Footprints of Thunder (72 page)

He rode on, the sun setting on his left. It would he behind the hills soon, leaving the valley in shadow, and still the city could not be seen. He passed a section of collapsed forest, ran into an impassable rock slide, and headed uphill to skirt it. At the crest, he skidded to a stop. The view was unobstructed, and to his dismay he saw Mount Saint Helens in the distance. There was no city. Tears blurred his vision, and he wiped his eyes. Then he realized Mount Saint Helens had disappeared into a haze, and shimmering before him the city appeared. Skyscrapers towered above the trees as he looked around. He was in a city that wasn’t there.

From this close Portland wasn’t transparent. It was back, but Cubby didn’t know for how long. If God had opened this door for him, he wasn’t going to let it close. You don’t need certainty when you have your faith, his father always said. Cubby sucked down his doubts, revved up the engine, and released the clutch. “Time to go home,” he said to himself, and angled the bike down the hill toward the city.

* * *

Now Terry rubbed his aching eyes with both fists. He admitted defeat to himself and was ready to convince Bill.

“Bill, this is useless. We don’t even know if Angie and Ellen are in there.”

“Yeah, I know. I just don’t know what else to do. Where do we start looking if we don’t look here?”

“Will this thing make it to the beach … say about ninety miles? We can check our summer house.”

When Bill didn’t answer right away, Terry rubbed his eyes again, and opened them to see the return of the phantom city.

“Bill, it’s back.”

Bill straightened the helicopter, and hovered facing the city.

“We can try flying into it again. What do you think?” Terry suggested.

“Mmmm—I don’t think—”

Something zoomed past the helicopter on the left, banked to the right on stubby wings, and flew directly toward the city, taking Terry by surprise. Bill spun the helicopter around and throttled up the engine until the rotors screamed.

“What’s going on, Bill?”

“It’s a cruise missile. We’re in big trouble.”

Terry looked around, trying to follow the flight of the cruise missile, and when he did he spotted another missile in the distance, then suddenly he realized the sky was full of them. Terry was trying to make sense of what was happening when the sky went white, as if a giant strobe light had just flashed. At the same time there was a burst of static over the earphones, followed by the acrid smell of ozone. The helicopter’s engine sputtered and then died. Terry’s stomach made him think they were suddenly in an elevator going down. The rotors continued to spin but without any power, making more of a whistle than a thump. The churning of his stomach increased and the helicopter’s nose dipped, giving Terry a good view of the onrush-ing forest.

When John stepped out from beyond the last tree and onto the front lawn of the Colonial house, he felt tension being swept out of his body. His legs went weak with relief and began to shake. He hadn’t realized how much fear and adrenalin had powered him, and he now felt every ache and pain, and he was exhausted.

He thought of his mom in a hospital, his dad in Washington, D.C., or somewhere, maybe with his sister. That meant John should be with his mom.

He found the cul-de-sac and the blue house Ripman had described. Two other houses at the end of the cul-de-sac were surrounded by fences six feet high, making the end of the street look like Fort Apache. The owners of the blue house had settled for a four-foot fence. John jumped up and straddled it. Balanced on the top he looked back down the cul-de-sac toward the forest. Ripman and Cubby were in there somewhere, and that meant he was leaving a part of himself there too. He knew the closeness they had shared was too good to last a lifetime, but he never expected it to end so abruptly. It wasn’t the way childhood friendships should end. They should end slowly, day by day, month by month; each of them taking different paths that would lead them farther and farther apart. The forest had replaced the slow march to separate lives with a race to adulthood, and to loneliness.

John stared at the forest one last time, knowing there was no going back. As he turned to look for a soft landing spot beneath him, a blinding flash of light knocked him off the fence into the azalea bushes on the other side.

The New World

69. Beach House

The New World

North Oregon coast

C
able TV was out, since the Portland feed was gone. At their beach house, Ellen and John could still pick up the Eugene and Salem stations, although the reception without the cable boost was terrible. It didn’t matter though. The stations weren’t carrying anything but disaster coverage, and John was sick of it. He wanted escapism, some mindless sex or violence to distract him.

The network news people were dominating the coverage, sitting in anchor booths and telling the camera what other people were telling them. John could only pick up two of the networks, but neither had its regular anchor. Apparently the New York problem had taken some of the network people; the second string was now anchoring from Chicago.

The news might have been fresh at one time but was now a series of recycled reports, including oft-repeated interviews with the President’s chief of staff, Elizabeth Hawthorne. “The President is devoting himself to dealing with the crisis, but will meet with the press when the time is right,” Ms. Hawthorne was shown saying over and over again. John watched Ms. Hawthorne deny rumors that the President was ill, take questions about relief efforts, and defer questions requiring an explanation of what had happened to the President’s science advisor.

