"And that Oklahoma City is definitely dog meat," Rosina added.
"Mega," said Crimson Avenger.
Oklahoma City was methodically recording its own destruction. Jane knew immediately that she was seeing history bubble off the screen, an odd and intense kind of history. Like some decadent Roman poet reciting his autobiography as he opened a vein in the bath.
At the touch of the F-6, now in its full fury, Oklahoma City was exploding on television, block by block. It was being sucked up and peeled apart and smashed. Heavily reinforced high-rises were being pulled up bodily out of the ground, like a farmer pulling up carrots. They were very hard and very strong buildings, and when they fell over and started rolling, all their contents would gush out of their windows, in a fountaining slurry of glass and trash and mist. The falling high-rises would rip up big patches of street with them, and when the wind got under the Street, things would start fountaining up. There was a lot of room under the earth in Oklahoma City, a lot of room with a lot of human beings in it, and when the wind got into those 'long shelters it simply blew them like a flute. Manholes blew off the streets and big whale gushes of vapor came Out of the pavement, and then a whole pod of whales seemed to surface under the street, because another skyscraper was slowly falling over and it was ripping up the street surface with its internet links and its indestructible ceramic water pipes and its concrete pedestrian subway.
And somebody was putting this vision together, deliberately assembling it. Somebody had broken the screen into compound miniscreens like a bee's eyes: traffic securicams and building securicams and minibank securicams and all the other modern urban securicams that offered no one even the tiniest trace of security. And as the cams were blinked out and smashed and ripped apart and exploded and were blinded and crushed, whoever was at work just kept adding more viewpoints.
One of them was a sudden glimpse of the Troupe. It was Jerry, he had his back half-turned to the camera, he was leaning, half-doubled, into the gusting wind. He was shouting and waving one arm. It was Troupe camp, and all the paper yurts were smashed and torn and writhing in the wind. Jerry turned to the camera suddenly and he held up a broken-winged ornithopter, and his face was alight with comprehension and terror.
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?