Tony nodded and retreated into the shadow of the crew cab and the large dog followed him back, tail flat between her legs.
Outside, it was harshly cold again. The two days in Marty’s truck stop had made Nathan soft, unaccustomed all over again to the cold. He’d even been sitting in the truck without his padded North Face jacket, and he instantly regretted it.
He walked towards the Toyota.
It was at an angle of forty-five degrees to the road, stuck partially into a hole that looked to be seven feet deep and fifteen feet wide. The Land Cruiser engine had stalled, the leftover heat from the pistons ticking through the metal. Nathan listened intently for any sounds that could possibly be those of an approaching Ski-Doo, but all around them was the dull, dampened sound of the Big Winter. Nothing more.
As Nathan reached the lip of the hole, it became clear how precarious Freeson and Lucy’s predicament was.
They hadn’t fallen into a hole in the road.
It’s a hole in a bridge.
The bottom half of the road had fallen away entirely. Two hundred feet below, they could see a frozen creek surrounded by scrubby brush. Leaning forward, Nathan could see past the hull of the Toyota all the way down.
Nathan looked back the way they’d come. Since he’d been asleep, he hadn’t noticed that the trees had run out and they’d begun crossing a wide, deeply cut ravine. The bridge was a good two hundred yards from end to end, and he guessed that if they could see the surface of the road, it would have cracked to blazes by the harshness of the Big Winter. This was another thing to add to the itinerary of risks to make them all wary. The U.S. road system had been a piece of work before the Big Winter, especially on the roads away from the highways. Now, concrete, tarmac, and ironwork was permafrosted to hell. Months and months of growing ice could tear concrete like this apart. There were no road gangs out fixing things, and so infrastructure was suffering big-time. Maybe within a year or so, most of the bridges would be out or too dangerous to cross.
Of course, the other even more chilling explanation was that the bridge had been sabotaged deliberately to catch travelers, like flies caught in a web of iron and concrete.
Jeez.
It suddenly occurred to Nathan that they needed to get the wrecker back from this hole—now. What if the entire bridge was unstable?
“Cyndi, get back in the Dodge; turn it around and take it off the bridge. Now. The whole lot could go any second.”
Cyndi didn’t need to be told twice. She backed off and jumped back into the cab, turning the wrecker to complete the circle the jackknife had started and running the Dodge and Airstream combo back the fifty or so yards up the road, to get it off the bridge.
The Land Cruiser’s back tires were still on the surface of the road, but the front tires were balanced on a rusted drainage pipe and a square of concrete. That levitating chunk of sand, gravel, and cement was still partially attached to the far side of the hole by its internal grid of iron reinforcements. And below that, the huge empty space of air went all the way down to the frozen creek.
Then another problem arose—one that Nathan should have predicted. From inside the Land Cruiser came a raised, shrieking voice and a thumping on glass. The passenger side door opened next, and Lucy all but launched herself into space, only stopping at the last moment as she saw the drop beneath her.
“Get back in the car, Lucy,” Nathan called down to her.
“Don’t just stand there, you fool! Help us!”
“We’re going to try, but you really need to stop rocking the truck. Seriously. I don’t know how long whatever’s holding it up will last, and you moving around and panicking isn’t going to help. Okay?”
There was silence, and Nathan waited to hear Free’s voice reasoning with her, but it didn’t come. He pushed down worry for his friend, and asked instead, “Okay?”
“Yes. Yes. Okay. I’ll sit still. Should I shut the door?”
“Gently, and wind the window down so I can talk to you.”
“I’ve hurt my legs on the dash,” she added belatedly.
Nathan ran his hand through his hair. “Let’s concentrate on one thing at a time, yes? Close the door.”
Lucy took a few seconds to build up the courage to reach back out for the door handle and pull the door closed with a gentle snick of the lock. In that time, Cyndi had walked back from the Dodge.
