We were flying over a windswept basin about a hundred kilometers northwest of Cheyenne when we saw the mushroom cloud peek up over the horizon.
For a second I was too stunned to move, watching the way the shock wave raced upward in a spherical shell and how the surface of the cloud roiled and churned inside it. Then, remembering where we were, I shouted, "Christ!" and yanked the emergency descent handle under the dashboard. It was the first time I'd ever done that in a car; the air bags blossoming out of the doors and roof and dash slammed me back in the seat and completely blocked my view for ten or fifteen terrifying seconds while the automatic landing sequence took over and dropped us like a rock. We bobbed once, hard, like a cork smacking into water, then settled with a crunch on the ground. The air bags sucked back inside their cubbyholes and I fell forward against the dash. We were listing at about a thirty-degree angle toward the front.
Jody had caught herself with her hands before she fell forward. She looked out the window and said, "We're sitting on a sagebrush."
I looked out my side. Sure enough, a gnarled, knobby little bush was holding the rear end of the car in the air. Not a good position to be in when the shock wave rolled over us. I started the motor and lifted the joystick to raise us off it, and with a sound like ice cubes in a blender the car chopped the bush to shreds, blowing blue-gray bits of foliage everywhere and sending an eye-watering burst of sage smell in through the vents. We lifted up, though, and the wind shoved us forward a few meters before I could set us back down again. We sat there watching the cloud rise and waited for the blast to reach us.
And waited, and waited. The wind shifted a little, then shifted back, and after a while we realized we weren't going to feel anything more this far away so I cautiously took us up a few meters and started flying southeast again. The car had picked up a bad vibration from the sagebrush, but it still flew.
The mushroom cloud blew eastward in front of us as we approached, the wind at different altitudes slowly tearing it apart. We were moving faster than the wind, though, and as we approached it we realized the bomb couldn't have gone off very far out of Cheyenne.
Jody looked at me with a worried expression. "I thought Gwen said he'd lob one into Nebraska."
I was starting to worry, too. "Maybe it went off in the launch tube."
"We'd better call and see if he's okay."
I didn't want to blow our chances of surprising him, but if he was hurt I supposed we should know it. "Okay," I said, and Jody dialed his number.
When it rang half a dozen times without an answer I began worrying in earnest, but then the phone display flickered on and his face appeared before us. "Dave here," he said.
Jody put on a stern expression. "God called, and He told me to tell you to knock it off."
For just a moment, I could see hope blossom in Dave's face. Then he scowled and said, "Very funny. Did you call just to harass me or do you have something important to say?"
"We called to see if you were okay. That blast looked like it was pretty close to town."
"It was in town," said Dave. "At the Air Force base, anyway, which is pretty much the same thing. None of the rockets were in shape to fly, so I just blew one of the missiles in place."
"Where were you?" I asked.
Dave laughed. "Colorado Springs. NORAD control. I've got a half mile of mountain over my head right now, in case you were thinking of trying to stop me."
In a teasing voice, Jody said, "Aren't you afraid God will miss you again?"
Dave shook his head. "You wouldn't believe the spy network they've got here. I've got satellite surveillance all over the world. If He shows up I'll know it, and I'll set off another one closer to home. He'll know I'm here."
And so did we, now. I angled the car straight south.
"Have you ever considered how God might feel about nuclear bombs?" Jody asked him. "Destroying so much of His handiwork all at once might make Him mad."
"It's a risk I'm willing to take," Dave said.
"But you're taking it for all of us, and I'm not willing."
"Not now," Dave said, "but you'll thank me when I succeed."
"And what if you don't? None of us are going to thank you for blowing a bunch of fallout into the air. We're going to have to live here, Dave. You too, probably."
He laughed. "That's what the environmentalists thought. So they quit cutting the forests and burning fossil fuels, and all for what? The environmentalists are gone and the forests and the fossil fuels are still here. It was a complete waste."
I could hardly believe my ears. "You really believe that?"
"I really do."
"Then you're a lot worse off than I thought."
His eyes narrowed. "Ah, why am I even talking to you?" He reached forward, and his image flicked out.
Jody looked over at me. "I don't think subduing him's going to be easy. If he's in the NORAD command center, then I don't know if we'll even be able to get to him."
