They sprinted along a narrow stream bed where runoff from the storm earlier in the day was time-frozen but not at all like ice: clearer than ice, black with reflections of the night and marked by pure silver highlights instead of frost-white crystallization. The surface was not flat, either, like a frozen winter creek, but rippled and runneled and spiraled by turbulence. Where the stream splashed over rocks in its course, the air was hung with unmoving sprays of glittering water resembling elaborate sculptures made from glass shards and beads.
Though staying on the move was desirable, continued flight soon became impractical. They were already tired and stiff with pain when they began their run; each additional exertion took a geometrically greater toll from them.
Although they seemed to move as easily in this petrified world as in the one to which they were accustomed, Harry noticed that they did not create a wind of their own when they ran. The air parted around them like butter around a knife, but no turbulence arose from their passage, which indicated that the air was objectively denser than it appeared subjectively. Their speed might be considerably less than it appeared to them, in which case movement required more effort than they perceived.
Furthermore, the coffee, brandy, and hamburger that Harry had eaten churned sourly in his stomach. Acidic flares of indigestion burned through his chest.
More important, block by block as they fled through that town-size mausoleum, an inexplicable inversion of biological response increased their misery. Although such strenuous activity should have left them overheated, they grew steadily colder. Harry couldn’t work up a sweat, not even an icy one. His toes and fingers felt as if he had slogged across an Alaskan glacier, not a southern California beach resort.
The night itself felt no colder than before the Pause. Indeed, perhaps not quite as cool, since the crisp breeze off the ocean had fallen into stillness with everything else. The cause of the queer internal chill was evidently something other than the air temperature, more mysterious and profound — and frightening.
It was as if the world around them, its abundant energy trapped in stasis, had become a black hole of sorts, relentlessly absorbing their energy, sucking it out of them, until degree by degree they would become as inanimate as everything else. He suspected it was imperative that they begin to conserve what resources they had left.
When it became incontrovertibly clear that they would have to stop and find a promising place to hide, they had left a residential neighborhood and entered the east end of a canyon with scrub-covered slopes. Along the three-lane service road, lit by rows of sodium-vapor arc lamps that transformed the night into a two-tone black and yellow canvas, the flat ground was occupied by semi-industrial businesses of the type that image-conscious towns like Laguna Beach carefully tucked away from primary tourist routes.
They were walking now, shivering. She was hugging herself. He turned up his collar and pulled the halves of his sportcoat tight together.
“How much of the hour has passed?” Connie asked.
“Damned if I know. I’ve lost all time sense.”
“Half an hour?”
“Maybe.”
“Longer?”
“Maybe.”
“Less?”
“Maybe.”
“Shit.”
“Maybe.”
To their right, in a sprawling recreational-vehicle storage yard behind heavy-duty chain-link fence crowned with razor wire, motor homes stood side by side in the gloom, like row after row of slumbering elephants.
“What’re all these cars?” Connie wondered.
They were parked on both sides of the road, half on the narrow shoulders and half on the pavement, squeezing the three-lane street to no more than two lanes. It was curious, because none of those businesses would have been open when the Pause hit. In fact, all of them were dark, and had closed up seven to eight hours earlier.
On their right, a landscape-maintenance company occupied a concrete-block building behind which a tree and shrub nursery was terraced halfway up the canyon wall.
Directly under one of the pole lamps, they came upon a car in which a young couple was necking. Her blouse was open, and his hand was inside, marble palm cupping marble breast. As far as Harry was concerned, their frozen expressions of ardent passion, tinted sodium-yellow and glimpsed through the car windows, was about as erotic as a couple of corpses tumbled together on a bed.
They passed two automobile-repair shops on opposite sides of the three-lane, each specializing in different foreign makes. The businesses fronted their own parts junkyards heaped with cannibalized vehicles and fenced with high chain-link.
Cars continued to line the street, blocking driveways to the businesses. A boy of about eighteen or nineteen, shirtless in jeans and Rockports, as thoroughly gripped by the Pause as everyone they had seen thus far, was sprawled across the hood of a black ‘86 Camaro, arms out to his sides and palms up, staring at the occluded sky as if there was something to see up there, a stupid expression of drugged-out bliss on his face.
“This is weird,” Connie said.
“Weird,” Harry agreed, flexing his hands to keep the knuckles from growing too stiff with the cold.
“But you know what?”
“Familiar somehow,” he said.
“Yeah.”
Along the final length of the three-lane blacktop, all of the businesses were warehouses. Some were built of concrete block covered with dust-caked stucco, stained with rust from water pouring off corrugated metal roofs during countless rainy seasons. Others were entirely of metal, like Quonset huts.
The parked cars grew more numerous in the final block of the street, which dead-ended in the crotch of the canyon. In some places they were doubled up, narrowing the road to one lane.
At the end of the street, the last of all the buildings was a large warehouse unidentified by any company name. It was one of the stucco-coated models with a corrugated steel roof. A giant for rent banner was strung across the front, with a Realtor’s phone number.
Security lights shone down the face of the structure, across metal roll-up doors large enough to admit big tractor-and-trailer rigs. At the southwest corner of the building was a smaller, man-size door at which stood two tough-looking guys in their early twenties, steroid-assisted physiques bulked up beyond what weight-lifting and diet alone could achieve.
“Couple of bouncers,” Connie said as they approached the Pause-frozen men.
Suddenly the scene made sense to Harry. “It’s a rave.”
“On a weekday?”
“Must be someone’s special party, birthday or something.”
Imported from England a few years ago, the rave phenomenon appealed to teenagers and those in their early twenties who wanted to party nonstop until dawn, beyond the eye of all authorities.
“Smart place to hide?” Connie wondered.
“As smart as any, I guess, and smarter than some.”
Rave promoters rented warehouses and industrial buildings for a night or two, moving the event from one spot to another to avoid police detection. Locations of upcoming raves were advertised in underground newspapers and in fliers handed out at record stores, nightclubs, and schools, all written in the code of the subculture, using phrases like “The Mickey Mouse X-press,” “American X-press,” “Double-Hit Mickey,” “Get X-rayed,” “Dental Surgery Explained,” and “Free Balloons for the Kiddies.” Mickey Mouse and X were nicknames for a potent drug more commonly known as Ecstasy, while references to dentistry and balloons meant that nitrous oxide — or laughing gas — would be for sale.