Linda Evans - Far Edge of Darkness

She coughed salt water. Tried to get away from crushing hands. Why hadn't he died? Then an immense black shape reared up out of the night. A horse...

"CHARLIE!"

No familiar voice answered that primal scream. The horse stood on its hind legs, fighting a grip on its trailing lead rope. The man holding that rope wasn't Charlie Flynn. Then Tony Bartlett slammed into whoever it was and seized the rope himself. The horse's hooves smashed into the surf within inches of Sibyl's head. She lost sight of Tony as she scrambled to her feet. Another glare of lightning showed Tony astride the horse, clutching his shoulder and the horse's mane.

Then it happened.

Between them, a brilliant crack of white light opened out of thin air. Oh, God, please, it's too late, it won't open fast enough ... Peripheral vision showed her a looming wall of fire bearing down on them. She could hear the roar as the fiery avalanche swept through the dying town. Could smell the brimstone stench as death blasted closer...

With agonizing slowness the sliver of white light widened. Became a bar. A window. Screams and sobs for divine help rose in a shriek behind her. A frantic look over her shoulder revealed a half-mile high tsunami of fire crashing down on her. Glowing white streaks and seething balls of incandescence flashed through it.

The cresting mass swirled orange and red where it was cooler. In places it was shot through with black smoke and pumice. It engulfed buildings, whole city blocks, sweeping down through the town at tornado speeds. Where the white streaks and glowing masses touched buildings, they ignited. People ran screaming toward the seawall in front of it, were swallowed alive... .

The leading edge was less than a block away and coming like a derailed freight train. The time portal wasn't quite as wide as a closet doorway. Just wide enough if she didn't misjudge.

Sibyl drew a frantic breath of air—

—and launched herself straight into the still-widening glare. Three feet away, Tony Bartlett kicked the horse after her. As she fell forward into the portal, Sibyl twisted, disoriented and lost. She caught a final, horrifying glimpse of Herculaneum. That glimpse burned into her mind with the force of nightmare: a woman with hideous buck teeth, dressed as a whore in a short tunica , stood frozen atop the seawall. The prostitute was pointing directly at the portal, transfixed, her form lit insanely by the light pouring out of the time doorway. Her mouth worked, shaping words...

Venus and Mars, help us—

The fiery avalanche caught her up and flung her to the beach.

I've seen her bones, the buck-toothed woman thrown from the seawall, I've seen her bones... .

Then brilliant white light blotted out everything.

Time crawled to a meaningless standstill. Sibyl twisted helplessly without reference points. She was spinning into nowhere... . Some unknown distance after her initial fall into the light, she felt a concussion along the length of her body. Something heavy had crashed through with her.

Tony and the horse.

She couldn't see them, couldn't hear anything. The surge was right behind her, but she couldn't see it, either. When I drop out the other side, it'll be right on top of me . If she crawled straight forward, it would blast through and kill her. Gotta get off to the side or maybe get behind it ...

Could she get behind it?

The force of landing jarred her so deeply she couldn't breathe. Sibyl lurched to her knees anyway, flung herself sideways on a perpendicular line away from the open portal. A gagging stench and lethal heat blasted loose behind her. The volcanic surge blew out through the time hole. The portal widened like a dilating camera shutter. Sibyl lunged forward, rolled away from the heat, toward the back side of the rip in reality—

She landed in clear, sweet air the temperature of an industrial-grade freezer. Sibyl gulped reflexively. For an awful moment, she couldn't distinguish the burning of knife-cold air in her lungs from the burning of super-heated volcanic gasses.

Then she collapsed, simply breathing in and out.

She was barely cognizant that she lay belly down on a hard-packed surface of snow and ice.

A couple of sunny Saturday afternoons on the glassy waters of Biscayne Bay had not prepared Charlie for the maddened seas off Herculaneum. Decius Martis thrust him toward the tiller, shouting, "Hold her on course—got to get the sail down in this storm! My wife will watch your child!"

So Charlie hung grimly to the tiller, manfully not screaming when the broken rib grated. I'm gonna die, it's gonna puncture a lung and I'm gonna drown in my own blood ... . He whimpered and clamped his lips and struggled to hold the tiny vessel stern-first to the ravaged swells. Charlie was convinced if punctured lungs didn't kill him, he'd traded death by burning for death by drowning in the Mediterranean. Every time a wave crested above their tiny boat, terror for Lucania's life choked him a little tighter. He was amazed the boat hadn't capsized already. Seas were running at least twelve feet. The ceaseless plunging and tilting was like riding Space Mountain while half submerged on the biggest log flume in the universe—blindfolded.

The lanterns the fisherman had hung earlier had swung so violently on their mounts, they'd gone out. Insane lightning flickered through the black night, strobing across a lightless abyss where the boat hung poised on a wave crest. In the next instant Charlie's stomach would roll over as they plunged straight down into darkness, swallowed by the trough. Then another lightning bolt would reveal more mountains of water towering above them. Salt water surged across the gunwales, all but swamping them with each crashing wave.

Charlie was so scared, he wasn't even seasick.

The fisherman emerged finally from the gloom and caught Charlie's shoulder. "Get forward!" He had to shout in Charlie's ear to be heard. "Don't need you for now! And hang on! Don't fall overboard!"

Decius Martis took the tiller from Charlie's aching grasp. Charlie crouched on his belly in the bottom of the boat grabbing at anything that looked grabable, then inched his way past the footings for the mast. A lightning bolt cracking through nearby clouds revealed Phillipa huddled in the bow. She cradled another child he hadn't noticed before, hiding it protectively under her tunic. Lucania clung to her. The little girl's wide eyes found his in another mad flicker of lightning.

"Papa!"

Charlie hugged her close, wedging himself in as best he could facing the stern. Every time thunder crashed, Lucania's little body flinched in terror. Charlie wrapped his cloak around her and kissed her hair. "Shh... It's okay now, Lucky, Papa's got you safe and sound... ."

The bloody red glow that marked Vesuvius swung violently in a fifty-degree arc as the waves tossed them about like dried leaves in a tornado. His daughter, drenched as a drowned rat, trembled under his cloak. He wrapped it more tightly around her, trying to protect her from the maddened night. If she wasn't afraid of the dark before, she will be now .

The sky was as crazed as the sea. As the little boat gained distance and perspective, the storm seemed somehow to center itself on the tiny, doomed town behind them. Could the eerie display be the time storm effect? Lightning, clouds, and wind all seemed to fit with the descriptions. Something like that would be visible for miles.

Sibyl, where are you?

Had she'd gotten safely away? Did that storm mean she was getting out? Please God, let it be Sibyl ... . He was just beginning to appreciate the lesson Marcus the gladiator had learned in the old movie The Last Days of Pompeii : threaten a man's child and he'll do anything.