From the sides of his eyes he began to glimpse brown-frothy, whirling, pursuing walls. The thunder became that of a dozen express trains. At one moment there was yellow foam around his feet, at another it looked as though a swinging, dust-raising surge would cut him off.
Yet he did make it to the hilltop, and the waters didn’t get quite that far, and the thundering began slowly to fade.
As he swayed there panting, his lower chest feeling as if it had been kicked, there stepped out of the trees just ahead a straight-backed, small, elderly man with a shotgun.
“Stand, sir!” this apparition cried, directing the weapon at Richard. “Or I’ll fire.”
The apparition was dressed in brown gaiters, gray knickerbockers, and a lilac pullover. His narrow, wrinkled, watery-eyed face was set in lines of grimmest disapproval.
Richard stood, if only because he was so utterly and painfully winded. The thundering died away completely as the turbid water leveled a little way down the hill.
“Speak up!” the apparition cried. “What lets you think you have the right to trample my barley? And how did you let in all that water?”
Finally getting some of his breath, Richard shaped his lips in a grave smile and said: “It wasn’t deliberate on my part, believe me.”
Sally Harris, the midmorning sun glowing from the solid gold threads in her bikini, peered down over the balustrade and called back a running commentary.
Jake Lesher sat by a cup of black coffee flaming almost invisibly with Irish whiskey and puffed a long greenish cigar. Occasionally he frowned. A notebook stood open at two blank pages beside the coffee cup.
Sally called, “The water’s ten stories higher than last time. The roofs are packed with people and there’s two or three at every window I can see. Some are standing on the ledges. We’re lucky our skyscraper had a fire and the elevator’s stuck. Somebody’s shaking his fist — why me, what have I done to you? Somebody else just took a high dive — ouch, bellywhopper! The current’s fierce — it’s pushing a police launch backwards. You there, quit pointin’ your cane at me! There’s mothers and kids and—”
There was a zing and a crack and the tubular chrome rang along its length. Sally flipped her hands off it as if she’d been stung and turned around.
“Somebody just shot at me!” she announced indignantly.
“Move back, baby,” Jake instructed her. “People are always jealous of the guy at the top. Or the gal.”
Chapter Thirty-one
The saucer students heard four rapid horn-beeps which came winging back through air heavy with the sour, acrid fumes of burnt-over land — and reeking more than ever since a hot, damp wind had set in from the southeast. Overhead the sun was hot but there was a big black cloudbank to the south.
Hunter brought the sedan to a stop behind the Corvette, which had just topped a rise, the road passing between two natural rock gateposts some fifteen feet high.
Doc was standing in the seat, studying the terrain ahead. He looked just a little like a pirate, with the brim of his black hat pulled down in back but turned up sharply in front. He reached out his right hand, and Rama Joan put the field glasses into it. He resumed his scanning, using the seven-power instrument. Rama Joan and Ann stood up, too.
Hunter stopped the sedan’s motor, set the brake, and as the school bus drew up behind them third in line, he and Margo got out and hurried forward until they could see, too.
In front of them a slope stretched downward for a quarter of a mile in gentle undulations to a broad-ditched flat, then rose again, though not so high.
The slope was black to the left, dusty greenish-brown to the right. Monica Mountainway went down it in swinging curves, crossing and recrossing the demarcation line between the burned and the unburned.
Toward the bottom, almost on the demarcation line, it passed three white buildings surrounded by a wide graveled space and a high, wire-mesh fence. Then the road joined the broad-ditched fiat which led off in either direction, almost level but gently curving, until the hills hid it each way.
Down the center of the flat, following its contours, stretched what looked for a long moment exactly like a miles-long, flattish, scaly serpent thirty yards wide. The individual scales, which ran in glitter-bordered rows eight or nine across, were mostly blue, brown, cream and black, though here and there was a green or red one. Judging by its glittering sides, the serpent had a silver belly.
Wojtowicz, coming up behind them, said, “Cripes, we’re there. That’s it. Wow!”
The scaly serpent was inland Route 101, jammed with cars bumper to bumper. The glitter-border was the freeway’s wire-mesh fence.
Doc said hoarsely, “I want to talk to Doddsy and McHeath.”
Rama Joan said, “Ann, you can get them.” The little girl climbed past her mother and hopped out.
As soon as Hunter’s and Margo’s eyes stopped swinging and started to linger, details began to destroy the serpent illusion. At many spots cars had been driven wide on the shoulder, up against the fence. Some of these had their hoods up and dabs of white at their sides — Hunter realized these last must be towels, shirts, scarves, and large handkerchiefs: pitifully obedient “askings for assistance” set up before the jam got impossible.
At several points the serpent scales were twisted and whorled: accidents never cleaned up and attempts of whole groups of cars to turn and go back the way they’d come, either by crossing the median strip or by using the shoulder.
At three places the wire-mesh fence bulged acutely outward, each bulge filled with cars nose-on: these must have been trying to ram their way out. One of these attempts had been limitedly successful: the fence was down, but the way out beyond it blocked by a mess of cars ditch-overturned and crushed together, two half-climbed onto the others’ backs.
Here and there a few cars still moved in senseless-seeming, backward and forward jerks of a few feet each way. Stale exhaust-stench mixed with the burnt reek coming on the moist southeast wind.
Hunter thought of what it must have looked like at night in the last stages of general movement: five thousand cars in sight from here, ten thousand headlights swinging and blinking, ten thousand bumpers to clash and snag and rip, a few police speeding up and down trying to keep open lanes that relentlessly shortened and narrowed, five thousand motors, belching exhaust pipes, horns…And about a hundred thousand more cars between here and L.A.
He heard the Ramrod saying, “It is the valley of dry bones. Lord of the Saucers, succor them.” From the car beside him Rama Joan said softly: “Even an evildoer sees happiness so long as his evil deed does not ripen; but when his evil deed ripens…”
The biggest and worst car-crush of all was where Monica Mountainway entered 101 just beyond the three white buildings: a hundred or so cars slewed every which way, several overset, others ditch-jammed sideways, and the nearest three dozen burnt black — it occurred to Hunter that he was very possibly looking at the source of the brush fire.
Only after he and Margo had studied the cars for quite a while (or for an interminable, incredulous, eye-darting moment) did they begin to see the people. It was as if some universal law forced vision to descend by size-stages.
People! — three or four to each car, at least. Many of them still sitting in them, by God. Others standing or walking between them, a few standing or sitting on fabric-or-cushion-spread car roofs. Off to the left, beyond the burnt swathe, many people had climbed the fence and set up blanket-and-beach-towel-shaded bivouacs, yet few if any of them seemed to have gone far from the freeway that penned their vehicles; perhaps they figured the jam would be cleaned up somehow in a few hours or a day. And there wasn’t much walking around — they were sticking to the shade.