"We'll figure out something when we get there," I said. I was trying to convince myself as well as her. I didn't have any idea what we'd do, but what else could we do but try?
Thin as our plans were, the car put an unexpected twist in them just south of the Wyoming-Colorado border. The vibration in the rear fans had been getting steadily worse, and I'd brought us down closer to the ground to reduce the strain on them, hoping to make it to another city before they died completely, but we were still quite a ways north of Fort Collins when the right one gave up with a shriek and the car dropped on that side, hit the ground, then slewed halfway around and flipped completely over. The air bags whooshed out to hold us in place again, but the one in front of Jody burst with a bang and I heard her shriek in surprise as she fell head first into the windshield.
"Jody!" I fought to reach her over the bags still holding me in place. We skidded to a stop, but with the car upside down they deflated slowly, so we wouldn't fall to the roof and break our necks. I managed to squeeze out through the gap between the one in front of me and the one between the seats. Jody lay in the hollow made by the roof and the curved windshield, her face bloody from a gash in her forehead. She was groping for something to pull herself up against.
My first thought was that she should lie flat in case she'd hurt her neck or spine, but then I realized there wasn't enough space for that and she'd probably be better off sitting upright anyway. I took her hand in mine and helped her twist around until she could sit on the roof. The seats were just over our heads. "Is anything broken?" I asked as I looked in the gap between seats and floor for a medical kit.
"I don't know." She flexed her arms and legs, then said, "Doesn't feel like it." She held a hand to her forehead to keep the blood out of her eyes while she blinked to clear them. "Both eyes are okay," she said after a moment. Her voice was a little slurred but completely calm, the result of years of training for emergencies.
I couldn't find a medical kit, so I tore a strip of cloth from my shirt and used that to sop up the blood from her wound. She winced when I blotted her cut with it, but I was glad to see muscle instead of bone before the blood welled up again.
"I think you'll live," I said, trying not to let her hear the worry in my voice. Her injuries probably wouldn't kill her, but a night outside in Colorado in the wintertime just might. I bent down so I could look out the windows. The Sun was still fairly high over the mountains. We had a couple of hours of daylight left, but I couldn't see any houses and I didn't know how far we could walk to find one. The wind wasn't as strong here as it had been farther north, but it was still blowing hard enough to drop the chill factor by twenty degrees or so. It was already sucking the heat out of the car.
Jody had been thinking along the same lines. "All of a sudden I'm not so happy the world's empty," she said.
"We're not in trouble yet," I told her. "For one thing, the world's not empty." I flicked on the car's phone, dialed upside down, and waited, hoping the transmitter could make contact with its antenna underneath us.
"Who are you calling?" Jody asked. "Dave?"
"That's right. He's the only one anywhere close to us."
"What makes you think he'll help us?"
"I don't know if he will or not. But it can't hurt to ask."
We waited for ten or fifteen seconds while the phone tried to make a connection. Finally we saw a flickering, snowy phantom on the windshield, and Dave's voice, shot through with static, said, "What now?"
"This is Gregor," I said. "We've been in a wreck just north of Fort Collins. Jody's been hurt. Can you come get us?"
His upside-down face looked us over suspiciously. "This is a trick to get me out of here."
"No it's not," Jody said. "Here, have a look." She bent down toward the camera eye and took the blood-soaked rag from her forehead. Dave's expression grew a little more sympathetic, but not enough.
"Sorry," he said. "You got yourselves into this, you can get yourselves out."
I said, "Dave, we're not just asking a favor. We could die of exposure out here."
"Quit being melodramatic. You're resourceful—" His image broke up for a second, then came back. "—must have brought coats and hats and stuff."
"We're in an upside-down car in the middle of nowhere and you're telling us to put on our coats? Damn it, Jody's injured! We need to get her to a hospital and see if she's broken anything. She could have internal injuries."
It was hard to read his expression in the snowy, upside-down image. I thought he was scowling, then for a brief moment the scowl reversed itself. "All right," he said. "I'll come. It'll take me a while to get out of the mountain, and an hour or two more to get up there and find you. Just sit tight." Then before either of us could say anything more, he switched off.
I thought for a moment about his sudden capitulation. I didn't like the feel of it, and pretty soon I realized why.
