Abby fell back into the dark interior. Jacopetti’s strained shouting ceased abruptly.
The exposed engine of the Glendale ground against a torn flank of Mart’s camper and sparks fountained into the night air. “Christ, no,” Matt whispered.
The motor home was on fire as soon as that terrible possibility entered his mind.
Events were outrunning him. The fire didn’t spread. It was much quicker than that. There was no fire—and then the fire was everywhere. The side door of the Glendale rolled up to an impossibly steep angle.
Matt vaulted through the window and ran across the Connors’ dry garden to the burning vehicles. Both were on fire now. A propane tank popped, and Matt heard shrapnel scream past his ear.
The subsidence wasn’t deep. He scrambled down toward the Glendale just as flames licked up the undercarriage, forcing him back.
He called Abby’s name. She didn’t answer. He ran to the rear of the Glendale. There were no flames here—not yet—but the paint was peeling off the aluminum, and when he tried to climb up to the window, the skin of his hands sizzled on the metal.
He dropped to the ground and crawled away until the heat from the burning vehicles was no longer painful.
The Artifact, shrunken by altitude, dropped away beyond the western horizon. Its light faded.
It left behind the light of the burning campers, and a more baleful light from the caldera far away, a column of smoke impossibly wide, fan-shaped where it had risen into the dark sky.
The prairie was still undulating, Matt thought. Long, low-frequency waves. Like the swell of the ocean on a gentle night. Or maybe it was his imagination.
There might be stronger aftershocks.
He thought about Beth. Still work to do.
Time lurched forward in a drunkard’s walk. Somehow, he dragged Beth away from the Connor house. Somehow, he went back for Tom Kindle, who had pulled himself most of the way to the door before passing out.
He remembered Miriam. The old woman had been too sick to be sequestered with the others. Her small camper was still intact. Matt hurried to the door and forced it open.
But Miriam wasn’t inside—only a relic of Miriam. Only her empty skin.
In that interval, the sun had risen.
The southern horizon was a bank of roiling gray smoke larger than the Artifact had been. The sky was grayer by the minute and a gray ash had begun to fall like snow.
Beth continued to breathe. But each breath was a miracle; each breath was a victory against great odds.
Somehow, he lifted Beth and Tom Kindle into the coach of an undamaged camper.
Somehow, he began the longest journey of his life.
Chapter 38
Eye of God
It was cold in the shadow of the volcanic cloud.
The sun was a tenuous brightness in a dark sky, pewter or brass on a field of featureless gray. Matt drove with the camper’s high beams on.
He drove toward Cheyenne on 1-80. The place where the Artifact had been anchored to the Earth was sometimes visible on his right—not the caldera itself, but the glow of distant fires, of lava flows, a second brightness, not sunlight. Periodically, the road shook under his vehicle.
The road was difficult to follow. Ash fell from the sky in a continuous sheeting rain. It collected on the tarmac and drifted across the highway in charcoal dunes. At times the road seemed to disappear altogether; he navigated by the vague shapes of retaining walls, by road signs and mile markers transformed into gray cenotaphs. The camper’s wheels spun in the drifts, grinding for purchase on the buried blacktop. Progress was slow and painful.
He passed through Laramie, a landscape of hopeless ruins. At noon—he supposed it was noon—he stopped at a gas station that had lost its windows but was otherwise reasonably intact. He fought through a drift of ash, his shirt tied over his mouth and nose. The volcanic ash was a fine-textured grit that smelled a little like rotten eggs. He stepped through the space where a window had been, and in the meager shelter of the depot he located a road map of Colorado and Wyoming.
The camper could have used some gas, but the pumps were dead.
Matt shivered in the cold. Across the highway, a charred frame building smoldered. All else was ash, a concealing darkness, a smudged snowfall. Time to check on Kindle. Time to check on Beth.
He had left them in the coach, bandaged and wrapped in blankets against the cold. All his medical supplies, carefully hoarded, had been destroyed in the fire. But he had treated both patients with the antibiotics in his bag.
Kindle was occasionally conscious. Beth was not. Her breathing was terribly, desperately faint. Her pulse was rapid and weak. She was bleeding internally, and she was in shock.
He checked her bandage, decided it didn’t need changing. There was so little he could do. Keep her warm. Keep one shoulder up so her good lung wouldn’t fill with blood, so she wouldn’t drown in blood.
He worked by the light of a Coleman battery lantern. The daylight that penetrated the ash-caked windows was powerless and bleak.
He turned to Kindle next. Kindle opened his eyes as Matt examined the leg wound.
The injury didn’t appear serious but the bullet might have taken a chip from the fibula—and this was the leg Kindle had broken last fall. It would need to be immobilized until he could make a more thorough evaluation.
He looked up from his work and found Kindle staring at him. “Jesus, Matthew—your hands.”
His hands?
He held them up to the light. Ah—his burns. He had burned his hands trying to get Abby out of the Glendale. The palms were red, blistered, peeling—weeping in places. He took a strip of clean linen and tore it in half, wrapped a piece around each hand.
“Must hurt like hell,” Kindle said.
“We have painkillers,” Matt said. “Enough to go around.”
“You been driving since last night?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Taking painkillers, and you can drive like that?”
“Painkillers and amphetamines.”
“Speed?” He nodded.
“You carry amphetamines in that black bag?”
“Found them in Joey’s trailer,” Matt said.
“You crazy fucker. No wonder you look like shit.” Kindle moaned and moved a little under his blanket. “Beth alive?”
“Yes.”
“Where are we?”
“A few miles out of Cheyenne.”
Kindle turned his head to the window. “Is it dark out?”
“Day.”
“Is that snow?”
“Ash.”
“Ash!” Kindle said, marvelling at it.
But Kindle was right: he had gone without sleep for too long. When he looked at the map, all the names seemed obscurely threatening. Thunder Basin. Poison Spider Creek. Little Medicine Creek.
We have very little medicine at all, Matt thought.
Progress was maddeningly slow. The ash continued to fall. Hard to believe the earth could have yielded so much ash, the refuse of such an enormous burning.
Volcanic ash was rich in phosphorous and trace elements. He had read that somewhere. The rangeland would be fertilized for years to come. He wondered what might grow here, next year, the year after.
The speedometer hovered around ten miles per hour.
He was overtaken by a thought as the afternoon lengthened: Beth might die.