Текст книги "The Harvest"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

Chapter 23
View from a Height

It was the winter the oceans bloomed with strange life.

The Travellers, perceiving the thermal imbalance of the planet and the human desire to restore it, dispatched seed organisms into the Earth’s restless hydrosphere.

The organisms multiplied in the shallow surface waters. Like the phytoplankton they resembled, the new organisms fed on mineral material from the upwelling ocean currents, fed on sunlight, but fed also on the water itself, assembling themselves from atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. The ocean was food, and the Traveller organisms increased their tonnage by the minute.

As they multiplied, they began to avoid the coastal waters rich in natural diatoms. Their role in the oceanic ecology was temporary and there must always be enough phytoplankton to feed the krill. They confined their bloom to less nutrient-rich waters far from land.

They grew so numerous that autumn that in places they covered the surface water in crystalline slicks hundreds of miles in diameter, their opalescent coats bouncing rainbows from the swell.

Then they began their significant work: They began to devour atmospheric carbon and bind it to themselves, as the phytoplankton do, but more efficiently—voraciously.

The oceans combed the air of C0₂.

* * *

The population of the Earth plummeted daily.

In the Greater World, a few acts remained malum in se but none were malum prohibitum. The inhibitions of a thousand generations had been swept away by Contact. The last devotees of the flesh celebrated their bodies even as their bodies grew pale and light.

They danced to silent music in abandoned mosques, made love in infinite variation in the shadows of cathedrals. They laughed and embraced and surrendered their bodies by the light of Arab sunsets, Oriental noons, African dawns.

Daily, they vanished into the Greater World; and their abandoned skins, like phantom armies, roamed the streets of Djakarta, Beijing, Reykjavik, Capetown, until they crumbled to dust and the dust was borne off by the rising wind.

* * *

Matt Wheeler picked up a school notebook at Delisle’s Stationery—where Miriam Flett used to buy Glu-Stiks and paper cutters before the Observer ceased publication in October—and began a private journal.

According to Rachel, everyone started fresh at Contact. Basically, they entered a new state of being. It’s not the Last Judgment—no sins are punished. It’s not the Judeo-Christian paradise at all. More like the ancient Greek idea of the Golden Age, when men were so pious they socialized with the gods.

“Everything is forgiven,” Rachel said. “Nothing is forgotten.”

I try to believe this. It sounds noble. But what does it really mean? It’s hard to imagine guys who wore Cartier watches joined in spiritual union with Third World sharecroppers. Or, much worse, men who battered their infant children to death allowed to live forever. Nirvana for mass murderers. Terrorists surviving their victims by a millennium or more.

Unless they’ve changed, it isn’t just. And if they’ve changed so radically—it isn’t human.

Rachel admitted as much. The human baggage is too unsavory to carry into a new life.

She claimed the real punishment for such people is to understand what they were—to truly understand it.

I suppose this is possible, though it beggars comprehension. For her sake, of course, I want it to be true.

He chewed on the end of his pencil and decided he might as well ask the big questions: There was nothing to be lost by honesty, not at this late hour.

But what about those of us who stayed behind? What made it possible or necessary for us to turn down immortality? Why are we here?

None of us seems extraordinary in any outward particular. The opposite, if anything.

What is it we have?

What is it we lack?

The next morning, Beth Porter phoned and said she wanted to be a nurse and would Matt be willing to help her?

He asked her to repeat the question. He hadn’t slept much the night before… these days, his eating and sleeping habits didn’t encourage a lucid state of mind. He’d lost fifteen pounds since November. His reflection in mirrors took him by surprise: Who was this skinny, hollow-eyed man?

“I think you should teach me how to be a nurse,” Beth said. “I’ve been thinking about this. You’re the only doctor in town, right? So maybe you need an assistant. At least somebody who knows what to do in an emergency. This storm that’s coming, for instance. Say a lot of people get hurt. Maybe I could at least put on a bandage or stop some bleeding.”

He closed his eyes. “Beth… I appreciate what you’re saying, but—”

“This is not a come-on. Jesus, I hope you don’t think that.” Pause. “I’m serious. Maybe I can save somebody’s life somewhere down the road.”

“Beth—”

“I mean, I feel so useless just sitting here in this room all by myself.”

He sighed. “Do you know CPR?”

“I’ve seen it on TV. But I don’t know how to do it, no.”

“You should.”

* * *

Joey Commoner used the handicam he’d stolen from the Newcomb house to videotape Buchanan.

