The Wanderer

South of the mound stretched a tiny graveyard, its wooden headboards sand-drifted and some pushed down and all sedge-draped by the scour of the last high tide. At the foot of the graveyard was a small wooden church that had once been painted white. It was shifted a dozen feet off its foundation bricks and strained and twisted at the corners, though not broken apart. The brown mark of the tide went up about eight feet on it, almost to the flaking but newer-painted black letters over the door, which read CHURCH OF JESUS SAVER .

Barbara squeezed her eyes shut several times rapidly. It looked to her as if several patches of the blue sky had come down onto the flat, brown-green land to the east, a little like the watery reflections one sees far ahead on a level concrete road on a burning hot day. The blue patches grew and merged. No longer conscious of blinking, Barbara watched with an intensity approaching that of trance. Second linked to second and minute to minute seamlessly, as if the hooves of time had halted, or as if something in her stood still so that she could no longer hear their pounding.

Nor — so attentive was she to the strange phenomenon of the sky overflooding the land — did she much hear the physical roar coming louder and louder from the east, or the awed, excited calling back and forth of the three great gray featherless fowl beneath her, or even much feel the tree shake and strain as the waters came surging around it, or hear Helen’s scream.

But it did seem to her that the whole earth was tipping and sliding up into the sky as that blue came reaching dizzyingly underneath, and she leaned farther and farther backwards and would have fallen, except that now a body came pressing up against her side and a strong arm came around her back, bracing her.

“You hold on, Miss Barbara,” Benjy was shouting in her ear. “You watch so hard you fall.”

She looked around the watery plain. Florida was gone. The Church of Jesus Saver was floating off upside down with its eight short legs crookedly in the air.

She looked down again. The magnolia, its height halved, was a lonely midsea refuge. She thought of the Rolls Royce and giggled.

“I don’t know about that, Miss Barbara,” Benjy said, diviningly. “I hoist out the battery and ’stributor and some more parts. Grease others heavy — might help. Plug up gas tank tight at both ends, same for oil. Tide go down, she might run again, though I be surprise.”

The tree swayed with the surge and then swayed back. Helen squawked. Hester clutched at her. Benjy laughed crowingly. He said to Barbara: “But I still got hopes — some.”

Chapter Thirty-two

Ross Hunter, driving conservatively fast, swung the sedan around the last curve. Now the road lay straight along the high mesh fence of Vandenberg Three.

Margo hit his shoulder and pointed at a small open door in the first corner of the fence.

Hunter didn’t slow down. “No good,” he grunted. “I’d try for a gate that can take the car.”

“Hurry it up,” Hixon urged from the back seat.

The landscape turned suddenly spectral. The big cloud-bank had cut off the sun. There was thunder. Through the thunder, guns cracked ahead. A police car came out of the flaming laager through the opening clipped in the freeway fence, plunged down a little slope, and headed in their direction, bumping and jouncing around the edge of the burned car-crush at the mouth of Monica Mountainway. A second police car came out, hind end foremost but backing fast, and followed the first.

Hunter slowed. There was a big gate with an empty guard booth. The gate was open. He swung through it as a third police car, this one front end first, escaped from the laager.

Hunter gunned the sedan across the dusty gray gravel toward a wide black door in the biggest of the three white buildings.

Beyond them Margo saw teenagers climbing the far fence and crowding in through a little door in it.

Hunter pulled up. Hixon and Margo piled out. There were three concrete steps, a narrow porch, then the black double door with a tag of white on it.

Hixon and Margo ran up the steps. She tried the door. It was locked. Hixon pounded on it with the butt of his rifle and yelled: “Open up!”

Hunter started to turn the sedan around.

The first police car came screeching through the gate and headed toward them. Through the clouds of dust the first raised, the second police car followed, still backing.

Hixon ran to the nearest window and smashed with his rifle butt through it, then chopped away at the big fangs of glass left.

With a squeal of brakes, a surge of springs, and a ten-foot skid, the first police car drew up beside the sedan. Two officers jumped out, their faces soot-smeared, their eyes wild. One wave of a Tommy gun.

“Drop your guns, all of you!” he yelled.

The other covered Hunter. “Get out of that car!”

Hixon, holding his rifle muzzle away from the police, yelled: “Hey, we’re on your side!”