To the Vanishing Point

17

"Come on, let’s move it!" Frank recognized the other voice as well. It was high and determined. The .22 looked larger than it was in Niccolo Flucca’s tiny hand. "Before we run into any more playful citizens."

"Coming, little kitchen wizard." Burnfingers put a massive arm around Frank and lifted him to his feet. The rib screamed and Frank bit into his lip.

"Can you walk?"

"I dunno, Burnfingers."

"You have to try. I cannot carry you and aim at the same time."

"Then I guess I will walk, won’t I?"

He did it by rote, putting one foot ahead of the other, chiding the laggard to follow until it was alongside. Burnfingers helped as much as he could. Flucca walked on the other side, his stubby legs kicking up saltwater, his eyes missing nothing.

"Alicia. Wendy," Frank gasped.

"They are fine," Burnfingers told him. "Your house was unchanged when we left to come look for you and it is well above the rising water." The huge Casull gleamed in the smoke-tinted light. In Burnfingers’s fist it looked big enough to blow away the Anarchis itself.

That was another unreality, Frank told himself unhappily.

They were fighting their way toward an island of metal, of sanity. It stood unaltered amid madness and devastation: the motor home. Several new gouges scarred the trim where something had tried to break through. The metal had resisted. A little of the pain in his side and shoulders went away at the sight of it.

"If we survive this I’m gonna buy that damn machine. Alicia can turn it into a planter or the kids can make a rec room out of it. I’ll take off the wheels and put it up on blocks, but I’m not giving it back. It’s saved my ass too many times."

"It has not saved anything yet." Burnfingers manipulated the keys with one huge hand until he found the one that fit the door lock.

He and Flucca had to help Frank in. Water continued rising around them. What looked like a giant salamander came wriggling through the water toward them. Burnfingers kicked it aside. The contact produced a feeble, gurgling squeal. Tiny dark eyes peered mournfully up at them out of deeply sunk eye sockets. The face was faintly human.

Once inside, Frank headed for his familiar place behind the wheel. Burnfingers gently but firmly eased him into the other chair.

"Not this time, my friend. Now I drive whether you like it or not." Frank was too exhausted to argue.

"All clear!" Flucca yelled as he closed the door and dogged it tight.

Burnfingers turned the motor home around, accelerated slowly so as not to soak the brakes. The water was halfway up the wheels and still rising. Fortunately, the motor home had higher clearance than any automobile.

After a few miles, the road began to ascend, climbing from the industrialized harbor area into the suburban knolls of Rolling Hills Estates. Looking back the way they’d come, Frank saw a ten-foot-high wave advancing across the city. No ordinary surf, it was more like a bore tide. The solid wall of water rushed up the city streets from the harbor to crash against burning buildings. Anything less than a story high was submerged.

Riding the crest of the irresistible tide was an army of nightmares from the depths, all pulsing red gills and snaggleteeth and poisonous spines. Flat, silvery fish eyes burned with an unnatural intelligence. Even at this distance Frank fancied he could hear the bloated bubbling sounds the aquatic invaders made as they began to feed frenziedly on the drowning carcasses of the inundated city dwellers. Hills and trees soon blotted the horror from view.

The Peninsula appeared deserted. Any surviving families were probably cowering inside their homes. There were no other vehicles moving. Palos Verdes had become a Gibraltarlike island anchoring the southern corner of the sunken Los Angeles Basin.

For the moment they were safe, though the land continued to subside. The fabric of reality was unraveling around them faster than ever. At any moment the remaining dry land might sink beneath the hungry waves or be torn asunder by a new earthquake. Gravity itself might end, sending them spinning into space, choking and gasping for air as the planet’s atmosphere dissipated rapidly around them.

As they continued to climb he saw that the Pacific had reclaimed all the lowlands. The only evidence of former human habitation were the tops of office towers and luxury condominiums along Wilshire and downtown, and the occasional top lane of some freeway interchange to which crowded cars clung like ants trying to escape a flood.

Burnfingers shifted out of low as the ground leveled off. They drove past denuded eucalyptus, oak, sycamore, and bottlebrush. Even the evergreens had been stripped of their needles. As they crossed the Peninsula and turned south toward his house, they saw the ocean once more. It was bubbling and heaving like a boiling pot. Waterspouts danced across the tormented surface despite the absence of wind. The long brown silhouette of Catalina Island was missing entirely from the western horizon, having vanished completely beneath the waves.

His house still sat intact on its acres, the iron gate guarding the entrance unbroken. Flucca borrowed his key and opened the lock, admitting them to the circular driveway.

