Mysterium

The sound came later, a basso thunder that barreled out of the troubled sky. And then a hot, whipping wind. The car was buffeted. “Christ Jesus!” Paige exclaimed. Then a series of hard but muffled thuds against the roof, the windshield, the hood. Some kind of bomb debris, Shepperd thought wildly, but it was only snow, huge mounds of snow shaken out of the crossed boughs of the trees. It slid against the window glass, already wet in this unnatural heat.

“Drive on,” Ted Bartlett said as soon as the roar abated. “This can’t be healthy.”

Shepperd started up his engine and heard others revving behind him. Hang on, Sarah, he thought, and put the car in gear.

∞

Shepperd’s convoy reached the abandoned logging camp, which was three tin-roofed wooden longhouses and a potbelly stove, at dusk.

He calculated that this expedition had saved maybe one hundred families out of the thousands in Two Rivers. The rest were smoke and ashes… and that was a crime so grievous it beggared comprehension.

But the people with him had been saved, no small accomplishment, and that included a lot of kids. He watched them filing out of the cars as they were parked in a defile between the tallest trees. The kids were cold, stunned, but alive. It was the kids he had some hope for. They knew how to adjust.

Not that the future looked especially rosy. One of his scouts had come back from the south with a road map, and sales of hoarded bottle liquor and bathtub hooch to the soldiers had built up the gasoline fund, in local currency, to a respectable size. But they were marked strangers. Even their cars were strange. No amount of paint or pretense would allow a Honda Civic or a Jeep 4x4 to pass for one of those cumbersome boats the natives drove.

Still… the few roads west were said to be lightly traveled (if passable!) this time of year, and if they made it over the unthinkable obstacle of the Rocky Mountains, even if it took until June … the northwest was supposed to be wide open, hardly a policeman or Proctor to be seen outside the biggest towns.

He held that thought. It was comforting.

∞

The clouds were gone by sunset. Even the towering mushroom cloud had dispersed, though there was still a column of sooty black smoke, which he supposed was the incinerated remnant of Two Rivers, Michigan, drawn up like a migrant soul into the blue ink of the sky.

Sarah joined him under the shadow of a longhouse roof and Shepperd put his arm around her. Neither of them spoke. There were no words for this. A military aircraft passed overhead—amazing how much those things resembled P-51’s, Shepperd thought—but it didn’t circle, and he doubted they had been seen. It was a safe bet, he thought, that they would all live to see morning.

After

Mr Graham says its important to keep this diary. He wants me to keep up with my English, although that’s not what they speak here, and with history, although they have a different history, here, too.

Today, although still winter by our calendar, is warm. Almost as warm as the day we came here. I don’t remember all of that, which is just as well, my mother says.

Mainly I remember how green everything seemed after we came through the light. The lab looked very strange, a few ruined buildings in a clearing as round as a crater, all surrounded by green, the bushes with long pointed leaves and the trees that looked like green feathers. A few snowflakes were still in the air around us! Of course, they melted quickly.

The blue light was gone.

For a few days after that we stayed in a partly collapsed dormitory building at the edge of the forest, but Mr. Graham said we couldn’t stay too long because there might still be radiation. We had the food and supplies in the car but no road to drive on, only trails.

Then the new people came and took us to their town.