Worlds in Chaos (61 page)

They had to get back across to Highway 281 running parallel with them farther inland, and then south along it to the San Saucillo site. The road they were on ran a little above the flat expanse of land to their left, stretching away twenty-five miles to the coast. Watching the approaching line of foam as it appeared and disappeared in the murk, Keene put it at two miles away at most. If Charlie was right about progressive tides getting higher, and they took 281 as a likely guess for the next high-water mark, the water’s average rate of advancement from the former coast would be between six and seven miles per hour. That meant it would reach Highway 77, the one they were on, in around twenty minutes. Timing the truck’s odometer with his watch told Keene that they were averaging close to twenty-five miles per hour, and with the state of the road and the obstacles, Legermount wasn’t going to push any more. The turnoff that Keene normally took when driving to San Saucillo was fifteen miles farther south, which at this rate would take them thirty-six minutes. They weren’t going to make it. It was as simple as that.

He looked up at Mitch after timing another mile and shook his head. “Scratch the plan for taking the exit that I said. It isn’t going to work.”

“Great. So what do we do?”

“A few miles ahead, the road goes down into a dip where it crosses a valley with a creek—kind of wide and shallow. You come up the other side onto a ridge that extends west. Our only chance is to try and pick up a farm track or something going that way. We’d be running ahead of the tide and should gain on it. Saucillo’s on high ground too, so if we can make 281 with time to spare we should be okay.”

Mitch turned to Legermount, relaying the proposition unvoiced. Legermount nodded and said nothing as he wound the wheel around and then back, keeping his eyes on the road.

They passed a succession of overturned vehicles, carried off the roadway and containing disheveled, water-sodden corpses, that looked as if they had been caught in a previous tide. As the truck began descending into the dip that Keene had mentioned, a bus filled with people, its roof loaded up the way the truck’s had been, appeared going the other way. “We can’t stop,” Mitch said sharply. Legermount didn’t have to be told. He slowed down enough to gesture back with a thumb and wave his hand negatively. After the bus had passed, he took his eyes off the road intermittently to glance at the mirror, finally shaking his head. “They’re not turning.” Keene sighed, but there was nothing to be done. God knew what those people were doing here in the first place.

Looking to the left as the ground began to slope, Keene could see the approaching front plainly now, still maybe a half mile off but with a tongue surging ahead into the valley that the road descended into. It was not a placid, beachlike rising of the tide accompanied by rolling breakers, but an angry, boiling wall of foam, flailing the land ahead with wreckage, debris, and pieces of uprooted trees as it advanced, while behind, the ocean rose and heaved in impatiently jostling hills of water and wind. Keene felt a coldness at the base of his spine and a sweaty slipperiness in his palms. The tension of the other two in the cab communicated itself palpably. A wheel hit a rock, and the truck bounced sickeningly. Legermount swore under his breath.

As the road leveled, the first fingers of water were streaming across the lowermost point ahead. They were below the level of the oncoming crest, now a churning cliff of water bearing down on them. A building of some kind on the creek bank came apart as they watched and was swept away in pieces. Parts of the roof reappeared again, bobbing and cartwheeling in a surge of whiteness that engulfed the roadway just yards ahead. Then, momentarily, the surge retreated, but the truck slowed as it hit the resistance of water, throwing the occupants forward.

“
Don’t slack off now! Go for it!
” Mitch shouted.

Legermount straightened his leg as if he were trying to push the gas pedal through the floor. Keene felt them sway as a swell caught them on the side, and for a moment he thought they were afloat without traction. Just at that moment, he could have done without being an engineer with the picture in his mind of the probable state of what was under the hood, and what water would do to it. But it was time they were due a small miracle, and somehow the motor shuddered and roared defiantly through to claim a tiny victory of abused technology. The road began rising, and while the land to the left and ahead of them was still being swallowed up, they had gained some margin, however temporary. Keene leaned out and looked back. The water was already far into the valley, cutting off the opposite side like a strait separating an island. He knew that the road dropped again not much farther on. Very possibly, the water would have covered it already. They had to get off the highway before then.

Beyond the ditch, the road was now bounded by a wire fence strung between wooden posts with a plantation of young firs on the far side, mostly flattened or uprooted and thrown together in tangles. The fence was down in places and sagging in others under debris that had been thrown against it, but there could be no crossing the silt-laden ditch between it and the road. Keene scanned the margin ahead anxiously. Just as it seemed that they were going to have to start descending again, he spotted a shoulder ahead where the ditch disappeared into a pipe under a gravel ramp crossing to what looked like a gate. “Slow down,” he yelled across the cab. Legermount eased off the gas. Below, to their left, a sheet of ocean extended away where there had been nothing but land an hour before.

There was a gate, but it was intact between concrete posts and appeared locked. Behind it, a fire break led away between the trees, offering just a watery, sandy surface littered with branches and downed trunks. “That’s gotta be a way into a trap if I ever saw one,” Mitch said.

“That’s something we’ll have to risk,” Keene replied. “It’ll be worse farther on.”

“How do we get past the gate?” Legermount asked.