As they entered, a vast shadow darkened the motor home. Frank leaned forward and looked skyward, flinched as the monster attacked. It was all teeth and claws and dripping toxins. The motor home rang like a bell when the thing made contact with the roof, but the metal held and they managed to remain upright.

Flucca darted outside, popping away with his tiny pistol. Frank followed, then Burnfingers. The Casull bellowed once, twice. Nothing tumbled to the ground and there was no answering scream, but the shadow vanished.

"It will be back." Burnfingers holstered the now empty hand-cannon. "Along with mother knows what else. The world is going crazy."

Frank leaned against the comforting side of the motor home, breathing a little easier. He felt a lot better now than he had when his friends had dragged him from the collapsing city below. The throbbing in his side was starting to relent.

"Nothing’s stable no more," Flucca avowed, still scanning the sky. "The fabric of existence is really coming apart." Satisfied that the clouds shielded nothing more than an errant pigeon, he looked over at Frank. "We’re running out of time, we are. That’s what Mouse told us before we came looking for you."

"That’s what she’s been telling us all along."

"I was beginning to wonder if we could make it all the way to your office," Burnfingers told him. "Then we saw you lying in the water with that bunch preparing to do you."

"Five more minutes." Frank straightened, able now to stand on his own. "No, I didn’t have that much. Three, maybe."

"We have to get her to the Vanishing Point quickly. She is the only one who can stop this."

"You get her there. You and Nick. I’m all out. I’m staying here. I want to die in my own house surrounded by what’s left of my family. If things keep worsening at this rate you’ll never make it, no matter how close the Point lies."

"That is not like you, Frank Sonderberg." Burnfingers put a big hand on the other man’s shoulder. "I have been in worse spots and it has always worked out for me."

Frank was shaking his head. "How would you know if it worked out for you or not? You’re nuts, remember? Besides, how can you cope with a situation that changes from day to day, minute to minute? How do you cope with a new reality every time you turn around?"

"You change with it."

"Burnfingers, I ain’t like you. You’ve been some weird places and done some weird things. Me, I’m strictly middle-class straight and normal. I can’t take this anymore. I can’t take it. I’m not the hero type. I knew that when I was growing up, I knew it when I was going through school, and I knew it when I was starting my business. I still know it. It’s just not in me, understand?"

Burnfingers replied solemnly. "Sometimes, my friend, we are forced into situations we don’t like, that make us uncomfortable, that we think we haven’t a chance in hell of coping with. But people cope, Frank. They cope all the time. From what I have seen of you these past many days I believe you can cope, too. No more talk of dying in your hogan. This is not the day for it. If you do go down, we all go down together fighting, if it be against the Anarchis itself. People were not made so they could cower in their beds when there was work to be done."

"You heard the man." Flucca headed for the front steps. "Let’s get the others out of there."

"What about it?" Burnfingers jerked his head in Flucca’s direction. "He has half your size and twice your guts."

Frank hesitated, took a step forward. Too late, he knew he was committed. But according to Mouse, he’d been committed since that morning when he’d stopped to pick her up. So why the hell was he beating himself to death worrying about the inevitable? When he took the second step, Burnfingers Begay smiled.

"That’s better."

Halfway to the front door the big hibiscus bush on the left wrapped leafless branches around Frank’s waist. He let out a yell as the branches pulled him toward a mass of leaves that concealed something wet, green, and threatening. What they needed was an ax or machete. Instead, they had to make do with Burnfingers’s butterfly knife. It sawed through the branches as the remaining landscaping began to rustle alarmingly around them. More mutations, more changes.

"See, it’s hopeless," Frank muttered as he brushed himself off. "Pretty soon we’ll be fighting crabgrass and bugs."

"Mankind’s always fought crabgrass and bugs," Flucca reminded him. "Let’s get inside."

The rose bushes were the worst because of the thorns. By the time they reached the door all three of them were scratched and bleeding. Burnfingers flailed at the clutching vines while Frank and Flucca pounded on the door.

"Wendy, Alicia, open up! It’s me!"

The door was wrenched inward and he almost fell. Alicia caught him. She was crying.

"Frank, Frank — I thought we’d never see you again."

"Same here, sweetheart." He held her close, not wanting to let her go.

Only Burnfingers’s size and weight allowed him to shut the door against the press of rose bush and hibiscus, which a degenerate reality had turned carnivorous.

Wendy stood in the center of the hall, staring blankly toward the door. Her expression was as lifeless as was possible for a sixteen-year-old to muster. Frank tried to manage a smile.

"How ya doin', kiddo?"

She blinked, focused on him. "Daddy. What’s going to happen now, Daddy? I thought it was all over and it’s only gotten worse, it’s gotten worse."

