Greg Bear - Blood Music

“Exactly,” April said. “So gentlemen, tomorrow we will drive back up and over the hill, and if you wish, you can join me, but I will go by myself if need be, and join my son.”

Jerry sobered. “April, that is crazy. What if that’s just something really dangerous, like a big electrical storm or a nuclear power plant gone haywire?”

“There ain’t any big nuclear power plants in LA,” John said. “But Jerry’s right. It’s just fucking crazy to talk about walking into that hell.”

“If my son is there, it will not hurt me,” April said.

Jerry poked the fire vigorously. “I’ll take you there,” he said. “But I won’t go in with you.”

John looked hard and seriously at his brother. “You’re both bugfuck.”

“Or I can walk,” April said, determined.

Jerry stood with his hands on his hips, staring resentfully at his brother and April Ulam as they walked toward the truck. Sweet purple-pink fog spilled out of the LA basin and drifted at tree-top level over Fort Tejon, filtering the morning light and leaving everything without shadow, ghostly.

“Hey!” John said. “Goddammit hey! Don’t just leave me here!” He ran after them.

The truck crested the hills on the deserted highway and they looked down into the maelstrom. It looked very little different in daylight.

“It’s like everything you’ve always dreamed, all rolled up at once,” Jerry said, driving intently.

“Not a bad description,” April said. “A tornado of dreams. Perhaps the dreams of everyone who’s been taken by the change.”

John clutched the dash with both hands and stared wide-eyed down the highway. “There’s about a mile of road left,” he said. “Then we got to stop.”

Jerry agreed with a curt nod. The truck slowed.

At less than ten miles an hour, they approached a curtain of dancing vertical streamers of fog. The curtain stretched for several dozen feet above the road and to each side, rippling around vague orange shapes that might have once been buildings.

“Jesus, Jesus,” John said.

“Stop,” April said. Jerry brought the truck to a halt. April looked at John sternly until he opened the cab door and stepped out to let her exit Jerry put the shift lever into neutral and set the brake, then got out on the other side.

“You gentlemen are missing loved ones, aren’t you?” April asked, smoothing her tattered gown. The maelstrom roared like a distant hurricane—roared, and hissed, and bellowed down a rain gutter.

John and Jerry nodded.

“If my Vergil’s in there, and I know that he is, then they must be, too. Or we can get to them from here.”

“That’s crazier than shit” John said. “My wife and my boy can’t be in there.”

“Why not? Are they dead?”

John stared at her.

“You know they aren’t I know my son is not dead.”

“You’re a witch,” Jerry said, less accusing than admiring.

“Some have said so. Vergil’s father said so before he left me. But you know , don’t you?”

John trembled. Tears rolled down his cheeks. Jerry stared at the curtain with a vague grin.

“Are they in there, John?” he asked his brother.

“I don’t know,” John said, sniffing and wiping his face with one arm.

April walked toward the curtain. “Thank you for your help, gentlemen,” she said. As she entered, she became scrambled like a bad television picture, and then vanished.

“Look at that!” John said, trembling.

“She’s right” Jerry said. “Don’t you feel it?”

“I don’t know !” John wailed. “Christ brother, I don’t know.”

“Let’s go find them,” Jerry said, taking his brother’s hand. He pulled gently. John resisted.

Jerry pulled again.

“All right,” John said quietly. “Together.”

Side by side, they walked down the few yards of highway and into the curtain.

Her leg cramped on the eighty-second level. With a twist and a cry, she fell on the stairs and knocked her head against the railing. One knee caught a stair edge just below the patella. The flashlight and radio flew from her hands onto the concrete landing. The bottle of water wedged between two stairs and burst open, soaking her and dribbling away as she watched, paralyzed with pain. It seemed hours—but was probably only minutes—before she could even pull herself up to the landing. She lay on her back, eyes sandy from needing to weep and having no tears.

A knot on her forehead, one leg that just wouldn’t move right, little food and no water; scared, hurting, and with thirty more stories to go. The flashlight beam flickered and went out, leaving her in complete darkness. “Shit,” she said. Her mother had deplored that word even more than taking the name of God in vain. Since they were not a particularly religious family, that was a minor infraction, odious only when used in front of those it would offend. But saying “shit” was the ultimate, an acknowledgment of bad manners, bad upbringing, or simply surrendering to the lowest emotions.

Suzy tried to stand and fell down again, her knee ripe with new agony. “Shit, shit, SHIT!” she screamed. “Get better, oh please get better.” She tried to rub the knee but that only made it hurt worse.

She felt for the flashlight and found it. With a shake, it lit up again and she directed the beam around to reassure herself the brown and white sheets and filaments hadn’t overtaken her. She looked at the door to the eighty-second floor and knew she wouldn’t be able to climb stairs for some time, perhaps the rest of the day. She crawled to the door and glanced over her shoulder at the radio as she reached for the knob. The radio lay on the landing; it had come down hard when she fell. For a moment, she thought she might as well abandon it, but the radio meant something special to her. It was the only human thing she had left, the only thing that talked to her. She might be able to find another in the building, but she couldn’t chance silence. Trying to keep her injured knee straight, she crawled back for it.

Getting past the heavy fire door resulted in more misery and more bruises when it slammed on her arm, but she finally lay back on the carpet of the elevator lobby, staring up at the acoustic ceiling overhead. She rolled onto her stomach, alert for anything moving.

Stillness, quiet.

Slowly, trying to conserve her strength, she crawled out of the lobby and around a corner.

Beyond a glass partition, the entire floor was covered with drafting tables, white enamel legs on beige carpet, black lamps arranged like so many birds with adjustable necks. The glass door had already been propped open with a rubber wedge. Hobbling past the desk and couches, she leaned on the nearest table, eyes bright with exhaustion and pain. There were blueprints on the drafting table beside her. She was in an architect’s office. She looked at one drawing more closely. It laid out deck plans for a ship. So this was an office for people who designed ships. “What the hell do I care?” she asked herself.

She sat on a tall stool with locked casters. With one foot she labored for half a minute to unlock the casters, then rolled herself down an aisle between tables, using the table edges to push herself along.

Another long glass wall separated the drafting area from office cubicles. She stopped and stared. All the fear had gone now. She had run out of it. There might be more fear available the next morning, she thought, but for now she didn’t miss it She simply observed.

The cubicles were filled with things moving. They were so strange that for a time she hardly knew how to describe them to herself. Disks with snail feet crawled along the glass, their edges actually lighting up. Something fluid and shapeless, like a blob of wax a lava light bobbed around in another cubicle, straining on black ropes or cables that stretched and sparkled; the blob fluoresced green wherever it struck glass or furniture. In the last cubicle, a forest of scaled sticks, like chicken legs, bent and swayed in an impossible breeze.