The cosmos was filled with noise.
The wag was moving, constantly buffeted by collisions with the maddened animals.
Ryan cracked his bead again and he fell into the blackness. This time the LAV was the right way up when he came around, and the bedlam seemed a little less.
“J.B.?” His voice was a croak.
“Yo. Been around and around like a leaf in a twister. Feels like it’s easing.”
Now there was only an occasional jarring thud on the outside, and the ground was no longer vibrating.
“Just hope we haven’t lost a tire or anything,” Ryan said. He cautiously leaned forward in his seat, feeling a muscular pain across his ribs from being tossed around, and opened the ob slit in front of him. A whirling cloud of dust filtered in, and he closed it again.
Now the stampede was over.
He could hear J.B. unlocking his safety belt and he followed suit. He opened the ob slit again and peered out, seeing that the turf had been churned and trampled by thousands of pounding hooves.
The hatch was thrown back and the Armorer sucked in a great gulp of air. “Dark night! Surely do detest being locked away in a steel coffin like that. Doesn’t do a damned thing for my claustrophobia.”
J.B. wasn’t joking. Though he often appeared to be a man without any weakness, the one thing that he couldn’t handle was being closed away in a confined space.
“Can’t see any immediate damage.”
Ryan climbed into the open, looking immediately to see the last limping stragglers of the huge buffalo herd picking their way past the wag.
“Wish I could’ve watched that from a safe hillside,” he said. “Must’ve been something to see.”
J.B. had hopped down onto the ground, going around to check all the wheels. “Seems okay,” he said. “Watch the stampede? Sure. I read old books that talked about the prairies in the early days of white men.”
Ryan sat on the side of the LAV and kicked his feet against one of the tires. “Yeah. I read that, too. Man could lie down on a bluff and watch the buffalo pass. Hundreds across and moving slowly on by from sunrise to dusk.”
J.B. fanned flies away from his face with his fedora. “Used to be an old song. ‘Show me a home where the buffalo roam, and I’ll show you a house full of shit.’ Like it?”
“Not a lot.” He jumped down, looking away toward where the herd had vanished into a broad valley, an almost biblical pillar of dust marking their progress.
“Storm’s coming closer,” J.B. commented, wiping smudges of dirt off his glasses.
Ryan had been so preoccupied with the stampede that he hadn’t even bothered to look up at the sky to check the progress of the chem storm.
The sky was blackening, with streaks of purple-pink-silver lightning lacing it.
“Coming our way,” he said.
J.B. had walked quickly around the wag, and Ryan followed him. Considering that the armasteel was designed to keep the occupants safe against the direct hit of an armor-piercing 7.62 mm round, it was staggering how much damage the rampaging buffalo had done.
Superficially it looked as though the LAV had been dragged backward through hedges and fields, upside down into swamps and middens.
There was mud, grass and leaves covering the outside, with several dents and gouges. One of the wheels looked as if it had been knocked slightly off-center, and the barrel of the cannon was totally blocked with dirt.
“Good job we don’t have any ammo for that,” J.B. said, climbing back up for a closer look. “Blow ourselves into the middle of the next century.”
The distant thunder of the storm was nearer, sweeping in toward them over the Colorado mountains.
“Big one.” Ryan instinctively hunched his shoulders. “Think we could find a better place to park this wreck and face the chem storm? Narrow spur like this could flood in no time.”
“Higher ground,” J.B. agreed. “How about straight ahead and up there? Seems like a trail.”
Ryan looked, aware that the wind was suddenly starting to rise with startling speed, a sure sign that the approaching tempest was going to be triple bad.