Heavy Weather

CHAPTER 10

The day dawned bilious yellow and veined with blue, like a bad cheese. The jet stream had shifted, and at last, the high was on the move.

Jane and Alex took Charlie west down Highway 40 in pursuit of ground zero. Jane didn't know why Jerry had assigned her Alex as a chase companion, on this critical day of all days. Maybe to teach her some subtle lesson about the inevitable repercussions from an arrogant good deed.

She had anticipated a mean-spirited battle of wills between herself and her brother, but Alex was unusually subdued. He looked genuinely ill-or more likely, doped. It. would have been only too much like Alex, to sneak into Oklahoma City and score some hellish concoction.

But he did as he was told. He took orders, he tried running the cameras, he kept up with the chase reports from camp, he downloaded maps and took notes. She couldn't call him enthusiastic, but he was watchful and careful, and he wasn't making many mistakes. Actually, Alex wasn't any worse as a traveling companion than any other-Trouper. Somehow, despite everything, he'd actually done it. Her brother had become just another Trouper.

He had his rope with him. He always carried the rope now, looped around his bony shoulder like a broken puppet string. But he'd put away his play-cowboy finery and was wearing a simple paper refugee suit, fresh off the roll. And he'd sponge-washed, shaved, and he'd even combed his hair.

For once, Alex wasn't wearing the breathing mask. She almost wished that he was. With his pale muzzle and striped cheeks, and the waxy skin and too neat hair, he looked like some half-finished project off an undertaker's slab.

Long kilometers of western Oklahoma went by m silence, broken by reports from the Aerodrome Truck and the Radar Bus.

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

"I dunno. The other clothes just didn't fit anymore."

"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 running. You seen any birds around here lately? Red-tailed hawks? Turkey vultures? Scissortails? Me neither."

"What are you getting at?"

"Janey, every wild creature that can get away from this place is running as fast as it can run. Get it? That's not any accident." He coughed a bit, cleared his throat. "And I've been doing some research," he announced. "There are certain towns in this area that have a lot of available shelter. Really good, solid storm shelter. Like, say, Woodward. That town got wiped flat by an F-4 about ten years ago, so they got themselves a bunch of diamond drills and they dug out underground in a mega way. Big-city shelters, whole malls down there, lots of private shelters too. And it's only twenty minutes from here."

"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 gonna put a pretty serious long-term crimp in your career."

"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 gonna get ridden down and stomped flat out here, just like two of those rabbits!"

"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 thinned, and the sun was higher, and the cirrus looked utterly bizarre. There were hundreds of little growing patches of it now. Shapes just like frost on a windowpane, like patchy mutant snowflakes. The clouds looked like a down feather might look if you shot ten thousand volts through it.

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.

It looked like a tiling pattern. Like ceramic tiling. The Oklahoma sky was tiled like a bathroom floor.

"Bénard convection does that sometimes," Jane babbled. "The cells have six different axes of rotation and that self-similarity has gotta mean that the cell updraft vectors are all, well..." Words failed her. Words failed her quite suddenly, and really badly. A kind of software crash for language. Words-yeah, even scientific words-there were times and contingencies when reality ripped loose from verbal symbolism and just went its own goddamned way. And this was one of those times.

"What's that big seam growing up the middle?" Alex said.

"I dunno. Get the cameras on it."

"Good idea." Alex put his face into the camera goggles and tilted them upward on the weapons mounts. "Wow."

"That's gotta be the jet stream," Jane said. "The major, polar jet stream that's been hanging north all this time. It's finally moved."

"Janey, I don't know much about the jet stream, but I know the jet stream doesn't bend at that kind of angle."

"Well, it's probably not really bending; it just looks that way from this angle of observation."

"The hell it is. The hell it does. Janey, I can see it through these cameras a hell of a lot better than you can, and whatever that thing is, it's coming down. It's coming down right at us, it's gonna hit the earth."

"Great! Keep recording!"

His voice cracked. "I think we'd better leave this place."

"Hell no! That's it! Of course! Of course, that's what Jerry's been looking for-a permanent source of power for the F-6, and the jet stream is permanent power! It wraps the whole planet, and it's seven kilometers thick and it's fifty degrees below zero and it does two hundred klicks an hour. God, the jet stream, if the jet stream spikes down out of the stratosphere, then it's all gonna add up!" She grabbed for her headset.

"Janey, that thing's going to kill us. We're gonna die here."

"Shut up and keep recording." A remarkably stupid robot truck raced suddenly past them, mangling and crippling dozens of bloodied flopping jackrabbits. The rest of the rabbits exploded off in all directions, like fleas on a hot plate.

"Jane in Charlie here!" she shouted. "We got a massive outbreak! These are the coords . .

She began reading them off, her voice rising.

An avalanche of freezing air fell out of the sky. The stratosphere was ten kilometers up. Even at two hundred klicks an hour, it took the jet stream a good four minutes to fall to earth.

First, the sky cracked open, on a long, furred, spiky seam. Then, maybe ninety seconds down, the vast, thick surge of air hit a warm layer in the upper atmosphere. There was a massive, soundless explosion. Freezing gouts of ice-white cloud blew out in all directions. The clouds touched the sun, and in instants, everything began to darken.

The stream plowed through the spewing clouds like a bullet through an apple, and hit a second thermopause. There was another fantastically powerful explosion. There was still no trace of wind at ground level, but the sound from that first overhead explosion reached the earth then, a cataclysmic roll of thunder that did not vary and did not stop. A cottonwood tree at the side of the road trembled violently, for no visible reason, so violently that it shed all its leaves.

From the second explosion, actual vortices blasted out in every corner of the compass, literal swirls of splitting, freezing, curling air, whirlpool swirls of air as big as towns.

She had one last glimpse up the central core of the falling jet stream. It was clear and cold and vast and lethal. She could see stars through it.

Then the jet stream hit the living earth, maybe three kilometers away. The earth erupted in torment and dozens of vast clotted cobras of filth leaped skyward instantly. Jane jammed her sound-cahcellation earphones over her head then so she did not go deaf, but the sound of the F-6 was something far beyond the Train. It was a sonic weapon pressing through her body and crushing her inside. It was more than sound, it was raw shock, terrible, unendurable, deadly.

She fought with the car then, trying to get Charlie to turn and run. Nothing happened; the machine sat as if stunned. Lightning like no lightning she had ever seen caine out of the erupting columns of dirt. It was dirt lightning, rock lightning. It was thick and crooked and horizontal, and it looked like flying, spinning swastikas. A great flying complex of crooked lightning flew right over their heads, and it broke apart in front of her eyes into gigantic, glowing, sparking chunks.

The car moved. She turned and ran. The day was gone. They were in black hell, instant Gehenna. A hurricane of dirt had spread all over the sky. They were buried alive under a giant spreading plateau of screaming, crackling filth. The air was half-dirt. The maddened earth had forgotten the difference between air and dirt. Dirt and air were going to be the same thing from now on. The black slurry of wind was hanging over them, it was all around them.

