Heavy Weather

"What's with the paper suit, Alex?"

"I du

"I know what you mean.~~ A lot more long silence.

"Put the top back," Alex said.

"It's really dusty out there."

"Put it back anyway."

Jane put it back. The car began to fill with fine whirling vu There was a nasty hot breeze down at ground level, a breeze from the far west with a bad smell of ashes and ,minimification.

Alex craned his narrow head back and gazed straight the zenith. "Do you see that stuff up there, Janey?"

"It looks like the sky is breaking into pieces."

There was a low-level yellowish haze everywhere, a 1st haze like the film on an animal's teeth, but far up the dust, it was dry and clearer. Clear enough so that mewhere at the stratosphere, Jane could see a little ciru. More than a little cirrus, when she got used to looking r it. A very strange. spiderwebby cirrus. Long, thin, filaof feathery cloud that stretched far across the sky, in parallel waves either, as might be expected from ~nzs, but crossing at odd angles. A broken grid of high, razor-thin ice cloud, like a dust-filthy mirror cracking into hexagons.

"What is that stuff, Janey?"

"Looks like some kind of Bénard convection," Jane said. It was amazing how much better heavy weather felt when you had a catchphrase for it. If you had a catch-phrase, then you could really talk successfully about the weather, and it almost felt as if you could do something about it. "That's the kind of stratus you get from a very slow, gentle, general uplift. Probably some thermal action way up off the top of the high."

"Why aren't there towers?"

"Too low in relative humidity."

On 283 North, just east of the Antelope Hills, they encountered a rabbit horde.

Although she had eaten far more than her share of gamy, rank, jackrabbit tamales over the past year, Jane had never paid much sustained attention to jackrabbits. Out in West Texas, jackrabbits were common as dirt. Jack-rabbits could run like the wind and jump clean over a parked car, but in her own experience, they rarely bothered to do anything so dramatic. There just weren't many natural predators around to chase and kill jackrabbits, anymore. So the rabbits-they were hares, if you wanted to be exact about it-just ate and reproduced and died in their millions of various nasty parasites and plagues, just like the other unquestioned masters of the earth.

Jackrabbits had gray-brown speckled fur, and absurdly long, veiny, black-tipped ears, and the long, gracile limbs of a desert animal. Glimpsed loping around through the brush, eating most anything-cactus, sagebrush, beer cans, used tires, old barbed wire maybe-jackrabbits were lopsided, picturesque animals, though their bulging yellow rodent eyes rivaled a lizard's for blank stupidity. Until now, Jane had never seen a jackrabbit that looked really upset.

But now, loping across the road like some boiling swarm of gangling, dirt-colored vermin, came dozens of jackrabbits. Then, hundreds. Then thousands of them, endless swarming ragged loping rat packs of them. Charlie slowed to a crawl, utterly confused by a road transmuted into a boiling, leaping tide of fur.

The rabbits were anything but picturesque. They were brown and gaunt with hunger, and trembling and desperate, and ragged and nasty, like junked, threadbare stuffed animals that had been crammed through a knothole. Jane was pretty sure that she could actually smell the jackrabbits. A hot panicky smell rising off them, like burning manure.

The car pulled over and stopped.

"Well, that tears it," said Alex, meditatively. "Even these harebrained things have more common sense than we do. If we had any smarts, we'd turn off the road right now and head wherever they're heading."

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Alex. It's just a migration. It's because of the drought. The poor things are all starving."

"Maybe they are, but that's sure not why they're ru

"What are you getting at?"

"Janey, every wild creature that can get away from this place is ru

"You don't say. It's nice of you to take so much initiative."

"I want to make you a deal," Alex said. "When this thing really rips the lid off, I want you to get to a shelter."

"Me, Alex? Me, and not you?"

"Exactly. You won't lose anything by doing that. I can get you all the data you want. I'll punch the core on the thing for you, I swear to God I will. I can do that. But you need to live through this so you can put it all together later, and understand it. And sell it too. Right? If I don't make it through this experience, it's no big loss to anybody. But Janey, if you don't survive this, it's go

"Alex, this is my career."

"You've got nothing, unless you stay alive. That makes good sense, so think about it."

"Do I look afraid to you? You think I want to run for cover? You think I like this stupid idea of yours?"

"I know you're real brave, Janey. That doesn't impress me. i'm not afraid, either. Do I look afraid to you?" He didn't. "Do I look like I'm kidding about this?" He wasn't. "All I'm telling you is that it's a bad idea for both of us to get killed today. Both the Unger kids killed at once? What about our dad?"

"What about him?"

"Well, he's no prize, our querido papd, but he cares! I mean, he cares some. At least, he wouldn't send his daughter into a death trap, just to gratify his own curiosity!" Alex started talking really quickly. "I think Mulcahey does care about you some, when he can be bothered to notice you instead of his mathematics, and in fact that's why Jerry stuck me in here with you today, so you would slow down some, and not do anything really crazy. Right? Right! That's him all over!"

Jane stared at him, speechless.

"So maybe Jerry cares about you, I grant you that, but he doesn't care about you enough! I don't care what charming bullshit he gave you, or how he convinced you to live his life for him, but if he loved you the way somebody ought to love you, he would never have sent you out here, never! This is a suicide mission! You're a young woman with a lot going for you, and you shouldn't end up as some kind of broken, stomped, bloody doll out in this goddamned wasteland!" He broke into a fit of coughing. "Look at those clouds, Jane!" he croaked. "Clouds are never supposed to took like that! We're go

"Take it easy! You're losing it."

"Don't talk down to me, just look up at the sky!"

Jane, against her own will, looked up. The-dust had thi

But that wasn't the half of it. The crazy thing was that all the little feather clouds were all exactly the same shape. They weren't the same size. Some were huge, some were tiny. They were pointed in different directions. Not all different directions, mind you-exactly six different directions. And yet hellishly, creepily, the clouds were all identical. A little comma drip on one end, a curved spine with a hook at the other, and hundreds of fine little electrified streamers branching off from both sides.