“They are fine,” Burnfingers told him. “Your house was unchanged when we left to come look for you and it is well above the rising water.” The huge Casull gleamed in the smoke-tinted light. In Burnfingers’s fist it looked big enough to blow away the Anarchis itself.
That was another unreality, Frank told himself unhappily.
They were fighting their way toward an island of metal, of sanity. It stood unaltered amid madness and devastation: the motor home. Several new gouges scarred the trim where something had tried to break through. The metal had resisted. A little of the pain in his side and shoulders went away at the sight of it.
“If we survive this I’m gonna buy that damn machine. Alicia can turn it into a planter or the kids can make a rec room out of it. I’ll take off the wheels and put it up on blocks, but I’m not giving it back. It’s saved my ass too many times.”
“It has not saved anything yet.” Burnfingers manipulated the keys with one huge hand until he found the one that fit the door lock.
He and Flucca had to help Frank in. Water continued rising around them. What looked like a giant salamander came wriggling through the water toward them. Burnfingers kicked it aside. The contact produced a feeble, gurgling squeal. Tiny dark eyes peered mournfully up at them out of deeply sunk eye sockets. The face was faintly human.
Once inside, Frank headed for his familiar place behind the wheel. Burnfingers gently but firmly eased him into the other chair.
“Not this time, my friend. Now I drive whether you like it or not.” Frank was too exhausted to argue.
“All clear!” Flucca yelled as he closed the door and dogged it tight.
Burnfingers turned the motor home around, accelerated slowly so as not to soak the brakes. The water was halfway up the wheels and still rising. Fortunately, the motor home had higher clearance than any automobile.
After a few miles, the road began to ascend, climbing from the industrialized harbor area into the suburban knolls of Rolling Hills Estates. Looking back the way they’d come, Frank saw a ten-foot-high wave advancing across the city. No ordinary surf, it was more like a bore tide. The solid wall of water rushed up the city streets from the harbor to crash against burning buildings. Anything less than a story high was submerged.
Riding the crest of the irresistible tide was an army of nightmares from the depths, all pulsing red gills and snaggleteeth and poisonous spines. Flat, silvery fish eyes burned with an unnatural intelligence. Even at this distance Frank fancied he could hear the bloated bubbling sounds the aquatic invaders made as they began to feed frenziedly on the drowning carcasses of the inundated city dwellers. Hills and trees soon blotted the horror from view.
The Peninsula appeared deserted. Any surviving families were probably cowering inside their homes. There were no other vehicles moving. Palos Verdes had become a Gibraltarlike island anchoring the southern corner of the sunken Los Angeles Basin.
For the moment they were safe, though the land continued to subside. The fabric of reality was unraveling around them faster than ever. At any moment the remaining dry land might sink beneath the hungry waves or be torn asunder by a new earthquake. Gravity itself might end, sending them spinning into space, choking and gasping for air as the planet’s atmosphere dissipated rapidly around them.
As they continued to climb he saw that the Pacific had reclaimed all the lowlands. The only evidence of former human habitation were the tops of office towers and luxury condominiums along Wilshire and downtown, and the occasional top lane of some freeway interchange to which crowded cars clung like ants trying to escape a flood.
Burnfingers shifted out of low as the ground leveled off. They drove past denuded eucalyptus, oak, sycamore, and bottlebrush. Even the evergreens had been stripped of their needles. As they crossed the Peninsula and turned south toward his house, they saw the ocean once more. It was bubbling and heaving like a boiling pot. Waterspouts danced across the tormented surface despite the absence of wind. The long brown silhouette of Catalina Island was missing entirely from the western horizon, having vanished completely beneath the waves.
His house still sat intact on its acres, the iron gate guarding the entrance unbroken. Flucca borrowed his key and opened the lock, admitting them to the circular driveway.
As they entered, a vast shadow darkened the motor home. Frank leaned forward and looked skyward, flinched as the monster attacked. It was all teeth and claws and dripping toxins. The motor home rang like a bell when the thing made contact with the roof, but the metal held and they managed to remain upright.
Flucca darted outside, popping away with his tiny pistol. Frank followed, then Burnfingers. The Casull bellowed once, twice. Nothing tumbled to the ground and there was no answering scream, but the shadow vanished.
“It will be back.” Burnfingers holstered the now empty hand-cannon. “Along with mother knows what else. The world is going crazy.”
Frank leaned against the comforting side of the motor home, breathing a little easier. He felt a lot better now than he had when his friends had dragged him from the collapsing city below. The throbbing in his side was starting to relent.