And out at the far edge of it-at the very far, spreading edge, where there was still a little squashed and sickly light at the horizon: there were spikes dropping. Spikes, all around them. Dozens of spikes. A corona of spikes, a halo of spikes. F-is, F-2s, F-3s. Kinky spikes. Fat spikes. Spikes as squat as footballs. Spikes that whipped like venom-spitting mambas. Spikes that the F-6 had flung out all around itself in a single gesture, spikes it had conjured up and flung to earth in a moment, a chorus line of devils at the skirts of its Dance of Destruction.

Charlie flew as it had never flown before. They ran east over a darkened road, and the pursuit vehicle's complex wheels scarcely touched the ground. Jane glanced at Alex. He was still looking through the cameras. He was still recording-everything that he could. He had the cameras turned backward and he was looking behind the car.

Then suddenly Alex flung the cameras off his face and he doubled over hard, and he wrapped both arms around his head. Jane wondered for a passing instant what he had seen, and then in the next instant, the car simply became airborne. Charlie was actually flying. No illusion. No simulation. No hallucination. A very simple matter.

They were flying through the air. Maybe ten meters off the road. They were up in the air in an arctic, polar, stratospheric gust of wind that had simply caught the car and plucked it from the earth like a paper cup, and it was bearing them along inside it, like a supersonic torrent of black ice.

Jane felt a chill existential horror as they remained airborne, remained flying, and things began to drift gently and visibly past them. Things? Yes, all kinds of things. Road signs. Bushes. Big crooked pieces of tree. Half-naked chickens. A cow. The cow was alive, that was the strangest thing. The cow was alive and unharmed, and it was a flying cow. She was watching a flying cow. A Holstein. A big, plump, well-looked-after barnyard Holstein, with a smart collar around its neck. The cow looked like it was trying to swim. The cow would thrash its great clumsy legs in the chilly air, and then it would stop for a second, and look puzzled.

And then the cow hit a tree and the cow was smashed and dead, and was instantly far behind them.

And theft Charlie hit another, different tree. And the air bag deployed, and it punched her really hard, right in the face.

When she came to, Alex was driving, or trying to. Everything was pitch-black. Great sheets of lightning tore across the sky and the noise-cancellation phones, amazingly, were still on her head. She was slumped in the passenger seat and drenching wet.

They were in some small town. The town strobed, periodically, into visibility around them, in massive flashes of sky-tearing lightning. Because everything was utterly noisy, everything beneath her headphones was silent. The town was a silent ghost town, under silent artillery bombardment. The town was simply being blown down, blown apart. Walls were being twisted apart, and roofs methodically caved in. But the bare wind was not alone in its work. The wind had brought its -friends. Thinp-projcctiles, shrapnel-were randomly smashing the town, smashing anything that stood up, smashing anything that resisted, flying and smashing and crushing and bursting. Flying, wrecking things. Ancient telephone poles from before the wireless days-they were being snapped up clean and picked up and thrust through the sides of multistory buildings. With a weird kind of ease, like someone piercing big blocks of tofu with a breadstick.

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 runnels of blackness streaking down his face and she realized numbly that his nose was bleeding. Her nose too. Her nose hurt; the wreck had really hurt her nose.... Alex was driving down the main street of town, rather slowly and clumsily really, and with a lot of pained attention to detail. There were cars turned upside down all over the place, kicked-over cars like a giant child disturbing a convention of turtles.

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, spinning like a black cone of wet rubber and methodically tossing a salad of smashed tree. She saw it again, three more times, in three more lightning flashes, until it meandered out of sight.

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!"

Jane rubbed at her hair and face. Filthy. And her nose was still bleeding a little. It seemed a real shame to put blood on such a nice thick dry towel. "How'd you find me, out there?"

"I heard your distress call! I scarcely dared to leave the shelter, but there came a break in the weather, and you were close to the shelter, and well"-Leo smiled-"here we are, both safe and sound, so the risk was well worth it."

"My brother's still out there."

"Yes"-Leo nodded-"I did overhear that. A shame your brother-Alex, isn't it?-didn't have the wisdom to stay with the vehicle. When it dies down, maybe we can make a try to find young Alex. All right?"

"Why not rescue him right now?"

"Jane, I'm no meteorologist, but I can read a SESAME report. All hell is breaking loose out there. I'm very sorry, but I won't comb a patch of woods far a missing boy while the landscape swarms with tornadoes. You and I were lucky to get back here alive."

"I'll go alone, I can drive that thing."

"Jane, don't be troublesome. I don't own that vehicle."

"Who owns it, then?"

"The group owns it. I'm not here all alone, you know. I have my friends! Friends who strongly disapproved of my leaving this shelter in the first place. Would you think this through a bit, please? Consider this from my perspective."

Jane fell silent. Then she couldn't restrain herself. "My brother's life is at stake!"

"So is my brother's," Leo said sternly. "Do you know how many people have died in this horror already? It's already leveled five towns, and the F-6 is headed right for Oklahoma City! Tens of thousands of people are going to die, not just one person that you happen to know! It's a holocaust out there, and I don't propose to join in it! Get a grip on yourself!" He opened a tall closet. "Look, here's a bathrobe. Get out of that wet paper, Jane, and try to compose yourself. You're in a storm cellar now, and that's where sane people are supposed to be, during a storm. We're going to~y here now! We won't be leaving again."

He shut the ck~&r and left her alone in the bathroom. Alone again, she began shaking violently. She glanced at herself in the mirror. The sight of her own face sent a chill through her. She looked terrifying: a madwoman, a bloodied gorgon.

She tried the faucet; a thin trickle of ill-smelling water emerged. Very chlorinated. If you were rich in Oklahoma, you could drill a big hole in the ground and put a mansion inside it, but that still wouldn't get you decent water. She stoppered the sink and rinsed her face, quickly. Then she put a cupped handful of water through her hair. Something like a kilo of rust-colored Oklahoma dirt dripped out of her hair and into the sink. And her paper suit was smeared with wet dust.

She stepped out of the paper suit, and put it into the sink and ran a little water over it, and washed her hands and wrists. Then she pulled the suit out again and wiped it with the towel, and the paper suit was pretty darn clean. It dried out in no time. Good old paper. She stepped back into it and zipped it up.

She -opened the bathroom door again. There were distant voices down a sloping corridor. Jane tromped down the corridor in her trail boots. "Leo?"

"Yes?" He handed her a mug of something hot. Café con leche. It was very good. And very welcome.

"Leo, what on earth are you doing in this place?"

"Interesting question," Leo admitted. "It's no accident, of course."

"I thought not, somehow."

"Even the blackest cloud has a chrome lining," Leo offered, with a tentative smile. He led her into an arched, bombproof den. There was a sitting area with low, flowing, leather couches in a conversation pit. The walls were stuccoed ceramic and the roof was a thick blastproof stuccoed ceramic dome, like the inside of a roe's egg. A brass chandelier hung on a chain from the top of the dome. The chandelier swayed a little, gently.

There was a media center with a pair of silent televisions on, and an old rosewood liquor cabinet, and a scattering of brass-and-leather hassocks of brown-and-white furred brindled cowhide. There were a pair of Remington bronzes of mustached cowpokes on horseback doing unlikely horse-breaker things, and a pair of awesome octagon-barreled frontier rifles were mounted on the wail.