He moved to embrace her. She hardly had the strength left to hug him, having cried herself out earlier. Branches and vines beat a staccato tattoo on walls and roof as the vegetation went berserk all over the Peninsula. They weren’t strong enough to penetrate the walls.

"Got anything in the way of large and sharp?" Burnfingers inquired, feeling it was time to interrupt the reunion. "An ax would be nice."

Frank looked back at him, Alicia under one arm and his daughter beneath the other. "This isn’t exactly a mountain cabin. What would I be doing with an ax?"

"Thought you might have a fireplace."

"Two of 'em, but we have wood delivered in the wintertime. We don’t cut it ourselves." He remembered something else. "Hang on. There are garden shears in the garage. I mean, we have gardening service but we do keep a few tools and — "

Burnfingers was gone already, racing for the garage. Alicia peered up at her husband. "If we have a minute or two, would you like some coffee, dear?"

"God, I’d love some. If it runs normal and doesn’t bite."

Mouse greeted him when he entered the kitchen. He waved or said something meaningless — he wasn’t sure. Everyone sat down at the dinette and stared at the green carnage taking place in their yard. The double-paned glass kept the rampaging plants away from them but not from each other.

Decorative bushes ripped and tore at each other in eerie silence, the only noise the sound of breaking wood and leaves being shredded. Even the big elm by the back wall had gone mad, flailing away at its smaller neighbors until it found itself locked in a wrestling match with the eucalyptus nearby. Meanwhile, smaller branches and vines flailed wildly at the roof and walls of the house.

The smell of fresh-brewed coffee was a physical presence in the kitchen, its taste wonderfully invigorating. A few things hadn’t changed. His family was still human, his house still a sanctuary in a world gone mad.

Certainly Mouse’s presence helped. She was leaning against a counter, sipping tea.

"It is getting out of hand. The condition is becoming chronic."

"Now there’s a news bulletin," Frank muttered. The coffee was balm to his throat, his stomach, his soul. "The whole city’s gone."

"Gone?" Wendy stared at him, eyes wide. "You mean, like, everything?"

"Like everything, kiddo. The sea’s come up a hundred feet. Catalina’s not there anymore. First the people went nutso, then the machines, and now the land itself. It’s all underwater. You didn’t see any of it?" His gaze flicked to his wife, who shook her head negatively.

"We haven’t been outside since Burnfingers and Niccolo went looking for you. They told us to stay in and keep the doors bolted."

Frank grunted. "Sound advice."

"What’s going to happen now, sweetheart?" She was playing at drinking her own coffee, but her hand was shaking so badly she had to set the mug down until the trembling subsided. "What’s going to happen to us?"

"I dunno. Our reality’s shot regardless."

"Perhaps not," Mouse said calmly.

He stared sharply at her. "Don’t you of all people go trying to make me feel better. I’ve been through hell the last hour and I’m in no mood to be patronized. I know my own reality when I see it. This is my house. I was in my own office, among my own people, until it all turned into something out of a real bad horror movie. Whatever happens now, nothing can change that. Our world is gone."

"Are you so absolutely sure this is your world, then? Your reality? There are millions of reality lines, Frank Sonderberg. The slightest of differences would be sufficient to distinguish yours from one very much like it."

He put the coffee down. "So how do we know if this one is ours?"

"Once the Spinner has been soothed and the fabric of reality made whole again you will return to your one true reality. Only then will you know if this line is yours — or another."

"And if this one isn’t ours, where are the local equivalents of us?"

"In Las Vegas, enjoying your vacation, I should imagine. Provided Las Vegas still exists on this line."

"You mean, if this ain’t our reality and we hang around here long enough we might run into ourselves?"

"Nothing is impossible when reality lines cross."

"That’s enough!" Wendy rose from the table, screaming and clutching her head. "That’s enough, that’s enough, that’s enough! I can’t understand any more!"

Frank rose to grab her, pull her close. She kept raving. What was he supposed to do, slap her until she quieted? That was what they did in the movies, but this wasn’t a movie. This was his daughter who’d suffered too much he was holding in his arms. He couldn’t hit her to help her.

So he just rocked her gently and kept telling her everything was going to be all right and, as it developed, that was exactly what was required.

A clattering sounded in the hallway and everyone turned sharply, but it was only Burnfingers Begay returning from his foray to the garage. His hands held the garden shears Frank had remembered seeing hanging on a wall hook. Also two small tree saws and a pair of hand clippers.

"No chainsaw, but these will help. We should take all the big knives, too." He looked over their heads. "Where is Flucca?"

Frank turned a circle. He didn’t remember when the dwarf had disappeared. His return coincided with Burnfingers’s own.

"We’re all here, then." Burnfingers nodded to himself. "We will fight our way out together, as we have done since the beginning. I am glad I will be with white-eyes who have learned how to fight."

