kept crossing his vision. He tried to blink it away. A happy buzz of talk from a group of people standing by a car fifty yards up the road caught Eric’s ear. They too stared at the sun’s image. One of them, wearing sunglasses, stood apart looking directly into the sky.
Then, gradually, the air dimmed more and chilled. In the mutated light, the land looked alien. Even with other people in sight, Eric felt isolated, like he and his dad were lone explorers in a new world. Birds he hadn’t really noticed before quit chirping. Without knowing why, Eric began crying. Now, in Littleton, clouds covering the sun, the houses and lawns almost purple in the odd light, Eric felt like he was once again at the eclipse. Dad hadn’t explained to him what had happened until they were driving home. He’d assumed Eric knew what an eclipse was. For the weeks before, he’d thought Eric was excited as he was about the chance to see one. “It was a once-in-a- lifetime opportunity,” he said repeatedly.
Leda twisted the garage door handle, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Dang,” she shouted. Her vehemence startled him. The wind pushed her hair in front of her face, and the bitter smoke caught in Eric’s throat. He coughed hard, once, and squinted his eyes against it, then rubbed goose-bumps off his arms. This is weird, he thought. Wind’s cold, like winter cold, but the smoke smells hot. Leda said, “You going to help, or what?”
“How about that window?” he said. A clean, pink and blue geometric patterned drape hid whatever was in the garage. He pried a decorative border-brick out of the garden and heaved it through the glass without a qualm Careful of the glass he looked in. It was hard to imagine that they were actually breaking into someone’s house. Not only did he feel that in some way no one owned this house anymore, but that the whole city was unowned. Even though two tricycles were entangled by the back door, that a tennis racket, three baseball bats and a fishing pole stuck out of a cardboard barrel by a work bench, and that a sign above the cluttered bench read, “BLESS THIS MESS,” he couldn’t imagine the people they belonged to. He felt like an explorer as he had with his dad, like a Conquistador. Absurdly, for an instant, he thought about “claiming” the house, but he couldn’t come up with a sovereign to claim it for, and he decided Leda might think it stupid. She was clearly agitated.
“Help me up,” said Leda.
Eric stepped between her and the window. “You’ll cut yourself.” He tugged sharp-edged glass teeth out of the frame. Leda stared to the west, where the sky grew increasingly dark.
“Hurry,” she said. “We need to find a ladder.”
Eric shook his head without understanding and removed the last piece of glass. “Okay.” Once inside, Leda yanked the manual release on the garage door opener and slid the door up its tracks, but the outside wasn’t that much lighter than the leaden interior. Eric spotted a ten-foot extension ladder hanging from a pair of hooks. He took one end while Leda carried the other, and they set it against the side of the house. Leda swarmed up before Eric was even sure the ladder was firmly planted. He rattled the ladder, then followed her.
Leda, bracing her tennis shoes against the siding, leaving a pair of smudges, chinned herself from the low garage roof to the higher roof above the second story. Running lightly, Eric jumped and caught the edge of the roof on his chest, easily levering himself up beside her.
“It’s an advantage to be tall,” he said, but she was peering west and didn’t seem to hear him, or the clamor of wind might have swallowed his words.
“That’s what I thought,” she shouted.
“What?”
Eric looked back the why they’d come. Through the smoke at first he noticed the clouds, now directly overhead, blackening the sky and hiding the mountains, They’d lost their shapes, and become a single, sullen, flat gray, plate-seeming to rest only a hundred feet above and stretching north, south and west. To the east, a thin line of blue vanished as he watched.
“Not there,” Leda said. “There.” She pointed to where the road crested over a hill they’d come over a mile or so away. Smoke obscured his vision, then the distance cleared and he could see the intervening ground: closest to them, hundreds of house roofs poked through a broad expanse of trees bending in the wind. Beyond that, closely packed stores and warehouses crowded Bowles Avenue. Open field, golden with waist-high, dry prairie grass stretched both north and south behind the business areas. He saw nothing odd.
