Another spurt of brown water, wider and thicker, strong as an iron rod, hurled itself fifty feet out into the cold air of the valley.
A much wider fissure appeared near the top of the brimming dam, splitting downward, and the entire structure wavered briefly like a mirage in the desert and finally started to crumble.
Zelig bounded up from behind one of the M113s, letting the binoculars dangle around his neck. “By God, whoever’s done that job… Could it be Jim Hilton?”
MARGARET TABOR also stood up as she watched the dam beginning to fall apart, hundreds of feet above her and her soldiers. Someone started to curse in a high, shrill voice of doom, and one of the older men had fallen to his knees, frantically tugging out a silver crucifix as he began to mouth a prayer.
“Run!” shouted someone.
But you can’t run from death.
The whole front wall disintegrated, leaving a gap fifty feet wide and forty deep, opening up so that the great lake of meltwater could pour through in an unstoppable torrent.
Margaret Tabor vanished beneath the frothing flood, her last sentient thought a furious, bitter rage that she had been finally defeated.
THE VALLEY was scoured clean, the second Chinook tossed aside and torn to splinters like a cardboard toy. Not one of the Hunters of the Sun escaped the dam burst, all of them swept away by the wrath of the pent-up flood.
Jim and the others crowded to the edge of the cliff and stared down, awestruck and silent.
Beyond the thunderous cascade, General John Kennedy Zelig raised his glasses again and focused them at the ragged group of ten men, women and children.
“Excellent,” he said to himself. Then he raised his hand into the air in a victory salute.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Her return to a sort of consciousness coincided with the arrival of dusk.
Margaret Tabor blinked open an eye, seeing a hazy gray darkness around her. There was pain. That was her first reaction. Pain so severe that it made her faint.
When she came around for a second time, she struggled with the pain, seeking to identify it and control it. It was everywhere, running through every nerve and every bone and muscle.
She was soaking wet, and her head and body were slathered with icy mud. One eye didn’t seem to be functioning, and the Chief of the Hunters of the Sun battled to lift a hand to her face to find out why.
Only one of her arms, the left, was still working, but to lift her hand sent screaming messages of agony down an of the lines.
“Come on, Margaret, don’t give up.” Her voice sounded strange, distant and muffled. With her left hand she tried to trace her own features, remembering them from images in mirrors. But what her numbed fingers touched didn’t remind her of herself.
There was enough light for her to squint at her hand, seeing that the thumb and one of the fingers were bent right back at an unnatural angle, and she could make out the whiteness of jagged bone protruding through purple, swollen skin.
Her jaw felt sloppy and loose. When she moved her tongue, it didn’t encounter the fine line of regular teeth that had been an expensive tribute to orthodontal expertise. Now there was stickiness and ragged stumps.
And pain.
Much more pain.
The darkness came weaving around her like the embrace of a midnight drunk, closing her mind down.
A noise woke her.
A thin, keening sound that she finally traced to her own throat.
Despite being wet, she was also desperately thirsty.
Now Margaret Tabor began to fight. Fight to realize where she was. The dam had burst and the floods had roiled over her, throwing her helplessly into one of the countless narrow ravines, a mile or more down the hillside.
Her back was broken.
She was quite surprised at how calmly she reached that conclusion. Taking stock of her own body, aware of the devastation to it.
Spine. No feeling below the waist.
“Screw sex,” she whispered.
If she lifted her head she could see her legs. One of her legs, crooked and splintered. The other leg was partly hidden from her sight, under a moss-slick boulder.