"Fight? Our way out?" Alicia sounded despondent. "Frank, we’re not leaving again, are we? Not from here, not from our house."

"It may not be our house," he told her grimly. "Burnfingers is right. We can’t stay here. We have to go on until there’s an end to all this, no matter who wins. And if this does turn out to be our reality, I don’t want to stay here anyway. Not with the whole damn city drowned. At this rate the rest of California’s going to go, too. Maybe the whole planet." He looked over at Mouse. "I wish to hell I’d never set eyes on you."

"I’m sorry, Frank Sonderberg. Right now I’m the only reality you have left."

"Yeah, I guessed." At that instant he understood everything better than at any moment since they’d left Barstow. Small comfort at best. "Let’s go."

"No, Daddy." Wendy took a step away from him.

"Honey, we have to. We’ve come too far to stop here. Don’t you see? We don’t have any choice in the matter. Probably haven’t had for some time. Besides," he finished quietly, "if we don’t go with Mouse I have this powerful feeling we’ll never have a chance of seeing your brother again."

"What makes you think we have any chance anyway?" she replied bitterly.

"Because I believe we do. I believe it because I have to."

Mouse was smiling that thin, enigmatic smile he found so maddening. "I knew you were the right one when you stopped for me, Frank Sonderberg."

He whirled to face her. "How about you shut up for a while?" His anger surprised him. Since he had the strength in him, he took the opportunity to rail at God, the fates, and whatever other agency might have played a part in the disintegration of his pleasant, contented life. What he really wanted to do was fight back, but in this war there was nothing to strike out against except the shapeless, ill-defined nemesis Mouse called the Anarchis.

That didn’t prevent him from cursing the Cosmos, which he proceeded to do loudly and fluently. When he was finished he gave his wife a hand up from the table.

"We’re stuck, sweetheart. We can’t go back and we can’t stay here, so we have to go on. So we might as well give it our best shot. Whaddaya say?"

Her smile was full of love. "That’s how we’ve always lived, Frank. I guess I’m too set in my ways to change now even if I want to."

"That’s my gal." He kissed her lightly, then turned to Burnfingers. "I think we’re ready."

"I know it is so, my friend. Now, everyone grab something useful. Knives, cleavers, food, bottled water, juice — anything we might need."

They loaded themselves down, filling pockets with food and medicine, arming themselves with makeshift weapons. Mouse carried more than her share, but she was so full of surprises Frank didn’t even blink at the size of the sack she slung over her shoulder.

As they assembled supplies in the front hall, preparatory to making a dash for the motor home, Frank saw Burnfingers emerge from the garage carrying a double armful of unexpected devices. He nodded in their direction as the Indian began shoving them in an empty suitcase.

"What are you gonna do with all that stuff?" The small propane torch made some sense: what they couldn’t cut or stab or shoot they might be able to burn. But the rest struck him as peculiarly useless.

"You will see. At least, I hope you will have the chance to see."

Frank considered, trying to look past the present moment at something else. "You know, we sell a lot of hobby stuff in our stores." He nodded at Burnfingers’s package. "Steven used that for a little while, then got bored. Funny it should be lying around. I wonder how much of what’s happened here lately is coincidence and how much of it something else. That Mouse — I get the feeling she can do a few tricks with the threads of reality herself."

Everyone assembled in the front hall, loaded down with bags and suitcases. Flucca insisted on being first out the door. "If they aim for your heads, they’ll miss mine. Besides, I’m used to working with vegetables." Alicia’s biggest cleaver dangled from his right hand as he turned.

Burnfingers stood ready to back him up as he flung the door wide and the little man dashed outside, weapon held high. He didn’t have to use it. The plants' blind fury had burned itself out.

The front walkway was littered with debris. It looked like the aftermath of a hurricane. Branches and leaves were scattered everywhere, a fine carpet of brown-green, which was just beginning to decay. Only a few growths remained standing. All were broken and torn, ripped to pieces by their neighbors. A few of the smaller plants, which had been ignored in the greater carnage, reached weakly for the refugees, but their roots and leaves were too short to span the walkway pavement. Flucca and Frank cut them to bits anyway, glad of a chance to strike back at something.

Taking the suitcases and heavy bags from the women, Burnfingers tossed them through the motor home’s open door, then helped them inside. A shadow the size of a 727 passed overhead, but when Frank tilted back his head and shaded his eyes he saw nothing. He wasn’t disappointed. Whatever it had been might be coming back, and he was relieved when it was his turn to enter.

"Sure you feel well enough to drive?" Burnfingers asked him as Frank settled himself behind the wheel.

