heady. He noticed that the lightning had become forked, crackling with
blue-tinged flares, tiny explosions that added eeriness to the already strange
lighting effect. The sweat was pouring off his brow and he wiped at it with his
sleeve again, inhaling the strong fur smell as if to ward off that other alien
and unnerving odor.
“I don’t like this,” he muttered, turning back to the abyss.
McCandless grunted as he got to his feet.
“They must’ve been blown off the road. The wind just lifted the whole pack of
’em, threw ’em down.”
“Steam trucks?” Kurt raised an eyebrow.
“Sure,” snapped McCandless. “It happens.”
“All six of ’em?”
“It happens!” The big man scowled at the rusty wrecks far below. Then he glanced
at Kurt warily. “How come you know so much about what kinda traction those guys
had?”
“I remember when Dolfo Kaler went out. It was only a couple of decades back. I
was a kid, but I remember it.”
“Yeah?” McCandless’s voice was thick with suspicion.
“Sure. So what?”
“So nothing,” growled McCandless, his eyes flicking back to the scene below.
“See any stiffs?”
“Well, I guess they’d be picked bones by now.” Kurt stared up at the towering
peaks that soared above them, black and ominous. He gazed down again, noting the
smoothness of the cliff face below, pierced here and there by tough-looking
bushes that sprouted from unseen cracks and crevices.
“The acids would eat ’em up,” Rogan put in, staring moodily downward.
“Ain’t no acids round here,” sneered McCandless. “Look at the rock, stupe. All
round ya. Ain’t eaten away. Smooth. Look at the road. Acids would tear all that
up, dissolve the surface cover.” He spat contemptuously into the sullen void
below.
Kurt hitched his pack to loosen the straps. McCandless turned away from the
brink of the precipice.
“Let’s go. We gotta deal of trekkin’ to do before we reach the top.”
Rogan snarled at Kurt. “Don’t you go pointin’ that piece at me again, blaster.
You hear me?”
Kurt did not bother to reply. He checked his gun, checked above, checked behind.
He watched Reacher head toward the next bend, then moved on up the road himself,
the ozone smell very strong in his nostrils now, an ugly, steely stink. He
thought about the trucks and knew it would need a fantastic blast of wind to
hurl them all over, all at once.
No wind, however fierce, had hurled them over into the abyss.
“McCandless!”
Kurt’s head jerked up. Reacher was now at the bend, looking beyond it. His voice
was not a yell but a hiss of alarm, incomprehension. There was tension there.
Kurt began running. He passed both McCandless and Rogan, his gun held in both
hands, his boots thudding on the road’s hard surface. He reached the senser. He
stared up beyond him at what lay ahead.
Fog.
A thick, sullen wall of it, gray-white, impenetrable. And huge. It blotted out
the sky above them, loomed hideously high like an immense barrier across the
road—a barrier that seemed to be alive, for it quivered and heaved gently. Thick
tendrils stirred and inched out along the road’s surface at its lower edge, like
questing fingers, then retreated into the main mass, A dull, eerie glow emanated
from its heart, blue tinged, somberly highlighting the immediate area.
Kurt gazed at it, his mouth suddenly dry. His eyes automatically took in the
fact that it only extended to just beyond the edge of the precipice; there it
seemed to fade away to become tattered shreds of whiteness hanging in the air.
That somehow made it all the more unnatural, all the more terrifying. It seemed
to Kurt to be not at all atmospherically created; not at all strange and random,
in the way that much of the weather in the Deathlands seemed bizarrely random,
in the way that here and now there was snow, heat, wild winds, periods of sullen
stillness.
He whispered, “The fog…”
A hand grasped his shoulder and tugged at it. He half turned to face
McCandless’s glaring eyes.
“What the hell is this, Kurt? What the hell d’you know about this?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything.”