“Nothing’s stable no more,” Flucca avowed, still scanning the sky. “The fabric of existence is really coming apart.” Satisfied that the clouds shielded nothing more than an errant pigeon, he looked over at Frank. “We’re running out of time, we are. That’s what Mouse told us before we came looking for you.”
“That’s what she’s been telling us all along.”
“I was beginning to wonder if we could make it all the way to your office,” Burnfingers told him. “Then we saw you lying in the water with that bunch preparing to do you.”
“Five more minutes.” Frank straightened, able now to stand on his own. “No, I didn’t have that much. Three, maybe.”
“We have to get her to the Vanishing Point quickly. She is the only one who can stop this.”
“You get her there. You and Nick. I’m all out. I’m staying here. I want to die in my own house surrounded by what’s left of my family. If things keep worsening at this rate you’ll never make it, no matter how close the Point lies.”
“That is not like you, Frank Sonderberg.” Burnfingers put a big hand on the other man’s shoulder. “I have been in worse spots and it has always worked out for me.”
Frank was shaking his head. “How would you know if it worked out for you or not? You’re nuts, remember? Besides, how can you cope with a situation that changes from day to day, minute to minute? How do you cope with a new reality every time you turn around?”
“You change with it.”
“Burnfingers, I ain’t like you. You’ve been some weird places and done some weird things. Me, I’m strictly middle-class straight and normal. I can’t take this anymore. I can’t take it. I’m not the hero type. I knew that when I was growing up, I knew it when I was going through school, and I knew it when I was starting my business. I still know it. It’s just not in me, understand?”
Burnfingers replied solemnly. “Sometimes, my friend, we are forced into situations we don’t like, that make us uncomfortable, that we think we haven’t a chance in hell of coping with. But people cope, Frank. They cope all the time. From what I have seen of you these past many days I believe you can cope, too. No more talk of dying in your hogan. This is not the day for it. If you do go down, we all go down together fighting, if it be against the Anarchis itself. People were not made so they could cower in their beds when there was work to be done.”
“You heard the man.” Flucca headed for the front steps. “Let’s get the others out of there.”
“What about it?” Burnfingers jerked his head in Flucca’s direction. “He has half your size and twice your guts.”
Frank hesitated, took a step forward. Too late, he knew he was committed. But according to Mouse, he’d been committed since that morning when he’d stopped to pick her up. So why the hell was he beating himself to death worrying about the inevitable? When he took the second step, Burnfingers Begay smiled.
“That’s better.”
Halfway to the front door the big hibiscus bush on the left wrapped leafless branches around Frank’s waist. He let out a yell as the branches pulled him toward a mass of leaves that concealed something wet, green, and threatening. What they needed was an ax or machete. Instead, they had to make do with Burnfingers’s butterfly knife. It sawed through the branches as the remaining landscaping began to rustle alarmingly around them. More mutations, more changes.
“See, it’s hopeless,” Frank muttered as he brushed himself off. “Pretty soon we’ll be fighting crabgrass and bugs.”
“Mankind’s always fought crabgrass and bugs,” Flucca reminded him. “Let’s get inside.”
The rose bushes were the worst because of the thorns. By the time they reached the door all three of them were scratched and bleeding. Burnfingers flailed at the clutching vines while Frank and Flucca pounded on the door.
“Wendy, Alicia, open up! It’s me!”
The door was wrenched inward and he almost fell. Alicia caught him. She was crying.
“Frank, Frank—I thought we’d never see you again.”
“Same here, sweetheart.” He held her close, not wanting to let her go.
Only Burnfingers’s size and weight allowed him to shut the door against the press of rose bush and hibiscus, which a degenerate reality had turned carnivorous.
Wendy stood in the center of the hall, staring blankly toward the door. Her expression was as lifeless as was possible for a sixteen-year-old to muster. Frank tried to manage a smile.
“How ya doin’, kiddo?”
She blinked, focused on him. “Daddy. What’s going to happen now, Daddy? I thought it was all over and it’s only gotten worse, it’s gotten worse.”
He moved to embrace her. She hardly had the strength left to hug him, having cried herself out earlier. Branches and vines beat a staccato tattoo on walls and roof as the vegetation went berserk all over the Peninsula. They weren’t strong enough to penetrate the walls.
“Got anything in the way of large and sharp?” Burnfingers inquired, feeling it was time to interrupt the reunion. “An ax would be nice.”