Joey had heard all this talk about the weather. If half the talk was true, there might not be much left of Buchanan in a month or so. He didn’t love this ugly little bay town, but he liked the idea of saving it on videotape while it was still intact. Joey Commoner, the town’s last historian.

So he drove up and down the main streets and some distance into the suburbs, guiding his motorcycle with one hand and running the camcorder with the other. He drove slowly in order to capture all the detail.

The images he played back on his basement VCR were unnerving and strange: empty streets bouncing when the Yamaha bumped over buckled asphalt; empty storefronts, empty sidewalks, empty buildings in whitewashed ranks all the way to the Marina and the cold winter sea. Empty everything.

It made him feel peculiarly alone. It was the feeling you might get, Joey thought, if you were locked inside some big mall at night with the mannequins and the mice.

It made him want to ride over to Tom Kindle’s place and work the radio. But that was probably a bad idea; since the big cities began their migration, Joey had been edged off the radio by Kindle and Bob Ganish and that asshole Chuck Makepeace. Gimme the microphone, this is important. Well, fuck it. He was tired of the radio. He had better things to do than DXing foreigners who couldn’t even speak English.

He videotaped some important personal places. His basement. His street. The street where Beth Porter used to live. The motel she’d moved into.

Hidden behind a highway abutment where she couldn’t see him, he videotaped Beth climbing into a white Volkswagen and driving north.

Beth didn’t have a driver’s license. She had only started driving since Contact, and it was funny how she drove, a clumsy jerk-and-stop. He wondered where she was going.

Where was there to go?

He watched the car bump out of sight.

She might be shopping. Idly curious, or so he told himself, Joey waited a prudent few minutes and then followed on his Yamaha. He checked the empty mall lots along the highway for her car, but it wasn’t there.

Visiting somebody?

So who was to visit?

Slow suspicions formed in Joey’s mind.

Not that he cared what she did. He hadn’t seen her much lately. He wasn’t sure what Beth meant to him or used to mean to him. A few good Friday nights.

But he remembered the way she used to undress for him, shy and bold at the same time. He remembered her shrugging out of an old sleeveless T-shirt in a dark room, unbuttoning her pants with one hand while she watched him watch. The memory provoked a knot of tension in his belly. Not desire. More like fear.

He rode past Kindle’s house, past Bob Ganish’s ugly little ranch house.

No Volkswagen.

Then he drove past the hillside house where Matt Wheeler lived. Her car was in the driveway.

Joey parked his motorcycle in a garage half a block away. He approached the house along a line of hedges and used the camcorder’s zoom to spy on the doctor’s house. But the blinds had all been pulled.

He waited about two hours until Beth came out again, looking somewhat pink in the cheeks.

He taped her climbing into the car and bump-jerking away from the curb.

Bitch, Joey thought.

* * *

Among the last things Tom Kindle moved down from his mountain cabin was his Remington hunting rifle, old but sturdy.

He hadn’t used it much in the last few years. Hunting in the coast forests wasn’t what it used to be; too many hobby shooters had moved into what had once been some pretty secluded territory. Every autumn, the woods grew a new crop of chubby CPAs in orange flak jackets. It made for a dangerous situation, in Kindle’s opinion. He didn’t relish getting shot by somebody who carried his ammunition in a nylon fanny pack.

But this talk of storms and travel made him nervous, too. So he brought down the Remington and picked up some shells and took some practice shots at the knotholes of a long-dead slippery elm back of his house.

The crack of the gunshots echoed a long time in the still air; the bullets struck the decayed tree with a different and softer sound, like a mallet head hitting a fence post.

Kindle found his aim was reasonably accurate even after too many lax years. But the rifle kicked harder than he remembered. Of course it wasn’t the rifle that had changed: He was getting old. There was no denying the fact. He bruised too easily, went to bed too early, and pissed too often. Old.

For shooting, he wore the corrective lenses he’d had made up a couple of years ago. Kindle was mildly myopic, which affected his aim, but the condition didn’t seem to have worsened—which was good, because where were the opticians since Contact? Gone to heaven, every one.

He sighted on a circle where the bark had dropped from the tree. Squeezed off a shot and missed by what appeared to be a good half foot.

“Damn,” he said, and massaged his shoulder.

