Lucifer's Hammer

The others nodded and began thrusting shells into their guns. They didn’t look back at Eric Larsen. When the guns were loaded, the three raised them to their shoulders and aimed at a dozen Wardens. The white-robed preachers screamed and pulled at their chains. Then the shotguns went off in volley.

Eric put his hand to his pistol, then drew it away quickly. Hell! He walked toward the men, his knees unsteady. They were reloading.

“Don’t do that,” Eric said.

The men jumped at the voice. They turned to see police blue. They frowned, their eyes wide, their expressions uncertain. Eric stared back. He had already noticed the “SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE” bumper sticker on the station wagon.

The oldest of the three men snorted. “It’s over! That was the end of civilization you just saw, don’t you understand?”

And suddenly Eric did understand. There weren’t going to be any ambulances to take the injured to hospitals. Startled, Eric looked back down Alameda, toward the place where St. Joseph’s was. He saw nothing but buckled streets and collapsed houses. Had St. Joseph’s been visible from here? Eric couldn’t remember.

The spokesman for the men was still shouting. “Those motherfuckers kept us from getting up into the hills! What use are they?” He looked down at his empty shotgun. It lay open in his hand. His other hand held two shells, and kept straying toward the breech of the gun, not quite inserting them.

“I don’t know,” Eric said. “Are you going to be the first man to start shooting policemen?” He let his eyes go to the bumper sticker. The burly man’s followed, then looked down at the street. “Are you?” Eric repeated.

“No.”

“Good. Now give me the shotgun.”

“I need it—”

“So do I,” Eric said. “Your friends have others.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Where would I take you? I need your shotgun. That’s all.”

The man nodded. “Okay.”

“The shells, too,” Eric said. His voice took on a note of urgency.

“All right.”

“Now get out of here,” Eric said. He held the shotgun without loading it. The Wardens, the few that survived, watched in silent horror. “Thank you,” Eric said. He turned away, not caring where the burly men went.

I’ve just watched Murder One and done nothing about it, he told himself. He walked briskly away from the traffic jam. It was as if his mind were no longer co

The sky to the southwest was strange. Clouds flew overhead, formed and vanished as in a speeded-up film. It was all familiar to Eric Larsen, as familiar as the way the air felt in his sinuses. Anyone from Topeka would know. Tornado weather. When the air feels like this, and the sky looks that way, you head for the nearest basement, taking a radio and a canteen of water.

It’s a good mile to the Burbank City Jail, Eric thought. He studied the sky judiciously. I can make it. He walked briskly toward the jail. Eric Larsen was still a civilized man.

Eileen watched the incident in horror. She hadn’t heard the conversation, but what happened was plain enough. The police… weren’t police any longer.

Two of the Wardens were messily dead, five more writhed in the agony of mortal wounds, and the rest were writhing to free themselves from the chains. One of the Wardens had a pair of bolt cutters. Eileen recognized them. Joe Corrigan had given them to the police only minutes, or lifetimes, before.

The scene outside was incomprehensible. People lay in heaps, or dragged themselves from ruined shops. One man had climbed on top of a wrecked truck. He sat on the cab, feet dangling over the windshield, and drank deeply from a bottle of whiskey. Every now and again he looked up and laughed.

Anyone wearing a white robe was in danger. For the Wardens in chains it was a nightmare. Hundreds of enraged drivers, more hundreds of passengers, many fleeing the city, not really expecting Hammerfall but heading out just in case — and the Wardens had stopped them. Most of the people in the street were still lying flat on their backs, or wandering aimlessly, but there were enough men and women converging on the robed and chained Wardens, and each carrying something heavy — tire irons, tire chains, jack handles, a baseball bat…

Eileen stood in the doorway. She glanced back at Corrigan’s body. Two vertical lines deepened between her eyes as she watched Patrolman Larsen’s retreating back. A riot was starting out there, and the only cop was walking away, fast, after calmly watching murder. It wasn’t a world Eileen understood.

World. What had happened to the world? Gingerly she picked her way back through the broken glass toward her office. Thank God for medium heels, she thought. Glass crunched underfoot. She moved as quickly as she could, without a glance at the smashed goods and broken shelves and sagging walls.

A length of pipe, torn loose from the ceiling, had half crushed her desk, smashing the glass top. The pipe was heavier than anything she had ever lifted before, and she grunted with the effort, but it moved. She pulled her purse from underneath, then scrambled about looking for the portable radio. It seemed undamaged.

Nothing but static. She thought she heard a few words in the static. Someone shouting “Hammerfall!” over and over again, or was that in her head? No matter. There was no useful information.

Or, rather, there was, in that fact itself. This wasn’t a local disaster. The San Andreas had let go. Okay, but there were plenty of radio stations in southern California, and not all of them were near the fault. One or more should still be broadcasting, and Eileen knew of nothing an earthquake could do that would cause so much static.

Static. She went on through the back of the store. She found another body there, one of the warehousemen. She knew from the coveralls; there wouldn’t have been any point in looking for a face. Or for an upper torso, either, not under that… The door to the alley was jammed. She pulled and it moved, slightly, and she pulled again, bracing her cut knee against the wall and straining as hard as she could. It opened just far enough to let her squeeze through, and she went out and looked up at the sky.

Black clouds, roiling, and rain begi

The alley was blocked with rubble. Her car couldn’t possibly get through. She stopped and used the mirror from her purse, found a Kleenex and wiped away the dirty tear streaks and blood; not that it mattered a damn how she looked, but it made her feel better.

More rain fell. Darkness and lightning overhead, and salt rain. What did that mean? A big ocean strike? Tim had tried to tell her, but she hadn’t listened; it had so little to do with real life. She thought about Tim as she hurried down the alley, back toward Alameda because it was the only way she could go, and when she got to the street she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Tim was there, in the middle of a riot.

The earthquake rolled Tim Hamner under his car. He stayed there, waiting for the next shock, until he smelled gasoline. Then he came out, fast, crawling across the buckled pavement, staying on hands and knees.

He heard screams of terror and agony, and new sounds: concrete smashing on street pavement, concrete punching through metal car bodies, an endless tinkle of falling glass. And still he couldn’t believe. He got up, trembling.

People in white robes, blue uniforms, street clothes, lay sprawled on shattered street and sidewalks. Some moved. Some did not. Some were obviously dead, twisted or crushed. Cars had been overturned or smashed together or crushed by falling masonry. No building stood intact. The smell of gasoline was strong in his nostrils. He reached for a cigarette, jerked his hand violently away, then thoughtfully put his lighter in a back pocket, where he’d have to think before finding it.