by neetha Napew
Sunstrokers had been both the low spot and the high spot for her career.
"Lori Hilton is the vixen queen of Bel Air," the copy on the box screamed in rainbow hologram lettering.
He gave his head a sad shake and dropped the box down alongside the body. Then he went to work with the others, to ensure a decent burial.
Then they said goodbye to their companion in so many adventures and misadventures.
"Kyle Lynch. 2015-2040. Navigator of USSV Aquila and a good friend."
Heather and Sly had worked on the wooden marker that was driven in at the head of the long pile of dirt. The temperature had dropped, and morning frost speckled the raw earth like sugar dusted on top of a cake. Heather had written the words out carefully on an invoice from the camera store, and then helped Sly with the painstaking lettering.
"Can me say Kyle with Dad?" asked the boy. "Now they two see me."
"No need," Carrie told him. "We all know that Kyle and Steve are still good friends, where they are now. Together." Her eyes were bright with unshed tears.
"Together for ever and ever and ever and ever."
"Amen to that, Sly."
Heather touched her father gently on the arm. "You feeling all right?"
"No. Sorry, kitten…darling. I find it hard to cope with such endless death."
"It'll get better."
"I wonder. I look ahead, and all that I can see is a bleak, dark future."
The bitingly cold northerly ruffled his hair as he stood by the makeshift grave, his face the face of a man who had experienced too much in too short a time.
IT HAD BEEN DIFFICULT to decide whether to continue with both their vehicles or cut the losses and crowd together into the one.
The paucity of gas had been a factor in Jim Hilton's final decision to dump the oldest four-by-four and press on north toward Eureka in the better truck. He drained what little gas remained and transferred it into the tank.
A small bonus was finding a five-gallon can of gas hidden away behind some sacks in the derelict barn behind the camera store. They hadn't found any food to top off their supply, unless you counted some strips of horse meat dangling from a hook and so rotten that it seemed to shine with a ghastly pale green phosphorescence, shimmering with the movement of the countless maggots.
Then they'd rolled out, mostly silent in the confines of the car. Around eleven they stopped so that Sly Romero could take a leak.
There was a sleety drizzle coming in from the direction of the Pacific, and the other three remained in the comparative warmth of the cab, watching the teenager as he picked his way slowly up the hillside, heading for a clump of stunted, pink-tinted elms that would give him some protection.
"He's so sweet," said Carrie.
"And brave." Jim tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. The engine ticked away gently. "Got a heart like a lion."
"He said that he wanted to marry me," said Heather. "I told him that I thought he was too old for me."
"How did he take that?" Carrie asked.
"He smiled and said in that case he guessed he'd have to marry you."
"Hey," Jim said, and wound his window down so that he could see more clearly. "What's wrong with him?"
Sly had stopped and looked as if he were trying to hop from foot to foot, waving his hands around his head. He seemed to be shouting.
"Can't be hornets or anything like that," Heather said. "Not in the middle of December."
"Switch the engine off, Jim." Carrie had her head on one side, as though she was listening to something. "Track seems to be sort of vibrating."
As soon as he turned the key in the ignition, they were aware of what Sly was shouting.
"Me feet's humming. Help Sly, his feet's humming."
"Christ, it's a quake," exclaimed Jim Hilton, opening the cab door. "Everyone outside, quick."
Everything was rattling. The loose wing-mirror was visibly shaking, and the ground beneath their feet trembled. On the hillside there were great pillars of orange-brown dust rising as some of the larger stones and boulders began to work loose. Sly was still agitatedly hopping around, about one hundred and fifty feet above them.
"Come down!" called Jim. "You'll be safe if you just get here with us."
"I'll help him," offered Heather, darting away toward the floundering boy.
There was a roaring noise that somehow managed to be both far away and all around them. Like an invisible subway train thundering by, a subway train that was above and below them at the same frozen moment of time.
"What should we do?" Carrie was staring around like a tourist being shown a singularly unusual attraction.