He could have gone inside, where Chuck Makepeace was talking by radio to Avery Price, the Boston guy, but Kindle distrusted this business about Ohio. It was where everybody wanted to go, a new Promised Land, a Place Prepared; worse, it was where the Helpers wanted them all to go. Boston and Toronto were both travelling with Helper guides, and probably so were a bunch of small towns like Buchanan.

At least they called it guiding. Another word for it was herding. All the wild human beings were being assembled in one place—and Kindle guessed there were other such places on other continents, little reservations, little corrals. Barns. Pens.

He didn’t like that idea at all.

No doubt, he thought, the promises were true. Everybody would be defended against the weather; the land would be fertile and the skies would be blue. They would all be well cared for.

Like cattle.

Cattle were well cared for. Cattle were also slaughtered.

He put three more shots into the bole of the tree and then stopped because his right shoulder felt damn near dislocated.

The sky was a high, luminous blue brushed with cloud. The air smelled of brine. There had been ground fogs every morning for the last week. Sunsets had been wide and vivid.

If old bones tell the weather, Kindle thought, then something big was indeed about to break. The last few days he had been sleeping restlessly. This morning, he had woken up at dawn in a cold sweat. His body felt tight, as if it was braced for something.

He turned and squinted across the bay. The water was choppy, whitecaps feathering in a stiff breeze.

The ocean, Kindle thought.

Dear God, what mischief had been committed out there?

* * *

Storms were already raking the east coast as the President of the United States prepared to leave the White House.

He was alone in the building. The First Lady had abandoned her skin many weeks before. Elizabeth had been captivated by the Greater World and had wanted to explore it in greater detail, an impulse William understood; in any case, she had never liked bad weather. It frightened her.

William, on the other hand, had been a devotee of thunder, a relisher of storms.

It was not entirely his aim to relish the weather that had already begun to wreak so much destruction. There were still many mortal human beings on the surface of the Earth… and many of them would die, despite the best efforts of the Helpers. But it was the paradox of the senses that they did not make such distinctions. A stormy sky made his skin tingle, his pulse quicken, no matter what the circumstances.

Fundamentally, though, it wasn’t the storms William wanted to see; it was the country—the nation he had once governed, if “govern” was a meaningful verb.

That was why he had clung to the flesh even after Elizabeth went Home. (Besides, she was not really absent, merely less accessible.)

Only a small minority of Contactees had retained their corporate bodies, and many of those, like William, had changed or were changing themselves in some critical way.

After all: it wouldn’t do to go tramping across the landscape in an old man’s cumbersome shell.

Therefore William went to bed for a week; and while he slept the neocytes altered certain genetic instructions and ran his cell division at a feverish pace. He radiated heat, and when he woke he was many pounds lighter than he had been. He was also younger.

He peered at himself in a full-length mirror and saw a face he hadn’t seen since the year the Allies marched into Berlin.

What age would he have guessed this boy to be? Twelve? Thirteen?

Anticipating the change, William had obtained some clothes to fit before he went to sleep. He dressed himself in blue jeans and a T-shirt and fresh running shoes. The shoes were a little loose; he’d had to guess at the size. But how glorious.

He felt newly minted. He felt like a bright penny.

He felt restless and hungry. The White House seemed suddenly bigger and more ridiculous than ever, and he couldn’t wait to get away from its stifling frills and history. He thought of all those miles of America opening out from his doorstep, a continent like a long empty beach.

William laughed a high child’s laugh and ran down the steps of the Main Portico.

The sky that day was heavy and fat with clouds.

* * *

By January, the albedo of the planet had risen considerably.

Traveller-engineered phytoplankton laced the surface waters of the tropics. Like crystals of fine glass, they bounced sunlight back into the sky.

Above these vast reflective ocean plains, domes of moisture-laden air punched into the troposphere. Convection clouds the shape of fists rose and flared into cirrostratus.

From orbit, the tropics resembled a fractal image, a fury of greater and lesser whorls. The air above the sea was knotted with hurricane crowns.

Individual pressure cells broke loose and travelled with the prevailing currents like tall ships of wind, wound tighter as they penetrated the cooler latitudes.

Some rode the monsoon drift into India and Asia. Some rode the equatorial currents to Australia or Africa. Some followed the Gulf Stream across the East Indies into the Gulf of Mexico.

A few rode the Kuroshio Current to Japan and then veered eastward, gaining new strength over the phytoplankton-heated North Pacific, and turned at last like lazy giants toward the coast of North America.

Chapter 24
Hard Rain

The storm, once a comfortably distant threat, seemed to hurry closer as the days passed.