"You kiddin'? I’m looking forward to it."

They took their seats and he headed for the gate, not bothering to close it behind them as they barreled through. Whether this was or wasn’t their own reality, he doubted they’d be coming back.

He slowed as they approached the first intersection. All the streets were carpeted with shredded vegetation. The remaining stripped growth stood motionless as the dead all around them, having spent their energy in that earlier hour of cannibalistic fury. Only a few of the taller trees that lined the streets jerked spasmodically. None reached for the motor home. Not another vehicle appeared as they sat idling behind the stop sign.

"Which way?" He looked back over his shoulder.

Mouse stood by a closet, eyes closed tight. Either she was thinking hard, or else inspecting something none of them could see. Then her eyes snapped open and she looked to her right.

"That way?" Frank sounded dubious. "That way’s down. Nothing there anymore except ocean." Come to think of it, he reminded himself, there was nothing in any direction except ocean. He shrugged and pulled on the wheel, putting the motor home on the drive that wound like wire around the ragged edge of the Peninsula.

Soon the ocean came into view. Catalina was still gone and there were more waterspouts and whirlpools than before. Immense brown-red shapes the size of small ships battled in the raging water. Behind them, the sun was setting. Even it was different: a swollen, unhealthy-looking yellow globe. Frank was sure he could make out individual solar prominences flaring hellishly from the edge of the bloated disk. Was it an optical illusion or had it really grown? Would it go nova on this reality line while they were still driving in circles? He fancied he could see dark sunspots crawling across the nuclear surface, forced himself to turn back to the leaf-and branch-paved road.

The coast drive descended sharply toward a small suburb called Hollywood Riviera. Redondo Beach was the first major community up the coast.

Except Redondo Beach wasn’t there anymore. There was only the agitated green sea, which stretched as far north as the Hollywood Hills. A few taller structures still thrust their uppermost floors above the waves, now that the rate of subsidence seemed to have slowed. East and north, the towers of Wilshire Boulevard rose above the water like a line of violets. He applied the brake.

"What now?"

Mouse nodded calmly. "This is the right path. Continue."

"But we can’t," Alicia pointed out. "The road goes under the water."

The other woman smiled at her. "Reality is what you make of it. Keep going, Frank. I’ll tell you when to stop or turn."

So this was it, he told himself tiredly. They could turn back to the empty house in the devastated neighborhood and wait for the ballooning sun to fry them, or he could listen to Mouse. Tiny, elfin-faced, beautiful, enigmatic, irresistible Mouse. She’d followed as often as she’d led, these past crazy days. Now she was telling him to do the impossible.

But was it really so very much more radical than sticking one’s foot over the edge of the world, or driving blind on a highway that ran through ultimate void past a veil of stars? If there could be roads through nothing, why couldn’t there be roads through something? Water, for instance? Slowly his foot came off the brake.

"Frank …?"

He turned to his wife and smiled, surprised at his own indifference to what might happen next. "There’s nowhere else to go, sweetheart. Not here, not on this line. So we might as well go on."

She looked at Mouse, who smiled reassuringly. Then she sat up straight in her seat, her hands gripping the armrests tightly. "Okay. I don’t know why, but okay."

"There is only one other problem." Burnfingers was staring straight ahead as Frank started down the slope, the motor home picking up speed as it headed for the water.

"What’s that?" Frank heard himself shout.

"I cannot swim."

The motor home did not leak. Not even a little bit. Nor did it show signs of leaking as they plunged deeper and deeper into the resurgent sea. By law they should have come to a halt. At the very least, water should have seeped into the engine compartment and shut them down, or the air they continued to breathe should have made them too buoyant to cling to the increasingly rough seabed. Laws, however, no longer seemed to apply to them, natural ones least of all.

Mouse continued to give directions and Frank obeyed, too far beyond astonishment to object. He tried to pretend they were out for an afternoon drive on the San Diego Freeway, but it was hard to ignore the fish and other denizens of the deep who swam curiously up to the windshield and windows. Something was keeping the water out, and it wasn’t a pressure differential or airtight seals. It defied reason — which meant that in the context of the past several days it was perfectly logical.

"Just don’t open any windows." Mouse’s eyes alternated between open and shut. Frank wasn’t inclined to ask why. "We are safe within a fragment of your reality, which you have carried about with you the way a diving spider carries its air supply. Now is the time for you to make use of it."

"How long will it last?" Alicia asked softly, marveling at the increasingly dark landscape.

"Long enough."

"It’d better, little singer." For the first time since they’d made his acquaintance, the big Navajo was showing symptoms of fear.

