Time Storm

6

My first reaction, out of that old, false, early training of mine, was to worry. Then common sense returned. It would only be a relief, as far as I was concerned, to have her gone; with her fits of withdrawal and her pestering Sunday until he, in turn, became a bother.

Damn it, I thought, let her go.

But then it occurred to me that something might have happened to her. It was open country all around us here, except for a screen of young popple, beyond which there was a small creek. I went down through the popple and looked across the creek, up over a swelling expanse of meadow lifting to a near horizon maybe three hundred yards off. There was nothing to be seen. I went down to look at the creek itself, the edges of which were muddy and marshy, and found her footprints in soft earth, going toward the water. A little further, one of her shoes was stuck in the mud and abandoned.

The creek was shallow—no more than knee deep for someone her size. I waded across, picked up the shoe, located her tracks in the mud on the far side and saw them joined by two other sets of footprints. Bare feet, larger than hers. I began to feel cold and hot inside at the same time.

I went back to the tent, strapped on the belt with the holstered revolver and took the carbine. The carbine held thirteen shells and it was semi-automatic. My first thought was of following the tracks up the hill; and then I realized that this would be more likely to alert whoever the other two people had been than if I drove. If they saw me coming in the panel, they might figure I’d given up the girl and left her. If they saw me coming on foot, particularly with Sunday, they wouldn’t have much choice but to think I was chasing her down.

I packed the gear. It would be hard to replace, maybe; and there was no guarantee we’d be coming back this way again. Then I got into the panel, letting Sunday up on the seat beside me for once, but making him lie down out of sight from outside. I pulled out on the highway and headed up the road parallel to the way I had last seen the footprints going.

We did not have far to go. Just up and over the rise that belonged to the meadow across the creek, I saw a trailer camp with some sort of large building up in front of all the trailers. No one had cut the grass in the camp for a long time, but there were figures moving about the trailers. I drove up to the building in front. There were a couple of dusty gas pumps there, and a cheer-fully-grinning, skinny, little old man in coveralls too big for him came out of the building as I stopped.

“Hi,” he said, coming up within about four feet of Sunday’s side of the car and squinting across through the open window at me. “Want some gas?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m looking for a girl. A girl about fourteen, fifteen years old with dark hair and doesn’t talk. Have you seen—”

“Nope!” he chirped. “Want some gas?”

Gas was something you had to scrounge for these days. I was suddenly very interested in him.

“Yes,” I said. “I think I’ll have some gas. And...”

I let my voice trail off into silence. He came closer, cocking his left ear at me.

“What’d y’say?” He stuck his head in the window and came face to face with Sunday, only inches between them. He stopped, perfectly still.

“That’s right,” I said. “Don’t move or make a sound, now. And don’t try to run. The leopard can catch you before you can take three steps.” He didn’t know that Sunday would never have understood in a million years any command I might have given to chase someone.

I jerked my thumb at the back of the panel. Sunday understood that. He turned and leaped into the back, out of the right hand seat in one flowing movement. The old man’s eyes followed him. I slid over into the right hand seat.

“Now,” I said, “turn around. Give me room to open the door.”

He did. I opened the door on that side of the panel a crack. The baggy coverall on his back was only inches away. Vertically in the center of the back, about belt level, was a tear or cut about eight inches long. I reached in through it and closed my hand on pretty much what I expected. A handgun—a five-chamber .22 revolver-stuck in a belt around his waist under the coveralls.

“All right,” I said, picking up the carbine and getting out of the panel behind him. “Walk straight ahead of me. Act ordinary and don’t try to run. The leopard will be with me; and if I don’t get you, he will. Now, where’s the girl? Keep your voice down when you answer.”

“Bub-bu-bu—,” the old man stammered. Sounds, nothing understandable. Plainly, as his repeated offer of gas had shown, whoever lived in this camp had chosen one of their less bright citizens to stand out front and make the place look harmless.

“Come on, Sunday,” I said.

The leopard came. We followed the old man across the drive, past the pumps. The large building looked not only closed, but abandoned. Darkness was behind its windows, and spider webs hung over the cracked white paint of its door frame. I poked the old man with the carbine muzzle, directing him around the right end of the building and back into the camp. I was expecting to be jumped or fired at, at any second. But nothing happened. When I got around the end of the building, I saw why. They were all at the party.