Dr. Paulson was interviewed repeatedly by the networks. He labeled what happened as time quilting, and described it as a natural result of the interaction of strings of dense matter created by nuclear detonations. When asked if it was true that only the former U.S.S.R. had detonated devices of sufficient size to create the effect, he deferred to Natalie Matsuda, the secretary of defense, who proceeded to blame it on the U.S.S.R. and single out the Russian Republic in particular to inherit the blame. She also claimed credit for preventing a worse disaster with the action taken in the Portland area. John noticed they never referred to it as a nuclear attack, calling it instead an “action.”

There was quite a bit of debate over what had happened at Portland. Some experts claimed the explosions destroyed Portland, others claimed the blast more likely took place somewhere between the two space/times involved. John thought of Cubby during these discussions. Had he been incinerated in a nuclear holocaust, or was he where he so badly wanted to be, with his family and church?

The networks interviewed a Dr. Gomez of the Fermi Institute about the effect itself, but her explanation made little sense to John. She talked of explosions in the sixties and the time quilting, as if they were concurrent events. She referred vaguely to possible future events. Apparently the first computer models had correctly predicted the focal point and the time quilting but had not projected the events into the future. More sophisticated models were being tested and some of these projected additional events. She also said something about effects on the moon, but being unable to confirm them until the space program could be reestablished. That point was then lost in questions about identifying where the displaced people had gone. John realized there was cold comfort in knowing that friends and relatives could be alive in some other time period.

Dinosaur horror stories filled the rest of the news. Of course the media concentrated on made-in-America stories. Attacks by tyrannosaurs were the most popular. Occasionally a story sympathetic to dinosaurs would surface. The story of an old woman in New York with a pet dinosaur got a lot of play, and John was particularly touched by the story of the mother apatosaurus and her baby that saved a shipwrecked family, despite a killer whale attack. There were also stories of organized protests of animal rights activists who were fighting for dinosaur rights. There were many stories of food shortages, fuel shortages, and medical supply shortages. These were invariably followed by predictions of more shortages, and how the poor were disproportionately affected. The only silver lining in these reports was that the human losses were out of proportion to the crop losses. In other words, they lost more people than crops to feed them.

John’s mother came out of the bedroom to make a cup of tea. Her right arm was in a cast, which she carried in a sling. He watched her until he was sure she could handle fixing the tea one-handed. The hotshot’s noise drowned out the sound of the TV.

Ellen was more animated now than when she had learned of her husband’s death, but her grief was still compounded by the fact she had been angry the last time she saw him. She couldn’t make peace with him now and would live the rest of her life with that knowledge.

They couldn’t get through to John’s sister, Carolyn, until after her father had been buried. It wouldn’t have mattered though. Civilian air travel was restricted. Ellen offered to bury Colonel Conrad next to John’s father and include Angie’s name on the marker, but the military took charge of Colonel Conrad’s body. John remembered vividly his mother sobbing as she explained what had happened to Colonel Conrad’s wife, and after that Ellen had been more depressed than ever.

With her tea, his mother sat on the other end of the couch watching the TV. The constant repetition couldn’t hold her attention any better than it held John’s, and her eyes wandered to the window and the distant ocean. But that only reminded her of more death. Animal carcasses mixed with debris had begun washing ashore. The carcasses were victims of nature’s recycling process and hard to identify. Some of them were dinosaurs, of course, but with live ones loose in the countryside, the carcasses received scant attention. At their beach house, John’s parents used to walk the shore endlessly, occasionally collecting glass floats or unusual pieces of driftwood. To walk the Oregon beaches now, though, was to risk an encounter with the bloated remains of a prehistoric animal, victim of something they could never conceive of. Most sickening of all was the realization that somewhere in time there were undoubtedly human bodies washing ashore in the same condition.

The sound of a car outside distracted them. They had few friends at the coast, since they were weekenders, and no one had come by to see them since they moved in.

John opened the door and stepped back with the shock. Cubby’s van was parked behind Angie’s Jeep. The glare on the tinted windows prevented John from seeing inside. Behind him he heard his mother’s gasp of recognition. The driver’s door opened, and Ripman stepped out, grinning sheepishly. They smiled at Ripman and then turned and watched the other door. Ripman lost his grin.

“He’s not with me. I looked for Cubby after the … light, bombs, whatever. I never found him. Never found Portland either. It’s really gone now.”

Ripman stayed by the car, making no move toward them, seeming uncertain. John felt his mother’s hand oh his shoulder and stepped aside to let her pass. She walked around the car toward Ripman. He stepped back, but she kept coming, wrapping her good arm around him in a big hug. Ripman’s hands went up, but he couldn’t bring himself to hug her back. His face went red, but the smile returned.

“What’s the matter, Ripman?” John teased. “A hug is as elemental as things get.”

“Screw you,” Ripman mouthed over Ellen’s shoulder.

“Up yours,” John replied silently.

Ripman looked at John and mouthed the word “El-ah-mental,” then let his hands fall and hugged Ellen back.