Page 140 of Almost Midnight

They were gone.

All of it was gone.

They were driving over the city of Nice even now. The broken, contaminated, irradiated ground was all that remained of the jewel on the water that Nick remembered.

That thought did make him profoundly sad.

The vehicle’s maps led them on a different path than what Nick remembered the last time he’d driven in this part of the world.

Large chunks of the cliffs had been shorn away––by bombs followed by massive landslides, according to Forrest Walker––so they drove along the backside of what remained of the largest of the two mountains.

They eventually made a wide right turn, and after that, they drove directly towards the Mediterranean Sea. They turned again, that time to the left, to avoid a long, narrow bay of yellowish water. From that point, they skirted the eastern edge of a low valley, which was sandwiched between what remained of the massive cliffs.

Much of that valley was flooded now.

Nick guessed he was looking at all that remained of the cute little harbor he remembered.

They had to drive around the flooded zone.

As they did, the all-terrain vehicle gripped the stone and clay and mud and climbed its way up another ridge of land until they were driving right alongside the sea, only on the east side of the cliffs, not the shorn-away faces to the west.

Nick didn’t recognize much of this, either, but from what the map showed him, he knew roughly where he was.

They were just east of what had been the mouth of the old harbor.

The route chosen by the GPS climbed higher than the old road had done, mostly to get them above the water, but they still looked disconcertingly close to the waves on their right side. Nick wondered if they could even get swept out to sea; it was a possibility that hadn’t even occurred to him until now, but one that now struck him as frighteningly plausible.

But the line to their destination had suddenly gotten short.

“We’re almost at the halfway point,” Walker muttered. “With time. That’s including the time needed for the suits.”

Nick nodded, once.

It was still light out, but the orange-brown-gold sun hung lower over the water.

Nick guessed it would be dark by the time they got back to the bubble.

But the idea wasnotto go back, wasn’t it?

Nick glanced at the gauges.

He looked out the murky window, squinting through the thick, orange and gold air, and realized they’d reached their destination.

That had to be it, didn’t it?

Nick stared at the opening in the side of the mountain.

No building remained there. Whatever had once stood around the opening to the cave had long ago been pulverized in one of the many nuclear blasts. All that remained was that narrow crack visible between two slabs of fallen stone.

Nick stared at it, swallowed.

He looked at the gauges.

Time was being sucked away from them, even just from him staring out the window.

They had forty-nine minutes now, before they had to start heading back.

That included the roughly twenty minutes, each way, in the suits.

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