Still, the shaking and thundering continued, with more rocks tumbling and crashing into them from above. The rear wall of the cab was torn and bulging inward, wedging Keene awkwardly toward the driver’s-side door, with Charlie hanging above him beneath the slanting seatback. Hot, caustic gases seared Keene’s nostrils and his throat. There was fresh blood on his sleeve. He felt his arm and shoulder, but apart from probable bruising they didn’t seemed to be injured. It wasn’t from inside his coat. Finally, he traced it to his shoulder and found wetness down the side of his face and neck. There could be no thought of getting out until the turmoil outside eased.
His mind had gone into a state of numbness; he lost track of how long it lasted. It could have been ten minutes or an hour. Gradually, the heavier lurches gave way to a slowing clatter of pebbles striking the runabout or the rocks outside. Then Keene felt water inside the cab seeping into his boots. “Charlie, we have to get out.” He waited for a second or two, then jabbed upward around the bulge in the cab’s rear wall at Charlie’s shoulder. “Charlie, are you okay?”
A pang of worry hit him, and then Charlie’s head turned sluggishly. “I think so. . . . Just a bit shaken up.” His voice was wheezy. “Man, look at you!”
“What?”
“One side of your head’s got blood all over it. You sure you’re okay?”
“Just a scalp thing by the feel of it. But we need to move. We’ve got water coming in. I can feel it.”
There was no question of opening the driver’s door. It was partly on the underside, its window disintegrated, embedded in mud and by the look of it, buckled firmly in place anyway. Charlie felt for the door latch on his side, released it, and heaved with his arm and shoulder, but the door wouldn’t budge. “It’s no good,” he announced, breathless. Keene released his seat harness and leaned past Charlie to add his strength as well, but it didn’t help.
“Then it’ll have to be the front,” Keene said. He searched around and checked the dash compartment. The only object he could find of any weight was a metal-cased flashlamp. He used it to clear the remaining windshield shards from around the edge of the frame; then, with Charlie assisting, lifted his legs up along the dash panel and hauled himself over the wheel to squirm downward and out through the opening. It would have been easier if the runabout possessed more of a hood, which would have left a bigger space between the windshield and the ground. As it was, Keene had to worm his way feetfirst toward the passenger side, where the gap was higher, before he could turn and straighten up. Charlie followed, managing more easily since his reversed position brought him out the right way around. The squeeze had left both of them smeared with mud and soaked along their bodies.
The runabout had come to the end of its trail. It was nose-down in a mud slide that had surged into the marshes, its back end lifted by a rock lodged firmly underneath, and the rest of it looking as if it had been used as a practice target for field artillery. The generator had torn loose and was partly immersed in ooze maybe thirty feet away. Looking up to take in more of the general surroundings, Keene was dumbstruck.
The slopes that they had been traversing above had been broken and rugged before, but they had been continuous. Now they were split by two enormous, vertical fissures that had opened up all the way to the summit line, from which palls of black smoke or dust were spilling out over the lower slopes. Rivulets of rubble could be seen cascading down into the nearer fissure in places. But even more than that, the whole line of the slopes was tilted drunkenly forward, as if it had been torn from the greater massif behind by the opening up of a fault running lengthwise but invisible from where they were standing. Charlie was standing, staring up as if mesmerized. “Awesome!” was all he could find to murmur.