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The spiral wire fence no longer presented a problem, nor did the penitentiary's fifty foot border wall. Bede struck out into the flats. He'd heard about the Storm, or the Atmospheric Disturbance as the news channels were calling it. He hadn't had any idea of its scope, though. Its extent. He soon found out. Victorville was a wasteland. It also appeared to have moved. The nearby San Gabriel mountains were much closer than he recalled, and considerably taller. They jutted up like the Himalayas from the desert floor. The city itself was totally empty. Fire-swept. The freeway, I-15, a tangle of wrecked traffic. No one was around. Nobody. He traveled for hours, circling, watching, experiencing the unbelievable freedom the Storm had given him. Not only was he different physically, but he instinctively "knew" how to use his gift. After a time, though, he wearied of the exertion. He began trying just about every car he lit upon. They wouldn't work no matter what he tried, and he was pretty darn handy with engines - a tribute to all those automotive science classes taught in Juvenile Hall. He did coax an old two-stroke dirt bike to life, but after about a half mile it died. When he smelled the gas tank, he knew why. The fuel was different. Like the water. The next day he found the stables. They were a part of the sprawling Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Amusement Park. He'd ridden a lot as a boy in Griffith Park, back when his dad had been around. One of the paddocks had a dozen or so puzzled and skittish horses. He found to his surprise he could still rig the tackle and belt the saddle. He chose a weathered bay, a mare that seemed tougher, though maybe a little slower than the others. He let the rest go - to forage in the open plains, to find their own way. The bay wasn't scared of him, which was a bit surprising - given how he'd changed. He stroked her withers, letting her smell him - all of him - before he even tried to mount up. He couldn't imagine there was anything he needed in the high desert, that there was in fact anything left in the high desert worth needing, so he'd turned the mare's head south toward San Bernardino. The roof of the ranger station offered a panoramic view of the wide, southeast-sweeping cut of the arroyo. Highway 18 sloped downhill through it, cutting diagonally to the left. Beyond the immediate brush plain, the tree-lined battlements of the front range opened, exposing the dusk-cloaked valley floor. They were up at about three thousand feet, in the hinterland between the corrupted foothills and the mountains proper. In the distance, Bede could make out the closest of the prairie dog moundtowns, through the v-notch of the pass. It had been built smack in the middle of what had been a major housing development on the eastern flank of the City of San Bernardino. The moundtown rose at least 500 feet, and probably measured a quarter mile in diameter. Its sides were pocked with holes, reinforced with scavenged steel plates, studded with the wrecks of cars, and supported by monstrous revetments of cannibalized brick. A bonfire roared at its summit. Inside it, if Bede were to believe the geophysicists and hydrologists Dr. Randolph had brought with him in his wagon train from Caltech, was a reservoir some million or more gallons in volume. Pumped and channeled up by the prairie dogs for use by their allied nations. The mother lode of drinking water. Overhead, the stars were popping up, an unfamiliar pattern of green, blue and red dots, some huge, half the size of the moon, others minuscule flickering specks. They, like the new, blue-fired primary sun, took some getting used to. They bathed the dusky landscape in cartoonish hues. The wild, bracing scent of scrub and desert pine filled the air. A troop of prairie dogs had emerged from the thicket lining the highway's elevated embankment, along the eastern perimeter of his field of vision. They were scampering north with purpose, with vigor; leaping over bushes, lacing their way through a Pepper Tree copse. They looked like they were on a mission, Bede realized. Going somewhere fast, on orders. The main body of the army stood tight, in a diamond formation, below and south. Watching. Bede checked the ammo-display on his machine rifle. He had more than three hundred rounds in the gun's center drum, and another fifty or so in the haft. Enough to hold off most prowlers for the duration of the night. Not enough to repel the prairie dogs if they swarmed in over him, but enough to hold them at bay until relief came. He'd scavenged the weapon from the twisted detritus of the prison's armory. It ran off a compressed gas mini-cylinder, and fired plastic-sheathed explosive pellets. Quiet as a knife slicing through oiled skin. The best 2019 had to offer in jail population pacification. The ranger station had been reinforced by the scouts. The ground floor was heavily fortified, windows grilled, doors steel-paneled. A hand-cranked telephone circuit ran the fifteen miles from the ranger station to the Conference Center. Bede had already tried it once but the ground interference was too great for a signal to pass through. If he could get word to the watch commander that he was on his way in with two young survivors, both seriously storm-touched, and needed an escort, an armored horse carriage would be sent. Mailed and