"The bastard isn't going to come."
Jody looked around at me sharply. "What? He just said—"
"He wants us to think he's coming, but he's going to wait for us to die of exposure. Think about it. What better way to get God's attention than to send a couple of free souls to go knock on Heaven's gates for him?"
"But . . .he . . .would he do that?"
"Sure he would. He just said so. It's going to take him a 'while' to get out of the mountain, and a 'while' to fly up here, and a 'while' longer to find us. He'll make sure it takes a long while, so when he gets here he can honestly say he tried to rescue us, but he was just too late."
She shook her head. "No, I don't think he'd do that."
"I do. I'm not waiting around to find out the hard way."
"What are you going to do?"
I reached under the seats into the back for our coats. As I helped Jody into hers, I said, "I'm going to walk toward Fort Collins and see if I can find a house or another car that works. I won't go any farther than I can walk back before dark."
She thought about it, then said, "All right. While you're doing that I'll call Gwen and see who else might be able to come get us."
"Good." I pulled on my coat and hat and gloves, then opened the window and slid out onto the frozen ground. A cold blast of air swirled snow inside. I leaned in to give Jody a kiss, then backed away and made sure she closed the window tight before I stood up.
The car was a dark oblong against white snow; I wouldn't have much trouble finding it again if I got back before dark. I started off toward where I hoped town would be, turning back periodically to make sure I could spot the car again until the slope of the land hid it from view. The Colorado foothills didn't have nearly as much snow as Yellowstone, but there was enough to leave a pretty good set of tracks. It would take a few hours for them to fill in, so I wasn't that worried. I trudged along, hands in pockets and head tilted to the side to keep the wind from blowing down my neck, looking for any sign of civilization.
As I walked, I realized how much I was going to hate living a primitive life when all the machinery started falling apart. By the time I was an old man, I'd probably be walking everywhere I went. I might even be burning wood for heat, depending on how long the colony's power plant lasted. No wonder Dave was so desperate to have God come back for him.
I thought about Jody waiting for me in the car, possibly dying of injuries or exposure before I got back. At the moment I didn't mind the idea of a God watching over us, either, provided He'd actually do something to help if we needed it. Even if He wouldn't—or couldn't—keep her alive, the idea that I might somehow join her again after we both died was at least a little comfort. Not much, because I could never be sure it would happen until it did, but the possibility might keep me going for a while.
It came to me then that if Jody died, I could easily join Dave in his quest. But she wasn't going to die. All I needed was to find some shelter and we'd both be fine.
I eventually spotted what I was looking for down in a gentle valley: a house and barn set in among a stand of tall, bare cottonwood trees. There were a couple of vehicles parked out front and a long, winding road leading down to them from a highway off to my left. I kept going cross-country straight for it.
It was farther away than it looked, but I made it just as the Sun touched the mountains. The house was unlocked, so I didn't have to break in. It was also unheated, but it felt wonderful compared to outside. I tried to call Jody on my cell phone, but when I opened it up the screen had a big crack in it and it failed to light. I had apparently landed on it in the crash. The house phone was dead, too; no surprise after four years of weather like this. But I found a hook by the back door with a set of keys dangling from it, so I took them outside and tried them in the vehicles.
There was a hovercar and a four-wheeled pickup truck in the driveway. The hovercar was as dead as the phone, but the pickup lurched forward when I turned the key. I pushed in the clutch and tried again, and was rewarded with the whine of a flywheel winding up to speed. The power gauge read low, but I didn't think I'd need much just to reach Jody and come back.
While the flywheel spun up I checked in the glove box for a working phone, but all I found were a bunch of wrenches and fuses. That wasn't reassuring. I let out the clutch slowly and the truck began to roll forward, though, so I steered it around the driveway and began to bounce and spin my way up toward the highway. I'd heard it was easy to get a wheeled vehicle stuck in snow, so I figured I should drive on roads as much as I could until I got close enough to try driving cross-country.
It was a good idea, and it would have worked if there hadn't been a big drift about a kilometer down the road where it crossed the bottom of the valley and began to climb the other side. I realized too late that the road didn't rise up with the terrain, and by the time the pickup nosed into the bank, shuddered as it dug itself in a few more meters and came to a stop, it was thoroughly stuck. I couldn't back out or go forward, not even when I left it in gear and got out and pushed.
