“Here?” Carys was scathing. “Sorry, you guys, but come on. Randtown isn’t exactly the strategic center of the universe. Without the detector station this is nothing.”
“You’re probably right,” Mark said. “Okay, we’ll head for town, and check in with a few neighbors on the way.”
“Good enough plan,” Liz said. “We need to know what’s happening on the rest of Elan, and the Commonwealth. If the government makes any attempt to contact us, it’ll be at the town.”
“If there is a government,” Carys said.
Liz gave her a sharp glance. “There will be.”
“Into the pickup,” Mark told the kids. They clambered into the backseat without a word. An equally subdued Panda quickly jumped up with them. He almost ordered the dog out, then relented. They needed every bit of comfort they could get right now. All of them.
“I’ll follow you,” Carys said.
“Okay. Keep your handheld array on.” They’d dug out three old models from the house that had been switched off when the emp washed over the valley. It had been simple enough for Mark to alter their programs so they could be used as basic communicators, giving them a five-mile range.
Carys gave a backward wave of reassurance as she made her way over to the MG. To Mark’s complete surprise and grudging respect, the sports car’s systems had survived the emp almost intact.
“You’d better take this,” Liz said. She handed him his hunting rifle, a high-power laser with a low-light focus lock sight. “I checked it, it still works.”
“God, Liz.” He snatched a hurried, guilty glance at the kids. “What for?”
“People can behave badly in times of stress. And I’m not convinced the way Carys is about the Primes leaving us alone.” She opened her jacket to show an ion pistol in a shoulder holster.
“Holy shit. Where did that come from?”
“A friend. Mark, we live kilometers from anywhere, and you were away from home during the day.”
“But… a gun!”
“I’m just being practical, baby, a girl should know how to look after herself.”
“Right,” he said dumbly. Today it didn’t seem important, somehow. In fact, he was rather glad she’d got it. He climbed up into the front of the pickup, and drove it off down the long track to the main valley road.
Randtown was still standing. Sort of. The Regents had deflected the worst of the blast upward, but the terrible distorted pressure waves that had rushed out from the mountains had easily reached the town.
Composite and metal paneling had been twisted and torn off every building. The crumpled rectangles were strewn everywhere: on the pavements, embedded in other buildings, the lighter ones floating in the Trine’ba. Thick insulation blankets were flapping freely off the naked structural girders. Roofs were skeletal outlines, almost completely devoid of their solar panels. Strangest of all was the sparkle. The whole town glittered under a coating of prismatic rainbows. Each and every window in Randtown had shattered, flinging out splinters and granules in long plumes that fell across the pavements and streets, as if sacks of diamonds had been spilled out.
Mark stopped the pickup on Low West Street, barely a couple of hundred meters off the highway. “My God, I didn’t know there was this much glass on the whole planet, let alone here.”
“Can the tires take that?” Liz asked. She was looking along the street, trying to see if anyone was around. Several pillars of smoke were rising over the broken roofs, closer to the center of town.
“Should do. They’re gelfoam.”
“Okay then.” Liz brought the handheld array up to her mouth. “Carys, we’re going in. Can the MG handle this?”
“MG will be having a nasty talk with my lawyers if it doesn’t.”
Mark leaned out of the side window. David and Lydia Dunbavand were riding in the back, sitting on the bags of camping gear; while all three of the Dunbavand kids were squashed into the MG with Carys. Behind that, the Conants’ four-by-four was acting as rear guard; Yuri had fixed it when they arrived at their homestead.
“Going in,” he called back to them.
David brought his maser wand up. “Okeydokey, we’ll keep sharp.”
Mark shook his head as he toed the accelerator. What was it with disasters and people with guns? The pickup moved forward slowly, its big tires making a constant crunching sound on the road’s crystalline coating.
They found the residents as they got closer to the center. Almost everyone caught outside during the blast was injured to some degree. People walking along the pavements had been badly wounded by wall panels slicing through the air. Those who avoided the panels had been inevitably caught in the shotgun bombardment of glass. A lot had suffered both kinds of impacts.
As they approached the top end of Main Mall the road was jammed solid with parked vehicles. Mark braked the pickup, and they all got out to walk. “Leave Panda inside,” Liz told the children. “She can’t walk on this, her paws will be shredded.”