And there were eight strangers in the shelter, counting Leo. Two women, six men. Two of the men were playing with an onyx Mexican chess set, off at the far end of the conversation pit. Another was gently manipulating a squealing broadband scanner hooked to an antenna feed. The other four were playing some desultory card game on a coffee table, pinochle or poker maybe, and munching from a red lacquered tray of microwaved hors d'oeuvres.

"Well, here she is," Leo announced. "Everyone, this is Jane Unger."

They looked up, mildly curious. No one said much. Jane sipped her warm coffee, holding the mug with both hands.

"Forgive me if I don't make introductions," Leo said.

"You know what would be a really good idea, Leo?" said one of the chess players, mildly, looking over his rimless glasses. "It would be a really good idea if you put Ms. Unger back outside."

"All in good time," Leo said. He turned to the silent televisions. "Oh dear, just look at that havoc." He said it in a voice so flat and numbed that Jane was taken aback. She set her coffee mug down. Leo looked at her. She picked the mug back up.

"It's pretty much leveled El Reno," remarked the other chess player, cheerfully. "Pretty danm good coverage too."

"Have they structure-hit that broadcast tower outside Woodward yet?" Leo said.

"Yeah. It came down three minutes ago. A good hit, Leo. Real solid hit. Professional."

"That's great," Leo said. "That's splendid. So, Jane. What would you like? A few spring rolls with hot mustard? You do like Thai food, don't you? I think we have some Thai in the freezer." He took her elbow and led her to the open kitchenette.

Jane pulled her arm free. "What the hell are you doing?"

Leo smiled. "Short explanatün, or long explanation?"

"Short. And hurry up."

"Well," said Leo, "shortly, my friends and I are very interested in dead spots. This is a big dead spot, and that's why we're here. We've put ourselves here quite deliberately, just like you and your Troupe did. Because we knew that this area would be the epicenter of damage from my brother's F-6."

"Leo, I gotta hand it to that brother of yours!" called out the second chess player, with what sounded like real gratitude. "Personally, I had the gravest doubts about any so-called F-6 tornado, it seemed like a real reach, a real nutcase long shot, but Leo, I admit it now." The chess player straightened up from his board, lifting one finger. "Your brother has really delivered. I mean, just look at that coverage!" He pointed briskly at the television. "This disaster is world-class!"

"Thanks," Leo said. "You see, Jane, there are many places in America where human beings just can't -live anymore, but that's not true for our communications technologles. The machines are literally everywhere. In the U.S.- even Alaska!-there's not one square meter left that's not in a satellite footprint, or a radio-navigation triangulation area, or a cellular link, or in packet range of nemode sites or of wireless cable TV... . 'Wireless cable,' that's a nasty little oxymoron, isn't it?" Leo shook his head. "It took a truly warped society to invent that terminology...."

Leo seemed lost for a moment, then recovered himself. "Except, Jane, not here, and not now! For one shining moment, not here, not around us! Because we are inside the F-6! The most intense, thorough, widespread devastation that the national communications infrastructure has suffered in modern times. Bigger than a hurricane. Bigger than earthquakes. Far bigger than arson and sabotage, because arson and sabotage on this huge scale would be far too risky, and far too much hard work. And yet here we are, you see? In the silence! And no one can overhear us! No one can monitor us! Not a soul."

"So that's why you overheard me in my car? My distress call? Because you're paying so much attention to broadcasts?"

"Yes, that's it exactly. We're listening to everything on the spectrum. Hoping, aiming, for perfect silence. Luckily, we have the resources to help the project along a bit-to take out a few crucial relays and especially solid towers, and such. Because God knows, the damned repairmen will all be back in force soon enough! With their cellular emergency phone service, and the emergency radio relays, and even those idiot ham operators with their damned private services out of ham shacks and even their bathroom closets, God help us! But for a little while, a brilliant, perfect silence, and in that moment all things are possible. Everything is possible! Even freedom."

Someone, lackadaisically, applauded.

Jane swallowed coffee. "Why do you need that much silence?"

"Do you know what 'electronic parole' is?"

"Sure. When they put, like, a government wrist cuff on prisoners. With a tracker and a relay inside. My Trouper cuff is a little like that, actually." She held up her wrist.

"Exactly. And all of us here, we all have similar devices."

She was amazed. "You're all out on parole?"

"Not the common kind. A special kind, rather more sophisticated. It's more accurate to say that my friends and I are all bonded people. We gave our word of bond. But we're in a Troupe, of a sort. A Troupe of people in bondage."

"Excuse me," said the man at the broadband scanner. He was a large, hefty, middle-aged man, with short brush-cut hair. "May I see that device, please?"

"My Trouper cuff?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Jane unbuckled it and handed it to him.

"Thanks." The man rose, examining Jane's cuff carefully, then walked into the kitchen. He placed the cuff carefully beside the sink, opened a kitchen drawer, swiftly removed a meat-tenderizing hammer, and smashed Jane's cuff, repeatedly.

"Why are you doing this?" Jane shouted.

"It's a big world," Leo said, between his friend's precisely judged hammer blows. "It's an old world, it's a sad and wicked world... . We in this room, we are definitely people of the world, Jane. We're a very worldly lot!" The radioman carefully ran sink water over Jane's shattered cuff.

"We've done some of the work of the world, in our day," Leo said. "But you can't acquire that kind of power without responsibility. Power doesn't come without an obligation, without an account to pay. The people who put these cuffs on us-well, you might say that we all quite voluntarily put them onto one another, really-these bracelets are badges of honor. We thought of them as badges. As fail-safes, as a kind of moral insurance. As talismans of security! But after the years roll on... It doesn't ever stop, Jane, time just keeps going on, consequences just keep mounting up." He lifted his arm and looked at his watch. It looked just like any other watch. Nothing too special about Leo's watch. Just another metal-banded businessinan's watch. Except that the skin beneath the watch was very white.

"We've come here to stop being what we are," Leo said. "There's no way out of the Game, no way outside the code of silence. Except for death, of course; death always works. So we've found a kind of silence now that's an electronic, virtual death. We're going to cut our bonds away, and we'll die in the world of the networks, and we'll become other people, and we'll leave and vanish for good."

"Like evacuation freaks?"

One of the poker players burst into laughter. "Hey! That's a good one! That's dead on. Evacuation freaks. You mean those weird poseurs with no ID who just haunt the camps, right? That's good, that's very good. That's us right to a T."

"Leo, what have you done that's so horrible? Why do you have to do anything this weird and elaborate?" She looked into his eyes. They were not cruel eyes. They were like Jerry's eyes. They only looked very troubled. "Leo, why don't you just come to the Troupe camp? We have our own people there, we have resources and ways to get people out of trouble. I can talk to Jerry about it, maybe we can straighten all this out."

"That's very sweet of you, Jane. It's very good of you. I'm sorry I never had a chance to know you better." He lifted his voice to the others. "Did you hear that? What she just offered? I was right to do what I did." He looked into her face. "It doesn't matter. In any case, after this meeting you'll never see me again."

"Why not?"

