As well as Kansas, the winds and rain roared through Oklahoma, Nebraska and Louisiana, deadly swathes of destruction that for the time being obliterated all thoughts of weird flying lights and strange encounters.
TOKYO, JAPAN
While the citizens of Tokyo observed the three mystic lights that had appeared in the cloudy night sky over the city, nineteen miles below them a part of the Earth's crust was shifting dramatically. The shockwave that rose to the surface was equal to thirty Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosions. Great chasms opened up in the roads, trains were derailed, and thousands of panic-stricken people were killed or maimed by falling masonry, glass and even water tanks (mercifully, the newer buildings of the city had been built to absorb and withstand the worst of tremors, so damage to property was limited) or crushed by the fleeing hordes. But it was the fires caused by broken gas pipes, oil storage tanks, Calor gas heaters, vehicle petrol tanks and cooking stoves that inflicted the worst damage.
Soon the shanty slums of Hongo were ablaze, as was the Shitamachi area of the city, whose narrow lanes of wooden houses fed the hungry fires so that they spread and merged with those of other districts. It wasn't long before a huge wall of flame was moving through the city and many of the people were forced to leap into ponds and rivers. And so were boiled alive.
ZAFFERANA ETNEA, SICILY
The procession made its way up the mountainside towards the advancing lava flow. The people from the village chanted their hymns while at their head four of the menfolk concentrated on keeping the statue of the Madonna upright on its makeshift wooden platform. The route was winding and arduous, but Zafferana's priest resolutely led them onwards. Hundreds of mines detonated by the Italian military, aided by the US Marine Corps, had failed to redirect the lava flow and even the two-ton concrete blocks carefully placed by American helicopters were unable to divert the unremitting advance. Padre Giuseppe Pacello, however, was undaunted, for faith-and holy statues-had stemmed the burning tide's advance twice before in years gone by. Mongibello (the mountain of mountains) was the villagers' name for Mount Etna and less than a decade before the white-hot lava from openings in its rugged slopes had stopped only metres away from the first few houses. The Blessed Virgin had saved them then and on another occasion, and so would she this time. Much of the chestnut woods and orchards further up was already covered by pulsing black molten rock and the smell of sulphur was so thick and pungent that the children and old folk, whose lungs could not cope with such pervasion, had been evacuated to other places far away from the danger zone.
They halted just twenty feet from the oozing lava, hands shielding their faces from the hot glow, and followed their priest's example by dropping to their knees on the stony track. They sang the Lord's and His Virgin Mother's praises, voices swelling with emotion, eyes shining with desperation. It had taken the flow a matter of weeks to reach this point after the initial eruption, the fastest advance in their recorded history, and they knew their homes would be threatened within days. Padre Giuseppe indicated that the Madonna should be placed alone between his flock and the lava and, their backs turned towards the heat, the four men shuffled forward to set down their burden a mere ten feet from the flow. Bushes nearby burst into flames as the men retreated. Now the priest urged his people to pray even harder for their salvation, and this they did with vigour and fortitude, some of them covering their mouths with handkerchiefs and scarves against the acrid stench, others edging to the back so that their companions' bodies would protect them from the worst of the heat. Together they beseeched their Lord and His Mother for divine intervention.
The statue of the Madonna began to blacken. Its face grew dark, the hands, held palms outwards in supplication, began to crack. Wisps of smoke began to rise from the wooden platform. But the miracle they prayed for started to happen. Or so they thought.
The tiny halo appeared over the head of the Madonna, a white radiance whose centre resembled a round communion wafer. Now the eyes of the farmers and villagers shone with joy and wonder and their mouths opened in silent cries of adoration. The priest raised his face to the heavens that at present were soiled with smoke and ash, for here before them was the sign they had been waiting for. Zafferana and the land around it would be saved!
He was stretching his arms towards the blackened sky in gratitude when the Madonna disappeared before them. But this was no mystery, for the ground had opened up without warning, without even a sound or a trembling of the earth, and swallowed the statue and platform whole. The bright halo light, however, remained where it was. Until a jet of white-hot lava spewed from the newly created hole and consumed the light as it rose high into the air.
The people of Zafferana and their priest scuttled back down the mountainside, but very few escaped the searing rain of fire that fell from the terrible burning fountain. And the lava moved doggedly onwards towards the village.
LAKE NYOS, CAMEROON
They had flocked there from the village to see for themselves the little star that flittered over the big brown lake. It was mud and iron hydroxide that stained the surface of the normally blue Lake Nyos during this part of the season, but the villagers were unconcerned with such explanations, preferring to believe that the waters had grown old and weary with the passing of the year and were about to die only to be reborn, fresh and clear, when the days grew cooler. That phenomenon had been witnessed many times, but this god-light had never played a part in the rebirth before. They pointed at the light as it flitted here and there and they jabbered and nudged each other excitedly. The word spread and their numbers swelled to 2,000 or more as others heard the tale and journeyed to its source. They uttered a great collective sigh as a bubbling and belching breath emanated from the lake, then cried and held their noses when a white cloud smelling of rotten eggs rose from the depths. An ever-widening ripple swept towards the shore and those at the water's edge stepped back in fright.
