Total Eclipse

“Doesn’t look like much,” I said.

“It’s bad,” she said. “I think it’s bad.”

I gave her a sharper look. “What?”

She shook her head and slipped her sunglasses on, leaning her head back. “I’m going to take a nap. Wake me if we pass a hot male strip bar.”

Kevin growled, and she smiled and tucked her small hand in his. “Could we at least have some tunes?” he said. “Or is this car too sacred for a radio?”

“No car is too sacred for a radio,” I said. Sure enough, there was one—not factory original, apparently an upgrade from the rental agency. Satellite radio. I fiddled until I found a classic rock station. Billy Preston, “Will It Go Round in Circles.” Sweet. I cranked it up, opened the throttle a little more, headed for trouble.

Feeling better than I had in months.

I drove like the devil was after me.

As it was, because Cherise had been right about the storm. Even I could tell now that it was going to be a bad one; the clouds were massing up, boiling in black towers as warm and cool air collided. A huge anvil formation, spreading out over the entire western horizon. It hadn’t been moving fast, but it had been moving, the last I could see of it before it blocked out the sunset and sent us into premature darkness. I shifted stations from rock to weather, and caught reports of massive winds, fleets of tornados, flooding. The Weather Wardens were having one hell of a bad time, though so far they’d kept the tornados from touching down in any heavily populated areas. That was the best maintenance strategy—let the storm vent its energy where it wouldn’t do as much damage and injury. But just from the news reports I could tell how much power was stored in that storm. Massive. And even the best Weather Wardens weren’t going to be able to get to everything.

The rain hit us viciously about two hours later, right about the time that my body began urgently waving the yellow caution flag. I checked the clock; it was after midnight, and I’d been driving for far too long. I found a halfway decent roadside motel—a bland chain thing, but I wasn’t concerned about originality right now so much as availability of pillows and mattresses. Cherise and Kevin had both fallen asleep some time back, and I had to wake them to check in. I hated leaving the Boss unescorted—somebody was going to recognize its value—but the best I could do was park it outside the two rooms I rented, under a strong light, and hope for the best. I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.

One hot shower later, I crawled into bed next to David, who was flipping channels on the television. Looking for a twenty-four-hour news channel, apparently, because that was where he stopped. I sat there rubbing my wet hair to get it as dry as possible while I read the screen crawl at the bottom. The news airing at the moment was about the very storm we were in—not just us, but most of the eastern seaboard. Nasty. Easily as nasty as anything I had ever handled as a Weather Warden. There was a lot of damage. The death toll was already well into the hundreds and still rising.

What caught me, though, was the screen crawl, because it was all about disasters. Not just the storm, or its attendant deadly little brother, flooding . . . earthquakes along the New Madrid fault line, a whopping 7.5 on the Richter scale—more than twice as powerful as the biggest thermonuclear weapon ever exploded. It could have been worse; the scale went all the way up to 10, though the worst humans had ever lived through had measured a 9.5. Past that, it wasn’t really going to be our problem anymore.

The quake had shaken pictures off of walls in South Carolina, and rung church bells as far away as Boston. At the epicenter of the shift, in Portageville, it was going to be much, much worse. There’d be nothing much left standing.

The Portageville quake was far from the only thing going on, aside from the storm. The screen crawl tallied up unexplained increases in animal attacks, particularly by bears and mountain lions, and an unexpected increase in poisonous snakebites in the Western states. Wildfires had started up in the deep forests, in total defiance of wet conditions, and seemed to be getting the better of fire teams and—presumably—Fire Wardens.

And that was just the U.S. The devastation wasn’t confined to our shores. Virtually every continent was under attack. End-of-the-world prophets were out in force already, and they’d only get loonier and louder as things got worse.

The thing was, the end-of-the-world prophets probably weren’t wrong on this one.

I found myself holding David for comfort. He shut off the TV, and we sat in silence, watching the afterimage burn for a few seconds before we collapsed together back to the mattress and pillows I had, just a little while ago, so greatly lusted after. Now I wasn’t sure I could—or should—sleep. My body was still exhausted, aching, and needing to find some oblivion, but my mind was playing the Blame Game. We did this. We started this. And we have to do something to stop it. People are dying.

“Shhh,” David whispered, and kissed my temple. His arms were warm and strong around me, even though I knew instinctively he was right now despairing of how much power he’d had, and lost. How frustrated and grief- stricken he was, too. How helpless in the face of the inevitable. “Let it go, Jo. You have to let it go, just for now. Rest. Please.”

I didn’t want to, but he seduced me into it, with the comforting heat of his body curled around mine, the steady calm rhythm of his heartbeat, his love obvious even to all my blinded senses in every touch and caress. He was being strong for me. Maybe he needed to be.

Maybe I needed him to be, too.

I fell asleep finally, wrapped in his arms, and we woke up hours later to a clap of thunder so loud it rattled pictures bolted to the wall, and set off car alarms in the parking lot. I felt blinded, instinctively terrified, and cringed against David. Clinging for comfort. How long since I’d been afraid of a storm?

I got hold of myself and crawled out of bed to look out the motel room window. It was like looking into a strobe flasher; the lightning was bright, constant, and close. Thunder followed, so loud that I could see the glass vibrate under the pressure of the sound waves. The lights were out in the parking lot, and, I realized, in the room as well; even the low-level night-light glow from the bathroom had gone dark. We’d been busted back to the primitive days, hiding in a cave, cowering from the storm.

It kind of pissed me off. So instead of retreating back into the dark and hugging David, I stood there in front of the glass window, practically daring the storm to do its worst. If I’d still been a Warden, it probably would have taken me up on it, too—but a normal human? It didn’t even know I was there. That wouldn’t keep it from killing me, just as it would ants, birds, cats, or anything else that got in its way, but it wasn’t personal.

I would officially be collateral damage. Which really pissed me off.

Another eye-searing flash of lightning, and this time I saw the blue pop of a transformer blowing on a pole not far away. The pole caught fire, blazing like a creosote-smeared torch even through the driving rain. It gave the whole thing a hellish glow that was really, really unsettling.

“I think we need to get out of here,” I said. David was already out of bed and dressing in the dark—cursing softly in a language I didn’t recognize, mainly because he probably hadn’t had to dress himself in the dark for, oh, about five thousand years, and in those days, there weren’t quite as many challenges to the process anyway. “Is the phone working?”

His cursing got louder as he knocked the receiver off, but paused when he checked the line. “Yes,” he said, and handed it to me to continue his fight with pants. I dialed Cherise’s room number by touch. She picked up on the first ring.

“Holy crap, we need to go!” she said breathlessly. “That’s what you were going to say, right?”

“That’s what I was going to say.”

“So glad I didn’t unpack the luggage from the trunk. Let’s do it. But you go first and unlock the doors, okay? Because I am not standing out in that.”

She hung up before I could tell her that the castle had called and wanted its princess back. She was right, actually. I had the keys. I was the point person for this little expedition.

“Stay here until I get everything open,” I told David, and tossed a towel over my head as I opened up the door. The wind promptly blew the wood back against the wall with a crash, and knocked me back two steps by sheer force before I got control and leaned into it.

Then I stepped outside, into the teeth of the monster.

I didn’t dare look up, or around, or anywhere but at the Boss, sitting there with its chrome blazing in the flashes of lightning. Water was running off it in silver strings, and I lunged for the driver’s-side door, got in, and