Gordon R. Dickson by Time Storm Page B

by it.
    Midway through the next morning on
the road, we rode past a chunk of a suburb. I mean exactly that—a chunk. It was
some two hundred yards off our asphalt highway, a roughly triangular piece of
real estate with lawns, garages, streets and tract houses looking as if it had
been sliced off at random and dropped down here in the middle of nowhere.
    There were no people about it any
more than there had been people about the lakeshore home. But these buildings
were not in the untouched condition of the house by the lake. The area looked,
in fact, as if a tornado had passed through it, a tornado, or else something
with the size of a dinosaur and a destructive urge to match. There was not one
building that was whole and weather-tight, and some were all but flattened.
    Nonetheless, they represented a
treasure trove for us. I went through all the houses and turned up a sixteen
gauge shotgun and a carbine-type .22 rifle. There were no shells for the
shotgun and only one box of shorts for the .22. But the odds on picking up ammunition
for these two common caliber firearms were good enough to count on. The
suburb-chunk also contained eight cars. Five of these had been made useless by
whatever had smashed the buildings. Of the remaining three, all were more than
a few years old, and one would not start at all. That left me with a choice
between a two-door Pontiac hardtop in relatively good shape and a Volvo
four-door sedan that was pretty well beaten up.
    I chose the Volvo, however. Not only
for its extra carrying capacity, but because the gas mileage should be better.
There was no filling station among the homes in the suburb, but I drained the
gas tanks of all the other cars that proved to have anything in them; and when
we started out in the Volvo, we had a full tank plus another fifteen gallons in
cans tied on to a makeshift rack on top of the trunk. Also, I had found two
three-speed bikes in good shape. They were tied to the top of the car.
    The suburb had a fine, four-lane
concrete road leading out of it, but that ended about two hundred yards from
the last of the smashed houses. I drove the Volvo, bumping and bucking across a
lumpy open field, to get it back on our familiar asphalt and turned left into
the direction in which we had been originally headed. We kept going; and about
an hour later, I spotted a mistwall to our right. It was angled toward the road
we were on, looking as if it crossed the asphalt somewhere up ahead of us.
     
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    My heart jumped when I saw it; but
after watching it closely for a little while, I calmed down. Clearly, the wall
was standing still. We continued on up along the road, with its vertical, white
face getting closer and closer, until finally we were far enough along to see
where it ended. It did indeed cut across the road at last, about a quarter mile
ahead of where we were; but it only continued beyond that point of intersection
for about a hundred yards. By going off the asphalt to the left just a short
distance, we could get around the end of the cloud-high curtain. Not only could
we bypass it safely; but after going a little further, we would be able to get
where we could see what was behind it, without ever having to set foot in what
might be dangerous territory. I kept us moving.
    We stopped finally and left the
road, a good fifty or a hundred feet short of the point where it was
intersected by the mistwall. Up this close to the wall, we could see it seeming
to reach clear out of sight above us; and we could feel the peculiar breeze and
the dust that always eddied from it, like the peppering of a fine spray on our
face and hands. We struck off into the trees and brush to the left of the road,
with the car in low gear and moving along level with the face of the wall.
    It did not take long to reach the
end of it. I kept on a little further, however, not wanting to turn the corner
until I could see behind it. But though we kept going further and further, we
still did not seem to