Mysterium (35 page)

Bisonette nodded and ducked into the trench.

The wind came next, as hot as the wind from Tartaros.

Evelyn Woodward was blinded at once. The new sun devoured her eyes. Briefly, the sensation was beyond pain.

Then Lake Merced turned to steam as the shock wave crossed the water, and suddenly the window was gone. And the house. And the town.

Clement Delafleur had tried to staunch his bullet wound with the silk lining of his torn pardessus, but he had lost a great deal of blood despite his best efforts. In the time it took Dexter Graham to drive to the Ojibway reserve, Delafleur managed to drag the insensate meat of his legs as far as the door marked FIRE EXIT. From there, his plans were vague. Perhaps to lift himself to salvation. But time was short.

He was panting and only dimly conscious when the high basement windows admitted a column of superheated steam, and the stone walls of City Hall were crushed and carried away above him.

Calvin Shepperd listened to the countdown on a portable scanner, up at the limits around 1300MHz. When the count approached zero, Shepperd stopped the lead car and flashed his blinkers. The signal went down the long line of the convoy: it meant,
Take cover
. That is, hunker down on the upholstery and turn your engine off. Which he did. His friend Ted Bartlett huddled next to him, and in the back a sharpshooter named Paige. Shepperd’s wife Sarah was seven cars back, riding with a woman named Ruth and five-year-old Damion, Sarah’s nephew. He hoped they were all right, but he hadn’t been able to check. No time to stop. It was slow driving on this old log-truck road, even with chains.

The flash was distant, but it penetrated the cathedral pines like slow lightning.

The sound came later, a basso thunder that barreled out of the troubled sky. And then a hot, whipping wind. The car was buffeted. “Christ Jesus!” Paige exclaimed. Then a series of hard but muffled thuds against the roof, the windshield, the hood.
Some kind of bomb debris,
Shepperd thought wildly, but it was only snow, huge mounds of snow shaken out of the crossed boughs of the trees. It slid against the window glass, already wet in this unnatural heat.

“Drive on,” Ted Bartlett said as soon as the roar abated. “This can’t be healthy.”

Shepperd started up his engine and heard others revving behind him.
Hang on, Sarah,
he thought, and put the car in gear.

Shepperd’s convoy reached the abandoned logging camp, which was three tin-roofed wooden longhouses and a potbelly stove, at dusk.

He calculated that this expedition had saved maybe one hundred families out of the thousands in Two Rivers. The rest were smoke and ashes . . . and that was a crime so grievous it beggared comprehension.

But the people with him had been saved, no small accomplishment, and that included a lot of kids. He watched them filing out of the cars as they were parked in a defile between the tallest trees. The kids were cold, stunned, but alive. It was the kids he had some hope for. They knew how to adjust.

Not that the future looked especially rosy. One of his scouts had come back from the south with a road map, and sales of hoarded bottle liquor and bathtub hooch to the soldiers had built up the gasoline fund, in local currency, to a respectable size. But they were marked strangers. Even their cars were strange. No amount of paint or pretense would allow a Honda Civic or a Jeep 4×4 to pass for one of those cumbersome boats the natives drove.

Still . . . the few roads west were said to be lightly traveled (if passable!) this time of year, and if they made it over the unthinkable obstacle of the Rocky Mountains, even if it took until June . . . the northwest was supposed to be wide open, hardly a policeman or Proctor to be seen outside the biggest towns.

He held that thought. It was comforting.

The clouds were gone by sunset. Even the towering mushroom cloud had dispersed, though there was still a column of sooty black smoke, which he supposed was the incinerated remnant of Two Rivers, Michigan, drawn up like a migrant soul into the blue ink of the sky.

Sarah joined him under the shadow of a longhouse roof and Shepperd put his arm around her. Neither of them spoke. There were no words for this. A military aircraft passed overhead—amazing how much those things resembled P-51’s, Shepperd thought—but it didn’t circle, and he doubted they had been seen. It was a safe bet, he thought, that they would all live to see morning.

AFTER

Mr. Graham says it’s important to keep this diary. He wants me to keep up with my English, although that’s not what they speak here, and with history, although they have a different history, here, too.

Today, although still winter by our calendar, is warm. Almost as warm as the day we came here. I don’t remember all of that, which is just as well, my mother says.

Mainly I remember how green everything seemed after we came through the light. The lab looked very strange, a few ruined buildings in a clearing as round as a crater, all surrounded by green, the bushes with long pointed leaves and the trees that looked like green feathers. A few snowflakes were still in the air around us! Of course, they melted quickly.

The blue light was gone.

For a few days after that we stayed in a partly collapsed dormitory building at the edge of the forest, but Mr. Graham said we couldn’t stay too long because there might still be radiation. We had the food and supplies in the car but no road to drive on, only trails.

Then the new people came and took us to their town.

The town is really as big as a city, Mr. Graham says, if you count the underground part.

The people have been good to us. Their skin is mostly dark, sometimes even a shade of dark green. The green of shadows in a forest. Most of them are not as tall as Mr. Graham. About the size of Miss Stone. Their language is hard to learn, but I already know several words. When I learn a new word I write it the way it sounds in my “language” notebook.

They treat us well and are curious about us. We’re not prisoners. But everything is very strange.

Above ground, the buildings are as green as the trees. The ceilings are arched, like church ceilings.

I saw an airplane yesterday. Its wings were painted purple and white, like butterfly wings.

Mr. Graham and Miss Stone talk a lot about all the things that have happened to us. Last night we went up to what we call the courtyard, an open space with stone benches not far from the market square. You hear music there some nights and it’s never crowded.

The stars were out. The stars are the same, Miss Stone says, even if everything else is different.

She thinks it was Howard Poole who created this world. She says he is a “Demiurge” now.

Mr. Graham said he didn’t think so. “I think this world’s gods are a little more distant. It’s not a haunted place. But I think Howard may have steered us here, at least.”

“A godlike act itself,” Miss Stone said. Her voice was quiet, and she was looking at the stars.

I don’t know if I believe in God. My mother says if you believe in Jesus it doesn’t matter if you go to church or not. She never did.

Miss Stone says something lives in everything.

I don’t know what the new people believe. But I am curious to find out, and as soon as I learn more of their language I hope to ask them.