“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”
He reached behind his seat for the tire thumper to knock out the windshield and in the next instant Al was flaming bits and smoking pieces flying over the Pacific.
A mushroom cloud of greasy flame rose a thousand feet into the sky. The shock wave leveled trees for a block and knocked out windows for three. Half a mile away, in downtown Pine Cove, motion detector alarms were triggered and added their klaxon calls to the roar of the flames. Pine Cove was awake—and frightened.
The Sea Beast was thrown two hundred feet into the air and landed on his back in the flaming ruins of Bert’s Burger Stand. Five thousand years on the planet and he had never experienced flight. He found he didn’t care for it. Burning gasoline covered him from nose to tail. His gill trees were singed to stumps, jagged shards of metal protruded between the scales of his belly. Still flaming, he headed for the nearest water, the creek that ran behind the business district. As he lumbered down into the creek bed, he looked back to the place where his lover had rejected him and sent out a signal. She was gone now, but he sent the signal anyway. Roughly trans-lated, it said, “A simple no would have sufficed.”
The poster covered half of the trailer’s living room walclass="underline" a younger Molly Michon in a black leather bikini and spiked dog collar, brandishing a wicked-looking broadsword. In the background, red mushroom clouds rose over the desert. Warrior Babes of the Outland, in Italian, of course; Molly’s movies had only been released to overseas theaters—direct to video in the United States. Molly stood on the wire-spool coffee table and struck the same pose she had fifteen years before. The sword was tarnished, her tan was gone, the blonde hair had gone gray, and now a jagged five-inch scar ran above her right breast, but the bikini still fit and muscles still raked her arms, thighs, and abdomen.
Molly worked out. In the wee hours of the morning, in the vacant space next to her trailer, she spun the broadsword like a deadly baton. She lunged, and thrust, and leapt into the improbable back flip that had made her a star (in Thailand anyway). At two in the morning, while the village slept around her, Molly the crazy lady became, once again, Kendra, Warrior Babe of the Outland.
She stepped off the coffee table and went to her tiny kitchen, where she opened the brown plastic pill bottle and ceremoniously dropped one tablet into the garbage disposal as she had every night for a month now. Then she went out the trailer door, careful not to let it slam and wake her neighbors, and began her routine.
Stretches first—the splits in the high wet grass, then a hurdler’s hamstring stretch, touching her forehead to her knee. She could feel her vertebrae pop like a string of muted firecrackers as she did her back stretches. Now, with dew streaking her legs, her hair tied back with a leather boot lace, she began her sword work. A two-handed slash, a thrust, riposte, leap over the blade, spin and slash—slowly at first, working up momentum—one handed spin, pass to the other hand, reverse, pass the sword behind her back, speeding up as she went until the sword cut the air with a whistling whirr as she worked up to a series of backflips executed while the sword stayed in motion: one, two, three. She tossed the sword into the air, did a back flip, reached to catch it in midspin—a light sweat sheeted her body now—reached to catch it—the sword silhouetted against a three-quarter moon—reached to catch it and the sky went red. Molly looked up as the shock wave rocketed through the village. The blade slashed the back of her wrist to the bone and stuck in the ground, quivering. Molly swore and watched the orange mushroom cloud rise in the sky over Pine Cove.
She held her wrist and stared at the fire in the sky for several minutes, wondering if what she was seeing was really there, or if perhaps she’d been a little hasty about stopping her meds. A siren sounded in the distance, then she heard something moving down in the creek bed—as if huge rocks were being kicked aside. Mutants, she thought. Where there were mushroom clouds, there were mutants, the curse of Kendra’s nuked-out world.
Molly snatched the sword and ran into her trailer to hide.
The shock wave from the explosion had dissipated to the level of a sonic boom by the time it reached Theo’s little cabin two miles out of town. Still, he knew that something had happened. He sat up in bed to wait for the phone to ring. A minute and a half later, it did. The 911 dispatcher from San Junipero was on the line.
“Constable Crowe? You’ve had some sort of explosion at the Texaco station on Cypress Street in Pine Cove.
There are fires burning nearby. I’ve dispatched fire and ambulance, but you should get over there.“
Theo struggled to sound alert. “Anyone hurt?”
“We don’t know yet. The call just came in. It sounds like a fuel tank went up.”
“I’m on my way.”
Theo swung his long legs out of bed and pulled on his jeans. He snatched his shirt, cell phone, and beeper from the nightstand and headed out to the Volvo. He could see an orange corona from the flames in the sky toward town and billowing black smoke streaking the moonlit sky.
As soon as he started the car, the radio crackled with the voices of volunteer firemen who were racing to the site of the explosion in Pine Cove’s two fire engines.
Theo keyed the mike. “Hey, guys, this is Theo Crowe. Anyone on scene yet?”
“ETA one minute, Theo” came back at him. “Ambulance is on scene.”
An EMT from the ambulance came on the radio. “The Texaco is gone. So’s the burger stand. Doesn’t look like the fire is spreading. I don’t see anyone around, but if there was anybody in those two buildings, they’re toast.”
“Delicate, Vance. Very professional,” Theo said into the mike. “I’ll be there in five.”
The Volvo bucked over the rough dirt road. Theo’s head banged on the roof and he slowed enough to buckle his seat belt.
Bert’s Burger Stand was gone. Gone. And the minimarket at the Texaco, gone too. Theo felt an empty rumbling in his stomach as he pictured his beloved minimarket nachos going black in the flames.
Five minutes later he pulled in behind the ambulance and jumped out of the Volvo. The firefighters seemed to have the fire contained to the as-phalt area of the Texaco and the burger stand. A little brush had burned on the hill behind the Texaco and had charred a few trees, but the firemen had drenched that area first to keep the fire from climbing into the residential area.
Theo shielded his face with his hands. The heat coming off the burning Texaco was searing, even at a hundred yards. A figure in fire-fighting re-galia approached him out of the smoke. A few feet away he pulled up the shield on his helmet and Theo recognized Robert Masterson, the volunteer fire chief. Robert and his wife Jenny owned Brine’s Bait, Tackle, and Fine Wines. He was smiling.
“Theo, you’re gonna starve to death—both your food sources are gone.”
Theo forced a smile. “Guess I’ll have to come to your place for brie and cabernet. Anyone hurt?” Theo was shaking. He hoped Robert couldn’t see it by the light of the fire and the rotating red lights of the emergency vehicles. He’d left his Sneaky Pete pipe on the nightstand.
“We can’t locate the driver of the truck. If he was in it, we lost him. Still too hot to get close to it. The explosion threw the cab two hundred feet that way.” Robert pointed to a burning lump of metal at the edge of the parking lot.
“What about the underground tanks? Should we evacuate or something?”
“No, they’ll be fine. They’re designed with a vapor lock, no oxygen can get down there, so no fire. We’re going to have to let what’s left of the minimart just burn out. Some cases of Slim Jims caught fire and they burn like the sun, we can’t get close.”