The Wanderer

Chapter Thirty-two

Ross Hunter, driving conservatively fast, swung the sedan around the last curve. Now the road lay straight along the high mesh fence of Vandenberg Three.

Margo hit his shoulder and pointed at a small open door in the first corner of the fence.

Hunter didn’t slow down. “No good,” he grunted. “I’d try for a gate that can take the car.”

“Hurry it up,” Hixon urged from the back seat.

The landscape turned suddenly spectral. The big cloud-bank had cut off the sun. There was thunder. Through the thunder, guns cracked ahead. A police car came out of the flaming laager through the opening clipped in the freeway fence, plunged down a little slope, and headed in their direction, bumping and jouncing around the edge of the burned car-crush at the mouth of Monica Mountainway. A second police car came out, hind end foremost but backing fast, and followed the first.

Hunter slowed. There was a big gate with an empty guard booth. The gate was open. He swung through it as a third police car, this one front end first, escaped from the laager.

Hunter gunned the sedan across the dusty gray gravel toward a wide black door in the biggest of the three white buildings.

Beyond them Margo saw teenagers climbing the far fence and crowding in through a little door in it.

Hunter pulled up. Hixon and Margo piled out. There were three concrete steps, a narrow porch, then the black double door with a tag of white on it.

Hixon and Margo ran up the steps. She tried the door. It was locked. Hixon pounded on it with the butt of his rifle and yelled: “Open up!”

Hunter started to turn the sedan around.

The first police car came screeching through the gate and headed toward them. Through the clouds of dust the first raised, the second police car followed, still backing.

Hixon ran to the nearest window and smashed with his rifle butt through it, then chopped away at the big fangs of glass left.

With a squeal of brakes, a surge of springs, and a ten-foot skid, the first police car drew up beside the sedan. Two officers jumped out, their faces soot-smeared, their eyes wild. One wave of a Tommy gun.

“Drop your guns, all of you!” he yelled.

The other covered Hunter. “Get out of that car!”

Hixon, holding his rifle muzzle away from the police, yelled: “Hey, we’re on your side!”

The officer let off a couple of shots that holed the stucco over Hixon’s head. He dropped the rifle.

Margo was holding the revolver behind her.

Hunter climbed out of the car and came up the steps, hands held shoulder high.

The backing police car drew up behind the first. More officers piled out of it. The third police car drew up outside the gate.

Something dropped through the sedan window and bounced on the seat. Something else smashed against the windshield of the first police car, and hissing flames jetted out in a blue-yellow burst.

The police fired around the side of the building from which the Molotov cocktails had come. Two or three unseen guns returned their fire.

Margo was looking at the white tag on the black door. She ripped it down and crumpled it up.

The driver of the first police car lunged out of it, face arm-shielded from the flames. There were flames inside the sedan, too.

Hunter, keeping his hands raised, came up to Margo and Hixon.

The Molotov cocktail that had fallen unbroken into the sedan exploded. Big, blue-yellow flame-jets flared from the four windows.

Hunter said: “Let’s run for it. The little gate we saw first.”

They did. The police didn’t shoot at them. The officers were already piling back into their second car. Thunder rumbled again, much louder.

Margo and Hunter and Hixon ran past the last white building just as a bunch of teenagers came around it on the other side. Margo felt the gust of their crazy high spirits like an electric wind, and for a moment she was on their side. Then gravel jumped ahead of Hunter, there was a crack, and she realized one of the kids was shooting. They were waving bottles and knives and one of them had a handgun. It was still more than fifty yards to the little gate.

The teenagers came at them whooping and screaming. A girl threw a bottle.

As she ran, Margo shot at them three times with the revolver and didn’t hit anyone. Making the third shot, she tripped and sprawled on the gravel. The thrown bottle hit beside her and broke. She threw up her hands to shield her face from the flames, but there was only the smell of whiskey.

Hunter yanked her up and they ran on. Ahead, Hixon was pointing at something and yelling.

The teenagers no longer came straight at them, but a dozen or so raced ahead toward the little door, cutting them off.

Margo and Hunter saw what Hixon was pointing at: a bright red car with a black hat at the wheel coming fast down Monica Mountainway, tires screeching at the turns.

The teenagers had them blocked off from the door but they still ran toward it.