“The signs were down in the snow and wind. That’s why I didn’t realize we were approaching the bridge. Dammit. Road blind. Only thinking of the miles covered and not the present danger. Stupid. Sorry, Nate. I drove on without thinking and, wham, Free was in the hole. We’ll have to go back to being ultra-careful, I guess. Check bridges out first next time.”
If there is a next time, Nathan thought.
The window on the passenger door of the Land Cruiser rolled down.
“Okay, Lucy, how’s Free?”
“How should I know?”
“Just take a look at him.” Nathan tried to keep the frustration out of his voice. Maybe Syd was on the money about Lucy. Just a user, only concerned for herself. But to save Freeson, he was going to have to save Lucy at the same time. Nathan wasn’t going to be able to bring the Dodge any nearer to pull it out with the winch, not safely, and there was nowhere near enough cable on the wrecker to reach the Land Cruiser from where the bridge started seventy yards back.
“He’s hit his head, I think. On the windshield. He’s unconscious.”
“Is he breathing?”
“I’ll check.”
What a great person to have in an emergency.
“Yes, he is. Like he’s asleep.”
“Okay, Lucy, we’re going to get you both out. I just need you to stay calm and relaxed.”
“I’m two hundred feet above a ravine. That’s not a position that’s easy to relax in.”
“I know. But try. You said you’d hit your legs—are they okay?”
“I hit my knees on the dash, bruised but not broken. I’ll live.”
“That’s great.”
“If I don’t fall down this hole, that is.”
“Okay, Lucy, just hang tight.”
“Like I have a choice.”
Nathan motioned Cyndi and Syd away from the hole, looking back up the road to where the Dodge and the Airstream were.
“We need cable, and we need it fast. How far are we from Marty’s?”
“Three hours,” Cyndi answered quietly.
Nathan stared at her for a moment. “You let me sleep that long?”
“You looked like you needed it. The road was fine. … Well, fine until now.”
Syd pointed upward. “What about those?”
Nathan and Cyndi looked.
Syd was pointing at the utility poles running the length of the road.
The utility poles were made of some kind of treated pine and were topped by cross braces carrying a number of different lines. Electrical power, coaxial for cable TV, and some telephone lines for those people who hadn’t made the switch to digital cable. Nathan felt a twinge of regret for what he was about to do, knowing he might be taking away Marty and Betty’s TV and internet. Their power came from a generator, but their links to the outside world were all transmitted through distribution networks of lines and poles just like these.
Still, there wasn’t any choice. Nathan kicked the Dodge engine into life, pushed the shift into first gear, and rumbled forward.
The pole he’d linked to the winch on the back of the Dodge with three lumber chains, normally carried for moving fallen trees as needed, started to bend from its moorings in the ground, and then it began to lean forward at a crazy angle.
Nathan jumped down from the truck. Then he, Cyndi, and Syd ran to the stricken pole, pushing at it so that it would shift and fall away from the Dodge.
The pole needed a hefty amount of force to be toppled, but once it started to fall, nothing was going to stop it. It resisted momentarily as the cables Nathan had been trying to free held it against gr
avity, but then it crashed into the snow, throwing up a spume of white crystals.
The pole had fallen without sparks or a sizzle of released power, but Nathan was taking no chances. Using his voltmeter, he made sure all the cables were dead and then drove the Dodge on to the next pole and repeated the procedure.
While Cyndi turned the Dodge around and backed it as near to the bridge as they dared, Nathan cut the cables free, tied two thirty-yard lengths together to form enough cable to reach the Toyota, and did the same with the six other lengths of cable. The reef knots would hold, and used as one, there should be enough breaking strain to pull the Land Cruiser up out of the hole.
If it didn’t fall into the ravine first.
Nathan was so cold now, he was already having trouble thinking straight. “Let me,” said Cyndi as she watched his blue fingers fumbling with the knots. “Go and get your coat. Now.”
Nathan did as he was told and, when he got back from the Dodge, he saw that the cables were ready to have logging chains attached to both ends and then be fed towards the Land Cruiser.