God knows, they might have been normal people once. But what I saw now were somewhere between starving savages and starving animals. They were mostly late adolescents, rib-skinny every one of them, male and female alike barefoot below the ragged cuff-edges of the jeans they wore and naked above the waistband. Every one of them, as well, was striped and marked with black paint on face and body. They were gathered, maybe thirty or forty of them, in an open space before the rows of trailers began. It might have been a stretch of show lawn, or a volleyball court, once. At the end of it, tied to a sort of X of planks set upright and surrounded by burnable trash, paper and bits of wood, was the girl.

Whether she had come there willingly, I do not know. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that she had finally despaired of ever having Sunday love her; and when she met those two other pairs of feet by the creek, she had gone off of her own free will with them. But she was terrified now. Her eyes were enormous, and her mouth was stretched wide in a scream that she could not bring forth.

I poked the old man with the gun muzzle and walked in among them. I saw no weapons; but it stood to reason they must have something more than the revolver that had been hidden on the old man. The back of my neck prickled; but on the spur of the moment the best thing I could think of was to put a bold front on it, and maybe we could just all walk out of here—the girl, Sunday and I—with no trouble.

They said not a word, they did not move as I walked through them. And then, when I was less than a dozen feet from the girl, she finally got that scream out of her.

“Look out!”

For a part of a second I was so stunned to hear her utter something understandable that I only stared. Then it registered on me that she was looking over my shoulder at something behind me. I spun around, dropping on one knee instinctively and bringing up the carbine to my shoulder.

There were two of them, lying on the roof of the house with either rifles or shotguns—I had no time to decide which. They were just like the others, except for their firearms. The girl’s shriek must have startled them as much as it had me, because they were simply lying there, staring down at me with their weapons forgotten.

But it was not them I had to worry about, anyway, because—I have no idea from where—the crowd I had just passed had since produced bows and arrows; perhaps a bow for every five or six of them, so that half a dozen of them were already fitting arrows to their strings as I turned. I started firing.

I shot the two on the roof first, without thinking—which was pure foolishness, the reflex of a man brought up to think of firearms as deadly, but of arrows as playthings—because the two on the roof did not even have their guns aimed, and by the time I’d fired at them a couple of arrows had already whistled by me. They were target arrows, lacking barbed hunting heads, but nonetheless deadly for that. The rest of the ones being aimed would certainly not all have missed me—if it had not been for Sunday.

There was nothing of the Lassie-dog-to-the-rescue about Sunday. The situation was entirely beyond his understanding; and if the two on the roof or the bow-wielders had shot me quickly and quietly enough; probably he would merely have sniffed sadly at me as I lay on the ground and wondered why I had stopped moving. But the girl had screamed—and I must suddenly have reeked of the body chemicals released by fear and fury—so Sunday operated by instinct.

If I was frightened, he was frightened, too. And in wild animals, as in man himself once he is broken down to it, fear and fury are the same thing. Sunday attacked the only fear-making cause in view—the group of archers and their friends before us; and they found themselves suddenly facing a wild, snarling, pinwheel-of-knives that was a hundred and forty pound member of the cat family gone berserk.

They ran from him. Of course they ran. All but three or four that were too badly clawed or bitten to get away. I had plenty of time and freedom to get the girl untied from the planks and start to lead her out of the clearing. By that time Sunday was off in one corner of the open space, daintily toying, with one hooked claw, at a bleeding, moaning figure that was trying to crawl away from him. It was a little sickening; but so was what they had planned for the girl. I called the leopard. He came—if reluctantly—and followed us back to the truck. We got out of there.

Half a mile down the highway I had to pull over to the shoulder and stop the car, again. Sunday was still prickly from the adrenaline of the battle. He wanted to lie in the back of the panel all alone and lick his fur. The girl, rebuffed by him, was suddenly sick. I helped her out of the car and held her head until it was over. Then I got her back into the front seat of the car, curled up there with a blanket over her.

“They were going to EAT me,” she whispered, when I covered her up.

It was the second time she had spoken, and all in one day. I looked at her, but her eyes were squeezed shut. I could not tell if she had been talking to me, or only to herself. I got the panel moving again and let her sleep. That evening when we camped, I tried talking to her myself. But she had gone back to being dumb. She would neither speak nor look at me. Foolishly, I even found myself feeling disappointed —even a little hurt at that. But of course that was just the wrong-headed early training at work in me again. I had been feeling good over the fact that she was coming out of her mental prison—as if that really mattered, one way or another.