He gestured at the ceiling-at the storm outside their bank vault. "Because we are far beneath the disaster now. We're all just empty names now, in the long roll call of the dead and missing from the F-6. Everyone you see here-we all died inside the F-6. We vanished, we were consumed. You'll never see me again; Jerry will never see me again ever. We're cutting all ties, annihilating our identities, and Jane, we're the kind of people who know how to do that, and are good at doing it. And that's the way it has to be. There's no way out of what I've become, except to stop being what I am. Forever."

"What on earth have you done?"

"It's impossible to say, really," one of the women remarked. "That's the beauty of the scheme."

"Maybe you'll understand it best this way," Leo told her. "When your friend and colleague April Logan was asking the Troupers about when the human race lost all power over its own destiny-"

"Leo, how do you know about that? You weren't there."

"Oh," said Leo, surprised. He smiled. "I'm inside the system in camp. I've always been inside the Troupe's system. No one knows, but, well, there I am. Sorry."

"My brother's an academic, academics never pay any real attention to security updates."

"I'll say," said another of the shelter people, speaking up for the first time. He was big and dark, and he was wearing a charcoal-gray tailored suit, and Jane noticed for the first time that he was very young. Younger than twenty. Maybe no older than seventeen. How had this boy...

And then she looked at him. He was very young, but his eyes were like two dead things. He had the skin-creeping look of a professional poisoner.

"You see," said Leo, "the human race still has a great deal of control over our destiny. Things are by no means so chaotically hopeless as people like to pretend. The governments can't do anything, and our lives are very anarchic, but all that means is that the work that the governments ought to do is shrugged onto vigilantes. There are certain things, certain activities, that transparently require doing. What's more, there are people who recognize the necessity to do them, and who can do them, and are even willing to do those things. The only challenge in the situation is that these necessary things are unbearably horrible and repugnant things to do."

"Leo," said the first chess player, in weary exasperation, "why on earth are you dropping our pants to this woman?"

One of the women spoke up. "Oh, go ahead and tell her, Leo. I'm enjoying this. It doesn't matter. We're free now. We're inside the big silence. We can talk."

"That's you all over, Rosina," said the first chess player in disgust. "I hate this bullshit! I hate watching people blow all operational security, and spew their guts like some teenage burglar, drunk in a bar. We're professionals. for Christ's sake, and she's just some prole. Don't you have any pride?"

"She's not just anyone," Leo protested. "She's family.

She's my sister-in-law."

"No, I'm not," Jane said. "I didn't marry him, Leo."

"Details." Leo shrugged, irritably. "Jerry will marry you. I suppose you don't realize that yet, but he'll do it, all right. He'll never let you go, because he's pulled too much of you inside of him now; and besides, you're too useful to him, and he needs you too much. But that's fine, that's fine, I like that idea; you'd never do anything to hurt Jerry, would you? No, I can see that. Of course not. It's all right it's all just fine."

"You are being a complete moral idiot," said the chess player.

"Look," Leo snapped at him, "if I wanted to stay in the Great Game, do you think I'd have gone this far? Do you know anybody else who could get that danm cuff off you? Then shut up and listen. It's the last time you'll ever have to hear me out."

"Have it your way," the chess player interrupted, with a calm and deadly look. "Jane Unger, listen to me. I can see that you're a very observant person. Stop watching me so very observantly. I don't like it, and I won't have it. It's boring and clumsy to threaten people, but I'm threatening you, so listen." He pulled his manicured hands from the chessboard and steepled his fingertips. "I can commit an act in three seconds that will make you a clinical schizophrenic for eighteen months. You'll hear voices in your head, you'll rave about conspiracies and plots and enemies, you'll paint yourself with your own shit, and that can all be done in three seconds with less than three hundred micrograms. Dead men actually do tell tales sometimes but madwomen tell nothing but pathetic lies, and no one believes what madwomen say, about anything, ever. Am I clear? Yes? Good." He moved a bishop.

Jane sat, weak-kneed, on one of the cowhide hassocks.

"Leo, what are you doing? What have you gotten into?"

"It wasn't for us. It was never for ourselves. It was for the future."

The woman spoke up again. "The delightful part about the Great Game-I mean, the genuinely clever and innovative part-is that we don't even know what we've done! It all takes place through electronic blinds, and cells, and fail-safes, and need-to-know, and digital anonymity and encryption. One cell, for instance, will think up five potential direct actions. Then another cell will choose just one candidate action from that list of five, and break the action up into independent pieces. And then, yet other cells will distribute that work into small independent actions, so fragmented as to be meaningless. It's just the way engravers used to design money. When money was on engraved paper and money still meant something."

"Right," said the second chess player, nodding. "So that one year, some theorist predicts how useful it would be to have Bengali cholera decimate some overcrowded hellhole of a city. And eight months later, someone watches some little paper sailboats melting in a reservoir."

Jane stared. "Why would anyone do that?"

"The best of reasons," Leo said. "Survival. Survival of humanity, and of millions of endangered species. A chance for humanity to work its way out of heavy weather into real sunlight an& blue skies again. We had a lot of chances to take steps to save our world, and we blew them all, Jane. All of them. We were greedy and stupid and shortsighted, and we threw all our chances away. Not you personally, not me personally, not any of us personally, just our ancestors, of course. No one convenient to blame. But you, and me, and the people here, we are all the children of heavy weather, and we have to live under consequences, we have to deal with them. And the only real way to them is ugly, just unbearably ugly."

"Why you, Leo?"

"Because we know! Because we can! For the sake of the survivors. I suppose." He shrugged. "There's no global... There's no formal, deliberate control over these or events, anywhere. Institutions have given up. vernments have given up. Corporations have given up. 'the people in the room, and the many others who are us and with us, we've never given up. We're the closest this planet has to an actual working government." ane looked around the room. They were agreeing with It wasn't any joke. He was telling a truth that they all and recognized.

"Some of us, most of us, are in the government. But there's not any government in the world that can stand up publicly, and say coldly and openly, that the eight billion people on this collapsing planet are at least four billion people too many. Jane, each year, every year, there are children born on Earth to equal the entire populaot Mexico. That's insanely far too many, and it's been that for eighty years now. The situation is so desperate mat working to solve it is like joining a bomb squad. Every war a bomb explodes, and it's a bomb made of human and every human splinter in that bomb means extincand carbon dioxide and toxins and methane and pestiand clearcutting and garbage and further decline.

There were a lot of ways out once, but there are no more alternatives now. Just people who will probably survive, people who probably won't."

"Leo's being a bit dramatic, as usual, but that's part of bis charm," said the woman, Rosina, with a fond smile at him. Rosina looked like a schoolteacher might look-a teacher with a taste for platinum jewelry and expensive facial surgery. "The Great Game is less romantic than iniaht sound. Basically, it's just another American secret and, and while those are common enough, they iasr long. We're very much like the southern resisace during Reconstruction. Like the Invisible Empire- e Ku Klux Klan. For a decade or so, the Ku Klux Klan was a genuine underground government! Where everybody took turns holding the rope for a minute. So nobody really lynched the darkie. You see, the darky just sort of perished."

