Dan Simmons - Black Hills

But for all the clear sky and warm day, Paha Sapa knew that something was wrong.

It was about two p.m., and they were nearing the Kansas state line when it hit them.

— Hi-yay! Hi-yay! Mitakuye oyasin!

Paha Sapa was not even aware that he had shouted in Lakota. He shook the snoring and snorting Hoot awake.

— Hoot, wake up! Look to the north. Wake up, goddamn it!

A wall of blackness rising three thousand feet or more was rushing at them like a tsunami of dirt.

Hoot sat straight up. He pointed through the open windshield and shouted.

— Holy shit! It’s a duster. A black blizzard!

Paha Sapa stopped the Dodge immediately. Ahead of them, the pickup paused, then stopped.

There had been an intersection with a wide dirt road not a hundred yards behind them, and Paha Sapa almost stripped gears as he threw the overladen truck into reverse and backed wildly toward that crossing. Just before the intersection, he remembered seeing a dust-drifted little farmhouse set back amid the skeletons of a few trees.

— What the hell you doin’, Billy?

— We have to get these trucks turned around. Get the hoods and engines turned away from that wall of dirt. We’d never get them started again.

Normally, backing that heavy load onto the dirt road and turning the Dodge around would have taken Paha Sapa five minutes of careful backing and turning. Now he made the turn in thirty wild seconds, looking over his shoulder at the advancing wall of blackness all the time.

Lincoln pulled alongside the Dodge and shouted across the wide-eyed Red Anderson.

— That’s one hell of a duster!

Paha Sapa shouted back.

— We have to get to that farmhouse.

The ramshackle, tumbledown structure was less than a quarter of a mile ahead on the left as they drove back to the southwest. The only clues that it wasn’t abandoned were the Model A in the driveway and two rusted tractors tucked under a shed overhang and half buried in dirt and dust. But both were so ancient that they might have been abandoned there with the house.

Paha Sapa didn’t think they’d make it in time, and they did not. Beside him, Hoot was shouting the same mantra over and over, as if it were a religious invocation.

— Holy shit Jesus Christ! Holy shit Jesus Christ! Holy shit Jesus Christ.

Paha Sapa learned later that he would have seen this giant roller even if he’d stayed at Mount Rushmore. The cold front had slid across the Dakotas that morning, dropping temperatures thirty degrees in its wake and burying Rapid City and a thousand tinier towns in dust and howling winds. But the front was soon out of the Dakotas and rolling into Nebraska, picking up strength, velocity, and thousands upon thousands of tons of dust and dirt as it advanced.

Paha Sapa would also learn later that the temperature dropped twenty-five degrees in less than an hour when the west edge of the black-blizzard duster-roller passed by Denver. The width of the storm by the time Paha Sapa and his three fellow workers saw it approaching in southeast Colorado was more than two hundred miles and growing—advancing like a solid defensive line of brown-jerseyed football players—and it would be almost five hundred miles wide by the time it reached the real Dust Bowl states to the south and east.

None of this mattered as Paha Sapa floored the accelerator, getting the overloaded Dodge truck up to its maximum sprint speed of twelve miles per hour, watching in the rearview mirror and over his shoulder as the monster bore down on them.

Paha Sapa had spent his life on the Plains and it was easy for him to estimate the height of this black moving wall of dirt: the duster was coming over a low range of very eroded hills to the north and northwest, there were lower hills to the northeast—although the Dodge would have labored at the grade with the submarine engines on the flatbed—and just based on the size comparison with the hills, boulders, and the few pine trees disappearing into the black blizzard’s maw, Paha Sapa knew that the wall was three thousand feet high and growing. Paha Sapa had also spent much of his life watching horses rushing toward or away from him on the Plains and could calculate speeds well; this moving wall was hurtling toward them at sixty-five miles per hour or more. The low range of hills it had appeared above was no more than twelve miles away. The duster wall of black had covered half of that distance in the past minute or so.

Watching Lincoln’s pickup truck swerve into the dust-drifted driveway of the half-collapsed farmhouse, Paha Sapa glanced over his shoulder again and realized that the wall was black at the bottom, lighter more than half a mile higher at the top, but that strange, swirling, tornado-like columns of white were rushing in front of the solid wall, like pale cowboys herding stampeding cattle. Whatever those columns were (and Paha Sapa was never to learn), they seemed to be pulling the black wall along behind them and toward Paha Sapa and his truck with ever-increasing velocity.

He realized that Hoot was screaming something other than his former mantra now.

— Jesus fucking Christ! We ain’t gonna make it.

To the farmhouse, no. But Paha Sapa had known that. There were a hundred yards yet to go to the shack’s driveway, and time was up—the black wall was roaring behind them, audible now, and tactile as well, as the blackness blotted out the sun and the temperature dropped twenty or thirty degrees around them. Paha Sapa switched on the Dodge’s headlights and then the wall was on them and over them and around them.

It was like being swallowed by some huge predator.

Paha Sapa found himself stifling the urge to scream Hokay hey! and to shout to Hoot across the storm roar and static—

— It is a good day to die!

But there was no use trying to shout now. The roar was too loud.

A white horse ran by from the direction of the fenced farmhouse field. Disoriented and made crazy by the outer wall of flying dirt, the horse was running blindly toward the storm. But what Paha Sapa noticed—and would never forget—was the aura of chain lightning, ball lightning, Saint Elmo’s fire, and other static discharges that limned the horse in electrical flame. Lightning danced among the galloping horse’s mane and tail and leaped along its back.

Then the static enveloped the Dodge and the truck’s engine seized and stopped immediately.

Paha Sapa’s long hair stood on end, the black tendrils writhing like electrified snakes. There was a brilliant strobe flash from beneath the truck and for a second Paha Sapa was certain that the truck’s huge gas tank had ignited, but then he realized that it was lightning discharge from the drag chain attached to the rear axle. The flash lit up a fifty-foot radius in the sudden advancing darkness.

The truck rolled to a stop as blasts of dirt exploded inward through the open windshield and side windows. The dust was everywhere instantly—blinding them, choking them, flowing into their nostrils and closed mouths and ears. Paha Sapa grabbed Hoot’s flapping flannel shirt.

— Out! Now!

They staggered out into absolute darkness punctuated by nonilluminating lightning crashes. The Dodge’s engine seemed to be on fire, the hood thrown back, but it was only more electrical discharges frying everything there. Paha Sapa dragged Hoot forward—finding “forward” in the pitch-darkness only by feeling his way along the cab and fender to the bumper—and paused to grab the large canvas bag of water strung over the radiator. Paha Sapa tied his kerchief around his face after soaking it with water. He poured water in his eyes and felt the mud rolling down his face. With his powerful left hand, he kept Hoot from running while he handed the man the water bag.