“Buff and Luke aren’t coming?”
“It appears not,” Cavan said. “Perhaps they decided that trucks, not spacecraft, were more their line.” Keene realized that for some reason he had half expected it.
“Here,” Mitch said, handing Keene his radio. “You want to wish them luck?” There was still a set programmed to the same frequency in the cab. Keene took the unit and pressed the call button. Across the bridge, one of the figures near the truck turned around and walked back to the driver’s door.
“Yeah?” a voice answered in the radio that Keene was holding. It sounded like Buff.
“Lan Keene here. So you guys aren’t coming along after all?”
“Well, you know how it is. . . . I could never really see me up in one o’ them spaceships, anyway. And these people aren’t so bad. Someone’s going to have to get them to San An or wherever they want to go. And then Luke and me figured that if it works out that it’s possible, we might try heading back east when the worst is over, and try to find our folks—just the way you’re doin’. I reckon like maybe you gave us some inspiration. Anyways, we’re set on giving it a try.”
Keene swallowed. There wasn’t a lot left that he could say—or the time to say it in. “Well, you’ve been a big help to us. Good luck.”
“We’ll take whatever comes. Hope it all works out for you.”
Keene clicked off the radio. The others were already aboard, Legermount waiting on the driver’s side of the bench seat. Keene and Mitch squeezed in with him, while Cavan went around to the rear. Nobody else from across the bridge was coming back to collect any belongings. Evidently, the things they had found in the larger truck would suffice. Legermount fought the shift into reverse with a frightful grinding of gears, backed around onto the shoulder, then engaged forward and turned onto the highway. A series of blasts from the other truck’s horn sounded behind.
As they lurched their way among the washed-up debris, broken paving, and fallen rock rubble, Mitch nudged Keene’s arm and pointed ominously in the seaward direction to their left. Through the patches of brown haze twisting in convolutions with clearer air drawn in off the sea, a line of fuzzy whiteness had become visible, extending as far as they could see to the south ahead of them and northward behind, paralleling the coast.
49
They had to get back across to Highway 281 running parallel with them farther inland, and then south along it to the San Saucillo site. The road they were on ran a little above the flat expanse of land to their left, stretching away twenty-five miles to the coast. Watching the approaching line of foam as it appeared and disappeared in the murk, Keene put it at two miles away at most. If Charlie was right about progressive tides getting higher, and they took 281 as a likely guess for the next high-water mark, the water’s average rate of advancement from the former coast would be between six and seven miles per hour. That meant it would reach Highway 77, the one they were on, in around twenty minutes. Timing the truck’s odometer with his watch told Keene that they were averaging close to twenty-five miles per hour, and with the state of the road and the obstacles, Legermount wasn’t going to push any more. The turnoff that Keene normally took when driving to San Saucillo was fifteen miles farther south, which at this rate would take them thirty-six minutes. They weren’t going to make it. It was as simple as that.
He looked up at Mitch after timing another mile and shook his head. “Scratch the plan for taking the exit that I said. It isn’t going to work.”
“Great. So what do we do?”
“A few miles ahead, the road goes down into a dip where it crosses a valley with a creek—kind of wide and shallow. You come up the other side onto a ridge that extends west. Our only chance is to try and pick up a farm track or something going that way. We’d be running ahead of the tide and should gain on it. Saucillo’s on high ground too, so if we can make 281 with time to spare we should be okay.”