The body of the four-by-four was quivering as the vehicle swayed backward and forward on its springs, as if it were being driven over a rock-ripple dirt road.
"Try and stay on our feet, I guess." He raised his voice to call out to his daughter. "Careful, Heather. Watch out for those big rocks up behind you."
A couple of the dead elms toppled away, their roots rotted by Earthblood, and began to slide ponderously down the slope after Sly and Heather.
The rumbling was louder, closing in toward the pain threshold, and Jim was finding it tougher to stay upright, fighting for his balance against the liquid earth. The air was filled with dust, and somewhere he was aware that there had been a monstrous cracking sound, as if the edge had sheared off a tectonic plate, shifting a continent. It was virtually impossible to see anything, and he squeezed his eyes shut.
"Jesus, Jim!" screamed Carrie, stumbling into him, hanging on as they both fell sideways.
Somehow it was worse to be lying down, with the whole length of their bodies in contact with the quaking dirt. But now the movement was so violent that there was no alternative.
There was only the cold awareness of the reality. The reality that all four were going to die on this lonely blacktop, away in the rural wilds of northern California, during what was finally going to be the anticipated "big one," as the planet shook itself like a hound dog ridding itself of fleas.
A savage spasm tore Jim apart from Carrie, and he found himself lying half in a deep irrigation ditch, his feet in cold, brackish water. He caught a glimpse of the four-by-four, realizing to his horror that it was being moved by the quake toward him. The tires protested as it slithered sideways like some cunning vid special effects.
He wished that he could have been cuddling his beloved daughter as death came snarling in to claim both their lives.
Blind and deafened, barely able even to draw a choking breath, Jim Hilton knew that this was a fruitless wish. Finally he had only that depressing and lonely thought to take with him into the darkness.
Chapter Nine
"That was a serious mother of a shaker."
"Yeah. I reckon the epicenter was probably a couple of hundred miles north of here."
"I hate to imagine what kind of damage it must've done up there where we're going."
Nanci Simms joined Jeff, Mac and Jeanne McGill, standing on the crest of a rise in the highway, staring away toward the dusty haze that obscured the far north from them.
"I never felt anything so strong," she said. "At least without power running, there shouldn't be any serious fires. That was always the main threat to life and to property."
"You think that Jim and the others, whoever that might be, are somewhere up in the middle of that?" Henderson McGill shaded his eyes, aware of the slight tremor of an aftershock rocking him up onto the balls of his feet.
"Sure hope not, Dad," said Paul, chewing vigorously on a strip of chili beef.
"There's always a very real danger that shifting of the big faults can also trigger some major domino effects."
"Like what, Nanci?" asked Pamela McGill.
"Like pressing the start button on one or two of the sleeping volcanoes up that way."
Mac sniffed and coughed. "Damn dust catches your throat," he said. "Come on. Won't learn anything by standing here staring like a bunch of boobies. Better get going
and try to make the best time we can."
"And hope we don't find the highway's vanished," added Jeff Thomas.
The highway was fine for another eleven miles.
Then it vanished.
"FUCKING VANISHED." Jeff Thomas stood on the brink of the fresh chasm and petulantly kicked a jagged piece of stone over the brink. It clattered down the steep slope, landing with a splash in the narrow stream.
"That's very positive, Jefferson," said Nanci at his elbow. "Now, if you were to kick in just another three million of those pebbles, we could probably pick our way across and continue with our odyssey."
He turned to her, and for a jagged splinter of a second she saw the ruby glow of murderous hatred in his eyes. It disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. But she knew that it always burned there and that one day she would have to do something about it. Ignoring it, she flashed him an ironic smile and joined the others.
They decided that it was time to abandon the Phantasm.
Pamela had noticed that the engine had been running hot since the previous afternoon, and it looked as if the bearings were going. Also, the vacuum brakes needed pumping before hitting a serious downgrade, and even then seemed sluggish. Now, confronted by the totally blocked road, it seemed that the end had come for it.