She smiled. She said this terrible, heart-freezing thing, and she smiled, because she found it amusing. "And everybody involved went right back to being a county judge and a policeman and a lawyer and the owner of the hardware store. And next week they rode out in their hoods and masks and they killed again. That's exactly what it's like for us, Jane. It can really happen. It has happened. It's happened in the United States. And it's happened here be-fore, long before networks or encryption, or any of the really easy, safe, convenient ways to facilitate large conspiracies. It's not farfetched at all, it's not even hard. It's quite easy if you work at it sincerely, and it's very real, it's real like this table is real." She slapped it.

"Just because we few are dropping out of the game doesn't mean that the Great Game will end," said another poker player. He looked vaguely Asian, with a West Coast accent. There weren't any black people among these people. No Hispanics, either. Jane got the strong impression that ethnic balance hadn't been high on the agenda when they did their recruiting, however people like this did their recruiting. Floating Nietzschean Ubermensch IQ tests in obscure corners of networks, maybe. Intriguing intellectual puzzles that only those of a certain cast of mind could win. Little suction spots in the Net where people could slip into the Underground and never, ever come out... "Like AIDS for instance. That bug is a godsend, we might have cured it by now, but there are brave, determined, clever people who will guard every last AIDS variant like a Holy Grail... . A virus that kills sexually careless people! While at the same time lowering nnmunity, so that afflicted people become a giant natural reservoir for epidemics. It's thanks mainly to AIDS that new tuberculosis treatments become so useless so quickly... . If AIDS didn't exist, we'd have been forced to invent it. If it weren't for AIDS, we'd have ten billion people now, not eight."

"My dear friend Rosina has misled you somewhat with that ancient KKK analogy," said Leo, gently. "We're certainly not racists, we're very multicultural; we never aim to exterminate any ethnic group, we simply work consistently to lower global birthrates and raise global death rates. Really, our activity is no more a lynching than this F-6 is like a lynching. Like the F-6, it's a death remotely traceable to human action, but taking steps to increase the global death rate doesn't make death into murder. An epidemic isn't genocide, it's just another epidemic. Anyway, the vast majority of all our actions are perfectly legal and aboveboard, things that would never raise a second glance! Things such as... offering a scholarship to a medical student."

He poured himself some coffee and added steamed milk. "Instead of saving thousands of harmful human lives through public-health measures like clean water and sewers, why not train that doctor to do elaborate, costly measures, like neural brain scans? Usually, the heart and soul of a nation's public-health work are a few very lonely, very dedicated people. They are easy to find, and their organization can be structure-hit in a very subtle way. These selfless neurotics don't have to be shot out of hand or lynched by racists, for heaven's sake. Generally, all they need is a few kind words and a little gentle distraction."

"Yeah, a fad here, a twist there," said the Asian guy, "a brief delay in shipping to some hard-hit famine site, or a celebrity scandal to chase off news coverage of some lethal outbreak... The current muddled semilegal situation with drugs, for instance, that was a work of genius. .

A great source of finance for anybody's underground, and the people who shoot up heroin are extremely reckless and credulous. Street drugs will almost never be tested for additives, as long as they supply the thrill. There are narcocontraceptives-one shot makes a woman permanently allergic to the lining of her own uterus, something the woman would never notice, except that a fertilized egg will never adhere to her womb." He nodded sagely. "That works very well with mass inoculations too, if you can manage to contaminate the vaccines... . I suppose you could argue the technique's rather sexist, but we've tried covert sterilization with men, and statistics prove that the cohort of fertile women is the real crux of population expansion; it's all in the womb, that's just the way human reproduction works.....eople willing to take intravenous drugs are already flirting with suicide; there's no real harm in assisting them."

"Not to mention legalizing euthanasia on demand," said the second woman, testily. "And at least that form of suicide tends to be far more male-based."

"The whole military policy of structure hits was based on destroying enemy infrastructure-avoiding the political embarrassment of battlefield deaths so that the enemy populace died of apparently natural causes." It was the radio guy again, sitting ramrod straight in his chair before the scanner. "It was Luddism writ large-the first deliberate policy of national Luddism. That the practice of structure hitting quickly leaked into the American civilian populace only indicates the broad base of support for the practice... . Very much like the CIA and lysergic acid, if you don't mind a favorite analogy of mine."

Leo sipped his coffee. "I'm going to miss all of you very much," he confessed.

"I told you he was sentimental," said Rosina.

"It seems such a terrible shame that the talents of a group like this should be wasted on entirely clandestine endeavors. That you'll never have your real due. You all deserve so much better."

"Oh, none of us are any worse off than Alan Turing was," objected the second chess player. "Just more deep, dark, digital spooks."

"Someone will track it down someday," Rosina told Leo, comfortingly. "We ourselves don't know the full extent of Game activities, but there must be tens of thousands of buried traces... . Someone in the future, the next century maybe, with time on their hands and real resources for once and some proper database investigation, they'd be able to dig us all up and piece the story together." She smiled. "And utterly condemn us!"

"That's their privilege. A privilege we're giving to the future. Two great privileges-survival and innocence."

"That's why we're dead people now," Rosina said. "You know what we are, Jane? We are lifeboat cannibals. We did something terrible that had to be done, and now we're sitting here, sitting here on these couches right now in front of you, still smacking our lips on the shreds of meat from a dead baby's thighbones. We've done things that are way past sin and become necessity. We are vile little pale creepy creatures that live deep under the rocks, and we belong by rights with the anonymous dead." She turned to the man at the scanner. "How does it look, Red?"

"It looks pretty good," Red said. "Real quiet."

"Then I want to go first. Get this damned thing off me, somebody." She lifted her left arm. No one moved. Rosina raised her voice. "I said I want to go first! I'm volunteering! So who's gonna cut it for me?"

The very young man in the suit stood up. "You know what the hell of this is?" he said to Jane, his dark eyes like two oysters from a can. "The hell is that you bust your ass for five years finding some network doods that are truly elect, and then they turn out to be this crowd of middle-aged rich pols and lawyers! People who post way too much about academic political philosophy shit that doesn't mean anything, and then when it finally comes to taking some real action, it's always somebody else's fault, and they end up hiring some bent Mexican cop to do it for them. Jesus Christ!" He sighed. "Gimme that pneumatic. dood."

The second chess player reached under the leather couch and handed the young man a pair of pneumatic diamond-edged bolt cutters. "You want the safety goggles?"

"Do I look like I want fuckin' safety goggles? Wimp!" He hefted the bolt cutters and turned to Rosina. "Out. Out on the stairs."

The two of them left.

No one said anything for thirty seconds. They dealt cards, they studied the chessboard, Leo pretended huge interest in the broadband scanner. They were in anguish.

Rosina came back in, her wrist bare. A big bright smile. Like a woman on cocaine.

"It works!" gasped the second chess player. "Me next!"

The young man came in with the bolt cutters. The armpits of his suit were soaked with sweat.

"Do me next!" said the second chess player.

"Are you kidding?" said the very young man. "I know statistics. Let somebody else do it this time."

"I'll do it," Leo told the chess player. "If you'll do me afterward."

"Deal, Leo." The chess player blinked gratefully. "You're a straight shooter, Leo. I'm gonna miss you too, man."