Keene took in the situation rapidly. “Forget the gate. We can take out the section of fence next to it.”

Legermount steered the truck onto the ramp and brought it nose-up to the section of adjacent fence. Before it had stopped, Keene was out of the door and on his way back, hammering on the side with a fist as he ran. Birden opened the rear door from the inside. “Tool bag!” Keene shouted. “We need cutters . . . maybe claw hammer, pry bar.” Colby threw the bag out, then tumbled out himself, along with Birden and Cavan. Keene tore the bag open, took out a large set of cutters, and ran back to begin attacking the fence, snipping the mesh squares vertically down a line by one of the posts. Mitch found a pair of heavy pliers with cutter edges and went to work at the bottom, while the others held the strands back as they parted. Keene looked back across the highway behind the truck. Fountains of white spray were already exploding upward from below the end of the ridge. “
That’ll do it!
” he yelled at the others. “Let’s get moving.” While Birden and Cavan held the cut section of fence aside, Legermount eased the truck through the gap.

“We might need help if anything needs clearing,” Mitch told Birden. “You ride shotgun outside Legermount’s door.”

Keene stepped up into the cab as it passed. Mitch followed him but remained standing, holding the door open. Birden did the same on the other side. The others threw themselves in the rear while Alicia held the door from the inside. Legermount eased the clutch up. For a moment the rear wheels spun and skidded sideways, and then they gripped. They began snaking a way through the fallen trees and heaps of washed-up brush. But the way turned out to be not so bad as they had feared, the fallen branches giving traction in the sandy soil. The soldiers riding the cab only had to get down twice to haul obstructions aside before they came to a dirt service track, following the remnants of a power line, that led in the right direction and it looked as if it might keep to the ridge. They stopped long enough for Birden to return to the back of the truck. Mitch hauled himself in beside Keene, closed the door, and leaned his head back, letting his helmet rest against the cab wall to release in a long, slow gasp the tension he had been accumulating. Legermount reached forward and slapped the dash panel of the truck affectionately.

“Well, I’ll be darned,” he breathed. “The old gal done did it.”

“We still have Mexico to make,” Keene reminded him.

Legermount settled down more comfortably behind the wheel. “The way she feels right now, I reckon we could make Argentina,” he replied.

The service track brought them to a wider farm road, which they followed south for a mile or so before curving around to follow the contours in a more-or-less westerly direction once again. They emerged onto Highway 281 at a point Keene recognized as being only a couple of miles north of the turnoff to Amspace’s San Saucillo launch site. As they turned left onto 281, they could see water northward, away to the right. That would be the valley of the river that bounded the north side of the landing field, Keene informed the others. Past the landing field, the river curved south, marking the perimeter of the two-mile safety zone around the launch pads. Depending on how far upriver the tide had penetrated, and if the water had reached 281 farther south, the San Saucillo facility could have become an island on three sides by now.

50

It was like coming back to a place of fond remembrances and finding everything bulldozed away for a new highway intersection or a shopping mall—except the recollections weren’t from some idealization of distant growing-up years but a matter of mere weeks ago. The last time Keene saw the grounds bordering the approach road had been from the helicopter taking him and Vicki back to Kingsville after flying from Montemorelos, when cleanup crews had been collecting the trash left after the launch demonstration. There had been stone falls and cratering, and the area to the south was charred and blackened. Disabled vehicles stood along the roadside, all of them dented and holed, several burnt out, most with wheels missing and hoods and trunk lids open, stripped of movable essentials.

Loud concussions sounded from the north. The sky was the eeriest they had seen, causing even Mitch to gaze up wordlessly with an awed expression that probably came as close as he was capable of to dread. With the clearer masses of air coming in from the ocean, the canopy that had remained solid for days with dust and smoke from the conflagrations inland was now a turmoil of fiery clouds rolling down to blot out the landscape at one moment, then a minute later opening into vast vaults of emptiness extending upward like inverted canyons between walls of incandescent colors. All the time, the rumbling of distant thunder and the booms of bodies passing above or exploding in surrounding regions merged in a background of noise punctuated by occasional nearer detonations that were becoming practically continuous.

There was something ironic about the way the familiar sign by the main gate had survived unscathed, still proclaiming it the entrance to amspace inc. orbital launch & flight test facility. The gatehouse was demolished, and there were gaps torn in the outer security fence. The parking areas beyond had been pulverized, and Legermount had difficulty finding a path through the wrecked vehicles. A mound of recently bulldozed earth near the ruin of what had been the Sports and Social Club perhaps explained the absence of bodies.

Immediately ahead, one end of the main administration building had collapsed, while the remainder presented the familiar scene of a windowless facade with shattered upper levels open to the winds. The second floor was now a reinforced roof, and below, the ground floor had been turned into shelters behind earth banks and walls of sandbags. A number of wrecked military trucks suggested that the site had been used as a relief or evacuation center, probably on account of its large landing field. Behind the front offices, the flight preparation and assembly complex was for the most part a burned ruin, above which the larger vehicle assembly building had split down the middle into two parts that now hung outward in a deformed
V
against the sky. Legermount brought the truck to a halt. They sat surveying the scene.