Matt organized the men into a work crew, nailing plywood sheets over accessible windows on the first floor of the hospital and crossing the plate glass with duct tape. The hospital was a relatively new building, constructed under a strict State building code for regional emergency centers. Essentially, it was a three-story reinforced-concrete bunker. It stood on high ground in a neighborhood of middle-income residences and tall conifers. The basement contained a records room, generator room, laundry room, heating and plumbing, and a kitchen and staff cafeteria.

Matt chose the cafeteria to serve as shelter. It was a cheerless cinder-block box painted salmon pink, but it was spacious and well away from any exterior walls. Tables were shoved up against the service line to make room for mattresses and bedding. By the first Thursday in March the storm was still a day or two away, according to the Helper, but the shelter was as complete as Matt could make it, and people had already begun to truck in their valuables, protecting photographs, souvenirs, memories against the wind.

Abby Cushman served as coordinator, keeping in close touch with all nine members of the Emergency Planning Committee and relaying Helper updates. She conferred with Matt by telephone and they chose Friday at 6:00 p.m. as the hour when everyone should be in the hospital basement, doors closed, exits bolted.

“Incidentally,” Abby said, “I heard about Rachel. I’m terribly sorry, Matt.”

Matt accepted her condolences. Abby had recently lost her husband and two grandchildren to what Rachel had called the Greater World. For a moment, an unspoken understanding flowed between them. Then Matt was hailed by Bob Ganish, who had run out of duct tape; Abby said, “Tomorrow at six—and everybody better be there!”

* * *

The storm was preceded by strange gusts of warm air, flurries of rain, a racing overcast.

Matt had expected something sudden, a burst of weather as quick and violent as a spring thunderstorm. Tom Kindle, ferrying canned food down to the hospital kitchen, told him it wouldn’t be that way. A typhoon—which was what this was, if not something even more powerful, still nameless—wasn’t a localized event. It was a vortex of air, miles wide, slow at the edges, more intense as you moved toward the eye… or as the eye moved toward you. It would not come all at once; but it would come quickly, insidiously.

Friday afternoon, Matt packed up a few things at the house—the family album Rachel had cherished, Celeste’s letters, a change of clothes. It wasn’t much, but the act of selection was both agonizing and more difficult than he had anticipated. By the time he had the trunk full and his car on the road, his watch said 4:45.

The wind plucked at the car like a playful hand as he drove to the hospital. High clouds tumbled inland from the ocean, and the bay was so white with froth it seemed to be boiling. The roads were already littered with twigs and branches.

He parked close to the Emergency entrance but was drenched before he could dash inside with his two cartons of worldly goods. The rain was cold and the wind so intense he had to put his shoulder against the door to close it again.

The basement cafeteria, by contrast, was warm and noisy. He felt unreasonably cheered by the sight of other people, by the babble of their voices. Abby’s deadline was only a quarter of an hour away. If we’re all here, Matt thought, we can nail plywood over the last door and hunker down for the night. He looked for Abby Cushman, meaning to propose a final head count and a battening of the hatches—but Abby was on the phone.

It took him a second to work out the implication.

She waved him over. “It’s Miriam Flett. Miriam won’t leave her house—it’s too stormy to drive, she says. She thinks she’ll be safe where she is.”

Matt checked his watch again. “How about if we send someone to pick her up? Would she be willing to go with an escort?”

“Matt, do we have time? It’s getting bad awfully fast.”

“Ask her if she’s willing.”

Abby took her hand away from the receiver. “Miriam? Miriam, how about if we send somebody? Somebody to drive? Because we’re not sure your house is safe enough. No. But it’s not just the wind, Miriam. There’s the storm surge to worry about. Flooding, yes. You might be too close to the water. I know, but… yes, dear, but… but if we send someone, how would that be?”

Five-fifty, according to his Timex.

Abby covered the receiver again. “She’s willing to go, but she wants to know who to expect.”

“Tell her I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Matthew? Are you sure?”

He shrugged. “I’m already wet.”

“Well—you be careful. We can’t afford to lose the town doctor.”

“Tell Miriam to make sure she’s packed.”

“All right. We won’t barricade the door until you’re back.”

“No. But do it if you have to.”

* * *

Ordinarily it would have been a five-minute drive from the hospital to Miriam’s bungalow on Bellfountain Avenue. Allowing for the weather, Matt had estimated twice that. Outside, he wondered whether he should have doubled it again.