Cyndi attached the line to the winch, and Syd and Nathan took the lines to the hole on the bridge. The Land Cruiser’s window was still open and Lucy was looking backward at them, craning her neck to see them. “Where have you been? We’re going to fall! The damn truck has already shifted twice!”
Nathan could immediately see what she meant. The warmth of the coat was helping his mind unfog, and even as he looked into the hole, the wet front tire of the Land Cruiser that had once been resting on the drainage pipe slipped to one side. The weight of the truck had pressed down on the pipe and started to bend it across the middle. There was an ancient joint in the pipes, just below the tire, and as Nathan watched, he could see it was separating—millimeter by millimeter.
“Hang on down there—we’re going to pull you out now!”
The chain was threaded around the Land Cruiser’s tow bar, five lines of cable ready to take the strain when Nathan raised his hands to signal to Cyndi.
Even at this distance, the whine of the winch was clear to hear. The cables stretched taut and began to apply backward force to the Toyota, which shifted just as the drainage pipe broke away and fell into the abyss. There was no going back now; if the cables failed, the Toyota would fall.
The base of the Land Cruiser scraped agonizingly over the ruined blacktop, but Nathan knew the exhaust and transmission should be tough enough to take it. The Land Cruiser was a resilient, cross-country 4x4 vehicle, with a pedigree for near indestructibility. However, he feared the edge of the hole might not be as strong as the bottom of the Land Cruiser, and that might be the undoing of them.
The friable surface of the road was chewed away as the Toyota ground its metal guts into the edge of the hole. The crack of breaking concrete suddenly sounded louder than the grinding of the underfloor of the truck.
For a heart-stopping second, Nathan thought the road beneath all of them would drop away and send them to their doom, and Syd’s hurried steps backward suggested she feared the same.
But the Dodge and its winch were doing what they did best. In less than a minute more, the Toyota had enough of its back end over the lip of the hole for Nathan and Syd to leap forward, grab the bumper, and help seesaw the Land Cruiser back onto the horizontal plane of the bridge.
“Yes!” Syd shouted as the Toyota scraped back from the edge of oblivion.
The front tires bit into the edge of the hole, caught, and rolled the vehicle back up onto the road.
Lucy opened the door and Nathan slammed it shut. “Wait. We gotta get you off the bridge!”
Lucy nodded and Nathan now moved to the front end of the Land Cruiser as Cyndi continued winching, and began pushing the car off the bridge.
As they reached the end of the bridge and the start of the road, Nathan was breathing hard, cold and trembling with adrenaline. He didn’t care. He wanted to get to Free’s side of the Land Cruiser.
But before he could open the truck door, three things happened at once.
Lucy threw herself from the car almost as quickly as she’d done so from the limo, desperate for the safety of terra firma, one of the strained utility cables closest to Syd finally frayed and snapped, lashing her against the cheek and sending her spinning and bloody into the snow, and five people in ski gear walked down from the treeline near the Dodge—their faces covered in balaclavas, AR-15s carried in their gloved hands.
Blood spewed through Syd’s fingers and into the snow. The gash to her cheek was deep and ragged—an inch higher and the cable would have taken her eye. An inch lower, she’d have had her very own razorblade of a smile.
Lucy took one look at the advancing skiers and raised her hands. “Don’t shoot me! I’m rich!”
Which, in any other circumstances, would have sounded funny, but Nathan wasn’t in the mood for laughing. Instead, he was moving around to the driver’s side door of the Cruiser.
The lead skier, a man with a gruff, commanding voice, shouted in their direction, “Stay where you are!”
“Damn you!” Nathan yelled back, spitting the words out like hot nails. “My buddy is unconscious in the car. He may have swallowed his tongue, so I want to check on him. Shoot me if you like, but I’m not stopping.”
Nathan’s crunching footsteps were the only sound being made. Even Syd, bleeding through her fingers as she was, wasn’t making a sound.
Nathan tore the Toyota door open and reached inside to check on Freeson. The mechanic had the mother of all bruises darkening his forehead, and he’d bitten through his bottom lip so that blood smeared his chin from the wound. But he was breathing, his color was good, and as a hand raised and waved, he managed to whisper, “Shut the door, man. It’s freezing.”