It meant a division of everything between the four-by-four and the jeep towing the fuel tank.
"Hardly worth keeping that going," said Paul McGill. "By the time we divide up the remaining gas, it'll about fill the two tanks with a spit and dribble left over."
Nanci nodded. "Agreed. Mac?"
"Sure. Whatever you think best."
"Guns can be divided, as well as the food and what clothes we can carry." The burly teenager shook his head. "Shame. Going to have to dump an awful lot of stuff that Jeanne and Angel packed for us back home."
"Can't we trade it, Daddy?" asked Jocelyn. "Mommy said when we were leaving home that if we ran into hard times we could trade some things."
"Great idea," said Henderson McGill. "Well done, sweety. Brilliant." He swung the girl off her feet and gave her a hug and a kiss.
"Ugh." She pulled a face. "You're awful bristly."
He laughed, looking around at the others. "Just ask me who's got the brightest little girl in the world… what's left of the world, and I'll tell you."
"No."
The flat word came from Nanci Simms. Mac turned, puzzled. "How's that?"
"We don't try and trade what's left. We burn out the Phantasm with everything inside it as soon as we're ready to move on. Take what we can first."
"Why the fuck not?" Jeanne stepped forward, jaw thrust out, hands on hips.
"Come on, lady. Think about it for a moment. We're not dealing with a garage sale in downtown Tulsa. This is now. We go along in that big RV to the nearest community and offer them the stuff we don't want. What do they do?"
Jeff answered her question. "They look at us and think about what kind of gear we aren't selling. And there's half a dozen of us and maybe fifty or a hundred of them."
Pamela McGill shrugged. "We got guns."
"Come on, child." Nanci whistled through her teeth. "You've lived through Earthblood and traveled clear across the land from sea to shining sea. And you don't seem to me to have learned squat from it."
Mac put Jocelyn down, face changed. "Surely we could do some sort of trade without running too big a risk, Nanci? Shame to waste it all."
She ticked off the points on her gloved fingers. "One, it isn't a question of the degree of risk. We're talking dead or not dead, Mac. Two, we'll strip everything we can carry from the RV and jam it in the jeep or our truck. Won't be much useful waste. Three, time's passing, so let's get on with it."
No one said anything after that, and they set about transferring from the RV what they needed to keep, then set fire to the vehicle.
"Seems there's always fires these days," said Jeanne as she drove away from the blazing inferno that had been their home for so many weeks. Mac was at her side, with the two little girls in the rear of the jeep.
Pamela and Paul were with Jeff and Nanci in the four-by-four, leading them back along the same highway to search for a route that would take them around the worst effects of the quake and allow them to pick up another road north.
They had a hard time of it.
It seemed that every single route they found that looked as if it might lead in the general direction they wanted was eventually blocked. The roads ended in a massive fall of thousands of tons of rock and dirt or in a bridge ripped from its foundations or a diverted river that foamed across the original blacktop. Or, in one case, a two-mile stretch of straight highway had been rippled like cooling toffee into hundreds of ridges steep enough to make it impassable.
BY THE DAWNING of December 18, they were passing slowly through the hamlet of Hyampom, on the edge of the Trinity National Forest, the narrow, winding trail following the swollen Hayfork River.
From there they hoped to work their way northwest onto Highway 299. That would, if all went well, eventually bring them down into their destination of Eureka, a few miles south from Arcata.
"Present rate of progress means we'll be damn good to get to the rendezvous by Christmas Day, never mind later today." Mac spit into the muddy water of the river.
"Least there don't seem many folks around here," said Jeanne. "Real nowhereville."
"Plenty of goats," sniggered Jeff.
Late on the previous afternoon he'd been at the wheel of the four-by-four, leading the jeep by a hundred yards or so, when he'd suddenly spotted a herd of black-and-white goats wandering along the unfenced road.
"Geronimo." He'd put his foot down so hard that Nanci had banged her head on the side window, where she'd been snatching a few minutes of sleep.