Coming around Commercial, he managed to stop just short of a toppled Douglas fir. The tree was a giant, old growth left to mature next to a grocery store parking lot; its trunk obstructed the road as neatly as a fence. It would mean a detour, but not a long one: another block south and left to the highway. He backed up, sweating despite the cold.

The fallen tree made the storm seem suddenly real, an immediate danger. For Matt, a kind of emotional electricity always accompanied even a modest summer cloudburst. He used to love the sight of a storm coming in around the crest of Mt. Buchanan, the thunder rolling up the slopes. Grotesque as it seemed, maybe he had been getting the same kind of pleasure from this storm.

But the fallen tree had cut his euphoria as neatly as it divided the road. This wasn’t a cloudburst or an out-of-season thunderstorm. This was something immensely more powerful, an engine wound on a column of air as tall as a mountain. It had the power to lift, to compel, to move, slash, shatter; to destroy. It could pick up his car and spin it like a top—probably would, if not now, then in an hour or two hours. It had already toppled this ancient fir, and the storm had not even begun. This was only its curtain-opener, its prelude.

He circled down to Marina with his high beams on. The storm had blotted up all but the last trickle of daylight; streetlights cast a feeble iridescence into the gloom. Every house he passed was dark. The Contactees had turned out the lights before they left, a universal primness as alien as their means of departure.

Coming toward the highway along a familiar residential road, he was startled to see a house with windows blazing yellow light… even more startled when he recognized it as the house where Jim and Lillian Bix had lived for the last ten years.

He looked at his watch, fretted a moment, then pulled over to the curb.

The house wasn’t fortified against the storm. The windows weren’t taped or shuttered. Matt hoped the building was simply unoccupied, the lights left burning for no good reason—but then he saw a shadow against the downstairs curtains, a motion there and gone again.

He sighed and climbed out of the car. He was instantly wet, wetter than before, the rain drilling through his topcoat. He ran to the shelter of the porch, knocked once, waited, and knocked again.

Jim Bix opened the door.

Matt recognized him immediately, although his friend had changed.

The last time he had seen Jim Bix was when they argued over Lillian’s pregnancy, Jim insisting she didn’t need prenatal medical care: the Travellers would protect her. And Jim had cut his hand, and the blood had been viscous and very dark.

Now Jim stood in the doorway, haphazardly dressed, as tall and ugly as he had ever been… but thinner and inhumanly pale. His skin, Matt thought, didn’t look like skin at all; it looked like some much finer membrane, a transparent sheath drawn over bones as delicate as seashells. His eyes, in their china hollows, were like dusty blue marbles, as if the color of the irises had bled into the whites. The pupils, fixed and small, were the bottomless black of night shadows.

Matt thought of the empty skin he had inspected at Tom Kindle’s house. It looked like his old friend wasn’t far from that condition.

“Thank you for stopping,” Jim said. His voice was a husky whisper. “But it’s not necessary, Matt. We’re fine. You should get under shelter.”

He said, somewhat breathlessly, “So should you.”

“Really—we’re fine.”

“Is Lillian here?”

Jim hesitated, still blocking the doorway. Matt called out, “Lillian? Are you all right?”

No answer—or if there was, it was masked by the roar of the wind along the overflowing eaves.

Lillian would have been three months from her due date by now. “The baby,” Matt said. “Is that why you’re still here when everyone else is gone? Jim, for Christ’s sake, is it the baby?”

The thing that had been Jim Bix peered frowning at him but failed to answer. Frustrated, frightened, Matt pushed past him into the house.

Jim fell away instantly from the pressure, and Matt sensed his lightness, the terrible lack of solid weight behind his ribs.

“Lillian?”

“Matt,” Jim said. “It would be better if you left. Will you leave?”

“I want to see her.”

“She doesn’t need medical care.”

“So you say. I haven’t examined her since Contact.”

“Matt—” His friend looked at him mournfully. “You’re right. It was the baby that kept us here. Lillian wanted to finish the pregnancy. But the storm—it would be awkward to linger past tonight. This is a private moment, Matt. Please leave.”

“What do you mean, finish the pregnancy? You mean she’s having the baby?”

“Not exactly. We—”

“Where is she?”

“Matt, don’t force this on yourself.”

The front door was still open. Distantly, from somewhere down the street, came the sharp sound of a window shattered by the wind.

He felt driven by the need to see Lillian and speak to her; or, if not, to know what had overtaken her, know precisely what maze of transformation she had stumbled into. Maybe he wasn’t being reasonable. He didn’t care. She was his patient.