The next day we headed south by west again. It was a bright, hot day, and I was feeling good. We had gotten off the asphalt on to a stretch of superhighway, and there was no one to be seen—not even anything on the road as inconsequential as an abandoned car. We were making good time; and Samuelson had helped me to fix myself on the map. We were close enough to the location of Omaha that, barring unforeseen delays along the road, we would reach it by sunset. When noon came, I picked a ramp and pulled off the freeway—just to be on the safe side in case someone unfriendly should be cruising it about the time we were having lunch —and found a patch of shade under some large, scraggly-limbed trees I could not identify.

We had hardly glimpsed the mistwall of a time change all morning—and the few we had seen had been far off, so far off that in the bright daylight it was impossible to tell whether they were standing still or moving. But obviously one had passed by where we were some time, since the storms started. About four hundred yards from the exit ramp of the highway the cross road ended abruptly in a clump of tall mop-headed palms, the kind you find lining the street boulevards in Los Angeles.

The palms and the big scraggly-limbed trees signalled that we were into a different time-changed territory than we had been earlier. Now that I stopped to notice it, for some time there had been a different kind of dampness to the air than that which comes from midwestern, mid-summer humidity. The softness of the atmosphere was more like that of a seacoast; and the few white clouds that moved overhead seemed to hang low and opulent in the sky, the way they do in Florida, instead of being high and distant like piled up castles, as they are in temperate zone mid-continental skies during the warm months.

It was a hint, I thought, to be on our guard against strange company. As far as I had been able to determine, it was only everything below the animal level that got changed by the time storms when they passed. I had begun to add up some evidence in what I saw to reach the conclusion that much of what I came across was several hundred, if not several thousand, years forward from my own original time. There was some evidence of extensive storm damage and geological change, followed by considered reforestation in a majority of the landscapes I moved through. There must have been massive loss of life in most areas at the same time or another, which accounted for the scarcity of most warm-blooded creatures, except for birds. Certainly topography and vegetation changed when a time line passed; and I had noticed fish in lakes that had not been lakes before the time change. But just where on the scale of life the dividing line was drawn, I had no idea. It would pay to be watchful. If, for example, snakes were below the dividing line, then we might suddenly encounter poisonous varieties in latitudes or areas where such varieties had never existed before.

I spent part of the lunch hour trying to get the girl to talk; but she was back at being voiceless again. I kept chattering to her, though, partly out of stubbornness and partly out of the idea that if she had loosened up once, she could again; and the more I tried to wear down the barrier between us, possibly, the sooner she would.

When we were done with lunch, we buried the tin cans and the paper. The girl and I ate a lot of canned stuff, which made meals easy; and I had fallen into the habit of feeding Sunday on canned dog food or any other meat that could be found. He also hunted occasionally as we went along. But he would never go very far from me to do it, and this restricted what he could catch. We buried our trash just in case someone or something might find the remains and take a notion to trail us. We got back in the panel truck and headed once more down the superhighway.

But it was exactly as if stopping to eat lunch had changed our luck. Within five miles the superhighway disappeared—cut off by some past time storm line. It ended in a neat lip of concrete hanging thirty feet in the air with nothing in the shape of a road below or beyond it but sandy hills, covered with cactus and scraggly trees. I had to backtrack two miles to find an exit ramp that led down on to a road that appeared to keep going off at an angle as far as I could see. It was asphalt, like most of the roads we had been travelling earlier, but it was not in as good shape as the ones that had led us through Samuelson’s small town and past the trailer camp. It was narrower, high-crowned, and weedy along the edges. I hesitated because, although the road angled exactly in the direction I wanted to go, there was something about it that filled me with uneasiness. I simply did not like the look of it. Here and there sand had blown across it, a smudge of gold on black—but not to any depth that would slow down the panel truck. Still, I slowed on my own and cruised at no more than thirty miles an hour, keeping my eyes open.

