ready to raise the stock to his shoulder and shoot quickly. He saw them, too, swung his rifle upwards and fired twice, both shots clattering into the slope of rocks they had just climbed. They fit themselves into the cool, dark slot and climbed as fast as they could, grunting with the effort, scraping knees and elbows recklessly against the narrow walls. In one long passage they put their backs to the wall, pressed their feet against the opposite wall, and shimmied up to a ledge they could reach. If the gunman caught up to them while they were in that narrow chimney he would have an easy shot—they would be the proverbial fish in a barrel—but if they were too hasty in their climb they could slip and fall and surely that would mean broken bones, game over.
Nolan realized he was about to be out of firing range. He needed to get up there before they could exit the narrow passage. He could point his rifle straight up under them and shoot them down. He saw it in his mind’s eye. She would scream, maybe plead. He felt himself getting hard.
Up he went, the rifle in one hand and his other grabbing at every handhold he could find. About fifty feet up from the floor there was a short traverse over a thin ledge. He took it too quickly and lost his balance. He reached out and grabbed ahold of a hank of rice grass to steady himself and regain his footing. The rice grass held him for a second before it tore loose. He spun hard and dropped about ten feet onto a boulder. There was a sickening snap and a pain shot from his ankle up to his hip.
He paused to assess the damage. A sprain, he thought, just a sprain. But when he stood up and took a step, his leg buckled and he tripped forward, pitched over a dead juniper log, rolled twice downhill and was airborne. He hit the canyon floor feet first and his knee was driven up into his chin. He lost consciousness briefly. When he regained it he was spitting blood. He brought a finger to his mouth and discovered a massive tear in his tongue and the jagged edge of a broken tooth. He gurgled blood and spat. When he looked down he noticed that the toe of his boot was pointed to where his heel should be. He reached down and felt a raw bone protruding underneath his denim pant leg.
When the Earth’s atmosphere became overloaded with the CO2 and methane emitted by a carbon-based civilization, its oceans overheated and pushed the river of air flowing above them into wildly oscillating waves. The atmospheric currents that had regulated the benign flow of seasons and weather for thousands of years were overwhelmed. Whiplash waves drove Arctic air due south where it collided with warmer southern currents, spawning clusters of tornadoes and monster storms. Whole landscapes caught fire or were underwater from one season to the next. Droughts here, hurricanes there, it seemed like extreme weather was the new norm on an unpredictable helter-skelter planet. A clustering of consequences was at hand.
The southwest had always had a monsoon season marked by dramatic thunder and lightning shows that Luna referred to as “our daily cloud opera.” But now the thunderheads rose even higher and faster until they collapsed in pounding rainstorms that the landscape could not contain. The morning that found Luna and Hoppy running for cover was like most other hot summer days, hardly a cloud in the sky. In just a couple hours the sun sucked moisture into the sky and clouds like a herd of fluffy white bison grazed across the blue. Their bulk became so great that they pulled on one another, coalesced into an anvil-shaped monster cloud that became so thick it turned a bruise-colored purple at its core.
Nolan looked up from the sandy wash where he lay broken and twisted. He saw a darkening sky. Thunder boomed and rolled away into the distance. Rain started slowly, big wet drops splattered down and polka-dotted the ground. There was a brief pause and then all hell broke loose. Rain came down in sheets so thick he couldn’t see twenty feet away and so hard that the sand where Nolan lay was bouncing. Water poured down every slick surface of redrock. Rills and rivulets of rain braided together as they swept downward across bare stone and poured over canyon rims, making a universe of waterfalls.
Nolan tried to pull himself up above the canyon floor before the flash flood that was surely building arrived. He tried to stand but his bent leg would not hold him. He crawled but any effort he could make to get above the wash was too slow, too painful, too late. I’m pathetic, he thought. A fucking loser.
Rocks thudding underwater and the shush of dry leaves and dead twigs pushed forward by the flood’s advancing tongue told him it was coming closer. He read a faint change in the air pressure close to the ground and then he smelled its moist breath. Flood! It looked so odd coming toward him, a dry wall of sticks and branches, dead grass and leafy detritus, rolling almost lazily. The flash flood was pushing the debris it had scoured from the canyon floor ahead of itself. The wall roiling toward him was neither dry nor slow despite appearances. Behind the debris was a wet fury he would not survive.
His last words before it swallowed him were, “Oh fuck!”
Chapter 15
The new security guard at the Sea Ledges tar sands mine saw the gathering clouds. They built up into a towering mass above the mine site. The topmost layer of the massive cloud was etched in silver but the dense bottom was a dark and ominous grey. The guard was not alarmed. Monsoon season was like this. Usually the storms passed or dissipated. You could see storms on the horizon all day long and never get wet. The desert is big and thunder storms are a hit-or-miss affair.
This one was different. Darker and bigger than most, it rumbled and growled for close to an hour. The guard went into the shed where they kept equipment and broke out a rain poncho. He lit a cigarette and leaned back on a plastic lawn chair under a sheet-metal eve. “Bring it on,” he said aloud. “Start the show.”
A couple of days before, an eco-terrorist set fire to a house trailer and drove a bulldozer over a cliff. The site was strewn with yellow police tape because the detectives who were supposed to examine the crime scene were on another case and getting to the Sea Ledges site was a long and difficult trip. Construction was temporarily halted. The guard who was on the site when the sabotage occurred was fired and everyone who worked at the site was tense. But the young man on duty that morning reasoned that monkey-wrenchers don’t work in the rain and they don’t hit the same place twice in a week. He wanted to relax and the storm offered welcome entertainment.
In the first minute after the rain began to pour down it was clear this was no ordinary thunder bumper. It was as if someone turned on a fire hose. Rain came down in pillars of gray and silver. A trillion fists pounded the ground. The storm cloud pulsed with lightning and cracked with thunder so loud he felt it in his teeth. His hair lifted from his head and crackled with static electricity.
The dry washes filled with rivers of water and every low spot became a pond. The metal shed behind him buckled under the weight of the wet onslaught. He heard a groaning sound and realized that the company Hummer he rode in on was moving, lifted by rising water and headed slowly downhill, wagging back and forth as it moved like it was happy to be swimming away on its own. He scrambled to a ledge above the mine site and watched the carnage unfold. Machinery slid this way and that, shed roofs caved in, cement pads snapped as the soil beneath them disappeared into the maelstrom. Debris tangled in downed power lines made a temporary dam across the wash below him. Eventually the pressure of the mass of water trapped behind it snapped the lines and unleashed a small tsunami of mud and metal.