“Lillian?” He stepped into the kitchen; it was empty. “Lillian!” Shouting up the stairs.

Jim, too fragile to stop this, stood aside and gazed at him with a vast sadness in his cavernous eyes. “Matt,” he said finally. “Matt, please stop. She’s in the bedroom off the hallway.”

He hurried there and threw open the door.

Lillian was naked on the bed.

Her ribs were stark against her papery flesh, and her eyes were as strange as her husband’s, though browner. She raised her head to look at him and seemed unsurprised by his entrance.

Her legs were spread. There was no blood, but Matt recognized with horror that she had delivered… something.

It resembled a shriveled homunculus—a monkey fetus, perhaps, as preserved on the shelf of some medieval apothecary. It was quite dry, quite motionless.

His horror was overtaken by an immense, weary sorrow. He looked at Lillian. Her face was bland. She had wanted a baby very badly. “Lillian,” he whispered. “Dear God.”

“Matt,” she said calmly. “You don’t understand. This is not the baby. You must understand that. This is only an end product. The baby is with us! He’s been with us for some months now. A boy. He’s alive, Matt, do you understand me?” She tapped her head. “Alive here.” And spread her arms. “Here.” The Greater World.

She smiled a bloodless, paper-thin smile. “We named him Matthew.”

* * *

He arrived at Miriam Flett’s small house grateful for the anesthetizing noise of the storm. The roar of the wind had become so intense it was hard to think. Which was good. He didn’t want to think.

Miriam met him at the door, a small woman, her spine curved with what Matt diagnosed as a mild osteoporosis. Her expression was grim. “You’re late.”

“I had some trouble on the way over.”

“You look sick, Dr. Wheeler. Are you sick?”

“Miriam, I may very well be, but we don’t have time to worry about it. We have to get you to shelter.”

“I told Abby on the phone—I have shelter.”

It was an invitation to argue that Matt did not accept. “Are these your bags?” Two pale gray Tourister cases.

“Yes,” she admitted. He picked them up. “Well,” she said. “All right. But they’re heavy. Be careful.”

He carried them to the trunk of the car, came back to help her into a bright yellow raincoat. He took her arm, but she resisted. “My journals!”

“What?” The door was open and the wind was shrieking.

“My journals.”

“Miriam, we don’t have time!”

“We would have had time if you hadn’t been late.” She stamped her foot. “I won’t leave without my journals!”

Have mercy, Matt thought. How many minutes back to the hospital? And what were his chances, in that time, of staying on the road? “Damn it, we simply can’t—”

“There’s no call for profanity!” Shouting to make herself heard.

He closed his eyes. “Where are they?”

“What?”

“The journals! Where are they?”

She took him to the kitchen, where it was marginally quieter, and pointed to three shelves of bound notebooks so full of newspaper clippings they were bent as round as bread loaves.

Matt gathered up an armful.

“No!” Miriam shrieked. “They’ll get wet!”

“I can carry them to the car. I can’t make it stop raining.”

“Don’t be testy! Here.” She shrugged out of her raincoat and draped it over the journals.

“Miriam—you’ll be soaked to the bone.”

“I’ll dry out,” she said.

He took her to the car, helped her inside, and piled the journals at her feet. She slammed the door to keep the rain away from the books, narrowly missing the fingers of Mart’s left hand.

He climbed in behind the wheel and advised her to fasten her seat belt. The engine stuttered a little when he cranked it, as if some moisture had crept in where it didn’t belong.

He said as they pulled away from the curb, “Have you talked to Abby? She must be worried.”

The wipers, on double-speed, did very little to improve visibility. The road in front of him was a liquid blur.

“I would have liked to talk to Abby,” Miriam said, “but the phone stopped working twenty minutes ago. Dr. Wheeler, may I ask why you were so late?”

“Believe me, Miriam, it isn’t something you want to know.” She examined him over the rims of her eyeglasses and rendered a judgment: “Maybe you’re right.”

* * *

He took a different route back to the hospital, longer but higher; he was afraid of flooding down by the marina. The road rose along the foothills of Mt. Buchanan and Matt was forced to crawl along in the breakdown lane, away from the winds that had begun to sweep up the hillside with devastating force. Many of the houses he passed were already windowless and the road surface was littered with broken glass. Debris rolled past the car at a constant rate—loose garbage bins, cardboard boxes, green matter.