Everyone was silent. Jane heard the fire crackle.
Alex got up again, quickly but shakily. He slapped dust from his fancy shirt, trying gamely to smile. He'd been to town, somehow, into some neowestern clothing store. Probably sneaked off on a bike to Oklahoma City while nobody was paying attention to him.
He said his first words of the evening. "Spinnin' a rope is fun," he shouted raggedly, "if yore neck ain't in it!"
The Troupe broke into howls of laughter.
"Now for my goldurn pièce de résistance," Alex shouted. He began whipping energy into the rope, his dust-smeared pale face set grimly. The rope rose, began to spin, then to spiral inward. Narrow at the bottom. Broader at the top. It spun so fast that the lines of rope became a glimmering blur.
And faster yet. The fire billowed in the wind of its passage. It was sucking up dust from the ground.
A little toy spike.
The whipping rope was blowing hard enough to feel. As the vortex wandered past her at the end of the rope, Jane felt the rush of wind tugging her hair. Then, up at the very top, the end of the smart rope whipped loose, lashing out above their heads with a nasty whip crack of toy thunder. It cracked again, then a third time. The spike spun faster, with a mean dynamo hum. Alex was putting everything into it that the battery could hold. Jane saw him crouching there, flinching away below, wary, at the edge of control, frightened of his own creation.
Then he turned it off. It sagged in midair, and fell over in a heap of loops. A dead thing, dead rope.
The Troupe applauded wildly.
Alex stooped and gathered the dead rope up in both his arms.
"That's all I've got for y'all," he said, bowing. "Thanks a lot for your kindly attention."
CHAPTER 10
The day dawned bilious yellow and veined with blue, like a bad cheese. The jet stream had shifted, and at last, the high was on the move.
Jane and Alex took Charlie west down Highway 40 in pursuit of ground zero. Jane didn't know why Jerry had assigned her Alex as a chase companion, on this critical day of all days. Maybe to teach her some subtle lesson about the inevitable repercussions from an arrogant good deed.
She had anticipated a mean-spirited battle of wills between herself and her brother, but Alex was unusually subdued. He looked genuinely ill-or more likely, doped. It. would have been only too much like Alex, to sneak into Oklahoma City and score some hellish concoction.
But he did as he was told. He took orders, he tried running the cameras, he kept up with the chase reports from camp, he downloaded maps and took notes. She couldn't call him enthusiastic, but he was watchful and careful, and he wasn't making many mistakes. Actually, Alex wasn't any worse as a traveling companion than any other-Trouper. Somehow, despite everything, he'd actually done it. Her brother had become just another Trouper.
He had his rope with him. He always carried the rope now, looped around his bony shoulder like a broken puppet string. But he'd put away his play-cowboy finery and was wearing a simple paper refugee suit, fresh off the roll. And he'd sponge-washed, shaved, and he'd even combed his hair.
For once, Alex wasn't wearing the breathing mask. She almost wished that he was. With his pale muzzle and striped cheeks, and the waxy skin and too neat hair, he looked like some half-finished project off an undertaker's slab.
Long kilometers of western Oklahoma went by m silence, broken by reports from the Aerodrome Truck and the Radar Bus.
"What's with the paper suit, Alex?"
"I dunno. The other clothes just didn't fit anymore."
"I know what you mean.~~ A lot more long silence.
"Put the top back," Alex said.
"It's really dusty out there."
"Put it back anyway."
Jane put it back. The car began to fill with fine whirling vu There was a nasty hot breeze down at ground level, a breeze from the far west with a bad smell of ashes and ,minimification.
Alex craned his narrow head back and gazed straight the zenith. "Do you see that stuff up there, Janey?"
"It looks like the sky is breaking into pieces."
There was a low-level yellowish haze everywhere, a 1st haze like the film on an animal's teeth, but far up the dust, it was dry and clearer. Clear enough so that mewhere at the stratosphere, Jane could see a little ciru. More than a little cirrus, when she got used to looking r it. A very strange. spiderwebby cirrus. Long, thin, filaof feathery cloud that stretched far across the sky, in parallel waves either, as might be expected from ~nzs, but crossing at odd angles. A broken grid of high, razor-thin ice cloud, like a dust-filthy mirror cracking into hexagons.
"What is that stuff, Janey?"
"Looks like some kind of Bénard convection," Jane said. It was amazing how much better heavy weather felt when you had a catchphrase for it. If you had a catch-phrase, then you could really talk successfully about the weather, and it almost felt as if you could do something about it. "That's the kind of stratus you get from a very slow, gentle, general uplift. Probably some thermal action way up off the top of the high."
"Why aren't there towers?"
"Too low in relative humidity."
On 283 North, just east of the Antelope Hills, they encountered a rabbit horde.
Although she had eaten far more than her share of gamy, rank, jackrabbit tamales over the past year, Jane had never paid much sustained attention to jackrabbits. Out in West Texas, jackrabbits were common as dirt. Jack-rabbits could run like the wind and jump clean over a parked car, but in her own experience, they rarely bothered to do anything so dramatic. There just weren't many natural predators around to chase and kill jackrabbits, anymore. So the rabbits-they were hares, if you wanted to be exact about it-just ate and reproduced and died in their millions of various nasty parasites and plagues, just like the other unquestioned masters of the earth.
Jackrabbits had gray-brown speckled fur, and absurdly long, veiny, black-tipped ears, and the long, gracile limbs of a desert animal. Glimpsed loping around through the brush, eating most anything-cactus, sagebrush, beer cans, used tires, old barbed wire maybe-jackrabbits were lopsided, picturesque animals, though their bulging yellow rodent eyes rivaled a lizard's for blank stupidity. Until now, Jane had never seen a jackrabbit that looked really upset.
But now, loping across the road like some boiling swarm of gangling, dirt-colored vermin, came dozens of jackrabbits. Then, hundreds. Then thousands of them, endless swarming ragged loping rat packs of them. Charlie slowed to a crawl, utterly confused by a road transmuted into a boiling, leaping tide of fur.
The rabbits were anything but picturesque. They were brown and gaunt with hunger, and trembling and desperate, and ragged and nasty, like junked, threadbare stuffed animals that had been crammed through a knothole. Jane was pretty sure that she could actually smell the jackrabbits. A hot panicky smell rising off them, like burning manure.
The car pulled over and stopped.
"Well, that tears it," said Alex, meditatively. "Even these harebrained things have more common sense than we do. If we had any smarts, we'd turn off the road right now and head wherever they're heading."
"Oh, for heaven's sake, Alex. It's just a migration. It's because of the drought. The poor things are all starving."
"Maybe they are, but that's sure not why they're running. You seen any birds around here lately? Red-tailed hawks? Turkey vultures? Scissortails? Me neither."
"What are you getting at?"
"Janey, every wild creature that can get away from this place is running as fast as it can run. Get it? That's not any accident." He coughed a bit, cleared his throat. "And I've been doing some research," he announced. "There are certain towns in this area that have a lot of available shelter. Really good, solid storm shelter. Like, say, Woodward. That town got wiped flat by an F-4 about ten years ago, so they got themselves a bunch of diamond drills and they dug out underground in a mega way. Big-city shelters, whole malls down there, lots of private shelters too. And it's only twenty minutes from here."