The animals had seemed dazed, as though they'd already forgotten that vehicles could be dangerous. One or two had run off into the surrounding brush, dainty hooves pecking at the loose, wet gravel.
But most had stood their ground, including a ferocious long-bearded billygoat, who'd actually dipped his head as though he was going to charge the powerful truck.
After the jarring impact, Jeff had thrown the four-by-four into an ostentatious skid, jumping out to see how successful he'd been.
They'd all worked into the evening on skinning and dismembering the half-dozen youngest, tenderest goats, throwing the offal out into the darkness for the predatory coyotes that they'd heard every night for weeks.
"I done good, Nanci." Jeff had whispered into her ear as they all awaited rest and sleep that night. Every one of them was sated and stuffed from a stomach-bursting surfeit of the delicious pale meat.
"You did excellently, Jefferson."
"I earn a reward?"
She'd smiled and let her hand slip inside his shirt, inching across his chest until it touched his nipple. She had gripped it between finger and thumb and squeezed, gently, then firmly, then hard, kissing him on the open mouth to stifle his low moan of pain. Then nipping his lower lip between her sharp teeth until blood trickled down his chin.
She had withdrawn a little bit from him. "That's a down payment on the reward, Jeff," she'd said, unable to slow her own excited breathing. "Guess what the rest'll be?"
"Can't, Nanci."
"Yes, you can. It's going to be on the tip of your tongue, Jeff, if you get what I mean."
He got what she meant.
PROGRESS WAS agonizingly slow even with the off-road capacity of both their vehicles.
By the morning of the nineteenth they still hadn't even reached Highway 299. Paul McGill was the best at navigation, and his most optimistic guess still only put them around fifteen miles off the junction.
"Means we can't hope to reach Eureka until the evening of the twentieth." He paused to take in their disappointed expressions. Then he added, so that no false hopes would be nurtured, "At the earliest."
Chapter Ten
Jim Hilton kicked the front wheel of the silent, motionless truc
k.
"Can't be more than a dozen miles, and we run out of gas. Hellfire and bloody perdition."
It was late morning on December 18, the day after the huge earthquake that had come so desperately close to killing all of them.
Jim had recovered consciousness to find the earth still thrumming beneath him, the dust shifting across the spread fingers of his right hand. The four-by-four had hung over the side of the irrigation ditch where he lay, one wheel spinning silently only a few inches above his head.
There was a high-pitched sound drilling through his brain, as though a cheerful maniac who lived inside one of the abandoned back rooms of the west wing of his skull was busy sawing apart sheets of plate glass. He had winced and then reluctantly opened his eyes again.
There was also shouting. A woman's voice, he thought. "Lori?" No.
"Shut up, Sly, and help me find Dad."
It was Heather.
She'd finally managed to reassure the terrified boy that the world hadn't ended in the cataclysm of noise and whirling dust and had quickly discovered Jim lying under the threat of the four-by-four. Carrie had also been thrown off the highway, into the same ditch, farther along. She had strained her wrist and was bruised and battered from shoulder to ankle.
It had taken all four of them, working carefully together, to tease the truck back to safety. Heather sat in the driving seat with the engine running, ready to put it into gear as soon as Jim gave her the word. He and Carrie and Sly gathered at the rear end of the four-by-four, heaving and shoving. The boy proved invaluable in the difficult exercise, constantly eager to give of his considerable best, bracing his shoulder against the dusty metal.
Now, like Pilgrim within sight of his fabled destination, they'd fallen short by a handful of miles.
"Think anyone else could be there before us?" asked Carrie as they sat by the now-useless vehicle, sharing a large, dented can of apricots.
Food was also in the shortest supply.
Jim licked his lips, catching the sweet syrup, wondering vaguely whether one of his crowns was working loose. There'd been a couple of ominous stabs of pain in the past couple of days, and he guessed that good dentists were going to be few and far between.