They had a hard time driving through the kelp forest that clung to the narrow continental shelf. A pair of mutated things that looked like sharks with hands inspected them closely before swimming away. Frank wondered how their protective bubble of reality would respond to a direct attack. Would any assailants bounce off, or would they be able to penetrate?

As time passed and the air inside the motor home remained breathable, he found he was able to relax a little. They were so deep now that if their protection did collapse it would all be over in a few seconds. They rolled down an increasingly flat and featureless bottom until he came to a steep drop-off. He wasn’t even surprised to discover that the brakes still functioned.

"Keep going," Mouse instructed him.

"What, over that?"

"It’s the way." Her eyes were only half open, giving her a slightly sinister look.

Frank turned to his wife. They exchanged one more kiss. No need for words anymore. Not in a here and now that wasn’t.

He switched from brake to accelerator. As they went over the cliff he instinctively shifted into low. The slope was almost seventy degrees, but they didn’t fall. Somehow he kept control.

"Reality is sticky stuff," Mouse told him with a sly smile.

Feeling almost jaunty, he switched on the headlights. The twin beams pierced the blackness for forty feet. Schools of small silvery fish swam into the lights, hung as if paralyzed for an instant before dashing away in fright.

Their descent seemed to continue forever. When the cliff did terminate, the end was abrupt and unexpected. The ground leveled off. A broad, flat plain stretched endlessly before them. It looked like mud and sand, but the motor home progressed across the uncertain surface without any trouble at all. Except for the small area lit by the headlights, it was pitch-black around them.

"Wow, did you guys see that?" Wendy was sitting by a big side window, staring out into the darkness.

"See what, dear?" her mother asked.

"Something big. It had teeth and fins and it looked like a neon sign!"

"Didn’t know we were that deep." Frank spoke without turning. "You sure we’re goin' the right way?"

"We are going the only way," Mouse assured him.

"Pressure down here must be hundreds of pounds a square inch, or however the hell they measure that stuff."

Whatever the pressure was, the motor home cruised along unaffected. The roof did not crack, the joints did not groan. It wouldn’t take that long, Frank knew. If their protection went, the motor home and everything within would be flattened like a tin can beneath a tank.

Other phosphorescent monstrosities gradually became visible. Things with stomachs bigger than their bodies, with heads bigger than their stomachs, all needle-sharp teeth and bright electric eyes. The motor home’s lights froze them briefly before they jerked or darted back into the eternal night that was their home.

Other creatures, infrequent but active, scuttled out of the motor home’s path, stirring up mud and silt as they fled. Once something like a fifty-foot flounder exploded out of their way, stirring up so much muck they never got a decent look at it.

Frank glanced down at the speedometer. With the accelerator pushed to the floor and no obstacles to slow their progress, they were doing slightly over a hundred miles an hour, right up near the motor home’s limit. He saw no reason for caution. There was nothing down here to run into and in Mouse they had a guide more efficient than any sonar.

Only once did she direct him to deviate momentarily from their course. As they did so he saw the plutonic glow of subsurface vents off to their left. Five-foot-long worms clustered close around whirling plumes of Earth’s breath. Bacteria clouded the water, feeding on hydrogen sulfides. It was all real, and more alien than anything they’d yet encountered.

After several days of this Frank found himself wondering if it was Mouse’s intention to circumnavigate the globe underwater. They were making excellent progress and the fuel level fell with inexplicable slowness, but their range was still finite. She assured him repeatedly that they were not driving aimlessly, but toward a definite destination.

There was no propane to cook with, but the motor home’s microwave worked fine. Assisted by the imaginative Flucca, Alicia managed to conjure up remarkably nutritious meals from their declining food stock. Only Burnfingers was unable to relax and enjoy the impossible ride. Knowing that tons of water pressed tight all around them, held back only by a thin strip of transient reality, he kept to himself and said little.

"We’re getting close," Mouse finally said one day.

Frank was doing his stint at the wheel. Now he took a deep breath. He’d begun to despair of ever hearing those words despite her repeated reassurances.

She was crowding close, her perfume distracting him from his driving. "Turn here. No, more to the right. That’s it."

He complied, marveling once more at how the motor home responded under what should have been not only impossible but deadly conditions.

"Now straight."

A loud bump came from beneath and Frank’s blood went cold for an instant. Then he realized they hadn’t lost their seal of reality. It was only the sound of the front shocks adjusting as they began to ascend. He shifted back into low.

The grade was as steep as the one they’d descended when leaving Los Angeles but the motor home climbed with all the agility of a four-wheel drive. Several hours passed before Wendy let out a shout.

"Dad, turn the lights off! It’s getting light outside!"

Sure enough, the blackness through which they’d traveled for days was giving way to a velvety purple color. Soon brightly hued schools of tropical fish were swimming around them, darting for cover among rocks and coral as the motor home advanced.

