers riding the cab only had to get down twice to haul obstructions aside before they came to a dirt service track, following the remnants of a power line, that led in the right direction and it looked as if it might keep to the ridge. They stopped long enough for Birden to return to the back of the truck. Mitch hauled himself in beside Keene, closed the door, and leaned his head back, letting his helmet rest against the cab wall to release in a long, slow gasp the tension he had been accumulating. Legermount reached forward and slapped the dash panel of the truck affectionately.