James Axler – Shadowfall

Everyone had stopped.

There was no wind at all in the sheltered region, and the fog seemed to be a permanent feature, settled down over them like a large and noisome animal.

“When we passed across that higher part, by the old tree stumps, I thought I spotted clearer ground a half mile ahead,” Trader said.

“Can’t go on forever,” J.B. agreed, taking off his glasses for the fiftieth time since the raft had landed, trying to clean away the sticky condensation.

“My chest hurts,” Dean complained, squatting on his heels and coughing, retching as if he were trying to remove phlegm from his throat.

“Sooner we move on, sooner we find some clean air and green grass,” Ryan said, helping his son to his feet. He echoed the Armorer. “Can’t go on much longer.”

MILDRED SAT BESIDE Doc at a point where the track was wider. They’d stopped in a natural amphitheater, with a small pool of water at its center. The fog had diminished until it was only a light mist.

Dean had walked down from the others and was sitting on a smooth rock, picking up pebbles and lobbing them into the steaming water. The boy seemed vastly better, once they were away from the choking fumes of the fog.

“Amazing to think that all of this was once California,” she said.

“The judgment of God on a truly biblical scale,” he replied. “Even in my day the place was too wealthy. Too smug and sure of itself. By the time that the Armageddon plunged from the skies, it can only have been a thousand times worse. It considered itself the chosen land, did it not?”

“Guess it did.”

“More like Sodom and Gomorrah. And it received the scourge of the Almighty.”

“It is like some sort of dreadful apocalyptic wilderness, isn’t it? Something out of the Book of Revelations.” Mildred looked around her, wonderingly. “They sure must’ve opened up the seventh seal here.”

Doc seemed to have lost interest in their conversation, staring intently down at the surface of the water where Dean was playing.

Krysty caught his attention. “What is it, Doc?”

“I just suffered from a strange visual distortion. It seems to me that the level of that pool keeps on rising a little, then subsiding. Then rising a little farther again. I cannot for the life of me imagine why that should” He stopped, his jaw dropping, suddenly leaping to his feet. “By the”

He started to rush down toward the boy. “Dean, come away from there!” Doc’s ancient knee boots slipped on the damp yellow-stained rocks, threatening to send him cascading all the way to the bottom of the large hollow. “Away for your very life!”

Dean stood, his dark curly hair matted to his head by the moisture in the air, looking up at the bizarre sight of the respectable Dr. Tanner leaping toward him like a deranged gazelle, waving his arms, face red, yelling some kind of warning at him.

“What?” he shouted, moving a couple of paces away from the small pool.

Everyone was up on their feet, Ryan and Krysty both taking a few steps in pursuit of Doc, who had nearly reached the boy, hands outstretched toward him, still shouting incoherently.

“Away! Before it blows!”

“Before what blows?” Trader asked, standing on the rim of the basin.

Mildred was quickest. “It’s a geyser,” she shouted. “Doc figures it’s about to blow. If it does”

Doc had Dean by the hand, tugging him up the slope, the boy still bewildered, resisting the old man. “Run, son!” Ryan yelled. “Boiling fountain about to blow up behind you!”

Abe started toward the couple to try to help, but his feet skidded away from under him and he fell, yelping in alarm. Arms spread to try to save himself, he was rolling directly toward Doc and Dean, but he managed to grab hold of a spur of rock and pulled himself upright just before crashing into them.

Ryan looked at the pool, cursing his own lack of attention in such a hostile land. The level was much higher, and it was bubbling and steaming. The surface of the liquid surged and roiled with the unbelievable pressures beneath the earth.