"I'm going up, boy," Stu muttered.
He crawled to the eastern edge of the gully. It was a little steeper, but it offered more handholds. He had thought for the last three days that he might be able to get up there, but he hadn't seen the point. He was sheltered from the worst of the wind at the bottom of the cut, and he had water. But now he had to get up there. He had to see. He dragged his splinted leg behind him like a club. He got up on his hands and craned his neck to see the top. It looked very high, very far away.
"Can't do it, boy," he muttered to Kojak, and started trying anyway.
A fresh pile of rubble had piled up at the bottom as a result of the... the earthquake. Or whatever it was. Stu pulled himself over it and then began to inch his way up the slope, using his hands and his left knee. He made twelve yards and then lost six of them before he could grab a quartz outcropping and stop his slide.
"Nope, never make it," he panted, and rested.
Ten minutes later he started again and made another ten yards. He rested. Went again. Came to a place with no holds and had to inch to the left until he found one. Kojak walked beside him, no doubt wondering what this fool was up to, leaving his water and his nice warm fire.
Warm. Too warm.
The fever must be coming up again, but at least the shivering had subsided. Fresh sweat was running down his face and arms. His hair, dusty and oily, hung in his eyes.
Lord, I'm burning up! Must be a hundred and two, a hundred and three...
He happened to glance at Kojak. It took almost a minute for what he was seeing to sink in. Kojak was panting. It wasn't fever, or not just fever, because Kojak was hot, too.
Overhead, a squadron of birds suddenly flocked, wheeling aimlessly and squawking.
They feel it, too. Whatever it is, the birds feel it, too.
He began to crawl again, fear lending him additional strength. An hour passed; two. He fought for every foot, every inch. By one o'clock that afternoon he was only six feet below the edge. He could see jags of paving jutting out above him. Only six feet, but the grade here was very steep and smooth. He tried once to just wriggle up like a garter snake, but loose gravel, the underbedding of the Interstate, had begun to rattle out from beneath him, and now he was afraid that if he tried to move at all he would go all the way to the bottom again, probably breaking his other damn leg in the process.
"Stuck," he muttered. "Good f**king show. Now what?"
Now what became obvious very quickly. Even without moving around, the earth was beginning to shift downward beneath him. He slipped an inch and clawed for purchase with his hands. His broken leg was thudding heavily, and he had not thought to pocket Glen's pills.
He slipped another two inches. Then five. His left foot was now dangling over space. Only his hands were holding him, and as he watched they began to slip, digging ten little furrows in the damp ground.
"Kojak! " he cried miserably, expecting nothing. But suddenly Kojak was there. Stu flung his arms around his neck blindly, not expecting to be saved but only grabbing what there was to be grabbed, like a drowning man. Kojak made no effort to throw him off. He dug in. For a moment they were frozen, a living sculpture. Then Kojak began to move, digging for inches, claws clicking against small stones and bits of gravel. Pebbles rattled into Stu's face and he shut his eyes. Kojak dragged him, panting like an air compressor in Stu's right ear.
He slitted his eyes open and saw they were nearly at the top. Kojak's head was down. His back legs were working furiously. He gained four more inches and it was enough. With a desperate cry, Stu let go of Kojak's neck and grabbed an outcrop of paving. It snapped off in his hands. He grabbed another one. Two fingernails peeled back like wet decals, and he cried out. The pain was exquisite, galvanizing. He scrambled up, pistoning with his good leg, and at last - somehow - lay panting on the surface of I-70, his eyes shut.
Kojak was beside him then. He whined and licked Stu's face.
Slowly then, Stu sat up and looked west. He looked for a long time, oblivious of the heat that was still rushing against his face in warm, bloated waves.
"Oh, my God," he said at last in a weak, breaking voice. "Look at that, Kojak. Larry. Glen. They're gone. God, everything's gone. All gone."
The mushroom cloud stood out on the horizon like a clenched fist on the end of a long, dusty forearm. It was swirling, fuzzy at the edges, beginning to dissipate. It was backlighted in sullen orange-red, as if the sun had decided to go down in the early afternoon.
The firestorm, he thought.
They were all dead in Las Vegas. Someone had fiddled when he should have faddled, and a nuclear weapon had gone off... and one hellish big one, from the look and the feel. Maybe a whole stockpile of them had gone. Glen, Larry, Ralph... even if they hadn't reached Vegas yet, even if they were still walking, surely they were close enough to have been baked alive.