Nathan reached in, reclined Freeson’s seat, and checked that his airway was fully clear, and that there was no bruising to his throat that could swell up and take them by surprise.
When Nathan turned around again, Syd had gotten up and was pressing a scarf to her cheek; it had been handed to her by one of the skiers. The lead guy, as he took off his ski mask, was revealed to be an African American in a camouflage army surplus jacket, and carrying a few more pounds than he needed to. He rested his AR-15 against the Toyota and held out his hand for Nathan to shake.
“Steven Reynolds.”
Nathan eyed the hand, and then took it. “Nathan Tolley.”
Reynolds’ grip was firm and meaty. Nathan wouldn’t have wanted to meet him in a dark alley, even though the other man probably had twenty years on him. “Sorry I yelled,” Reynolds told him. “Couldn’t be too sure you weren’t going to the truck for a gun. Can’t be too careful these days.”
“Ten-four on that,” Nathan replied. The skiers were all taking off their balaclavas now. And they were of similar linage to Reynolds, he saw, if not all related. There were three women and two men among them, all in winter camouflage of various hues. But their faces and haircuts didn’t suggest a military bearing. The women appeared to be of similar age to Steven, and the men were more Nathan’s age or younger, though it was hard to tell with how wrapped up in their winter clothing they were. They all carried packs and had thumped through the snow on ski-boots.
If they hadn’t been in the middle of the winter apocalypse, it could have a been a scene from Aspen, with skiers making their way back to their chalets before changing into more suitable clothes for a spot of après-ski.
“Can I put my hands down?” Lucy asked plaintively.
“Yes,” said Reynolds and Nathan together.
As it turned out, the Reynolds were a family, but made up of sisters, uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces rather than your typical nuclear family. One of the women, Beryl, said she was a nurse, and with a medikit from her pack, she cleaned and steri-stripped Syd’s cheek professionally. Beryl’s sister, Mary, who’d said she’d been a surgical nurse in an emergency department, gave Freeson the once-over, declaring all he needed was “a rest, some observation, and some pain
killers.”
“I’m fine, everyone; no need to check on me,” Lucy said with maximum sarcasm to a bunch of ears that weren’t at all fussed with her condition.
Mary took pity on Lucy and gave her shins the once-over, bending over and feeling them like she was palpating a horse’s leg. “Just bruised, honey. Try not to fall down anymore holes and you’ll be fine.”
Cyndi had joined them at the Toyota, coming armed, but Nathan had signaled to her before she’d walked twenty yards that the Reynolds were okay and that she could retreat down from DEFCON 5.
The Reynolds helped them push the Toyota back to the Airstream and transfer Freeson to a bed inside. While Cyndi made coffee, Lucy looked unsure of where to sit, what to say, or how to make amends for her lack of concern for Freeson, finally perching on the side of his bed and making soothing noises towards his sleeping face.
“We’re skiing cross-country,” Steven told them as they sat with coffee in the Airstream, the windows steaming and the air warm enough for everyone to have gotten out of their coats. The young men, Randal and David, were cousins, and Steven’s nephews. They were both, they said, PhD students who’d been studying the polar shift and axis tilt which had caused the increased cataclysmic change in volcanic, earthquake, and tectonic activity on America’s west coast.
“So, what caused it? Do we know yet?” Cyndi asked. “We all know the government just fed us a load of crap about cores, magma, deep drilling in the Arctic, and even North Korean nuclear tests setting off chain reactions. The stars have moved. It’s like the world fell over on its back. What do you know?”
David looked to Randal, and Randal sighed before speaking. “It’s still not clear—it could be all those things, or none of them. Best guess is the crust of the Earth has shifted.”
Nathan and Cyndi looked at each other in shock.
Tony said, “Wow!” which made Beryl and Mary, who had crammed themselves into the back of the Airstream, smile and coo with delight at the boy’s brilliantly lit up face.
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 13