did enjoy the company of people who knew how to enjoy themselves.
CRACK!
The flash of lightning and the hard-edged peal of thunder were nearly simultaneous. He felt rain on his face, a few droplets at first but quickening to a downpour that slapped down on them with real force. He was drenched through within seconds by the cold, stinging rain. And then it stopped abruptly, and a sickly green light lay over the valley floor, flattening the scene, as though he were riding into a photograph in a book.
Uh-oh, he thought.
The first hailstone fell as a single white rock, bouncing off Flossie's sweat-streaked shoulders. He just had time to hunker down and cinch the drawstring on his Stetson so that it sat tightly before a huge white fist smashed down on them all, a sudden roaring storm of ice that slammed into the earth, raising a shrieking, braying protest from the cattle, and nearly unseating the rider in front of Miguel with shock.
The vaquero spurred forward at a gallop, ignoring the stinging, burning pain of an Old Testament stoning from above. He recognized D'Age ahead of him, about to tumble from the saddle. Flossie was streaking forward at her top speed now, and Miguel was drawing on decades of horsemanship to maintain his balance. He drew up beside the Mormon and saw the fear in his face, the terror of having lost control of a big beast, compounded by the pounding riot of the stampede a few feet away.
Yes, the cattle had gone over now. No longer a controlled herd but a fear-shot panicking mob, barreling forward, plowing under any of their own number that fell, their cries like the horns of a thousand ghost trains. Miguel leaned across the gap between his horse and D'Age's, precariously teetering on the edge of his balance. He grabbed at the other man's reins and took a firm grip on the first attempt, applying hard but steady pressure, letting the animal know that it was under the control of a higher power. Calming it. Steadying it.
The horse never slowed. It was caught in the flow of the great mass of flesh up the valley floor, but after a few moments Miguel felt its wild terror and abandon subside noticeably.
'Take the reins,' he yelled at D'Age, and for a wonder, the man did so, getting his own fear under control, too.
He tried to find Sofia in the storm, but there was simply no chance. He could see no more than a few yards in any direction. He prayed as he had not prayed since the murder of his family that she would be all right. Truthfully, he had no faith in prayer anymore, but the Hail Marys and the pleas to look after his only surviving child arose unbidden, anyway.
Without warning, the hailstorm transitioned to a ferocious downpour, and visibility contracted to just a few feet. A howling banshee wind bit down on them, blowing the gray sheets of water horizontal. Miguel could feel himself being pushed forward by the strength of the wind and water. It shrieked in his ears and lashed at every exposed inch of skin, burning like acid.
Even the uproar of the stampede faded beneath the monstrous assault of the storm.
He looked about for his dogs but could see them nowhere. He could see very little indeed.
He hoped they had just fallen behind, unable to keep up. They were well trained and would not have let themselves get close enough to be trampled, but he could not still the anxious rodent of fear he felt gnawing at his guts.
CRACK!
A fat white bolt of pure electric energy speared into the ground not fifty yards away. He was certain he heard the wet air fizzle and split apart a microsecond before the blinding light seemed to turn the whole world into an X- ray display. The crash of thunder was enormous, enough to swallow whole planets, let alone the tiny creatures running back and forth across the land. He felt the reverberation of the sonic boom deep inside his chest, like a cathedral bell tolling, making his nuts contract in fright.
A single longhorn peeled away from the mass and took off at a right angle to it. Flossie all but reared up and dismounted him, but at the last moment she veered and threaded herself around the moving obstacle. He flowed with the horse, gripping with his thighs. So closely bonded was he with the animal that he felt the ground change under her hooves. Her grip on the soil became less sure, and he looked down and saw that Flossie was throwing up great geysers of water as she hammered up the valley.
At the same instant Miguel heard the sound he had been dreading since the storm clouds first had piled up in the western sky.
The rumble of something huge chasing them. Something bigger and more deadly than a mere stampede.
A wall of water.
The flood.
54
New York The flight of the Second Bomb Wing of the much reduced U.S. Air Force was largely uneventful. Ten of the B-52H Stratofortresses left Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri just before sunrise, lumbering up into a low gray mass of rain clouds that turned reduced visibility in the predawn gloom to near zero. The bombers climbed high over the storm system, heading east into the sun. The mission commander, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew 'Havoc' Porter, was glad of the cloud cover not for any tactical reason but simply because he found it depressing to fly over hundreds of miles of empty countryside and burned-out cities, knowing that down there the remains of millions of his countrymen still lay unburied, unsanctified.
Porter was not one for dwelling on the old horror. He'd met his fair share of cranks and obsessives in the years since the Disappearance, all with their own patented explanations of the cataclysm. The bomber pilot preferred not to think about it. That way lay madness, in his opinion, because if you could not explain why it came and went away-and nobody could-you could never be certain it would not return. Best to just get on with the task in front of you and the work of living in a changed world. Christ knew, there was plenty to be getting on with. Behind him and in the other planes, flight crews passed their time, prepping for the mission with computer simulations while nine other pilots like him kept their bombers on course at thirty thousand feet.
This would be different from their previous sorties over Manhattan, where they often loitered in the battlespace for hours, depending on the availability of a tanker, occasionally releasing precision-guided ordnance on high-value targets, usually at the behest of an individual forward air controller somewhere down in the meat grinder. Porter clicked his tongue-an old unconscious habit-as he thought of the FACs who went out into that fucking madhouse. You had to respect those guys. And girls, he reminded himself. Sometimes they deployed with small spec-ops teams, sometimes with half-trained, ill-equipped militia units. Often enough they were they only thing standing between a ground unit and total annihilation. It was why their life spans were measured in hours once they hit the streets of Manhattan. As Porter brought the wing around on a new heading, taking them farther to the north, he wondered, not for the first time, who the hell joined the air force to go get themselves fed into the shredders with a bunch of dumbass grunts.
Exceptional motherfuckers, without a doubt, that was who.
For him, the job for the moment meant little more than a numb ass and a sore back after flying around for a day or so. He didn't even need to worry about triple A or enemy air response. But he wasn't foolish enough to downplay the importance of what he and his comrades were about up here. Because of them, thousands of dumbass grunts lived when they might have died, and thousands of pirates and raiders got handed the shit end of the stick.
He grinned darkly behind his flight mask. If this mission went ahead as planned, there might very well be no more pirates left by the time he set foot back on terra firma. And how fucking sweet would that be? Those ragged-