“Check the horizon,” Leda said. Her hand traced the shape of the hill, and she waved to show the clouds above.
More smoke blew in their faces, and Eric turned away until it lessened. He wiped his eyes and studied the empty reach of road. A flicker of movement caught his attention. It was a black dog, maybe a Labrador Retriever, racing down the street. A few blocks farther, he spotted another pair of indeterminate breed, running their direction like greyhounds. He thought, what are they running from? and he looked at the clouds again. On the horizon, outlining the hill and the line of building and fields on either side, the cloud’s color was different. Not the flat gray like that above them, but a seething, dark, dark red.
He started to ask, “What is that?” but he knew. A bright line of flame crested one side of the hill. Pushed by the wind, it flowed through the grass like water and washed against the backside of one of the mini-malls. A flash of light and flame enveloped the building, and a few seconds later, the dull whump of the explosion reached them. Flame broke over the top and the other side of the hill simultaneously. As far as he could see, in both directions, fire flew along the ground toward them.
“We’ve got to find a safe place!” yelled Leda. She hopped onto the garage roof, lost her footing on the pitch and almost slid off the edge before catching herself.
Eric leaned into the gale, which was really brutal now, and watched the flames for another instant. Wind flattened it out. It didn’t look like a campfire, but like a blow-torch, nearly horizontal. A building in the path caught fire
“No place will be safe, Leda. We’ve got to outrun it.” They hopped the brick wall. Leda recovered her pack and sleeping bag, shoving her arms into the straps.
She breathed hard, but not panicked. “The wind’s forty or fifty miles an hour. It’ll catch us.” A piece of plywood large enough to cover a picture window blew across the lawn behind her and splintered in two against a light post.
“Listen,” Eric said. He grabbed her arm. She tensed as if to pull away, then relaxed. The sound of a few more explosions reached them. Probably gas tanks, he guessed. Leda’s dark hair streamed in front of her face. She cleared it away impatiently. Eric continued, “We don’t have to run far.” He pulled her along with him. “The Platte River is a half-mile, maybe less. If we can get to that, we’ll be safe.” She looked over her shoulder, nodded and started running down the street. Eric followed. For a block he kept up with her, his long legs matching her efficient jogger’s rhythm, then he stumbled and almost fell. She didn’t see him, and he regained stride. His legs were like rubber, and he remembered he hadn’t eaten anything decent for… he couldn’t come up with the last full meal he’d had, but it must have been at the cave. Since then he’d had a few handfuls of beef-jerky, a couple of cans of peaches, some Oreos and Twinkies from the Wal-Mart, and that was it.
The street dropped down a hill and through an intersection. Eric looked both directions as he crossed under the dead traffic signal. Then Bowles Avenue angled left. Leda turned with the street, and Eric stopped himself from yelling at her to go straight. He figured the river must be just beyond those houses, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe the river curved, or, more likely, the fences and hedges would slow them down more than the distance to the water they’d cut off. He kept running.
Two blocks later sparks flew overhead, and he glanced back. He almost fell again, watching the treetops. Flame and smoke hid the center of the four-lane street a few hundred yards behind them, and he guessed that the house they’d stood on was already burning, but what was happening to the trees caught his attention now. Like long-fingered hands unclenching from fists, the wind stretched balls of flame from one tree to the next. For a second, the flames caressed the next victim, then the green tree burst into yellow, sickly light. Eric gasped at the sight and took in a lung full of caustic air. All the ornamental oaks, the willows and aspen, the birch and pine planted on the expensive front yards in little stands of three or four, lined along the property lines like sentinels, unwatered and dry as tinder, provided jump points for the fire.
Wind creaked the trees’ branches as he ran, and he realized that the closer they got to the river, the thicker the trees were.
A house behind a low brick wall and across a long stretch of lawn directly to his left exploded. A billow of white and orange pushed the windows out, throwing a piece of the roof into the sky. “What?” Eric yelled in surprise.
