Footfall

14. THE DAM

Jeri Wilson woke with a start. The sun was in the west, sinking toward one of the snowcapped peaks that surrounded the twisting mountain road. Melissa sat quietly in the backseat.

“It’s after noon,” Jeri said accusingly. “Why did you let me sleep so long?”

“You looked like you needed it.”

Jeri yawned. “I guess I did, punkin.” She glanced at the seat beside her, then looked down at the floor. “Where’s the map?”

“I have it,” Melissa said. “I was trying to figure out where we are, but I can’t.” She handed over the Auto Club map.

Jeri traced a yellow line along the map. “I’m not exactly sure myself,” she admitted. “I thought about what you said and decided we didn’t want to go through Albuquerque. Hairy Red marked a route up into Colorado. He’d have loved it, lots of twists and turns. Good thing you slept through it; you’d have got carsick.”

“So how far is it now?”

“About three hundred miles in a straight line, but I don’t know how far on the road.”

“Is — does Daddy really know we’re coming?”

“Well — sort of.”

“Does he want us to come?”

“I think so,” Jeri said. He didn’t say no! “Pour me some coffee from the Thermos. We’ve got to cross the Continental Divide this afternoon. Best we get started.”

Jeri coasted down the twisting Rocky Mountain roads in low gear, with the motor turned off, scared as stiff as the unpowered power steering. The highway was nearly deserted. Twice she pulled off for huge trucks, then used the motor to get back on the road. Once a Corvette shot into her rearview mirror, fishtailed as the driver saw her, and was still wobbling as it went past. Melissa, stretched out on the backseat, didn’t wake up.

The highway began to straighten out as it reached the bottom. The Great Plains stretched infinitely ahead. Jeri took the car out of gear, started the motor to get her brakes and steering back, and reached the Great Plains doing sixty in neutral. She waited until she’d lost some speed before going into gear.

It was mid-afternoon of a cloudless day. Behind her the Rockies, receding, seemed to grow even larger as the scale came into focus: a wall across the west of the world. She held her speed at fifty-five.

She jumped when she realized Melissa was peering over her shoulder. Melissa said, “When the gas needle says Empty, how much gas is left?”

“I don’t know. Could be anywhere from none to … five?”

They’d be out of gas soon. All she could think of was to get as far as she could. Maybe there would be gasoline at the next station, wherever that might be …

Jeri’s rearview mirror flared like a spotlight in her eyes. She slapped the mirror aside and screamed, “Don’t look, Melissa! Get down on the floor!” Hoping Melissa would obey; wishing she could do the same. Braking carefully, edging toward the right lane. Melissa said, “What—”

WHAM! Ears popped, the car lurched, the rear window crazed and went opaque. She’d expected it to shatter, to lace her head and neck with broken glass. The news had spoken of bombs falling on hydroelectric dams, railroads, major highways. George and Vicki Tate-Evans had told her (speaking in relay, impossible to interrupt) how to recognize a thermonuclear bomb flash, and how to survive.

She pulled off the road and waited. When you see the whole world turn bright, don’t look. Drop to the ground. Grip your legs, put your head between your knees. Now kiss your ass good-bye. Behind her, a Peterbilt ten-wheeler that had been charging up on her tail wobbled and tipped over and kept coming, on its side, leaving a trail of fire as it slid past and finally came to a stop ahead of her.

“Atomic bomb,” Melissa said, awed.

“Stay down!”

“I am.”

A man crawled out of the truck shaking his head. That really wasn’t much of a fire: just a streak leading to the truck, a few flames under it. Maybe the truck was out of gas too.

She waited for the softer WHAM!, the second shock wave as air rushed back to fill the vacuum beneath the rising fireball. When the station wagon stopped shuddering she pulled around the burning truck and kept going. A flaming toadstool lit her way. She kept glancing back, watching it die.

She made another six miles before the motor died. She hoped they were far enough from the radioactive cloud. She hoped it wouldn’t rain.

The old one-lung Harley had begun sputtering ten miles back. Now it died. Gynge let it coast and thought of his alternatives.

He could probably make it run another couple of hundred miles, but the damned thing had been nearly dead last year. It wasn’t getting younger.

He could walk.

There had to be something better. Up ahead was a rest area. Gynge let the Harley’s last momentum take it off the edge of the highway and into the picnic area.

The highways were deserted. At first the cops and national guards were stopping everything. Gynge had detoured three times around them. Damn good thing he knew the country. After he got into the mountains he left the main roads. There weren’t any cops at all.

A semi roared past. There was a little traffic. Food trucks. Come to that, in normal times one out of every three trucks carried food. People had to eat. But there wasn’t a hell of a lot except trucks.

The rest area was empty. Almost empty. Not quite. He heard sounds at the far end, and went to investigate.

What Gynge saw was a tired old man on a picnic table with his pants off and a girdle stretched out beside him. Bikers called it a “kidney belt,” but it did the same thing any girdle did: it held in a sagging gut. The old man’s gut was a good-sized beer belly. He was trying to hug one knee against his chest, but his gut blocked the way.

The man sat up, blowing. His frame was large; Gynge saw that he must have been formidable in his time. He didn’t look formidable now. His red beard had gone mostly gray, and the hair of his head was following. He sat up, consulted the book beside him. Then he stretched his right leg out in front of him, bent forward as far as he could manage, threw a hand towel around the arch of his foot, and pulled on both ends.

If the man had brought friends, they had had plenty of time to appear. Gynge watched a little longer. The red-and-gray-haired man switched legs, groaning.

One full day on a motorcycle had done him in.

Harry lay on the picnic table and groaned. Two whiplash accidents within two weeks would leave their mark for the rest of his life. His spine felt like a crystal snake dropped on flagstones! He knew well enough that he was overweight. That was what the kidney belt was for, but it hadn’t been enough, and his guts were about to fall out all over the picnic table.

He’d bought a book of stretching exercises. Some of those were supposed to help a bad back. It was worth a try … but it felt like he was breaking his back rather than mending it.

He had switched legs before the stranger stepped into view. A biker, probably. He strolled up to Harry’s bike, in no apparent hurry; ran his eyes over it; then stepped up to Harry. Looming. He was all muscles and hair and dirt, no prettier than Harry felt, though younger and in better condition.

He asked, “Why a towel?”

Harry flopped on his back, panting. He said, “A towel is the most massively useful thing a traveler can have. And that was a stretching exercise, because my back is giving me hell. See—”