For a moment Adam lost his footing in the slippery dust and fell forward, half in the van and half out, still holding the child.
With Mary screaming hysterically, he felt the two of them being pulled over the cliff along with the vehicle. But then his dragging foot miraculously found a rock under the dust and he pulled himself backward, out of the van, bearing his daughter with him.
As he fell to his knees in the dust the van, with agonizing inevitability, slipped over the cliff and was gone. They watched its tail lights disappear like angry red eyes into the surging storm.
“Oh, Adam,” Mary sobbed.
“It’s all right,” Adam answered. As he stood, his hand brushed against something in the mass of dust and he grabbing it; it vaguely resembled a chicken bone but then disintegrated in his hand. He pulled Lucy up after him. She stood unsteadily, crying over the loss of her doll.
He looked into his wife’s eyes, but said nothing.
“Okay, kids,” Adam said, “it’s time to walk.”
As they began to work their way through the silty dust to the lee side of the road, the wind came again, and the dust began to blow.
~ * ~
A flash of lightning, without thunder.
Ahead of them, down in a little hollow, in the midst of the roaring storm, stood a small cottage. Lightning came again, and in this second flash Adam grabbed Mary’s arm and pointed the dwelling out to her.
“I don’t remember anything like that being there,” she said.
“Well, it’s here now. Let’s get the kids down,” Adam answered, peering unsteadily through the whorls of dust.
Mary nodded, and then, in the next lightning illumination, looked behind them.
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
A solid wall of silt was flowing down the mountainside toward them. There was no hint now that there had ever been a road where they stood. It was as if some mammoth volcano had reared up within the mountain and spewed a hundred thousand tons of ash down on itself, obliterating everything. They could see, up the mountainside, by the light of now almost continual, thunderless lightning, a few weather-beaten tips of pine trees, but nothing else. The dust, like liquid, flowed with silent determination down the mountain, toward what had once been the road.
“Quickly,” Adam said, and this time he couldn’t hide the fear in his voice.
There was a broken stone path down the hollow to the cabin, already slicked with viscous silt. They half walked, half slid their way down.
When they reached the front porch Adam saw with sinking hope how delicate and vulnerable the structure was. It was painted an odd dark color that might have looked quaint in summer sunshine but couldn’t hide the fragility of the place.
Above and around it loomed most of the mountain.
The door opened easily. Inside, it looked like some sort of summer weekend place, one large room outfitted with the barest of necessities: a wash sink, cupboard, a few sticks of furniture including a small table with four chairs. Everything was painted in dark colors. There was a low ceiling of unpainted boards, and a picture window that looked out on the mountain and where the road had been.
Mary closed the door, took hold of Adam’s arm and pointed through the window. There was awe and fear in her voice.
“Look.”
Where the wall of dust had been flowing determinedly toward them, covering everything, it had stopped short of the hollow they were in.
“There wasn’t any wall up there,” Adam stated.
“It’s almost as it if’s waiting,” Mary whispered.
They heard a loud creak and felt the cottage shudder.
~ * ~
Night came on, and stayed. The dust storm beat without mercy against the cliffs, drove in whistling tornados around the hollow. Intermittently, lightning flashed, without sound. By its light, they could see the wall of dust at the base of the mountain, hanging over them.
Inside, the small family, in the half-light of candles Mary had found in a cupboard, waited for sunrise.
“It sounds like it won’t ever end,” Adam said. He glanced furtively out the front picture window.
Mary stared at him without speaking.
The wind picked up with renewed fury, blowing its dry, moaning burden of dust against the fragile structure.
“I wish to hell daylight would come,” Adam said.
His wife moved the blankets closer around the two children, who lay side by side on the cabin’s single bed. They slept fitfully, their young minds drifting in and out of reality. “Mommee…” Cindy said suddenly, half asleep, then sank back into unconsciousness with a fitful breath.
For a few moments, there was only the moaning of the wind, the dry sound of ash washing against the front window.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t have stayed outside?” Mary asked abruptly. “I keep thinking of that mass of dust above us. If it comes down…”
Adam took a shuddering breath. “We did the right thing.”
“But—”
“I said we did the right thing!” He covered his face with his hands. “God, I hope we did…”
Outside, the wind and dust lashed mightily.
With a great rending groan, something above the ceiling was torn away.
The children awoke, screaming.
“My God!” Mary shouted, as Adam thrust himself up to go look outside. “Don’t go near the window!” she pleaded.
But he was already there, peering into the foggy swirls of dust. “I can’t see anything. It had to be part of the roof.”
Mary set about calming the children down. Lucy began to cry, and Cindy, the older, tried to go back to sleep.
“Adam, please, get away from the window!”
“I see…”
Another tearing groan from above.
“Adam!”
He shrank away from the window as something hard hit it. It rattled, but, somehow, it did not break.
“What was that?” Mary asked anxiously.
Adam moved cautiously to the window again. “I don’t know. But I thought I saw something moving out there. A light.”
“A car?” There was desperation edged by hope in Mary’s voice.
“I don’t see how it could be a car, with the road gone. Maybe some sort of plow or truck…”
Silence stretched between them, as Lucy again fell into a shuddering sleep.
“Mary, I have to go out there,” Adam said finally.
“No!”
“This place won’t last the night. I have to see what that light was.”
As if in answer, there came a great rumbling sound from above them on the mountain. Something huge and heavy-sounding slammed into the cottage.
Mary looked with fear from the shuddering back wall to her husband. “You won’t come back.”
“I…just have to know if there’s a safer place for us.” He looked down at the two fitfully sleeping children. “You want me to take the chance of not going?”
Mary was silent.
Adam retrieved his parka and began to shrug into it.
The wind and dust whipped into a fierce cacophony of sound, as if waiting hungrily for him to leave the cabin.
He hesitated a moment, looked back at his wife, then unbolted the door and stepped out.
~ * ~
Immediately, the wind tried to yank the door from his hands. Groaning with effort, he pulled the door shut behind him. He stood with his back plastered to it for a moment, trying to see through his dust-blinded glasses.
There was movement ahead of him.
Something…
Up where the road had been, the wall of dust was still held in check. Adam tried to pick up some hint of why so much silt could flow so fast so far and then suddenly stop. He knew that was the spot where the car had been washed over the cliff—he could see the vehicle canted on its side at the bottom, its headlights like beacons, dust duned slightly up one side—and he could swear there had been no natural obstruction, a wall or damn, to keep the wall of dust at bay.