The light was faint and ghost-like through the mist that drifted towards them. The cloud soon enveloped them where they stood and they began to feel a warmness spread through them; one by one, men, women and children, they began to fall to the ground as a pleasant drowsiness overcame them. They were not to know that the gases, which included carbon dioxide, had seeped into the water from below, for the lake occupied what had once been a volcanic crater. Those gases remained at the bottom of the lake, trapped in the cooler water there, to be released during the monsoon season when cooling surface water sank to the bottom and displaced the now warmer water which, along with the gases it contained, rose to the top.
They weren't to know this, nor did those few who survived wish to hear it, for they preferred to believe that the Death Star had visited their people and warned them to mend their ways. No one could tell those left alive that they were wrong in this, and not too many tried.
***
… And so it continued, throughout the day and throughout the night, upheavals that would irrevocably change the planet's environment. California's San Andreas fault finally lived up to its full and lethal promise, the golden state tom asunder from Cape Mendocino to Imperial Valley, destroying the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as Daly City, Hollister and Bakersfield. A tidal wave hit Osaka in Japan, not even its sophisticated system of storm barriers saving the port city from devastation; another tsunami, caused by seismic faulting on the sea floor, swamped the Hawaiian island of Oahu, the waves returning again and again until not one building or tree on Kawela Bay was left standing. Another convulsion beneath the sea, this one in the English Channel, fractured the long and much-troubled tunnel rail link between England and France, causing the deaths of hundreds as they travelled through on high-speed trains. Hurricanes swept along the whole chain of Leeward and Windward Islands, the worst damage rendered to Antigua and Barbuda; storms also tore through Cuba, flattening buildings and vegetation, killing people and animals in their thousands. Earthquakes rocked Armenia,
Iran, Afghanistan, Thailand, Indonesia, Peru, Ch
ile and, more surprisingly, South Africa and Madagascar. Chicago and the Pyrenean village of Rebenacq were pummelled by hailstones as big as footballs, while Yellowstone Park's Mount Jackson shrugged off thousands of tons of rock in dusty torrents in the aftershock following a tremor that shook the whole state of Montana. Three mountain islands rose from the depths of the Indian Ocean, their emergence causing tidal waves along the southern tip of India, Sri Lanka and Somalia. Mount St. Helen's, never entirely dormant after its last eruption only a few years before, shot a blast of ash-filled steam and gas into the air at a speed of 700 miles per hour, snapping off trees from its slopes to scatter them like straws over a vast area, while a molten lava stream arced from the side of Hawaii's Kilauea volcano into the sea before the entire top of the open mountain sank into its own bubbling centre. A volcano in Iceland known as Laki tore open a thirty-mile-long fissure, lava pouring from it into the Skafta River, replacing water with molten rock that overflowed the river valley; twenty miles wide, the lava moved on at incredible speed, filling a large lake and two other river valleys, melting huge quantities of glacial ice which flooded the land, the steam created causing torrential rain that contributed to the flooding.
In many regions the sky was full of lightning and thunder, bolts strafing the air, joining earth to cloud with numerous simultaneous streaks. New York's Empire State Building was struck no less than sixty-five times during a single hour-long thunderstorm; eleven sightseers on an observation platform in one of Kenya's game parks were hit by lightning, six of them killed instantly, the others burned severely; a hole was melted through a bell inside a church tower in Ohio; in Ireland potatoes were cooked in their fields; many fires were started in forests all over the world, particularly in Canada, and a great ring of fire threatened the city of Sydney, Australia, and its suburbs when lightning set the surrounding woodlands ablaze. Lightning penetrated a reserve fuel tank in the wing of a 747 jetliner over Miami, igniting the vapours and sending the aeroplane plummeting; all passengers and crew were killed. An immense ethereal aurora appeared over Canada's Yukon Territory and auroral fires lit up Alaska's skies, their colours a beautiful blue-green merging to purple and mauve. High above Kiruna in Sweden, the northern lights swirled in a spectral 'folded ribbon' shape of blues, greens and indigos, and this during sombre daylight hours.
Tremendous gushers of boiling water burst through the ground everywhere, many of them in the unlikeliest, if not impossible, places: towering geysers erupted in Africa's Sahara and Namib Deserts as well as in Monument Valley and the Sonoran Desert, Arizona; geysers sprang from the Bandee Amir lakes 10,000 feet above sea level in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan as well as from the limestone plateau in Chad's Tibesti Massif: smaller, but no less impressive, springs bubbled from the almost dry Valley of Antarctica, while giant geysers appeared in the Thar Desert in north-west India and the bleak Denakil Depression of northeastern Ethiopia; others, some as high as 380 feet, appeared in Australia's Gibson and Great Victoria Deserts, at the edge of China's Altyn Tagh range and the Taklimakan Desert in the Sinkiang Province. In these places and countless others the great geysers jetted into the air, each of them having the power to change the environment and the quality of the land around them.