They went out of the room. A minute passed. They came back in.

"We're real lucky," said the second chess player. He wiped sweat from his forehead with a canary-yellow washcloth he'd snagged from the bathroom.

"Either that," the very young man scoffed, "or they're not designed as well as we thought. What'd you do with the dead bracelets?"

"Left 'em in the hall."

"We'd better detonate 'em later. Wouldn't want anybody reverse-engineering that circuitry."

"Right," said Leo, with a glance at Jane. "You can see now why the Crimson Avenger became so integral to our group! Only nineteen years old-but there's one of those young rascals in every network; it happens to even the best of company."

"Why did you come here?" Jane asked the Crimson Avenger.

"I been in the Game five years now," the Crimson Avenger muttered. "It gets real old." His face clouded. "And besides, if I don't clear town but good, I'm gonna have to kill both my lame bitchfucker parents! With a fuckin' shotgun!"

Two of the poker players rose-the Asian guy and the second woman. They exchanged a silent glance heavy with deep personal meaning and the man took the bolt cutters and they left together.

Fifteen seconds later there was a loud explosion. Then, screams.

Everyone went white as paper. The screams dwindled to agonized breathy sobs.

The Crimson Avenger reached inside his jacket and pulled Out a snub-nosed ceramic revolver and walked stiff-legged to the door. He yanked it open, leaving it open behind him. There was a brief gabbling wail of anguished terror, and a shot. Then another shot. And then a long, meditative silence. And then another final shot.

Crimson Avenger came back in, with his suit lightly spattered with blood, flying little droplets of blood on the shins of his charcoal-gray trousers. He had the cutters-the diamond jaws of the device were blackened with impact. "Hers blew," he said. "We don't have to do his now. He's dead too."

"I think I've changed my mind," said the first chess player.

Without changing expression, Crimson Avenger lowered his pistol and pointed it at the bridge of the first chess player's glasses. "Okay, dood."

"Never mind, I'm going." He looked at Red, the radioman. "Let's do it."

"I'm going too," said Crimson Avenger.

"Why?" said the chess player.

"Because I got left over, and you're gonna do me last. And because if you wimp out and try to run off with that bracelet on, you're gonna do it with my bullet in your head." He sniffed, and coughed. "Dood, for a guy with three advanced degrees, man, you are fuckin' slow!"

They left. And they came back alive.

"I think a twenty-five-percent mortality rate is extraordinarily good under the circumstances," said Leo.

"Considering the extreme precautions taken to keep us from accomplishing this... yes, quite acceptable," said the second chess player.

The television, which had been showing snow, flickered into life again.

"Look, it's hitting Oklahoma City," said the first chess player. He turned up the sound a bit, and the six surviving Garners settled in on the couch, their faces alight with deep interest.

"Look at the way they've networked those urban securicams to catch that first damage wave coming in," said Red. "Not only that, but they are the very first back on the air! The staff at Channel 005 are really technically adept."

"Leave it on 005," said the second chess player. "They're definitely the best fast-response storm team in the country."

"You got it." Red nodded. "Not that we have any choice. I think everything else is still down." He began channel-switching the second set.

"Whoa," Leo told him. "Look at that SESAME satellite shot... . That's very odd, people. Oklahoma City seems to be under siege by a giant doughnut."

Rosina chuckled.

"That's a very odd shape, isn't it, Jane? What does it mean?"

Jane cleared her throat. "It means... it means that Jerry is right. Because I've seen that shape before, in his simulations. That's not a spike, it's a... well, it's a giant torus vortex down on the ground. I mean, you think of a tornado . .. and you turn it sideways and you put the tip of it into the top of it, like a snake eating its own tail.

And it becomes a giant ring, a tows. And it sucks in updraft from all directions outside the ring, and it spews downdraft out the top and sides, and it's stable. And it just gets bigger until all the heat and moisture are gone."

"What does that imply, exactly?"

Jane felt tears slide thinly down her cheeks. "I think it means that all my friends are dead."

"And that Oklahoma City is definitely dog meat," Rosina added.

"Mega," said Crimson Avenger.

Oklahoma City was methodically recording its own destruction. Jane knew immediately that she was seeing history bubble off the screen, an odd and intense kind of history. Like some decadent Roman poet reciting his autobiography as he opened a vein in the bath.

At the touch of the F-6, now in its full fury, Oklahoma City was exploding on television, block by block. It was being sucked up and peeled apart and smashed. Heavily reinforced high-rises were being pulled up bodily out of the ground, like a farmer pulling up carrots. They were very hard and very strong buildings, and when they fell over and started rolling, all their contents would gush out of their windows, in a fountaining slurry of glass and trash and mist. The falling high-rises would rip up big patches of street with them, and when the wind got under the Street, things would start fountaining up. There was a lot of room under the earth in Oklahoma City, a lot of room with a lot of human beings in it, and when the wind got into those 'long shelters it simply blew them like a flute. Manholes blew off the streets and big whale gushes of vapor came Out of the pavement, and then a whole pod of whales seemed to surface under the street, because another skyscraper was slowly falling over and it was ripping up the street surface with its internet links and its indestructible ceramic water pipes and its concrete pedestrian subway.

And somebody was putting this vision together, deliberately assembling it. Somebody had broken the screen into compound miniscreens like a bee's eyes: traffic securicams and building securicams and minibank securicams and all the other modern urban securicams that offered no one even the tiniest trace of security. And as the cams were blinked out and smashed and ripped apart and exploded and were blinded and crushed, whoever was at work just kept adding more viewpoints.

One of them was a sudden glimpse of the Troupe. It was Jerry, he had his back half-turned to the camera, he was leaning, half-doubled, into the gusting wind. He was shouting and waving one arm. It was Troupe camp, and all the paper yurts were smashed and torn and writhing in the wind. Jerry turned to the camera suddenly and he held up a broken-winged ornithopter, and his face was alight with comprehension and terror.

And then he vanished.

It didn't look like a machine was doing these viewpoints. It was the sort of montage technique often best left to machine, but Jane had a very strong intuition that someone was doing this work by hand. Human auteurs were putting it together, very deliberately, swiftly, and deftly assembling it with their own busy human fingertips. Doing it, knowing they were going to die at their post.

And the sorrow and pity of the great disaster struck her then, lancing into her right through that busy thicket of interface. And she felt the hurt explode inside of her. And she thought, with greater clarity than she had ever thought of anything before, that if she ever, somehow, managed to escape from this shelter and from these People of the Abyss, then she would learn to love something else. Something new. To learn tu love something that didn't stink at its spinning core, of disaster and destruction and despair.

Then the broadcast blinked out.

"Lost transmission again," said Red. "I bet it took down the main towers out on Britton Road this time-who wants to bet?"

"That was great," said Rosina, appreciatively. "I can't wait till they compile all this coverage and do the definitive disk."

Red combed channels. "SESAME's still up."

"Yeah, the feds keep their weather links down in the old missile silos," said chess player two. "Practically Unnukable."

"Where are we exactly?" asked Crimson Avenger, looking at the SESAME map. Red pointed. "Well," Avenger said, "I don't see any precipitation over us. I think we're in the clear!"