Of course there was no shovel in the truck. I would have to go back to the house to get one. Cursing my stupidity in not thinking ahead, I followed the tire tracks back the way I had come.
It was starting to get dark by the time I reached the house again, so I prowled through the kitchen drawers until I found a flashlight that worked, then went out to the barn and found a shovel. I jogged back to the truck and started digging it out, hoping Jody wasn't too worried that I hadn't come back yet. She was only a kilometer or two away; if I was careful not to get stuck again I could be there in a few minutes.
I had just dug a path for the left wheel and was starting in on the right when I saw a bright light descending toward me from the south. It slid on past, still dropping, right toward the car. Dave.
"Well I'll be damned," I said aloud. "He actually came." I leaned back against the pickup for a moment, catching my breath. I didn't have to break my back at it now; he and Jody would probably be coming for me pretty soon.
If they could find me. My tracks would be pretty hard to follow in a hovercar, and if they missed the farmhouse then they could very easily miss me out on the road in a pickup.
I reached inside and turned on the headlights. That would help. But I started digging again, too.
Ten minutes later I finished the other wheel track. They still hadn't come for me. I climbed into the pickup, put it in forward, and let out the clutch, but it didn't budge.
Back outside with the shovel, this time digging the snow out from underneath. It took another fifteen minutes. When I tried it again the truck moved a little, and I rocked it back and forth until it started rolling, then drove on up the road as fast as I could. Something wasn't right.
Dave had left his landing light on. As soon as I came up over the edge of the valley I saw it, shining straight at our overturned car. I could see a figure standing beside it, but I couldn't tell if it was Dave or Jody.
The road curved the wrong way. Cursing my luck, I gunned the pickup and swerved off the road, bouncing over rocks and sagebrush and trying to steer whenever the wheels touched ground. The tires spun and the flywheel motor screeched in protest, but I kept the throttle all the way to the floor and held on while the pickup bounced toward the two air cars. As I drew closer I could see that it was Dave standing in the light, and Jody was lying flat on the ground in front of him. She wasn't moving.
I popped open the glove box just as the truck hit a hard bump, scattering wrenches all over the seat and floor. I snatched one of the bigger ones in my right hand as I skidded to a stop beside Dave's car, leaped out with it upraised, and shouted, "What have you done to her?"
He didn't even try to defend himself. He just stood there with a beatific smile on his face and said, "Go ahead. It won't matter. I'll even tell God it was justified."
"God ain't the guy you'll be talking with," I said. I raised the wrench to cave in his head, but with him just standing there I found that I couldn't do it. Not even with Jody lying before us on the ground.
He'd taken off her coat and gloves. Her face and hands were white as the snow, and no breath rose from her open mouth.
"We should have realized right away that one of us would have to go get Him for the rest of us," Dave told me as I bent down to feel her neck for a pulse. "I would have gone myself once I figured it out, but Jody was already so close I figured she might as well be the one. It really doesn't matter."
I didn't see any wounds other than the one on her forehead. She must have been unconscious when he arrived, or he'd stunned her somehow. I couldn't find a pulse, but my fingers were so cold from digging snow that I probably couldn't have found my own. I bent down and felt for breath against my cheek, but there was none. Not knowing what else to do, I covered her mouth with mine and blew a breath into her lungs.
Dave grabbed me by the collar. "No, I can't allow that. You can't bring her back until we're sure she's done the job."
In one quick motion I stood up and smacked him in the left temple with the flat of the wrench. His head jerked sideways, and he fell over backwards with a thump that swirled snow up around him. I bent back down to Jody.
Five compressions of the chest, breath, five compressions of the chest, breath, over and over again. Sometime between forever and an eternity later, she shuddered, gasped a breath on her own, and moaned.
I whooped with joy, lifted her up in my arms, and carried her over to Dave's car, where I set her in the passenger seat and turned the heater up all the way.
I ran around to the other side and climbed in. She woke with a scream when I slammed the door, then she saw it was me and slumped back in the seat. "Christ you scared me," she said. "I had a hell of a crazy dre—wait a minute." She looked around at the car, a much bigger one than what we'd been flying.
