The man reloaded his rifle.
Turning, Jess raised the gun still in her right hand. She fired four, five times. The men scattered. Jess swung her right leg over the bike, jammed the muzzle of the gun into her pocket and reached to turn on the ignition.
“Get on!” Jess kicked the starter down. The engine sputtered.
Another bullet thudded into the sand at her feet. She kicked the starter down again as Giovanni deposited Hector on the seat behind her. He jumped on himself, grabbing tight to Jess’s waist, cradling Hector between them. The engine roared to life and Jess clicked it into gear, spraying up sand. Glancing back, she saw men sprinting onto the dock, not more than two hundred yards away. They jumped off the dock into the mud, running at them.
Jess coasted across the sand, lit in orange and greens from the glowing skies, and looked for a way through the channel of water still separating them from the shore. The waters weren’t receding anymore; the churn of whitewater out of the bay had stopped. She gripped the throttle, pulled it all the way back, her fear of the men behind her eclipsed by the fear of what she felt was coming.
Scanning the thick band of dark water, Jess saw no way through.
She raced along the edge of it weaving past rocks, crab traps and piles of discarded fishing nets, and there, in the distance, by the breakwater of the fishing village, a path of dry ground. She’d need to backtrack a half mile, but there wasn’t any other way. Crouching low, feeling Giovanni’s fingers digging into her stomach, she gunned the throttle for everything it had.
Behind them, the running men reached the channel of water. They saw what Jess was doing, realized they could cut her off by wading and swimming through the channel to run up the bank to the other side.
Pulling up to the jetty beside the breakwater, Jess slowed to pick her way through the rocks, trying to keep her balance. More than once, Giovanni kept them upright, bouncing his legs beside the bike.
They reached dry pavement as a deep reverberation shook the ground. Seagulls squawked, birds filling the dark skies above them. The roar came from the ocean, but Jess didn’t look back. She clicked the bike into its highest gear, held the throttle all the way back, and kept her head low.
Speeding past the pickup truck that she’d been dragged here in, Jess glanced left, at the men from the villa scrambling up the rocks from the bay. They weren’t more than fifty feet away, but they didn’t stop to shoot at Jess and Giovanni.
Jess saw the terror in their eyes, and she allowed herself to look behind them. An explosion of glowing foam, hundreds of feet high, burst around the villa, still nearly a mile away. A wall of black water surged behind it, towering above them.
She reached the first turn in the road that zigzagged up the valley. Leaning into the turn, she gunned the throttle again. Racing up the hill, she watched one of the men jump into the pickup truck, squealing its tires as he reversed, the other men throwing themselves into the back. A rushing sheet of water slammed into the truck, picking it up, turning it end over end before disappearing in the roaring foam.
Jess stopped looking. Keeping her eyes on the dark pavement rushing toward her, she ignored the rumbling behind her and raced over the hilltop.
36
TUSCANY, ITALY
LOW HILLS AND farmland glowed under the walls of shimmering light towering high into the skies. Jess knew they were sheets of high energy particles, thrown off the sun in vast coronal ejections triggered by Nomad. Funneled by the Earth’s magnetic field, the high energy particles concentrated in sheets that impacted atoms high in the ionosphere, kicking off electrons and photons—exactly the same way that neon tubes glowed bright, except that these were shifting neon walls stretching a hundred miles into space.
They sped through towns and villages. Here and there, a few people stood in the streets, some staring up, some packing cars, but it was mostly deserted. Jess hoped her father, Ben, was secure in the castle with her mother by now.
Everything was dark. And not just lights out. No power.
The high energy particles streamed all the way into the ground, raising the ground voltage, frying power grids. And at these intensities, it wasn’t just frying power grids, but even exposed electronics and bombarding the DNA of living cells of plants and animals.
They had to get underground, as soon as possible.
If the streaming lights in the night sky were frightening, even more frightening was the horizon they raced toward. Gaining color. Sunrise. Or rather, they rotated toward the sun. Toward Nomad rushing toward them. Every fiber in Jess’s body wanted to turn around, to run. But run where? Back into the raging waters? She knew they needed to head east, toward the glowing horizon and the safety of the castle.