And yet Jane still couldn't help feeling sorry for the a.nticyclonic. That mutant left-handed runt of the litter... the poor damned giant evil beautiful thing . .
The right-hand twister left the ground, bunched itself, and suddenly made a major and definite maneuver. It ripped loose from its original moorings at the back of the storm and surged forward, root and branch. The whole structure of the cloud base collapsed before it like a shattered ceiling and was torn into foggy chaos. The trailing bent tail that was the anticyclonic buckled, and dwindled, and was sucked away.
A blinding torrent of almost horizontal rain blasted across the landscape. The spike vanished behind it.
Jane immediately wheeled and started to skirt the right-hand edge of the storm. Working her way around it took her twelve long minutes of high-speed pursuit and a painful drain of battery power. On the way they passed a charging land rush of three TV camera crews, five groups of amateur spotters in their rusty ham-hacker trucks, and two sheriff's deputies.
The sky was low and overcast ahead of the twister, an endless prairie of damp unstable Gulf air, tinder before a brushfire. When Jane caught sight of the spike again, it was a squat, massive, roaring wedge, lodged right in the pocket of the circulation hook and smashing northeast like a juggernaut. She turned off her monitor to the ongoing SESAME traffic and opened her mike and headphones to the general Troupe channel. "Jane in Charlie here. We have the spike in sight again! It's a mega F-4 on the ground and in the hook! This one could go all the way, over!"
"This is Joe Brasseur at Navigation. Copy, Jane. Your spike has habitation ahead-Quanah, Texas. Chasers, watch for fleeing vehicles! Watch for civilians! Watch for debris in the air or on the ground! Remember, people, a spike is a passing thing, but a lawsuit you always have with you. Over."
It was really nice, what the people of Quanah had done. You met all kinds out on the edge of the wasteland, most of them pretty unsavory kinds, but the citizens of Quanah were a special breed. There were just over three thousand of them. Most of them had settled here since the aftermath of heavy weather. They were hard and clever and enduring people, and they had a kind of rough-hewn civic virtue that, in all sincerity, you could only call pioneer spirit.
They didn't irrigate open fields anymore, because with their aquifer declining that was illegal as well as useless, But they had genetic crops with the chlorophyll hack, and they'd done a great deal with greenhouses. Enormous greenhouses, beautiful ones, huge curved foam-metal spars and vast ribbed expanses of dew-beaded transparent membrane, greenhouses as big as cornfields, greenhouses that were their cornfields, basically. Vast expanses of well-designed, modern, moisture-tight greenhouses, pegged down tight and neat across the landscape just like a big sheet of giant bubblepak.
The F-4 walked into the midst of the greenhouse bubbles and methodically wreaked utter havoc. It simply stomped the big pockets of bubbtepak and catastrophically ruptured them, with sharp balloon-pop bangs that you could feel in your bones from a mile away. The acres of damp air inside the ruptured bubbles geysered instantly upward in fat twisting rushes of condensation fog, and before Jane's amazed, observant eyes, the F-4 literally drank up those big sweet pockets of hot wet air, just like a thug at a bar doing tequila stammers.
It ripped every greenhouse in its path into flat deflated tatters, and it entirely destroyed alt the crops inside them.
The citizens of Quanah were not just farmers. They were modern bioagriculturists. They had set up a silage refinery: stacks, towers, fermentation chambers. They were taking the worst harvest in the world: raw weed, brush, mesquite, cactus, anything-and cracking it into useful products: sugars, starches, fuel, cellulose. Silage refining was such an elaborate, laborious process that it was barely profitable. But it made a lot of honest work for people.
And it made some honest use out of the vast expanse of West Texas's abandoned wasteland. Silage refining came very close to making something useful and workable out of nothing at all.
The F-4 waded into the silage refinery and tore it apart.
It picked up the pipelines, snapped them off clean at the joints, and wielded them like supersonic bludgeons. It twisted the refinery towers until they cracked off and tumbled and fell, and it threw a hot spew of gene-twisted yeast and fungi into a contaminating acres-wide stop. It blew out windows, and ripped off roofs, and cracked cement foundations, and shorted out generators. It swiftly killed three refinery workers who had been too stubborn and dedicated to leave. After the twister had shattered half the refinery and broken the rest open, its ally the rain arrived, and thoroughly drenched everything that had been exposed.
The twister then chewed its way through Quanah's flat checkerboard of streets, smashing homes and shops, destroying the ancient trees around the courthouse, and annihilating a dance hall.
When it had finished with the town of Quanah, Texas, the twister headed, undiminished, toward the Red River, and the people of the great state of Oklahoma.
WHEN JANE GOT back to the camp, it was five in the morning. She'd managed to sleep a little in the driver's seat during the long haul back, but she was far too full of adrenaline for anything like real rest.
She drove the car under one of the camp's garage tents and prodded Rick awake. Rick got up groggily without a word and staggered off for his tepee.
Jane walked stiff-legged and trembling into the command yurt. There was no sign of Jerry, and all his machines were shut down.
She went to their favorite tepee, the one they usually used for assignations.
Jerry was on the bubblepak floor in a bag, asleep.
Jane threw her sweaty clothes off and fought her way into the bag next to him.
"You've got the shakes," he told her.
"Yeah," Jane said, trembling harder to hear him say it. "I always get the shakes whenever they kill people."
"Nothing we can do about that," he said gently. "We just bear witness.
Jane stared up at the tepee's dark conical recess. She could see stars through the smoke flap. She was stiff all over and trembling with stress and she smelled really bad.
"My life sure has changed since I met you..." she said, "you crazy son of a bitch."
Jerry laughed and put his hand on her right breast. "Yeah?"
"That's right. I've seen people get killed... . I've raced down highways at two hundred klicks an hour. I've jumped out of airplanes. I climbed up a radio tower and I jumped off it, and I beat up the woman who taught me how to do it."
"You didn't beat her up very hard," Jerry said. He slid his bearded face into the hollow of her neck.
Jane started trembling much harder. "Just once," she told him, "I'd like to fuck you in a bed. With a mattress, and clean sheets. When we've both showered. And me wearing something slinky and maybe some perfume. Don't you like that, Jerry? Perfume?"
"What I like is remembering where the condoms are. Where are they?"
"They ought to be tucked over there under that ditty bag, unless somebody used 'em all."
Jerry climbed out of the bag, naked, found a condom after prolonged search, and crawled back into the bag again. His skin had gone cold in the night air. Jane shivered violently.
Jerry turned her onto her stomach and set his solid hands to work on her shoulders. "You've got it bad tonight," he said.
She nodded. "That's good. Keep doing that. Maybe I'll live."
Silently, deftly, Jerry worked his way off her shoulders, down her spine and rib cage, going after knotted nerves that were like snarled fishline. It felt so good to have the strong human touch of someone she trusted. Someone who wouldn't stop or hesitate, who knew what he was doing and who had never hurt her. He was pulling the jitters out of her, and it was like he was chasing little devils Out of her skin. Jane stretched out on her stomach and went languorous and heavy-lidded.