Paradoxically, Frank found he was more nervous now than he’d been at any time since leaving Los Angeles They’d come a long way under unbelievable circumstances. But if anything went wrong now they could drown just as easily twenty feet beneath the surface as two miles down.

He was worrying needlessly. The motor home continued to ascend into water clear as crystal. Doubly gratifying was the fact that all the fish looked normal. They saw no mutants, no bizarre shapes, no twisted bodies. Only color and form.

They had to drive for a while before they found a break in the jagged reef. Once beyond the coral wall, the surface hung placidly only a few feet above them. The radio antenna broke through, leaving a small wake behind it as they advanced. Frank found himself driving across a gentle bottom paved with white sand.

Come on, he found himself urging the motor home. Just a little farther. Another couple hundred yards and we can breathe free again. A little longer and we’ll be there.

Be where? he asked himself. Be where, beware. He found he could smile, however grim the humor of it, now that the pressure induced by their abyssal excursion was almost gone. What strange territory had they reached after days of hard driving? Would this land prove as blasted and doomed as the Los Angeles they’d fled? Or would it be as peaceful and normal as the coral and fish surrounding them?

They began to emerge from the sea, waiting tensely as the water fell first below the level of the windshield, then past the hood, and finally to the tires. Frank drove out onto a wide crescent beach. Dry sand slowed the motor home no more than had the abyssal muck. Reality, he’d long since concluded, was a wonderful accessory to have on a long trip.

There was a gap in the line of palm trees that fringed the beach. He didn’t need Mouse to point the way. The opening revealed a paved highway two lanes wide. A faded, intermittent yellow stripe ran down the middle.

It was getting hot, but he held off activating the air-conditioning. The gas gauge was hovering perilously near empty.

Alicia rose abruptly and marched toward the door. "I’m going outside."

He rose and caught her before she was halfway to the exit. "No way. We don’t know what’s out there."

"It should be safe enough." Both of them turned to Mouse. Her eyes were open wide now, lavender beacons. "We’re free of the water and back on the right reality line. Your own — or one barely distinguishable from it."

"Barely?" Frank clung to his doubts. "That’s what you said about the one we just fled."

Flucca was standing by the door. "I’ll go first, if you like."

"Not a chance, Small Chef." Burnfingers brushed him aside. Frank was startled to see that the big man was hyperventilating. Apparently he’d stood the confinement as long as he was able.

Before anyone could stop him, which would likely have been an impossible task in any event, he pushed the door open and jumped out. Air rushed through, sweeping aside the staleness of the previous days. It was rich with the aroma of saltwater, green growing things, and comforting warmth. It drew them to the doorway.

Burnfingers was doing a dance ten yards distant, hooting gleefully and kicking up sand. "It is all right, it is good!" Ignoring their stares, he knelt to grab a handful of sand and rub it over his face. Then he toppled slowly onto his back, arms spread wide, eyes regarding the clouds.

"Is he dead?" Alicia wondered fearfully.

"Naw." Frank used the handgrip to ease himself out, thrilled to be standing on solid ground once more. "He’s just enjoying the sunshine."

Wendy followed her father. Alicia exited next, inhaling the fresh air. Frank watched her breasts rise and fall, marveling at the thoughts that can occur to a man even in times of serious crisis. Mouse was standing alongside his wife, and his subsequent thoughts embarrassed him deeply.

Burnfingers hadn’t budged. While the others joined him in relaxing for the first time in days, Frank spent the time giving the motor home a thorough examination.

There was ample proof that their deep-sea drive had been anything but a dream. Rank saltwater was still dripping from the roof. Bottom-dwelling fish and crustaceans unlucky enough to have been caught in the axles and bumpers were starting to decay in the sun. Some had exploded messily under the pressure change. Flucca wandered over to help him with the cleanup.

"Look at this one." The little man held up a three-foot-long fish with minuscule fins. The body was barely an inch in diameter. Two feelers as long as the body itself protruded from the skull. It twitched once in Flucca’s grasp.

"We’ve been through a lot of madness, but this last has to be the ultimate. We all oughta be as dead as that eel thing. And this," Frank said as he tapped the metal side of the motor home, "should be scrap."

"Some things they still build well," was all Flucca could think of to say.

After circling the vehicle one last time to convince himself it was still intact, Frank and Flucca rejoined the others.

"Isn’t this a beautiful spot?" Alicia was surveying the little bay where they’d emerged from the sea, shading her gaze from a tropical sun. "Maybe when this is all over we can come back here."

"If it’s on our reality line, yeah." There was a harshness to his tone he hadn’t intended. He turned to Mouse. "You said we were real close. You’ve been spouting that line ever since we picked you up."

