Heavy Weather

Everything was airborne, like a little city churned into a dense aerial mulch. Laundry. Stoplights. Bicycles. Dog-houses. Sheets of tin, bending and tumbling and rippling just like big shining sheets of paper. Hills of branches, mountains of leaves. Satellite dishes, multibranched hollow radio and telephone aerials. The town's water tower had fallen over and ruptured like a big metal egg. Dirt. Dirt everywhere. Sudden mean gusts of dirt like a sandblast. Dirt that pierced the skin like ink from a tattoo needle. Dirt and hail, and water that was full of dirt, and water drops that hit her hard as hail.

Alex had twin ru

A quite large brick building gracefully gave up the ghost as they passed it, and it cascaded gently into the street like a sackful of dominoes. Inside it, every object on its walls and floors took flight like liberated pigeons, and its guts spewed great crackling gouts from severed power lines.

Outside the city, they picked up speed again. Jane's head began to hurt a lot, and suddenly she regained full consciousness, and she came to herself. She went at once for the comset, pressed the mike to her lips between two closed hands, and began shouting into the mike. Not that she could hear herself. Not that anyone in the Troupe could hear her, necessarily. But just to bear witness. Just to bear witness to everything, to bear witness as long as she could.

They entered some kind of forest. That seemed like a really bad idea. Charlie-began jumping over downed trees in the road, and she could tell from the way his wheels scrunched against the tarmac that this was not at all good for the car. The car was badly damaged. How badly, she couldn't tell.

Trees were whipping back and forth at the roadside like damned souls frantically flagging down a lift. Another great sheet of cloud-to-cloud lightning arc-lit the zenith, and, incidentally, also lit an F-i that was striding knee-deep through the forest alongside them, not fifty meters away. The spike was just churning along there, spi

On the far side of the forest an insane wind gust pounced on them and almost blew them away. Charlie actually leaped into the air like a hooked fish and sort of skipped, leaning and kicking violently against the wind, an odd maneuver dredged up from some subroutine she'd never seen before. Jane said as much, into the mike, for something to say, and then she looked at her lit Trouper cuff.

It was June i6, at two-thirteen in the afternoon.

Then another stronger gust hit them broadside, and Charlie was knocked completely off its wheels, and roiled right over and jumped up. And rolled over and jumped up, and roiled and jumped in yet a third somersauIt~ tumbling in the grip of the wind like an aikido master. Until Charlie fetched up, very hard, with his undercarriage smashing into the unyielding trunk of a tree. And then all maneuvers stopped.

Jane did not pass out. The air bags had deployed again, but without the same slamming gusto they had shown before. She realized from the sharp stink of ozone and the steady buzzing that the superconductive had cracked.

Alex gripped her shoulder-from above, since they were now hanging sideways in-their seats, propped against the tree trunk-and he shouted something at her, which of course she could not hear. He shook her and shouted again and shook his narrow, rain-drenched head, and then he climbed out of the top of the vehicle and vanished into the dark.

Jane assumed that Alex had at least some vague idea what he was doing, but she felt very weak and tired, and she had no urge to leave the vehicle. Jane had often imagined herself dying in a wrecked pursuit car, and it was a relatively peaceful and natural idea for her. It certainly seemed more comfortable and decent than stumbling into the woods in a violent rainstorm to hunt for some fresh way to be killed.

She kept on talking. She wiped fresh blood from her upper lip and she kept talking. There were no answers, but she kept talking. Charlie's superconductive blew its last fizzing volt and all the onboard instrumentation crashed. The radio stayed on, though. It bad its own battery. She kept talking.

After half an hour Alex showed up again. The wind had begun to slack off in spasms, long glassy moments of weird calm amid the roar. Also, it was not quite so dark.

There was a rim of drowned greenish light in the west-the F-6 was moving east. The F-6 was moving past them.

And apparently civilization was not so desperately far away as it seemed from the tilted seat of a smashed car, because Alex, amazingly, was carrying a hooded terry-cloth baby towel, a six-pack of beer in biodegradable cans, and half a loaf of bread.

She tried talking to Alex then, shouting at him over ~ atches in the constant rumble of thunder, but he shook is head and patted one ear. He had gone quite deaf. He'd probably been deaf from the very first instant the F-6 hit. He might, she thought, be deaf forever now. Worse yet, he looked completely insane. His face was drenched with rain and yet still black with dirt-not just dirt on the skin, but dirt tattooed under his skin, his face stippled with high-speed flying filth.

He offered her a beer. She couldn't think of anything she wanted less at that moment than a beer-especially one from some cheap Oklahoma microbrewery called "Okie Double-X"-but she was very dry-throated from shock, so she drank some. Then she~wiped her bloodied face with the towel, which hurt a lot more than she had expected.

Alex skulked off again. Hunting something, out in the black pitching mess of trees. What on earth was he looking for? An umbrella? Galoshes? A credit card, and working fax machine? What?

Not two minutes later Leo Mulcahey showed up, and rescued her.

LEO mivm IN an aging Texas Ranger riot-control vehicle, a big eight-wheeled urban chugger with a peeling Lone Star over black ceramic armor. What the hell a Texas Ranger vehicle was doing this far out of Texas jurisdiction was a serious puzzle to Jane, but the thing was a bitch to drive and Leo was in a tiny captain's chair looking through some virtuality blocks and wearing a headset. Jane sat slumped in the back in a cramped little webbing chair, shaking very hard. Leo was very occupied by the challenge of driving.

They drove maybe ten kilometers, a lurching, awful trip, pausing half a dozen times to work around or smash their way over downed trees. Then Leo drove the vehicle down a wet concrete slope into an underground garage. A steel garage door slid shut behind them like an airlock, and the torrent of noisy wind ceased quite suddenly, and fluorescents flicked on.

They were in a storm shelter.

A privately owned shelter, but it was a big place. They took stairs down from the garage. A nice place, a regular underground mansion by the look of it. Thick carpeting underfoot, and oil paintings on the walls, and designer lighting and a big superconductive someplace to keep all those lights burning. Outside, hell was raging, but they bad just sealed themselves in a big money-lined Oklahoma bank vault.

Leo stepped into a small tiled room with a compost toilet, and opened a pair of overhead cabinet doors, and offered her a thick canary-yellow toweL As if in afterthought, he pulled a pair of foam plugs from his ears, then ran one hand through his disordered hair. "Well, Juanita," he told her, smiling at her. "Janey. Well met at last, Jane!"