The Corvette lurched to a stop in front of the door. Rama Joan stood up beside the driver and pointed a gray-tipped hand at the teenagers. Dust and gravel blew up in their wild faces, they went staggering, lurching, sprawling backwards as if struck by a gale; the fence sagged inward.

Doc stood up beside her and yelled toward Margo and the two men: “Come on! Make it fast!”

They ran through the gate and piled into the tiny back of the Corvette. Doc cut the wheels sharp and turned it.

They saw the second police car, escaped from Vandenberg Three, bouncing back around the burned car-crush.

But the third police car was coming straight at them up Monica Mountainway along the fence.

Rama Joan pointed the momentum pistol at it.

Hixon cried: “Don’t do it They’re police.”

The police car seemed to brake to a stop, except that its occupants were not thrown forward but back. The whole car started to skid back. Rama Joan quit pointing the pistol.

The Corvette roared uphill. Hunter protested: “Not so fast, Doc.”

Doc retorted: “This is nothing. Didn’t you see me coming down?” But he did slow a bit.

Hixon chortled: “I’ll say we did! You sure swung it, Captain!”

Behind them the car Rama Joan had stopped had turned back, and both police vehicles were headed north along the flat outside the freeway fence. The flames of the abandoned laager waved and twisted higher. The fire had spread to other cars.

Hunter snorted and said: “That was the last useless, heroic nonsense I’ll ever go in for.” He scowled at Margo.

Thunder roared. A big drop or two of rain spattered.

Margo fished a small ball of paper from her bosom and uncrumpled it. “Useless?” she grinned at Hunter, holding the paper forward between Doc and Rama Joan, but so Hunter could see it, too.

The big-scrawled message was: “Van Bruster, Comstock, rest of you! We’re being lifted out to Vandenberg Two. Join us by Monica Mountainway. Luck!”

It was signed: “Opperly.”

A big raindrop hit the paper. The rain was black.

Don Guillermo Walker and the Araiza brothers were halfway up Lake Nicaragua. The launch would soon head around the island of Ometepe. From the island’s two volcanoes rose thick black smoke plumes that glared red toward the base even in the bright sunlight.

The sunlight came through a wide break in the curtain of steam to the west. The break should have showed the towns of La Virgin and Rivas on the Isthmus of Rivas between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific, but instead there was only water stretching endlessly.

The Araizas had supplied the information that the normal tides along the Pacific coast by Brito and San Juan del Sur across the isthmus were about fifteen feet.

The inference was incredible, yet inescapable. The Wanderer-multiplied tides were flowing over the isthmus, joining the Pacific to Lake Nicaragua. That was why the lake had gone up and why its waters now tasted of salt. Where once the white and sky-blue coaches of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company had carried the gold-dreaming Forty-niners and their baggage from ocean to ocean, from Virgin Bay to San Juan del Sur, there now stretched the blue waters of the Peaceful Sea. The Nicaraguan Canal, of which so many men had dreamed, had become a twice-daily reality.

A red glare appeared halfway up the thickly vegetated cone of Madera. Almost immediately pale smoke puffed from around it. Then the red glare began to lengthen downward, the smoke following. Red-hot lava must have broken through a crack and be flowing toward the lake.

The launch kept on. Don Guillermo wondered that the waters around them were so calm. He did not think particularly of the stupendous pressure they must be exerting on this whole stretch of coast, nor did he see anything ominous in the absence of the steam curtain, though if he had thought about it he would have guessed that steam was still generating far below.

There was no definable stimulus, but suddenly the three men looked at each other.

Don Guillermo slapped a mosquito on his neck.

A thick button of water swelled up like a gray pimple from the placid surface in the direction of the inundated Isthmus of Rivas and without a sound grew in three seconds to a mushroom of water a half mile high and a mile wide.

Something that turned the surface of the water from bright to dull was traveling from the mushroom to the launch.

The three men stared unbelievingly.

The blast wave from the explosion broke their eardrums and knocked them down in the launch.

Don Guillermo glimpsed the great vertical hillside of steam-driven water an instant before it engulfed him and his comrades in the launch. It seemed to be everywhere thickly covered with a water-vegetation of lacy, dull gray fronds. He thought, The blasted heath. There to meet with Macbeth. I come, Graymalkin.

The Isthmus of Rivas vanished, too. The Nicaraguan Canal became a permanent reality.