The dog started barking piteously as they left the vehicles behind.
Half of Main Mall’s buildings were bent over at perilous angles, their structural girders pushed beyond their tolerance-loading by the ferocity of the air that had surged against them. The town’s commercial heart had been busy at the time, with the cafes full of people having leisurely lunches, pavement tables crammed full, the street packed with window shoppers.
“Oh, Jesus God,” Mark groaned as he took in the sight. He felt dizzy and faint, needing to hold on to the nearest bowed wall for support.
It wasn’t the people still lying there. Nor the teams working to free the remaining trapped victims. Not the triage teams bandaging up the cuts and lacerations. Even the dreadful wailing and moaning he could have withstood. It was the blood. Blood covered everything. The pavement slabs weren’t even visible through the clogging burgundy fluid that had run down the whole length of the slope. The piles of glass were mushy with it. Buckled walls were caked in atrocious splatter patterns that had already darkened to black. People were soaked in it, their skin, their clothes. The air was thick with its tang-stench.
Mark bent double and vomited over his boots.
“Back,” Liz ordered the children. “Come on, back to the pickup.”
She propelled the kids along. Lydia and David hurried to help. Sandy and Ellie and Ed were all crying. Barry and Will looked like they were about to. The adults formed a little protective curtain, pushing gently.
“We’ll find out if there’s any sort of plan around here,” Carys called after them.
“Okay,” Liz said. She was fighting her own revulsion. “Stay in touch.”
“How about you?” Carys asked Mark. “You okay?”
“No I’m goddamn not.” He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Jesus!” The shock had turned him cold. He hadn’t expected this. The end of the world was supposed to be final, an infinite nothing. That would have been a blessing. Instead they had to endure the aftermath, a world of pain and gore and suffering.
“You’ll cope,” Carys said unsympathetically. “You have to. Come on, let’s see if we can help.”
Yuri Conant helped Mark stand straight. He didn’t look too good, either. Olga had a cloth pressed firmly over her mouth; above it her eyes were damp.
The four of them made their way down Main Mall, boots making a vile slushing sound at each footstep. Things clung to their soles. Mark got a rag out of his overalls, and tied it over his nose and mouth.
“Mark?” a girl called.
It was Mandy from Two For Tea. She was one of a little group clustered around a middle-aged man whose leg was badly torn. Makeshift bandages had been wrapped around the wounds, already heavily stained. A rough spike of rusty metal was sticking through the cloth, obviously deeply embedded in his flesh. One of the women was trying to get him to swallow painkillers.
“Are you hurt?” Mark asked her. Her face was filthy with grime and flecks of dry blood, with clear lines of skin on her cheeks where the tears had rolled. Her arms and apron were covered in blood.
“Some cuts,” she said. “Nothing bad. I’ve been trying to help people ever since.” Her voice came close to cracking. “What about Barry and Sandy, are they all right?”
“Yeah, they’re fine. It wasn’t so bad out in the valley.”
“What did we do, Mark? Why did they do this to us? We never hurt them.” She started sobbing. He put his arms around her, holding her gently. “We did nothing,” he assured her.
“Then why?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“I hate them.”
“Can you folks lend a hand here,” one of the others tending the injured man said. “We can move him now.”
“Move him where?” Carys asked.
“The hospital’s running, they got some power back. Simon took charge.”
“Where is it?”
“Two streets away,” Mark said automatically.
“We’ll take him,” Yuri said.
Even with a makeshift stretcher, it was hard going. There was so much debris to negotiate, and the Chinese restaurant on the corner of Matthews and Second Street was on fire. Without the firebots and volunteer fire service, the flames had really taken hold, threatening to spread to other buildings. They had to make a long detour down one of the alleys that branched off from Matthews. As they walked on, the light gradually grew dimmer. Clouds covered the sky, spinning in a slow cyclone formation centered around the Regents. Thicker, darker clouds were scudding in fast from the horizon. Rain was already falling at the far end of Trine’ba, a broad curtain sweeping toward the town. At least it ought to stop the fires, Mark thought.
A big crowd of people were milling around on the lawns at the front of the General Hospital. They parted reluctantly to let Mark’s group carry the stretcher through. Lights were on inside, and some of the medical equipment was functioning. The casualty department was already crammed with children and the most
