“Bloody hell!” he shouted up at the wall of trees.
When he turned around to look for the highway, he saw it was the thinnest of thin ribbons running down the middle of the valley.
“You’d best no be fuckin’ wid ol’ Azimuth, mon!” he roared in what he knew to be the general direction of the barricade and the bearded man. ‘”Cause I be backin’ down dis bloody snail trail an’ fuckin’ wid you right back!”
Kicking at the dirt with his steel-toe-capped boot, he hopped back in the Bug and headed into the shadows. In order to see, he had to switch on his headlights and roof lights. The road continued to climb and twist and turn around the huge trunks. Occasionally low branches whipped across his empty windshield frame. So far there was no problem with getting the big wags up the road.
The question was, would it ever return to the interstate?
As he continued on, Azimuth kept thinking that on the next turn, the track would wind back on itself and start to descend, but it showed no inclination of doing anything of the sort.
“You be takin’ me to da summit, you rat bastard!” he cried out the driver’s door window frame.
Azimuth told himself if that was the case, he would go no farther than the crest of the mountain. And once there, by hook or by crook, he’d find a way to get the Bug’s nose turned the way he’d come. And when he got back to the sign and the barricade, he would pick up the bloody three-pound marker rock and use it to bash in the bearded man’s head.
It occurred to him that there were no animals in these woods. No birds. Not even bugs. The heat was smothering, and there didn’t seem to be enough air to breathe. Beyond the range of his head- and floodlights was a wall of darkness. Then he saw sunlight breaking through ahead. The backlit trees sent a wave of relief passing through him.
“About bloody time!” he said.
When the Bug crested the top of a rise, it rolled into the open. Azimuth stopped the wag and got out. Just below him was a small lake, surrounded by a dead zone of stripped, barkless trees and muddy bank. On the hillside below the body of water, on a shelf of flat land, was a small ville.
There was plenty of room to turn down there.
And as he watched the jumble of shanties and lean-tos, he saw a few people moving in and out. Folks he could ask about the best way to get back to the highway.
Feeling much better, Azimuth put on the headset and drove down to the lake. He paused at the shoreline to lean out the driver’s door and look over the placid water. The sky reflected in it without a ripple.
Then something caught his eye.
A quivering shadow.
At first he couldn’t tell whether it was something in the water or something in the sky reflected by the water.
It was in the water.
The spot of darker color began to grow, and as it grew it bubbled and churned. Silvery bits, like tiny mirrors, started to rise from the water, forming a churning cloud. Then came the pale green lightning, shooting the wrong way, from the surface of the churning water to the underside of the cloud.
“I be damned,” he said, unable to take his eyes off the phenomenon.
The cloud got larger and larger and the lightning became more and more violent. When the strange ministorm started to drift across the lake toward him, Azimuth decided he had seen enough.
Even as he reached for the parking brake, the first of the pale spores swept over the Bug, angling in through the glassless window frames. They made a rustling, scratchy sound as they rained down on the sheet metal.
Azimuth sniffed at the air, once, and it was all over. His brain exploded in vibrating waves of color, color so pure and so intense that it obliterated everything else. He couldn’t feel his body, which had gone rigid with shock.
The carny scout sat there for the better part of ten minutes, his eyes rolled back in their sockets, quietly convulsing. Ten minutes, ten hours, ten years, the concept of passing time ceased to be part of his mental framework.