Suddenly there was a violent series of explosions just outside the door-explosions actually inside the shelter. Leo winced, then suddenly grinned. "Did you hear that, people! Those were our detonation signals!"

"Close," said chess player one, and plucked at his lower lip. He had gone quite pale. "Real close."

"How'd they squeeze that signal through?" said the second chess player.

"I'd bet autonomously launched drone aircraft," Red theorized. "Probably sweeping the whole locale. Of course, if a drone can safely fly over us, that ought to mean that we can leave here safely."

"Fuck the theory, I'm checkin' this out," Crimson Avenger declared. He left.

He was back within a minute, his handsome leather shoes leaving faint smudges of fresh blood on the shelter's thick carpet. "The sun is out!"

"You're kidding."

"No way, dood! It's wet, and everything is smashed completely flat, but the sky is blue and the sun is shining and there's not a cloud in the sky, and people, I am out of here." He walked into the kitchen and pulled a shining ceramic valise off the top of the freezer.

"You won't get far on foot," said chess player one.

Crimson Avenger glared at him. "How stupid do you think I am, Gramps? I don't have to get far. I know exactly where I'm going, and exactly what I'm doing, and my plans don't include you. Good-bye, doods. Good-bye forever." He opened the door and stalked away, leaving it ajar behind him.

"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 personnel carrier?"

"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 running around on the forest floor. It was drinking out of the rain puddle in the roots of the fallen tree. Didn't seem upset in any way. Just another squirrel going about its job.

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 funny! Would you like to be shot up in that tree, where it might be painful, or would you like to come down here, where I can make it very efficient and quick?"

"Oh," said Alex, daintily, "I prefer being murdered in the most remote, impersonal, and clinical manner possible, thank you."

"Oh, with you and I, it's personal," Leo assured him. "You kept me from telling my brother good-bye, face-to-face. I dearly wanted to see my brother, because I had certain important personal business with him, and I might well have gotten past his entourage and seen him privately, but you interfered. And then, in the press of business, it became too late." Leo's brow darkened. "That's not sufficient reason to kill you, I suppose; but then, there's the money. Juanita has no money left; if you're dead, she gets yours, and Jerry gets hers. So your resources go to environmental science, instead of being squandered on the drug habits of some decrepit weakling. Killing you is genuinely helpful. It'll make the world a better place."

"That's wonderful, Leo," Alex said. "I feel so honored to assuage your delicate feelings in this way. I can only agree with your trenchant assessment of my moral and societal worth. May I point one thing out before you execute me? If the shoe were on the other foot, and I were about to execute you, I'd do it without the fucking lecture!"

Leo frowned.

"What's the matter, Leo? An old bulishit artist like you can't bear to let your condemned man have the last word for once?"

Leo raised the pistol. Behind his head, a thin black noose snaked up silently from the forest floor.

"Better kill me now, Leo! Shoot quick!"

Leo took careful aim.

"Too late!"

The smart rope hissed around his neck and yanked him backward. He flew off his feet, his neck snapping audibly. Then he leaped up from the forest floor like a puppet on a string as the serpentine coils of the smart rope hissed around the butt of a cedar branch. There was a fragrant stink of burned bark as the body was hauled aloft.

The hanged man swayed there, violently, dangling from the tree. And at length was still.

IT TOOK ALEX forty-seven hours to get from a smashed forest in Oklahoma to his father's penthouse in Houston. There was a lot of bureaucratic hassle around the federal disaster zone, but the Guard and the cops couldn't stop him from walking, and his luck changed when he got his hands on a motor bicycle. He didn't eat much. He scarcel~ slept. He had a fever. His lungs hurt very badly, and deat was near, death was very near now, not the romantic death this time, not the sweet, drug-addled, transcendent death. Just real death, just death of the cold, old-fashioned variety, death like his mother's death, an absence and a being still, forever. He didn't love death anymore. He didn't even like death anymore. Death was something he was going to have to get over with.

It wasn't easy to get into his father's part of town. The Houston cops had always been mean, tough cops, the kind of cops that had teeth like Dobermans, and heavy weather had not made them kinder. The Houston cops were kind to people like him, when people-like-him looked like people-like-him; but when people-like-him looked the way that he now, the Houston cops in 2031 were the kind of ho collared diseased vagrants off the street and did secret things to them far out in the bayous.

But Alex had his ways. He hadn't grown up in Houston r nothing, and he knew what it meant to have people owe him favors. He got to his father's building without so much as a change of clothes.

And then he had to work his way past his father's own worked his way into the building. He won his own way with the machine in the elevator. The human receptionist at the penthouse floor let him in; he knew the receptionist. And then he found himself waiting in the usual marble anteroom with the giant Aztec mandalas and the orangutan skulls and the Chinese lamps.

He sat there coughing and shivering on a velvet bench, in his filthy paper suit, with his hands on his knees and his head swimming. He waited patiently. It was always like this with his Papa. There were no alternatives, none. If he waited long enough, some gopher would show up and bring him coffee and sweet English biscuits.

After maybe ten minutes the bronze double doors opened at the far end of the anteroom, and in came one of the most beautiful women he'd ever seen. She was a nineteen-year-old violet-eyed gamine with a sweet little cap of black hair and a short skirt and patterned hose and high heels.

She took a few tentative steps across the inlaid marble floor and looked at him and simpered. "Are you him?" she said in Spanish.

"Sorry," Alex said, "I don't think I am."

She switched to English, her eyes widening. "Do you want... to go shopping?"

"Not right now, thank you."

"I could take you shopping. I know many nice places in LIStOfl.

"Maybe another time," said Alex, and sneezed vioShe looked at him with deep concern, and turned and left, and the doors closed behind her with a tomblike clunk.

Maybe seven minutes later a gopher showed up with the coffee and the biscuits. It was a new gopher-it was pretty much always a new gopher, gopher being the lowest rung in the Unger organization-but the British cookies were really good, and the coffee, as always, was Costa Rican and fine. He kept the cookies down and had several cautious sips of the coffee, and he physically recovered to the extent that he really began to hurt. He ordered the gopher off for some aspirin, or better yet, codeine. The gopher never returned.

Then one of the private secretaries arrived. He was one of the older secretaries, Señor Pabst, a family loyalist, a nicely groomed old guy with a Mexican law degree and a well-concealed drinking problem.

Pabst looked him over with genuine pity. Pabst was from Matamoros. There were a lot of Unger family connections in Matamoros. Alex couldn't say that he and Pabst had had actual dealings, but he and Pabst had something akin to an-understanding.

"I think you'd better get right to bed, Alejandro."

"I have to see El Viejo."

"You're not in any condition to see El Viejo. You're going to do something foolish, something you'll regret. See him tomorrow. It's better."

"Look, will he see me, or won't he?"

"He wants to see you," Pabst admitted. "He always wants to see you, Alejandro. But he won't like to see you like this."

"I think he's past shock by this time, don't you? Let's get this over with."

Pabst led Alex to his father.

