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highway, a roughly triangular piece of real estate with lawns, garages,
streets and tract houses looking as if it had been sliced off at random and
dropped down here hi the middle of nowhere.
There were no people about it any more than there had been people about the
lakeshore home. But these buildings were not in the untouched condition of the
house by the hike. The area looked, in fact, as if a tornado had passed
through it, a tornado, or else something with the size of a dinosaur and a
destructive urge to match. There was not one building that was whole and
weathertight, and some were all but flattened.
Nonetheless, they represented a treasure trove for us. I went through all the
houses and turned up a sixteen gauge shotgun and a carbine-type.22 rifle.
There were no shells for the shotgun and only one box of shorts for the.22.
But the odds on picking up ammunition for these two common caliber firearms
were good enough to count on. The suburb-chunk also contained eight cars. Five
of these had been made useless by whatever had smashed the buildings. Of the
remaining three, all were more than a few years old, and one would not start
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
at aH. That left me with a choice between a two-door Pontiac hardtop hi
relatively good shape and a Volvo four-door sedan that was pretty well beaten
up.
I chose the Volvo, however. Not only for its extra carrying capacity, but
because the gas mileage should be better. There was no filling station among
the homes in the suburb, but I drained the gas tanks of all the other cars
that proved to have anything hi them; and when we started out in the Volvo, we
had a full tank plus another fifteen gallons in cans tied on to a makeshift
rack on top of the trunk. Also, I had found two three-speed bikes in good
shape. They were tied to the top of the car.
The suburb had a fine, four-lane concrete road leading out of it, but that
ended about two hundred yards from the last of the smashed houses. I drove the
Volvo, bumping and bucking across a lumpy open field, to get it back on our
familiar asphalt and turned left into the direction hi which we had been
originally headed. We kept going; and about an hour later, I spotted a mistwaU
to our right It was angled toward the road we were on, looking as if it
crossed the asphalt somewhere up ahead of us.
My heart jumped when I saw it; bat after watching it closely for a little
while, I calmed down. Clearly, the wall was standing still. We continued on up
along the road, with its vertical, white face getting closer and closer, until
finally we were far enough along to see where it ended. It did indeed cut
across the road at last, about a quarter mile ahead of where we were; but it
only continued beyond that point of intersection for about a hundred yards. By
going off the asphalt to the left just a short distance, we could get around
the end of the cloud-high curtain. Not only could we bypass it safely; but
after going a little further, we would be able to get where we could see what
was behind it, without ever having to set foot in what might be dangerous
territory. I kept us moving.
We stopped finally and left the road, a good fifty or a hundred feet short of
the point where it was intersected by the mistwall. Up this dose to the wall,
we could see it seeming to reach clear out of sight above us; and we could
feel the peculiar breeze and the dust that always eddied from it, like the
peppering of a fine spray on our face and hands. We struck off into the trees
and brush to the left of the road, with the car in low gear and moving along
level with the face of the walL
It did not take long to reach the end of it. I kept on a little further,
however, not wanting to turn the corner until I could see behind it But though
we kept going further and further, we still did not seem to quite dear the
end. Finally, I saw why. We were not going to be able to see behind that
mistwall after an. Here at what I had thought was its point of termination, it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]