The road seemed to run on without end, which did nothing to allay that uneasiness of mine. There was something about it that was unfamiliar—not of any recognizable time—in spite of the fact that it looked like a backwoods road anywhere. The sandy hill-scapes following us on either side were alien, too, as if they had been transported from a desert somewhere and set down here. Also, it was getting hotter and the humidity was worse.

I stopped the panel, finally, to do a more precise job of estimating our position on the map than I could do while driving. According to the compass I had mounted on the instrument panel on our vehicle, the asphalt road had been running almost exactly due west; and the outskirts of Omaha should be less than twenty miles southwest of us.

As long as we had been on the superhighway, I had not worried; because a road like that, obviously belonging to our original twentieth century time, had to be headed toward the nearest large city—which had to be Omaha. Just as on the asphalt road at first I had not worried either, because it headed so nearly in the direction I wanted to go.

But it was stretching out now to the point where I began to worry that it would carry me to the north and past the city, without letting me catch sight of it. Certainly, by this time we had gone far enough to intersect some other roads heading south and into the metropolitan area. But we had crossed no other road. For that matter, we had come across nothing else that indicated a city nearby, no railroad tracks, no isolated houses, no fences, no suburban developments in the bulldozer stage of construction.... I was uneasy.

Laying out the road map on the hood of the car, I traced our route to the superhighway, traced the superhighway to what I believed to be the exit by which we had come down off it, and along the road that exit tied into—headed west. The road was there; but according to the map, less than a dozen miles farther on, it ran through a small town called Leeder; and we had come twenty miles without seeing as much as a road sign.

I went through the whole thing twice more, checked the compass and traced out our route, and checked the odometer on the panel to see how far we’d come since leaving the superhighway— and the results came out the same. We had to be bypassing Omaha to the north.

I got back in the truck and started travelling again, driving slowly. I told myself I’d give myself another five miles without a crossroad before turning back. I drove them, and then another five. But I saw no crossroad. Nothing. Only the narrow, neglected-looking strip of asphalt which looked as if it might continue unchanged around to the Pacific Ocean.

I stopped the panel again, got out and walked off the road to check the surface of the ground to the south. I walked back and forth and stamped a few times. The surface was sandy, but hard— easily solid enough to bear the weight of the panel truck; and the vegetation was scattered enough so that there would be no trouble driving through it. Up until now I had been very careful not to get off the roads, for fear of a breakdown of the truck which would strand us a distance from any hope of easily finding another vehicle. On foot we would be at the mercy of the first moving time storm wall that came toward us.

But we were so close now—we were just a few miles away from getting back to normal life. I could see Swannee in my mind’s eye so clearly that she was almost like a mirage superimposed on the semidesert landscape around us. She had to be there, waiting for me. Something inside me- was still positive, beyond all argument, that Omaha had survived; and that along with it Swannee had survived in the sanity of a portion of the world as it had been before the time storm. In fact my mind had toyed a number of times with the idea that since Omaha, like Hawaii, had survived, it might mean there might be many other enclaves of safety; and the fact that there were such enclaves would mean there was a way of beating the time storm, by applying to all other places the special conditions or whatever unusual elements had kept these enclaves protected.

In those enclaves she and I could still lead the reasonable and normal life we could have had before the time storm hit; and somehow I felt sure that the experience of the time storm would have straightened her out on what had gone wrong between us before. Time would have brought her to the realization that it was simply an old reflex on my part that had made me act like someone literally in love with her. Also, she would know how tough life could be outside the enclaves like the one she now lived in—or even there, for that matter. She would have a new appreciation of what I could do for her, in the way of taking care of her. In fact, the more I thought, the more confident I was that by this time she would be ready to indulge these little emotional lapses of mine. All I had to do was find her and things would go well.

—But that was something to think about when there was time to think about it. The big question now was—should I take the panel cross-country, south, away from the road, to find a highway or street that would bring me to the city?

There was really no argument about it. I got Sunday and the girl back into the panel—they had followed me outside and wandered after me as I stamped on the ground to make sure it would not bog down the panel—then we got back in the truck, turned off the asphalt and headed due south by the compass.

It was not bad driving at all. I had to slow down to about five to ten miles an hour; and I kept the panel in second gear, occasionally having to shift down to low on the hills, but generally finding it easy going. It was all up and down, a roller coaster-type of going for about nine-tenths of a mile; and then suddenly we came up over a rise and looked down on a lakeshore.