And prior to all these calamitous and astonishing events, strange lights were observed. Some claimed to have seen only a single but wonderfully bright star, while others swore there were clusters of lights performing in odd ways, skimming erratically through the sky, circling each other, soaring up to the heavens to glide earthwards again without ever touching the ground; a few said the stars had joined together as one mass of shining light…
28
The journey to Hazelrod was long and arduous. The roads near to London were jammed with traffic as those who were able to fled the ruined capital, afraid of the aftershock that might follow the earthquake. Emergency services called in from the closest counties rushed by in the opposite direction, lights flashing, sirens wailing. Private vehicles headed towards the disaster area too, and Rivers could only surmise that the drivers were either ghoulish sightseers or those who had family or friends caught up in the earthquake. Perhaps others merely wanted to help.
After filling up with petrol, Rivers had avoided the motorway completely, deciding the minor roads might be less congested. And so they were, but only relatively so.
In exposed stretches the wind, which had strengthened considerably, rocked the car and bent the branches of trees. The sky had darkened even more as the clouds hurried south: they were black turbulent masses that hid the sun and turned daylight into dusk. Rain had begun to fall in torrents and was whipped by the wind into a driving force that beat at the windscreen and roof of the car. Thunder rolled in the distance and each time they heard it, Rivers and Diane wondered if the sound was from the skies or the earth below.
They drove past accidents more than once, cars jammed into each other because their drivers had been distracted by their own concerns or by the pelting rain. More fire engines roared past them in both directions and at other times it was ambulances or police cars. Sometimes it was all three together. Diane switched on the radio, but interference was so bad from local radio stations that they soon gave up trying to listen. From the main London frequencies there was nothing at all.
When they had travelled quite a distance and were approaching the town of Guildford, the car began to vibrate. They pulled over to the side of the road but the tremor did not last long. It hadn't been strong, but it increased their tension.
Diane checked on Josh to find him sleeping. His face was pale and occasionally his lips moved as if he were carrying on a conversation in his dream. She thought it wise to leave him be even though his sleep seemed troubled.
Their journey took them through country towns and villages, some of whose streets were deserted as if the residents were hiding from something more than just the storm. In a few of the larger towns the roads were blocked solid with traffic with perhaps one policeman or traffic warden trying to sort out the mess and inevitably making it worse. Rivers asked Diane to try the radio again and this time, although static was still bad, they managed to catch snatches of news. The obvious topic was the London earthquake, but the newscaster on the local frequency they had picked up gave reports of other global disasters, many of them as cataclysmic as England's.
'Now perhaps they'll understand,' Rivers had commented and Diane was not sure if he meant Sheridan and those he had to advise, or the world in general. She switched off when the interference worsened and they drove on in silence. It took a long time to work through some of the traffic's snarl-ups, but after a while they found themselves on open roads. Diane tried to reach Hazelrod again from a remote telephone box in one of the lanes they were passing through; she returned to the car frowning and shook her head when Rivers raised his eyebrows at her. By now she was desperately worried and urged him to make better progress, but because of the conditions there was little he could do to hasten their journey.
They saw lightning flashes, mostly on the horizon, and the clouds were low and heavy. Now and again the rain eased, but this was due to shifts in the wind rather than an alleviation in the downpour. Once or twice they saw in the distance more of the white steaming towers of boiling water rising from open countryside or cultivated fields. The thunder was moving closer and a cornfield they were passing suddenly blazed as a lightning bolt struck it; the persistent rain soon doused the fire, but the event triggered something in Rivers' mind.
'The lights we saw over the city,' he said, diverting Diane's attention from the still-sleeping boy.
'The warnings? What about them, Jim?'
'Lightning rises from the earth or grounded object to the sky, not the other way round as most people imagine. It's caused when the negatively charged base of a cloud induces a positive charge from the ground and the current leaps up along the conductive channel of negative particles from above.'
'The energy came from the lights themselves?'
'I think so.'
'But the lightning also joined them together.'
'Some kind of chain reaction between positive and negative. The lights must contain both.'
'You're saying these things are more than just pretty illuminations?'
'They're full of concentrated energy, don't you see?'
She did see, but wasn't sure where the notion led them. The Dream Man had told Rivers that the lights were portents, warnings that something was about to happen, without explaining their origin. 'Then I don't understand where this energy comes from,' she said. They have to have a source… don't they?'
Rivers did not reply. He kept his eyes on the road ahead, but Diane could tell by his expression that his mind was a turmoil of thought. Then he said, 'I think they come from us.'
The main street of the next village they came to was blocked by fallen masonry; they soon learned that the area had suffered an earth tremor powerful enough to demolish the spire and tower of the village's ancient church. It took quite a time for Rivers to reverse and find another route that would lead them back on to the right roads again.