At last the whole phytosphere crumpled.
As the stress band passed around it one more time, it exploded in a sloppy and gelatinous splash, like a water balloon filled with mint jelly.
Kev was left standing there in a hazmat suit covered with green slime.
“Okay, you can cut the fields,” said Gerry.
Mitch had his technicians do so.
There was a feeling in the room of fundamental and groundbreaking discovery. As the fields hummed down to silence and Platform 2 rolled to a stop, everyone stared at the splattered control area. Gerry looked at the readouts again. Theoretically, it was possible. But how? And with what resources? The Styrofoam ball plopped to the floor.
He glanced at Mitch. Mitch was looking at him in…
Yes, theoretically, it was possible.
If only he could figure out how.
PART FIVE
30
Darkness was her world, and her car was her life.
At last they reached Georgia. Glenda couldn’t believe how long it was taking them to travel the four hundred miles from Raleigh to Marblehill. She was anxious because her charge was getting lower and lower, and Hanna’s coughing was getting worse and worse. They were well up in the mountains and, luckily, there hadn’t been any more road washouts or landslides. The rain had stopped, and the hills were holding. What bothered her were the immense fog banks—fog so thick it was like cheese, with a stench like rotten algae.
She took 441 south through Clayton, Tallulah Falls, and Turnerville, glad to reach Turnerville because the hills and valleys weren’t so big, and the road didn’t wind so much. Also, there was some farmland, not the chilling and grotesque dead forest all the time, which was really starting to frazzle her. But she was also unnerved to reach Turnerville because Turnerville was where they really had to start looking out for Buzz.
Though it was ten o’clock in the morning, the sky was black. The only light came from her headlights.
They pierced the misty gloom like twin swords.
Ten miles later, they came to Clarkesville. She veered onto 17. The charge needle was on empty. Yet Clarkesville was a heady milestone to Glenda, the last town they passed before they reached Marblehill.
She remembered the road now, and didn’t need Gerry’s old map. Seventeen twisted north to 75, at which point she turned left on 75 and headed west again on an old blacktop highway that looked as if it had been abandoned by road crews years ago.
She was no more than a mile along 75 when a cloud of flies enveloped the car. She slowed right down because she couldn’t see through the flies. They landed on her windshield and didn’t blow off. This made seeing difficult. She turned on her windshield wipers and brushed them away. But too late. She bashed into something, and the car lurched to a halt. Her kids jerked forward in their seat belts. The pressure of
Hanna’s seat belt against the girl’s chest made her cough again, and it was a miserable, exhausted cough.
“Jake, give me the handgun,” said Glenda.
“What’d we hit?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see a thing. These damn flies.”
Jake handed the gun to her, and she got out of the car.
She shut the door so the flies wouldn’t get in, and walked around to the front. The flies immediately got in her hair, eyes, and ears. She brushed them away as best she could, but there were so many that she made only a halfhearted effort, and then resigned herself to suffering through them.
She shone the flashlight on the road and saw that she had run into a dead horse. The horse looked as if it had been shot through the head. Who would shoot a horse through the head? The animal was horribly emaciated, and starting to putrefy.
Shining her flashlight further up the road, she saw three other dead horses blocking the way at various distances. At last, far ahead, she saw a truck with a horse trailer, the trailer jackknifed across the road.
She cast her flashlight along the shoulder and wasn’t sure if she would have enough room to get by.
She approached the truck slowly, walking through this bizarre scene of equine mayhem with an overwhelming sense of apprehension. The other three horses looked as if they had also been pulled out of the trailer and shot. The flies got thicker, and the stench was horrendous. This was what she hated about her new world, how every so often a scene from Hell would arise, and there would never be any emergency crews to clear it away, only the terrifying effects of nature on dead flesh. She lifted the handgun and walked closer to the cab.
As she rounded the front of the horse trailer and came to the pickup truck, she peered in through the driver’s door and saw a man slumped forward against the steering wheel, a bloodstain shaped like a spider tattooing the side of his head. The dashboard lights were on, and the computer screen was telling her that while the engine might be off, the electrical was still on, and draining the charge at a rate of two percent per hour. Glenda had a wild hope that they might use this truck to get the rest of the way to Marblehill. Her hopes were further bolstered when she leaned over and looked at the charge gauge—it was a quarter full. Here, at the scene of this odd horse slaughter, they might find salvation.
But then she heard a noise from down the road. Her head swung in the direction of the sound. For a few seconds the noise disappeared, but then it came back stronger. Buzz. Like a hurricane coming in from the Atlantic, bound to get here sooner or later. Why couldn’t she be lucky every now and again, the way Neil and Louise were? Why couldn’t things go her way just once?
She took one more longing glance at the charge gauge in the truck, then ran back to her car. There was no time to make the switch.
Jake was up on his knees on the backseat, peering out the rear window. Hanna coughed and coughed, so miserable that she was in tears. Glenda handed the gun to Jake.
“I can’t see him yet, Mom.”
“He’s back there. The road climbs and dips.”
She got in, put the car in gear, and the dashboard immediately flashed a warning telling her she’d better charge up now or risk getting stranded. She had no choice but to ignore it. She leaned forward so she could get a better view through the windshield, eased her foot off the brake, backed up a bit, and maneuvered first around the dead horses, then the trailer, and finally the truck. Once past the truck she accelerated.
She looked in her rearview mirror and saw Buzz braking at the horse massacre site. He came to a stop, got out of his truck, and went to investigate the animals. He left his headlights on and was silhouetted in their glow.
He must have seen them because he lifted his rifle and shot toward them. The back window smashed.
“Jake, get down!
Jake was already down, but he lifted the gun and fired blindly a few times out the smashed back window. She glanced in the rearview mirror again and saw Buzz running back to his truck for shelter.
Then she just concentrated on getting as far ahead of him as she could.
As the road dipped down into a gully, she saw a track leading through a fence off to her left. With her charge light blinking, she knew she didn’t have more than a mile or two left. She swung left onto the track, where she saw a stand of dead trees up ahead, her headlights illuminating their gray trunks. She felt like she was in an airplane, and that the engine had just given out and she was now gliding. She wanted to turn her headlights off because she was sure Buzz would see them in the dark; at the same time, she was afraid she might crash into a tree if she