It was just a strip of whitish-brown, sandy beach. But the shallow, rather stagnant-looking water beyond the beach stretched out as far as I could see and out of sight right and left as well. Evidently the time storm had moved this whole area into the northwest of the metropolitan area, pretty well blocking off access from that direction. The problem for me now was—which way would be the shortest way round the lake? Right or left?

It was a toss-up. I squinted in both directions but for some reason, just while I had been standing there, a haze of some sort seemed to have moved in, so that I could not see far out on the water in any direction. Finally I chose to go to the right, because I thought I saw a little darkness through the haze upon the sun-glare off the water and sand in that direction. I turned the nose of the truck and we got going.

The beach was almost as good as a paved road to drive on. It was flat and firm. Apparently, the water adjoining it began to shelve more sharply as we went along, for it lost its stagnant, shallow appearance and began to develop quite a respectable surf. There was an onshore wind blowing; but it helped the heat and the humidity only a little. We kept driving.

As I watched the miles add up on the truck’s odometer, I began gradually to regret not trying in the other direction. Clearly, I had picked the long way around this body of water, because looking ahead I could still see no end to it. When the small, clicking figures of the odometer rolled up past the twelve mile mark, I braked the truck to a halt, turned around and headed back.

As I said, the beach was good driving. I pushed our speed up to about forty, and it was not long before we were back at the point where we had first come across the lake. I kept pounding along; and shortly I made out something up ahead. The dazzle of sunlight from the water seemed to have gotten in my eyes so that I could not make out exactly what it was—something like a handkerchief-sized island with a tree, or a large raft with a diving tower out in the water, just a little way from the beach. But there were the black silhouettes of two-legged figures on the sand there. I could stop to get some directions, and we could still be pulling into Swannee’s driveway in time for dinner.

The dazzle-effect on my eyes got worse as the panel got close to the figures; and the glitter of sunlight through the windshield was not helping. I blinked, and blinked again. I should have thought to pick up some dark glasses and keep them in the glove compartment of the panel for situations like this—but I just had not expected to run into water-glare like this. I must have been no more than thirty or forty feet from the figures by the time I finally braked the panel to a stop and jumped out of it on to the sand, blinking to get the windshield-glitter out of the way between us— and I still could not see them clearly. There were at least half a dozen of them on the beach, and I saw more out on the raft or whatever it was.

I started toward them.

“Hey!” I said. “I’m lost. Can you put me on the road to Omaha? I want to get to Byerly Park, there.”

The figures did not answer. I was within a few steps of them now. I stopped, closed my eyes and shook my head violently. Then I opened my eyes again.

For the first time I saw them clearly. They had two legs apiece all right; but that was the only thing people-like about them. As far as I could see, they wore no clothes; and I could have sworn they were covered with greenish-gold scales. Heavy, lizard-like features with unblinking dark eyes stared directly into my face.

I stared back at them. Then I turned and looked out at the raft and beyond. All around were the beach and the water—nothing more. And finally, finally, the truth came crashing in on me.

There was too much water. There was no way Omaha could still exist out there beyond the waves. I had been wrong all the time. I had been fooling myself, hugging to my mind an impossible hope, as if it was the fixed center of the universe.

Omaha was gone. Gone completely. Swannee was gone. Like so many other things, she had been taken away forever. I had lost her for good, just as I had lost my mother...

The sun, which had been high overhead, seemed to swing halfway around the sky before my eyes and turn blood red. The water seemed to go black as ink and swirl up all around me and the watching lizard-humans. My mind felt as if it was cracking wide open; and everything spun about me like liquid going down a drain, sucking water and beach and all, including me, away down into some place that was ugly and frightening.

It was the end of the world. I had been intending to survive anything for Swannee’s sake; but all the time she had already been gone. She and Omaha had probably been lost in the first moment after the time storm hit. From then on, there had only been the illusion of her in my sick mind. I had been as insane as Samuelson, after all. The crazy cat, the idiot girl and I—we had been three loonies together. I had flattered myself that the mistwalls were all outside me; but now I could feel them breaching the walls of my skull, moving inside me, wiping clean and destroying everything over which they passed. I had a faint and distant impression of hearing myself howling like a chained dog; and of strong hands holding me. But this, too, swiftly faded away, into a complete and utter nothingness....