She fought with the car then, trying to get Charlie to turn and run. Nothing happened; the machine sat as if stunned. Lightning like no lightning she had ever seen caine out of the erupting columns of dirt. It was dirt lightning, rock lightning. It was thick and crooked and horizontal, and it looked like flying, spinning swastikas. A great flying complex of crooked lightning flew right over their heads, and it broke apart in front of her eyes into gigantic, glowing, sparking chunks.
The car moved. She turned and ran. The day was gone. They were in black hell, instant Gehenna. A hurricane of dirt had spread all over the sky. They were buried alive under a giant spreading plateau of screaming, crackling filth. The air was half-dirt. The maddened earth had forgotten the difference between air and dirt. Dirt and air were going to be the same thing from now on. The black slurry of wind was hanging over them, it was all around them.
And out at the far edge of it-at the very far, spreading edge, where there was still a little squashed and sickly light at the horizon: there were spikes dropping. Spikes, all around them. Dozens of spikes. A corona of spikes, a halo of spikes. F-is, F-2s, F-3s. Kinky spikes. Fat spikes. Spikes as squat as footballs. Spikes that whipped like venom-spitting mambas. Spikes that the F-6 had flung out all around itself in a single gesture, spikes it had conjured up and flung to earth in a moment, a chorus line of devils at the skirts of its Dance of Destruction.
Charlie flew as it had never flown before. They ran east over a darkened road, and the pursuit vehicle's complex wheels scarcely touched the ground. Jane glanced at Alex. He was still looking through the cameras. He was still recording-everything that he could. He had the cameras turned backward and he was looking behind the car.
Then suddenly Alex flung the cameras off his face and he doubled over hard, and he wrapped both arms around his head. Jane wondered for a passing instant what he had seen, and then in the next instant, the car simply became airborne. Charlie was actually flying. No illusion. No simulation. No hallucination. A very simple matter.
They were flying through the air. Maybe ten meters off the road. They were up in the air in an arctic, polar, stratospheric gust of wind that had simply caught the car and plucked it from the earth like a paper cup, and it was bearing them along inside it, like a supersonic torrent of black ice.
Jane felt a chill existential horror as they remained airborne, remained flying, and things began to drift gently and visibly past them. Things? Yes, all kinds of things. Road signs. Bushes. Big crooked pieces of tree. Half-naked chickens. A cow. The cow was alive, that was the strangest thing. The cow was alive and unharmed, and it was a flying cow. She was watching a flying cow. A Holstein. A big, plump, well-looked-after barnyard Holstein, with a smart collar around its neck. The cow looked like it was trying to swim. The cow would thrash its great clumsy legs in the chilly air, and then it would stop for a second, and look puzzled.
And then the cow hit a tree and the cow was smashed and dead, and was instantly far behind them.
And theft Charlie hit another, different tree. And the air bag deployed, and it punched her really hard, right in the face.
When she came to, Alex was driving, or trying to. Everything was pitch-black. Great sheets of lightning tore across the sky and the noise-cancellation phones, amazingly, were still on her head. She was slumped in the passenger seat and drenching wet.
They were in some small town. The town strobed, periodically, into visibility around them, in massive flashes of sky-tearing lightning. Because everything was utterly noisy, everything beneath her headphones was silent. The town was a silent ghost town, under silent artillery bombardment. The town was simply being blown down, blown apart. Walls were being twisted apart, and roofs methodically caved in. But the bare wind was not alone in its work. The wind had brought its -friends. Thinp-projcctiles, shrapnel-were randomly smashing the town, smashing anything that stood up, smashing anything that resisted, flying and smashing and crushing and bursting. Flying, wrecking things. Ancient telephone poles from before the wireless days-they were being snapped up clean and picked up and thrust through the sides of multistory buildings. With a weird kind of ease, like someone piercing big blocks of tofu with a breadstick.
Everything was airborne, like a little city churned into a dense aerial mulch. Laundry. Stoplights. Bicycles. Dog-houses. Sheets of tin, bending and tumbling and rippling just like big shining sheets of paper. Hills of branches, mountains of leaves. Satellite dishes, multibranched hollow radio and telephone aerials. The town's water tower had fallen over and ruptured like a big metal egg. Dirt. Dirt everywhere. Sudden mean gusts of dirt like a sandblast. Dirt that pierced the skin like ink from a tattoo needle. Dirt and hail, and water that was full of dirt, and water drops that hit her hard as hail.
Alex had twin runnels of blackness streaking down his face and she realized numbly that his nose was bleeding. Her nose too. Her nose hurt; the wreck had really hurt her nose.... Alex was driving down the main street of town, rather slowly and clumsily really, and with a lot of pained attention to detail. There were cars turned upside down all over the place, kicked-over cars like a giant child disturbing a convention of turtles.
A quite large brick building gracefully gave up the ghost as they passed it, and it cascaded gently into the street like a sackful of dominoes. Inside it, every object on its walls and floors took flight like liberated pigeons, and its guts spewed great crackling gouts from severed power lines.
Outside the city, they picked up speed again. Jane's head began to hurt a lot, and suddenly she regained full consciousness, and she came to herself. She went at once for the comset, pressed the mike to her lips between two closed hands, and began shouting into the mike. Not that she could hear herself. Not that anyone in the Troupe could hear her, necessarily. But just to bear witness. Just to bear witness to everything, to bear witness as long as she could.
They entered some kind of forest. That seemed like a really bad idea. Charlie-began jumping over downed trees in the road, and she could tell from the way his wheels scrunched against the tarmac that this was not at all good for the car. The car was badly damaged. How badly, she couldn't tell.
Trees were whipping back and forth at the roadside like damned souls frantically flagging down a lift. Another great sheet of cloud-to-cloud lightning arc-lit the zenith, and, incidentally, also lit an F-i that was striding knee-deep through the forest alongside them, not fifty meters away. The spike was just churning along there, spinning like a black cone of wet rubber and methodically tossing a salad of smashed tree. She saw it again, three more times, in three more lightning flashes, until it meandered out of sight.
On the far side of the forest an insane wind gust pounced on them and almost blew them away. Charlie actually leaped into the air like a hooked fish and sort of skipped, leaning and kicking violently against the wind, an odd maneuver dredged up from some subroutine she'd never seen before. Jane said as much, into the mike, for something to say, and then she looked at her lit Trouper cuff.
It was June i6, at two-thirteen in the afternoon.
Then another stronger gust hit them broadside, and Charlie was knocked completely off its wheels, and roiled right over and jumped up. And rolled over and jumped up, and roiled and jumped in yet a third somersauIt~ tumbling in the grip of the wind like an aikido master. Until Charlie fetched up, very hard, with his undercarriage smashing into the unyielding trunk of a tree. And then all maneuvers stopped.
Jane did not pass out. The air bags had deployed again, but without the same slamming gusto they had shown before. She realized from the sharp stink of ozone and the steady buzzing that the superconductive had cracked.