Heavy Weather

"He's got a point," Leo said. "It's a good idea for us to split up as quickly as possible."

"You want to ferry us out in the perso

"No," Leo said. "It's wiser to stick to Plan A. You leave on foot, and I'll plastique the works here. The cars, the tank, the bikes, the shelter, everything."

"The bodies," Rosina pointed out.

"Yeah, okay, I'll put the deceased directly inside the tank before I detonate it."

"I'll help you, Leo," the second chess player said. "I owe you that much, after all this."

"Good. Time's pretty short, people, let's get moving."

Leo and his five remaining friends went into the hall. The woman and the Asian man were lying very dead on the sloping floor, the carpet sopping with their blood. The walls were pockmarked with shrapnel from the eight discarded cuffs that had detonated there. It stank of plastique. Rosina, and the older chess player, and Red the radioman picked their ways daintily past the corpses, with their eyes averted.

Jane tarried at the back of the hall. She wasn't too upset by the corpses. She had seen worse corpses. She was far more appalled by the living.

"Wet work," said the second chess player, sadly.

Leo hesitated. "I think we'd better use latex and medical paper for this job. That's a lot of body fluid."

"We don't have time for precautions. Leo. Besides, they were two of us; they're clean!"

"I don't know. I wouldn't put it past Ruby," Leo said, meditatively. "Ruby was quite the personal devotee of retrovtrus.

Jane began to walk up the hall. She brushed past the two of them. Her boots squelched moistly on the carpet. She was trembling.

"Jane," Leo called out.

She broke into a run.

"Jane!"

She broke out through the garage door. There was no wind. The sun was shining. The world smelled like fresh-plowed earth. The sky was blue. She ran for her life.

ALEX WAS SITTING up in a tree eating a loaf of bread. It wasn't a fresh loaf, because the smashed home where he'd raided the bread had been abandoned for at least two days. It had been the home of a man and his wife and the man's mother and the couple's two bucktoothed little kids. With a lot of religious stuff inside it; gold-framed devotional prints and evangelical literature and a thoroughly smashed farm truck with bumper stickers reading ETERNITY-WHEN? and AFtER DEATH-WHAT THEN?

It looked like it had been kind of a nice little farmhouse once; it had its own cistern, anyway, and a chicken coop, but it was all shattered now, and being Christians, the occupants would probably act real thankful about it. Alex had been astounded to discover that the inhabitants had a big stack of paper comic books, Christian evangelical comics, the real thing, in English no less, with hand drawings and black ink and real metal staples. A shame they were all torn up and rain-soaked and uncollectible.

Off in the distance, to the north, came an enormous explosion and an uprushing column of filthy smoke. The wind was so calm now, and the damp sweet sky so beautifully blue, that the burning column rose straight up and stood there in the sky and preened itself. It sure looked and sounded like a massive structure hit, but maybe he was being uncharitable. Could have been a detonating natural-tank or maybe a broken propane line. These things did Not every mishap in the world was somebody's fault.

Alex chewed more bread and had some carrot juice. The Christian family had been very big on organic whole juices. Except for the dad, presumably, who kept his truly awful Okie Double-X beer hidden under the sink.

Alex's tree was a large and fragrant cedar that had been uprooted and knocked over at an angle. Many of the branches had been twisted off by a passing F-2, showing red heartwood that smelled lovely. He had climbed into the downed tree and was lying on the sun-warmed trunk about four meters up in the air, his back against the underside of one of the thicker limbs. The gray-barked trunk under his paper-clad buttocks was as solid as a bench. His wasn't too far from the site of the crash. He could see dead wreck of Charlie from where he sat.

Juanita was gone, and to judge by the tracks in the sh mud, she had left with a rescuer in civilian shoes who sonic kind of big military truck. That was good news Alex, because Juanita's eyes had been crossed and glassy last hours, and he had her figured for a mild con;ion. He felt sure that Juanita, or at least some helpful uper, would show up again in pretty short order, some~, soon. She'd be coming to find him. And even if she 't want to find him in particular, that car had a lot of iand megabytage in it.

Alex felt rather restful and at peace with himself. He partially deafened, and his face hurt, and his lungs and his eyes hurt, and he could taste blood at the of his tongue. Scrambling through the roadside forest a mindless panic, basically-had left him striped with many nasty scratches and a couple of hefty, aching bruises, plus a thick coating of cedar gum and dirt.

But he had seen the F-6. It had been pretty much what he'd been led to expect. It was nice not to be disappointed about something in life. He felt he could put up with dying with a better grace now.

He chewed more bread. It wasn't good bread, but it was better than camp food. There was a gray squirrel ru

Vaguely, under the persistent whine of aural aftershock, Alex heard someone calling out. Calling his name. He sat up, put his foot in the smart rope, lowered himself down from the trunk to the ground, and swiftly coiled the rope around his shoulder.

He worked his way through the labyrinth of fallen trees back to the site of the wreck.

But whea he glJ~~j the rescuer, searching vaguely around the wreckage, Alex fled. He reached the fallen cedar again, cast his rope back up, and yanked himself quickly back into the tree.

"Over here," he called, standing on the trunk and waving. He couldn't call out too loudly. Shouting really hurt him inside.

Leo Mulcahey walked over, methodically working his way through the maze of fallen limbs. He wore a sturdy felt Stetson and a safari jacket.

He stopped in a small patch of knee-high undergrowth and looked up at Alex. "Enjoying yourself?" he said.

Alex touched his ears. "What's that, Leo? Come closer. I'm kind of deaf. Sorry."

Leo stepped closer to the leaning tree trunk and looked up again. "I might have known I'd find you much at your ease!"

"You don't have to shout now, that's fine. Where's Juanita?"

"I was going to ask you that, actually. Not that you care."

Alex narrowed his eyes. "I know that you took her away, so don't bullshit me. You wouldn't be stupid enough to hurt her, would you, Leo? Not unless you've really got it in for Jerry, as well as me."

"I have no quarrel with Jerry. Not any longer. That's all in the past now. In fact, I'm going to help Jerry. It's the last act I can commit that will really help my brother." He pulled a ceramic pistol out of his jacket pocket.

"Oh, that's really good," Alex scoffed. "You dumb spook bastard! I've had two tubercular hemorrhages in the past week, and you're coming out here to shoot me and leave me under this tree? You hopeless gringo moron, I just lived through the F-6, I don't need some pissant assassin like you! I can die perfectly well all by myself. Get lost before I lose my temper."

Leo, astonished, laughed. "That's very fu

"Oh," said Alex, daintily, "I prefer being murdered in the most remote, impersonal, and clinical ma