"Distance is a relative matter, Frank Sonderberg. North we must go a little ways farther yet."

"What happens when we get there?" Wendy asked her. "To this Vanishing Point, I mean."

"When we get there? When we get there, child, why then you will hear me sing."

"But we’ve already heard you sing."

Mouse shook her head slowly. "No. You haven’t heard me sing. Really sing. Not yet." She continued to stare northward. "But I think there is yet time for that. Yet time."

"Then let’s get moving." Frank turned toward the motor home.

"I know we have to find Steven," Alicia said to him, "but don’t you think you should rest a little?"

"We’ll rest when this is done. In our own reality, which we’re not sure this is yet." He trudged through the sand toward the only reality he’d known for days. Reluctantly, his family followed.

"Not home." Burnfingers Begay brushed sand from his pants and sleeves. "Hot enough, but the palm trees do not belong. Arizona has plenty of beach. Just no ocean."

Wendy laughed and Alicia smiled, but not Frank. His sense of humor was stuck on another reality line. He wouldn’t laugh again until his family was back together and Burnfingers Begay and Mouse and Niccolo Flucca and the Anarchis and Chaos had all been jammed back into the unimportant corner of his mind where they belonged.

The motor home balked when he started the engine. It jerked forward, hesitated, balked again. The exhaust pipe spat water and dead fish all over the pristine beach. Gritting his teeth, Frank kept trying it until the engine cleared. By the time they pulled into the northbound lane of the narrow road, it was running smoothly again.

The terrain was a patchwork: emerald outcrops of dense vegetation consisting of palms, ferns, and brilliant flowers alternating with barren fields of rough dark lava. As the road crossed a narrow spit that extended out into the ocean, they came into view of a towering active volcano. It reminded Frank too much of the first stop on their odyssey through alternate realities.

Mouse’s reaction was very different. "The place!" she declared excitedly. "The marker. The smoking harbinger. Very soon now, very soon." She was standing between his seat and Alicia’s, staring intently forward.

Soon they were driving along a thin strip of road with ocean on one side and sheer cliffs on the other. Rocks lying in the road kept Frank glancing nervously at the plant-choked wall of stone on their left. The road had been sliced from the sheer rock at great expense, yet no one seemed to use it. Since leaving the beach they hadn’t seen another vehicle, another sign of life.

"Wherever we’re going we’d better get there soon," he muttered. "I don’t know how it’s lasted this long, but we’ve about run out." He indicated the fuel gauge. The digital readout rested on empty. "We’re down to emergency gas, if there is any. Must be, because we’re still goin'."

"There! Turn there!"

It threw Frank for a moment because it was so rare that Mouse shouted. He hit the brakes harder than was necessary, then crept forward until they reached the turnoff she’d indicated.

The steep, narrow dirt track occupied a cleft in the rocks. Concealed as it was by thick ferns and other growths, it was all but invisible from the main road. He would have driven past it a hundred times without suspecting its presence. Reluctantly, he turned into the opening. It was barely wide enough to admit the motor home. Occasionally the metal sides scraped rock.

Tropical flora closed in around them. It was as if they were traveling down a long, green tunnel. At times the ferns packing the open space in search of scarce sunlight were so thick they completely blocked the windshield. Frank had to drive slowly and by feel, praying there were no sharp dips or unexpected bends or drop-offs ahead. Soon the road itself disappeared. They continued to advance up the streambed, which had cut the canyon. A trickle of water ran down the center, disappearing between their wheels and reemerging in their wake.

After half an hour of driving across terrain that the motor home had never been designed to handle, the tunnel opened onto a much wider but equally steep-sided canyon.

Walls of volcanic rock towered hundreds of feet above the canyon floor. In places they were nearly vertical. Everywhere was dense vegetation. It looked like films Frank had seen of New Guinea or the South Pacific, though there was no reason to believe they were anywhere in either vicinity, or even on the same reality line where such familiar places existed.

Mouse stood close by, nodding and murmuring incomprehensibly to herself. In the absence of further instruction he kept going.

The streambed filled up and became more like a road again, silt muting the bumps and bounces. The squeaking, complaining suspension gave every indication of failing utterly at any moment.

They topped a small rise in the middle of the canyon valley. Ahead, the by now awesome walls enclosing them on all sides came together. Almost. Where they nearly met, a thin sliver of sky showed clearly. Everything ended at that place. Or extended from it, Frank thought. The canyon, the vegetation, the little stream, even the sky and sunlight all angled toward that narrow passage.

Mouse sighed heavily. "There it is."

"There what is?" he asked tiredly.

Her smile was wider than ever. "The Vanishing Point."