Heavy Weather

When it had finished with the town of Quanah, Texas, the twister headed, undiminished, toward the Red River, and the people of the great state of Oklahoma.

WHEN JANE GOT back to the camp, it was five in the morning. She'd managed to sleep a little in the driver's seat during the long haul back, but she was far too full of adrenaline for anything like real rest.

She drove the car under one of the camp's garage tents and prodded Rick awake. Rick got up groggily without a word and staggered off for his tepee.

Jane walked stiff-legged and trembling into the command yurt. There was no sign of Jerry, and all his machines were shut down.

She went to their favorite tepee, the one they usually used for assignations.

Jerry was on the bubblepak floor in a bag, asleep.

Jane threw her sweaty clothes off and fought her way into the bag next to him.

"You've got the shakes," he told her.

"Yeah," Jane said, trembling harder to hear him say it. "I always get the shakes whenever they kill people."

"Nothing we can do about that," he said gently. "We just bear witness.

Jane stared up at the tepee's dark conical recess. She could see stars through the smoke flap. She was stiff all over and trembling with stress and she smelled really bad.

"My life sure has changed since I met you..." she said, "you crazy son of a bitch."

Jerry laughed and put his hand on her right breast. "Yeah?"

"That's right. I've seen people get killed... . I've raced down highways at two hundred klicks an hour. I've jumped out of airplanes. I climbed up a radio tower and I jumped off it, and I beat up the woman who taught me how to do it."

"You didn't beat her up very hard," Jerry said. He slid his bearded face into the hollow of her neck.

Jane started trembling much harder. "Just once," she told him, "I'd like to fuck you in a bed. With a mattress, and clean sheets. When we've both showered. And me wearing something slinky and maybe some perfume. Don't you like that, Jerry? Perfume?"

"What I like is remembering where the condoms are. Where are they?"

"They ought to be tucked over there under that ditty bag, unless somebody used 'em all."

Jerry climbed out of the bag, naked, found a condom after prolonged search, and crawled back into the bag again. His skin had gone cold in the night air. Jane shivered violently.

Jerry turned her onto her stomach and set his solid hands to work on her shoulders. "You've got it bad tonight," he said.

She nodded. "That's good. Keep doing that. Maybe I'll live."

Silently, deftly, Jerry worked his way off her shoulders, down her spine and rib cage, going after knotted nerves that were like snarled fishline. It felt so good to have the strong human touch of someone she trusted. Someone who wouldn't stop or hesitate, who knew what he was doing and who had never hurt her. He was pulling the jitters out of her, and it was like he was chasing little devils Out of her skin. Jane stretched out on her stomach and went languorous and heavy-lidded.

She turned over and stretched her arms out in welcome. He kissed her briefly, put the condom on, climbed over her, braced himself on his elbows. He slid into her all at once on an oiled film of latex.

She put her feet in the backs of his knees. "Short and sweet, okay," she whispered. "I'm really tired, baby. I'm going right to sleep after this, I promise.

"Good," he said, hitting his favorite rhythm.

"Do me, but don't do the daylights out of me.

He said nothing.

He wasn't violent, and he wasn't ever careless, but he was a big man, a head and a half taller than she was, and he was really strong. He had ropes of muscle in his back where people shouldn't even have muscle. He wasn't acrobatic or elaborately erotic, but he never got winded easily. And when he got up to speed, he tended to hit the groove and to stay there.

She gritted her teeth, rolled her head back in the soft darkness, and had an orgasm. She came out of the far side of it gasping and limp all over, with all the tension gone from her jaw and temples and her arms hanging slack.

He stopped, and hung there over her, and let her breathe awhile. There was a big lumpy rock under her neck, beneath the bag and the bubblepak, and she squirmed on her back to miss it. She'd been very tired before, but now she was fully wrapped in the hot life-giving power of her own libido, and all the weariness and horror of the day was like something that had happened to another woman somewhere far away. When she spoke again it was rough and low.

"I changed my mind about that daylights business."

He laughed. "You always say that."

"Unless you let me get on top, I'm go

"Go ahead and scream," he told her, moving hard. "You never scream all that much."

CHAPTER 5

Chasing tornadoes until two in the morning had been pretty bad, but not half so bad as Alex had feared. They'd spent most of those hours humming down darkened roads, with Alex curled in his nest of bubblepak, dozing.

They'd stopped three times to fling machinery into the sky, a fever of virtual activity in the midst of distance and darkness and thunder. They were ardently chasing storms by remote control. And yet there was little sense of real danger.

The storms didn't frighten Alex. He found them impressive and interesting. His only true fear was that the Troupers would discover the real and humiliating extent of his weakness. He could think straight, he could talk, he could eat, and he could breathe beautifully. But he was still bone feeble, with an edge of endurance that was razor thin. He was lucky that Martha and Buzzard hadn't asked him to do anything truly strenuous. It wasn't because they were sparing him, of course. They simply didn't trust him to do anything important.

The day after the chase, Alex was up with the dawn, his lungs still clear, his eyes bright, with no sign of sore throat or fever. He felt better than he'd felt in at least a year. Meanwhile, the road-burned Troupers lay around in their smelly bags and their stick-and-paper cones, in the grip of prolonged siestas. The after-chase day was a busy day for the support crews, but they were busy with information, a fourteeii-hour-day of a

Mound noon, Carol Cooper made Alex a big paper sombrero, gave him a bag of granola and a small canteen, and sent him out to watch the Troupe's goats. The Troupers had this teenage kid, Jeff, who usually did the goat watching and the firewood fetching and other little gopher chores around camp, but with Alex's arrival, Jeff had been bumped up the pecking order.

Alex didn't mind watching the goats. It was clearly the stupidest and lowest-status job in Troupe life, but at least there was very little to it. All the goats had smart collars, and you could set the herd's parameters on a laptop to give them minor shocks and buzzes when they wandered out of range. They were gene-spliced pharmaceutical goats, "pharm animals," and despite their yellow, devillike, reptilian eyeballs, the goats were remarkably docile and stupid. Most of the time the goats seemed to grasp the nature of the collar business, and they stayed where the machine wanted them. They industriously nibbled anything remotely edible and then lay in the shade belching gas from their gene-spliced guts.

Alex spent most of the day up in a mesquite tree at the edge of a brush-filled gully, wearing his paper breathing mask, grepping around with the laptop, and swatting mosquitoes and deer ffies. He wasn't too happy about the mosquitoes, but his bite-proof paper hat, mask, and jumpsuit kept them at bay, except on his bare neck and ankles. The deerflies were big, buzzing, aggressive, head-circling pests, and it wasn't too surprising that there were a lot of them around-the brush was crawling with deer. The damned deer were as common as mice.