kevlar-blanketed Clydesdales pulling a tank-like rescue wagon. His survival wasn't terrifically important. He understood that. He respected that. He had volunteered for that. It didn't make him a hero. He wasn't. Not even close. It was, he knew without knowing, part of his penance, his act of contrition for that mother and her unborn baby. That, and a bone-deep hopelessness, made the job right for him. He was a scout. Risk was part of the job. But the girls. They needed to be studied, examined, evaluated, cared for. They had to be brought in safe and intact. Bede chewed some hardtack, thinking nothing, not moving. It was quiet except for the thrumming of the brush along the bottom of the station's walls, and the unearthly soughing of the trees as they waved to each other in the windless near-night. The fragrant smell of sage and creosote wafted up from the undergrowth, joining and merging with pungence of the scrub and pine already in the air. A flurry in the distance caught his eye. Through the notch, the prairie moundtown had darkened - as if in a fogbank, or a cloud. Bede raised the binoculars. "Crap," he muttered as he focused the lens. The moundtown was being attacked by crows, swarms of them, huge, cumulus formations of them. He watched as the prairie dogs mounted a defense, launching catapults of jagged looking shrapnel, unleashing telephone pole-sized wooden swatters. The scene would have been comic if it hadn't been so ugly, so vicious. From closer, much closer, a howling rose. It climbed until it became an earsplitting whine. Bede fell to one knee, dropped the binoculars, and covered his ears. The prairie dog army was voicing, as one, its pain at the attack. Bede heard a scream from inside the station. Talker. Then: "Mr. Bede, help, please. My sister needs your help." He dove headlong down the open skylight, not needing the fireman's pole or the hanging ladder. Black-tailed Prairie dogs, Cynomys ludovicianus, had thrived after the Storm. Most other mammals had suffered horrendous losses. Many were just gone - like mankind. And those few hardy species that had actually made the crossing, weathered the Storm, were now dying of thirst as the last remaining uncontaminated water sources dried up. However, the situation wasn't utterly hopeless. The rain was nontoxic. The undrinkable water paste evaporated into basic water vapor and precipitation - indicating that the water shift was temporary. Thus, plant life, much of it profoundly storm-altered anyway, lived on. Apparently insects, from what Dr. Randolph's entomologist friend Sorenson said, like termites and ants were making a shift to subterranean life - constructing elaborate underground ecosystems - adapting to the cavern life - avoiding the surface of the planet altogether. The bigger wild animals, coyotes, foxes, badgers, deer, and the like - they were struggling. If the rain came quickly enough it might save them - replenish watering holes, restart creeks. The prairie dogs, though, they were an entire species that had undergone an identical storm-change. They'd been made smart. The Conference Center had observed them for weeks as they migrated westward through Palm Springs and into the San Bernardino flat lands. There had been isolated enclaves - "towns" - of them in the area before the Storm, vestiges of the mammoth colonies that had existed before the rise of civilization. These new, improved prairie dogs were not just diggers, but master craftsmen as well. They constructed ornate pyramidal moundtowns. They built bridges over obstacles. They irrigated terraced gardens. They herded smaller vermin - rats, fieldmice, voles, moles. They were also fiercely territorial. The first emissaries from the Conference Center, sent to forge a water pact, had been killed and eaten, their heads left on spikes at the perimeter of the prairie dogs' claimed lands. The next set of negotiators were chased off. The final party from the Conference Center had been a raiding band, consisting of armed scouts, who had charged in with portable ethanol-burning flame throwers, scaled a moundtown and seen the vast reservoir and wooden pumping pipes on its inside. Now a state of cold war existed. The prairie dogs ruled the lowlands. The Conference Center controlled the upper slopes of the San Bernardino mountains. The problem was the prairie dogs had the water rights, so to speak. And with their truly astounding numbers, millions in each moundtown, they had the workforce to conduct truly massive excavations. Two days before leaving on his present scouting mission, Bede had finally worked up his courage and asked Dr. Randolph where all the people had gone, all those millions, probably billions, of men and women who had vanished. The portly, untouched professor had been tending his orchids. The storm-changed flowers were kept in a mesh cage on his window sill. They greedily snapped up the crickets he released through the top chute; catching the hapless bugs in midair. "They haven't gone anywhere, Frank." Bede's confusion must have shown on his face. The older man had shuffled over, wheezing slightly, and sat next to him at the book and folder-strewn table. His pink-cheeked face was like a baby's, but his eyes and his voice were made of granite. Frank sat on a bench. Traditional high-backed chairs no longer worked for him. "We're the one's who've gone somewhere, Frank."
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