Alex stood up, peeled the suit's front zip down, pulled it down to his waist, and crudely belted it around his midriff with its dangling white paper arms. He looked truly awful now, pallid, skeletal, heat-prickled, and sweaty, but the others wouldn't notice; they were virch-blind and muttering steadily into their mikes.
Alex left the sunshade and walked around the truck, sweat running in little rills down the backs of his knees.
He found himself confronting an amazing western sky.
Alex had seen violent weather before. He'd grown up in the soupy Gulf weather of Houston and had seen dozens of thunderstorms and Texas blue northers. At twelve, he'd weathered the fringes of a fairly severe hurricane, from the family's Houston penthouse.
But the monster he was witnessing now was a weather event of another order. It was a thunderhead like a mountain range. It was piercing white, and dusky blue, and streaked here and there with half-hidden masses of evil greenish curds. It was endless and rambling and columnar and tall and growing explosively and visibly.
And it was rolling toward him.
A tower had broken the cap. It had broken it suddenly and totally, the way a firecracker might rupture a cheap tin can. Great rounded torrents of vengeful superheated steam were thrusting themselves into the upper air, like vast slow-motion fists. The dozens of rising cauliflower bubbles looked as hard and dense as white lumps of marble. And up at the top of their ascent-Alex had to crane his neck to see it-vapor was splashing at the bottom of the stratosphere.
Alex stood flat-footed in his plastic-and-paper shoes, watching the thunderstorm swell before his eyes. The uprushing tower had a rounded dome at its very top, a swelling blister of vapor as big as a town, and it was visibly trying to break its way through that second barrier, into the high upper atmosphere. It was heaving hard at the barrier, and amazingly, it was being hammered back. The tower was being crushed flat and smashed aside, squashed into long flattened feathers of ice. As the storm's top thickened and spread to block the sunlight, the great curdled uprushing walls of the tower, far beneath it, fell into a dreadful gloom.
It was a thunderstorm anvil. An anvil was floating in the middle of the blue Texas sky, black and top-heavy and terrible. Mere air had no business trying to support such a behemoth.
Lightning raced up the nimbus, bottom to top. First a thin, nervous sizzle of crazy brightness, and then, in the space of a heartbeat, one, two, three rapid massive channeled strokes of electrical hell, throwing fiery light into the greenish depths of the storm.
Alex ducked back around the truck. The thunder came very hard.
Buzzard tugged his goggles and earphones down, into an elastic mess around his neck. "Gettin' loud!" he said cheerfully.
"It's getting big," Alex said.
Buzzard stood up, grinning. "There's a gust front comin' our way. Gonna kick up some bad dust around here. Gotta get the masks."
Buzzard fetched three quilted mouth-and-nose masks from a stack of them in a carton in the truck. The paper masks were ribbed and pored and had plastic nose guards and elastic bands. Martha put her mask on and methodically wrapped her hair in a knotted kerchief. Buzzard shut the doors and windows of the truck securely, checked the supports of the sunshade, and tightened the strap of his billed cap. Then he put all his gear on again, and lay in the chair, and twitched his fingers.
All around the hill, little birds began fluttering westward, popping up and down out of the brush in a search for cover.
The searing light of early afternoon suddenly lost its strength. The spreading edge of the anvil had touched the sun. All the hot brilliance leached out of the sky, and the world faded into eerie amber.
Alex felt the cramp of a long squint easing from his eyelids. He put his mask on, tightly. It was cheap paper, but it was a good mask-the malleable plastic brace shaped itself nicely to the bridge of his nose. Breathing felt cleaner and easier already. If he'd known breathing masks were so easy to get, Alex would have demanded one a long time ago. He would keep the mask handy from now on.
Alex put his masked face around the corner of the truck. The storm was transmuting itself into a squall line, tower after tower springing up on the mountainous flanks of the first thunderhead. Worse yet, this whole vast curdled mass of storms was lurching into motion, the mountainous prow of some unthinkably vast and powerful body of hot transparent wind. There was nothing on earth that could stop it, nothing to interfere in the slightest. It would steam across the grassy plains of Tornado Alley like a planetary juggernaut.
But it would miss them. The aerodrome truck was parked out of range of the squall line, just past the southern rim of it. The Troupers had chosen their stand with skill.
Alex walked into the open, for a better look. Off to the northwest, a patch of the squall's base had ruptured open. A dark skein of rainfall was slowly drifting out of it. Distant shattered strokes of lightning pierced the sloping clouds.
Alex watched the lightning display for a while, timing the thunderclaps and pausing periodically to swat mosquitoes. He'd never had such a fine naked-eye view of lightning before. Lightning was really interesting stuff: flickering, multibranched, very supple, and elaborately curved. Real lightning had almost nothing to do with the standard two-dimensional cartoon image of a jagged lightning bolt. Real lightning looked a lot more like some kind of nicely sophisticated video effect.
Out on the western horizon, the grass and brush suddenly went crazy. It bent flat in a big spreading wave. Then, it whipped and wriggled frantically in place. The grass seemed to be crushed and trampled under some huge invisible stampede.
A flying wall of dirt leaped up from the beaten earth, like the spew from a beaten carpet.
Alex had never seen the like. He gaped in astonishment as the wall of dirty wind rushed forward. It was moving across the landscape with unbelievable speed, the speed of a highway truck.
It rocketed up the slope of the hill and slammed into him.
It blew him right off his feet. Alex landed hard on his ass and tumbled through the spiky grass, in a freezing, flying torrent of airborne trash and filth. A shotgun blast of grit spattered into both his eyes, and he was blinded. The wind roared.
The gust front did its level best to strip his clothes off. It had his paper suit around his knees in an instant and was tearing hard at his shoes, all the while scourging him with little broken whips of airborne pebble and weed. Alex yelled in pain and scrambled on hands and knees for the shelter of the truck.
The truck was heaving back and forth on its axles. The fabric veranda flapped crazily, its vicious popping barely audible in the gusting howl.
Alex fought his way back inside the writhing, flapping paper suit, and he tunneled his grimy arms into its empty sleeves. His eyes gushed painful tears, and his bare ankles stung in the gust of dirt beneath the truck. The wind was very cold, thin, and keening and alpine. Alex's fingers were white and trembling, and his teeth chattered behind the mask.
More filth was gusting steadily beneath the truck. The dirty wind skirled harmlessly under the bottoms of the Troupers' sling chairs. Though Alex couldn't hear what they were saying, he could see their jaws moving steadily below their paper masks. They were still talking, into the little bent sticks of their microphones.
Alex trawled up his windswept virching gear as it danced and dangled violently at the end of its wiring. He jammed his back against the lurching truck and clamped the earphones on.