Guillermo Unger was a tall, slight man in his late fifties, with carefully waved artificial blond hair the very color of the finest-quality creamery butter. He had blue and very watery eyes behind very thick glasses, the unfortunate legacy of a prolonged experiment with computer-assisted perception. Beneath his medicated pancake makeup, the acne from the hormone treatments was flaring up again. He was wearing a tropical linen suit. His mood seemed-not good, you could never call it good-but positive.

"So you're back," he said.

"I've been staying with Juanita."

"So I understand."

"I think she's dead, papa."

"She's not dead," his father said. "Dead women don't read their E-mail." He sighed. "She's still shacked up with that big dumb bastard of a mathematician! He's taken her off somewhere in New Mexico now. A failed academic, for Christ's sake. A crazy man. She's thrown it all over, she's let him smash her whole career. God only can help her, Alejandro. Because God knows I can't."

Alex sat down. He put his hands to his head. His eyes filled with tears. "I'm really glad she's still alive."

"Alejandro, look at me. Why the paper suit, like a bum off the street? Why the dirt, Alejandro? Why do you come into my office looking this way, couldn't you at least get dean? We're not poor people, we have baths."

"Pa pd, I'm clean as I'm going to get. I've been inside a big tornado. The dirt lodges deep in your skin. You can't wash it out, you just have to wait till it grows out. Sorry."

"Were you in Oklahoma City?" his father asked, with real interest.

"No, Dad. We were out where the storm set down at first. We were tracking it and we saw where it started."

"Oklahoma City was very heavily mediated," his father said, reflectively. "That was a rather important event."

"We weren't inside Oklahoma City. Anyway, they all died there."

"Not all of them," his father said. "Hardly more than half of them."

"We didn't see that part. We only saw the beginning of the F-6. We-the Troupe-they wanted to track the storm from the beginning, for scientific reasons, to understand it.

"Understand it, eh? Not very likely! Do they know why the storm stopped so suddenly, right after Oklahoma City?"

"No. I don't know if they understand that. I doubt they understand it." Alex stared at his father. This was going nowhere. He didn't know what to tell the man. He had nothing left to tell him. Except the ugly news that he was very near death, and someone in the family had to watch him die now. Just for formal reasons, basically. And he didn't want Jane to have to do that. And his father was the only one left.

"Well," his father said, "I've been wondering when you'd come back here, back to sense and reason."

"I'm back, papa."

"I tried to find you. Not much luck there, not with your sister hiding you from me."

"She, uh...ell,, I can't defend her, papd. Juanita's very stubborn.

"I had good news for you, that's why I wanted to talk to you. Very good news. Very good medical news, Alex."

Alex grunted. He slumped back in his chair.

"I don't know how to tell you the details myself, but we've had Dr. Kindscher on retainer for some time, so when I heard you had arrived, I called him." He gestured above a lens inset in his desk.

Dr. Kindscher arrived in the office. Alex got the strong impression that Dr. Kindscher had been kept waiting for some time. Just a matter of medical etiquette, a way to establish whose time was more important.

"Hello, Alex."

"Hello, Doctor."

"We've had new results from Switzerland on your genetic scan."

"1 thought you'd given up that project years ago."

Dr. Kindscher frowned. "Alex, it's not an easy matter to scan an entire human genome right down to the last few centimorgans. Doing that for a single individual is a very complex business."

"We had to subcontract that business," his father said. "Bits and pieces.

"And we found a new bit, as Mr. Unger has said," Dr. Kindscher said, radiating satisfaction. "Very unusual. Very!"

"What is it?"

"It's a novel type of mucopolysaccharidosis on chromosome 7-Q-22."

"Could I have that in English?"

"Sorry, Alex, the original lab report is in French."

"I meant give me the upshot, Doctor," Alex croaked. "Give me the executive report."

"Well, since your birth, this genetic defect that you suffer from has been periodically blocking proper cellular function in your lungs, proper expression of fluids. A very rare syndrome. Only four other known cases in the world. One in Switzerland-we were quite lucky in that eventuality, I think-and two in California. Yours is the first known in Texas."

Alex looked at the doctor. Then at his father. Then at the doctor again. It was no joke this time. There wasn't any of the usual hedging and mumbo jumbo~ and alternate prognoses. They really thought they had it this time. They did. They had it. This time they actually had the truth.

"Why?" he croaked.

"Mutagenic damage to the egg cell," Dr. Kindscher said. "It's a very rare syndrome, but all five of them diagnosed so far have -involved maternal exposure to an industrial solvent, a very particular industrial solvent no longer in use.

"Chip assembly,"-his father said. "Your mother used to do chip assembly in a border factory, long before you were born."

"What? That's it, that's all there was to it?"

"She was young," his father said sadly. "We lived on the border, and I had just begun the start-up, and your mother and I, we didn't have much money."

"So that's it, eh? My mother was exposed to a mutagen in a maquiladora plant. And all this time I've really been sick."

"Yes, Alex." Dr. Kindscher nodded. He seemed deeply moved.

"I ~

"And the best news of all is, there's a treatment."

"I might have known."

"Illegal in the U.S.," his father said. "And far too advanced for any border clinica. But this time it sticks, son. This time they really have the root of it."

"We have a clinic contacted already, and they're ready to take you, Alex. Genetic repair. Legal in Egypt, Lebanon, and Cyprus."

"Oh..." Alex groaned. "Not Egypt, I hope."

"No, Cyprus," his father said.

"Good, I heard there's a bad staph strain in Egypt." Alex stood up and walked, painfully, to the doctor's side. "You're really sure about it, this time?"

"As sure as I've ever been in my career! Intron scans don't lie, Alex. You can depend on this one. The flaw is written in your genes, obvious to any trained technician, and now that we've spotted the exact position right down to the branch of the chromosome, any lab can verify that for you. I've already verified it twice!" He beamed. "We've beaten this thing at last, Alex. We're going to cure you!"

"Thanks a lot," Alex said. "You son of a bitch." He hit Dr. Kindscher in the face.

The doctor staggered and fell. He scrambled up, amazed, holding his cheek, then turned and fled the office.

"That's going to cost me," Alex's f~ther observed.

"Sorry," Alex said. He leaned onto the table, shaking. "Really sorry."

"It's all right," his father said, "a son of a bitch like that pest, you can't hit him just once."

Alex began weeping.

"I want to do this for you, Alejandro. Because now I know, it was never your fault, my boy. You were damaged goods right out of the box."

Alex wiped his tears away. "Same old papd," he croaked.

"I don't know if things will change when you are no longer a mutant," his father declared, nobly, "but maybe you will. Who knows? I'm your father, my boy, I feel I owe you that chance at life." He frowned. "But no more foolishness this time! None of these scandals like that shameful business in Nuevo Laredo! Alejandro, those people have lawyers on me! You are going to Cyprus, and you're going right away, and you're going to stay there. No talking, no phone calls, no charge cards, and you do just as you're told! And no more nonsense from you, and especially none from your damn fool of a sister."

"All right," Alex said. He sat in the chair, half collapsing. "You win. I give up. Call the ambulance." He began giggling.

"Don't laugh, Alex. Gene replacement therapy-they tell me it really hurts."

"It always hurts," Alex said, laughing. "It all hurts. Everything hurts. For as long as you can still feel it."