"This is Dave's car," she said after a moment. "He did come."
"That's right, and he dragged you outside to die, too." I looked out to make sure he was still lying where he'd dropped. I had just enough time to realize he wasn't when the door beside me popped open and he stood there with my wrench in his hand.
I lunged for the lift controls, but he reached across me and rapped my hand with the wrench before the car even began to move. "No you don't," he said. "Get out. We're going to finish this experiment one way or another."
I cradled my suddenly numb right hand in my left, wondering if I could clench it into a fist, and whether I could do any good with it if I could.
Jody leaned over so he could see her. "It's already finished," she said.
"What do you mean? It can't be. You're still alive."
She laughed. "I'm alive again, idiot. I was dead. I was there. I saw your precious gates to Heaven, and they're slammed tight."
"You did?" I asked.
"They are?" asked Dave.
"Yup." Jody's eyes held a spark of elemental fire as she looked at him.
Dave let the wrench drop to the ground. In a subdued voice, he said, "Let me in. It's cold out here."
I thought about it a moment, much preferring the idea of leaving him outside a while longer, but Jody said, "Go ahead, I've got something I want to tell him," so I tilted my seat forward and let him climb in back. The moment he sat down I pulled on the lift control and took us straight up a hundred meters or so.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"High enough to make you think twice about trying something cute," I replied.
"He won't try anything," Jody said. "Not now or ever again."
"What makes you so sure?" I asked.
She grinned like a whole pack of wolves surrounding a deer. "Because if he does, he might get hurt, and if you think it's lonely on this side of the great divide, wait 'til you see what's waiting for us over there."
"What?" Dave asked, leaning forward between the seats. "What did you find?"
She got a faraway look in her eyes. "I found the place where Heaven used to be. At the end of a long tunnel of light. There weren't gates really; it was more of a . . .a place. It's hard to describe physically. But I could tell that was where I was supposed to go, and I could tell it was closed."
"Permanently?" Dave asked.
"It felt that way. There was just the memory of a doorway, no promise of one to come. So I turned around to come back, but I couldn't find the way at first. I wandered around quite a while before I stumbled across it. If Gregor hadn't kept my body going, I don't think I would have found it."
"Wandered around where?" Dave demanded. "What was it like?"
"Like fog," Jody said. Her voice picked up a tremor as she added, "I was just a viewpoint in a formless, shapeless, gray fog. There wasn't any sound, any smell; I didn't even have a body to hear or smell or feel with. I don't even know if I was actually seeing anything. There was nothing there to see."
"Then how did you know where your body was?"
"How do you know where your chin is? It was just there." Jody turned away from him and leaned back in her seat. "Look, I'm tired and my head hurts and I've been dead once too often today. I just want to get some rest. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow."
I took the hint and flew us away in search of a hospital.
Later, after we'd bandaged her head and made sure she had no other injuries, we took the bridal suite at the top of the Fort Collins Hilton. Dave was in one of the rooms down below. I'd wanted to put him in the city jail, but Jody wouldn't let me.
"His teeth are pulled," she told me as we lay in the enormous bed, a dozen blankets pulled over us for warmth and as many candles providing light. "He'll believe anything I tell him now. Besides, we need him. The best thing we can do is treat him like a recovering alcoholic or something and just integrate him back into our lives as fast as we can."
"Integrate him back into our lives?" I asked incredulously. "After what he did to you? He murdered you. You were dead!"
She giggled. "Well, I'm not so sure about that."
"Huh? What about the tunnel of light, and the gates to Heaven and all that?"
She lowered her voice to a whisper. "That was all total vacuum. I told him what he wanted to hear. Well, what I wanted him to hear, anyway."
I stared at her in the flickering candlelight, dumbfounded.
She shrugged. "I don't remember a thing from the moment Dave knocked me out until the moment I woke up with you next to me."
"You don't?"
"No."
"You're one hell of an actress, then."
"Good, because I want him convinced."
I thought about that. "Even if we aren't?" I asked after a while.
"What?"
"You want Dave convinced, but we're still in the same shape we were before. We don't know anything at all about what's waiting for us after we die."
She giggled again and snuggled up closer to me under the covers. "Then God is just, if He exists," she said. "After all, I'm agnostic. I wouldn't have it any other way."