And then he vanished.
It didn't look like a machine was doing these viewpoints. It was the sort of montage technique often best left to machine, but Jane had a very strong intuition that someone was doing this work by hand. Human auteurs were putting it together, very deliberately, swiftly, and deftly assembling it with their own busy human fingertips. Doing it, knowing they were going to die at their post.
And the sorrow and pity of the great disaster struck her then, lancing into her right through that busy thicket of interface. And she felt the hurt explode inside of her. And she thought, with greater clarity than she had ever thought of anything before, that if she ever, somehow, managed to escape from this shelter and from these People of the Abyss, then she would learn to love something else. Something new. To learn tu love something that didn't stink at its spinning core, of disaster and destruction and despair.
Then the broadcast blinked out.
"Lost transmission again," said Red. "I bet it took down the main towers out on Britton Road this time-who wants to bet?"
"That was great," said Rosina, appreciatively. "I can't wait till they compile all this coverage and do the definitive disk."
Red combed channels. "SESAME's still up."
"Yeah, the feds keep their weather links down in the old missile silos," said chess player two. "Practically Unnukable."
"Where are we exactly?" asked Crimson Avenger, looking at the SESAME map. Red pointed. "Well," Avenger said, "I don't see any precipitation over us. I think we're in the clear!"
Suddenly there was a violent series of explosions just outside the door-explosions actually inside the shelter. Leo winced, then suddenly grinned. "Did you hear that, people! Those were our detonation signals!"
"Close," said chess player one, and plucked at his lower lip. He had gone quite pale. "Real close."
"How'd they squeeze that signal through?" said the second chess player.
"I'd bet autonomously launched drone aircraft," Red theorized. "Probably sweeping the whole locale. Of course, if a drone can safely fly over us, that ought to mean that we can leave here safely."
"Fuck the theory, I'm checkin' this out," Crimson Avenger declared. He left.
He was back within a minute, his handsome leather shoes leaving faint smudges of fresh blood on the shelter's thick carpet. "The sun is out!"
"You're kidding."
"No way, dood! It's wet, and everything is smashed completely flat, but the sky is blue and the sun is shining and there's not a cloud in the sky, and people, I am out of here." He walked into the kitchen and pulled a shining ceramic valise off the top of the freezer.
"You won't get far on foot," said chess player one.
Crimson Avenger glared at him. "How stupid do you think I am, Gramps? I don't have to get far. I know exactly where I'm going, and exactly what I'm doing, and my plans don't include you. Good-bye, doods. Good-bye forever." He opened the door and stalked away, leaving it ajar behind him.
"He's got a point," Leo said. "It's a good idea for us to split up as quickly as possible."
"You want to ferry us out in the personnel carrier?"
"No," Leo said. "It's wiser to stick to Plan A. You leave on foot, and I'll plastique the works here. The cars, the tank, the bikes, the shelter, everything."
"The bodies," Rosina pointed out.
"Yeah, okay, I'll put the deceased directly inside the tank before I detonate it."
"I'll help you, Leo," the second chess player said. "I owe you that much, after all this."
"Good. Time's pretty short, people, let's get moving."
Leo and his five remaining friends went into the hall. The woman and the Asian man were lying very dead on the sloping floor, the carpet sopping with their blood. The walls were pockmarked with shrapnel from the eight discarded cuffs that had detonated there. It stank of plastique. Rosina, and the older chess player, and Red the radioman picked their ways daintily past the corpses, with their eyes averted.
Jane tarried at the back of the hall. She wasn't too upset by the corpses. She had seen worse corpses. She was far more appalled by the living.
"Wet work," said the second chess player, sadly.
Leo hesitated. "I think we'd better use latex and medical paper for this job. That's a lot of body fluid."
"We don't have time for precautions. Leo. Besides, they were two of us; they're clean!"
"I don't know. I wouldn't put it past Ruby," Leo said, meditatively. "Ruby was quite the personal devotee of retrovtrus.
Jane began to walk up the hall. She brushed past the two of them. Her boots squelched moistly on the carpet. She was trembling.
"Jane," Leo called out.
She broke into a run.
"Jane!"
She broke out through the garage door. There was no wind. The sun was shining. The world smelled like fresh-plowed earth. The sky was blue. She ran for her life.
ALEX WAS SITTING up in a tree eating a loaf of bread. It wasn't a fresh loaf, because the smashed home where he'd raided the bread had been abandoned for at least two days. It had been the home of a man and his wife and the man's mother and the couple's two bucktoothed little kids. With a lot of religious stuff inside it; gold-framed devotional prints and evangelical literature and a thoroughly smashed farm truck with bumper stickers reading ETERNITY-WHEN? and AFtER DEATH-WHAT THEN?
It looked like it had been kind of a nice little farmhouse once; it had its own cistern, anyway, and a chicken coop, but it was all shattered now, and being Christians, the occupants would probably act real thankful about it. Alex had been astounded to discover that the inhabitants had a big stack of paper comic books, Christian evangelical comics, the real thing, in English no less, with hand drawings and black ink and real metal staples. A shame they were all torn up and rain-soaked and uncollectible.
Off in the distance, to the north, came an enormous explosion and an uprushing column of filthy smoke. The wind was so calm now, and the damp sweet sky so beautifully blue, that the burning column rose straight up and stood there in the sky and preened itself. It sure looked and sounded like a massive structure hit, but maybe he was being uncharitable. Could have been a detonating natural-tank or maybe a broken propane line. These things did Not every mishap in the world was somebody's fault.
Alex chewed more bread and had some carrot juice. The Christian family had been very big on organic whole juices. Except for the dad, presumably, who kept his truly awful Okie Double-X beer hidden under the sink.
Alex's tree was a large and fragrant cedar that had been uprooted and knocked over at an angle. Many of the branches had been twisted off by a passing F-2, showing red heartwood that smelled lovely. He had climbed into the downed tree and was lying on the sun-warmed trunk about four meters up in the air, his back against the underside of one of the thicker limbs. The gray-barked trunk under his paper-clad buttocks was as solid as a bench. His wasn't too far from the site of the crash. He could see dead wreck of Charlie from where he sat.
Juanita was gone, and to judge by the tracks in the sh mud, she had left with a rescuer in civilian shoes who sonic kind of big military truck. That was good news Alex, because Juanita's eyes had been crossed and glassy last hours, and he had her figured for a mild con;ion. He felt sure that Juanita, or at least some helpful uper, would show up again in pretty short order, some~, soon. She'd be coming to find him. And even if she 't want to find him in particular, that car had a lot of iand megabytage in it.