Nomad (40 page)

Celeste nodded.

“Don’t tell Jess,” Ben added. “She’ll try to stop us.”

The tiniest of smiles tugged at the corners of Celeste’s mouth. “She’d just go herself.”

“Yes,” Ben laughed. “Yes, she would.”

Clapping Roger on the shoulder, Ben strode through the boxes, taking a turn into the left-hand tunnel, the one leading up into the main castle. Roger followed.

Celeste watched them go. Crunching thuds shook the ceiling and walls. Her hands shaking, Celeste took another sip of her tea and put the cup down. She stood, turning to grab a thin coat, and ran down the length of the cave, following Ben.

Leone came into the cave just in time to see her disappear up the stone staircase.

“Where are my parents?” Jess asked, walking in behind Leone.

“Out.” Leone pointed at the tunnel with the staircase leading up. “
Sono andati lassù
”

“They went out?” Jess pointed at the stairs, raising her eyebrows. “Why?”

“
Non lo so.”
Leone’s soot-streaked face creased up, his wisps of white hair matted against his glistening scalp. “I do not know”

Why would they go upstairs? Adrenaline flooded Jess’s bloodstream, the hair prickling on her exposed arms. She grabbed Leone. “We’ve got to go—”

A massive concussion rocked the ground, knocking Jess from her feet. She crashed into a wooden crate that split open onto her. The rumbling continued, burying Jess under a mountain of medical supplies spilling. She strained and scrabbled to get out. A wiry hand gripped and pulled her free.

Gasping for air, she pushed her way out of the pile, dragged by Leone. She rubbed her eyes. “Leone, help me, we need to…” She didn’t finish her sentence, but stood in dumb silence.

Half of the cave had collapsed, rocks and boulders crushing the crates on the other side of the room, the tunnel to the staircase gone.

“Mom!” Jess screamed. “Dad! Where are you?”

Ben struggled to his feet, dusting himself off and trying to quell the fear rising inside him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Roger groaned and pulled himself from a pile of rubble. Part of a wooden wall fell onto him. “Maybe we should go back, come later.”

Ben shook his head. “No, we need to do this.”

Hot wind blasted smoke and ash through the stable past the open door. Clicking on his headlamp, Ben stumbled forward. He coughed, almost gagged. The air was noxious, stank of rotten eggs and burnt wood. He pulled a cloth around his mouth, his lungs burning, his eyes watering. His headlamp cut a conical pool of light twenty feet in front of him before being swallowed by the gray-black soot swirling in the air. Pushing forward, he reached the door. “That was no quake.”

Outside was a hurricane of dark ash.

A boulder the size of a school bus had impacted the main structure of the castle, coming to rest between the main staircase and the two-story museum. In the dim light, it glowed faintly red. L’Olio, the three-thousand-year-old olive tree, remained, just in front of the smoking boulder-projectile. Its leaves were stripped off, but it still stood, naked and defiant.

“Let’s get this over with,” Ben wheezed as loud as he could.

The tops of the walls surrounding the courtyard had crumbled, spilling a jumble of boulders and cement across the ground, but the main portico gate and wooden entrance was still intact. Jogging across the courtyard, Ben pulled open the wooden entrance door. His bag should be just to the right, not more than twenty feet away. Stepping through the door, he stopped in his tracks. “My God…”

The valley of Saline, to his right, glowed red—a carpet of magma stretching from Monterufoli, further than he could see in the dust and dirt. Dark vortexes churned the sky, lightning crackling sideways through clouds that billowed almost to the ground, all lit in a pulsing dull red. A blast of hot wind rose up from the valley, covering Ben and Roger in flaming ashes.

Dusting off his arms, Ben forced himself to focus and began searching along the wall. “Over there,” he yelled to Roger. He pointed at an arch in the half-destroyed wall, just visible in the beam of his headlamp. Roger nodded, but instead of coming toward Ben, he walked the opposite direction, away from the wall.

“Where are you going? It’s here!” Ben yelled. Monterufoli boomed in the distance, the concussion waves echoing off the hills. The wind howled. “Roger!” Ben screamed. “Come back. It’s just here.”

Roger had disappeared into the swirling maelstrom.

Ben swore. What the hell? He hesitated, almost ran to fetch Roger, but stopped. The bag. He needed his bag. He ran under the arch, down the steps below it into the wall, and there, in the light of his headlamp, just where he left it in the corner of the half-basement, was Ben’s backpack. He crossed over and picked it up, then jogged back up the stairs. Easy.

“Roger!” Ben screamed again. “I’ve got it.”

Something caught Ben’s eye. Someone coming through the entrance door through the wall. But it wasn’t Roger. “Celeste? What are you doing?”

She stared down the valley, her eyes wide, her scarf wrapped around her mouth.

“Honey, I’ve got it.” He ran to her. “Let’s get back—”

A crunching concussion knocked Ben off his feet, throwing him sideways. His ears rang. He shook his head and propped himself up, using his left hand to take off his glasses so he could wipe his stinging eyes with the back his hand holding the backpack. The ground around him was littered with boulders. Glancing behind him, the wall section he’d just been into was completely gone. Blasted to the ground.

Celeste pulled him to his feet. “Are you hurt?” she screamed over the wind, dragging him toward the opening in the wall.

Ben shook his head. “I’m fine.”

“Where’s Roger?””

Ben pointed into the churning darkness. “He went that way.” He turned to his wife. “Why did you come up here?” he yelled through his cloth.

“I’m not leaving you alone again.” Celeste reached up to wipe dirt off her husband’s glasses. She stroked his cheek. “Whatever we do, we do it together from now on. Okay?”

The ground juddered, sending a shower of pebbles onto them from the wall.

Ben stared into his wife’s eyes. “Okay. Together. No matter what.” It was too dangerous to keep her up here. If Roger didn’t come back in ten minutes, he’d come back with Leone to search for him.

Ben reached for the door, but had the sensation of something horribly wrong. Looking up, a dark shape rushed toward him. He grabbed Celeste, cradled her underneath him as a three-story wall of stone collapsed onto them. Straining, he did his best to hold it back, but the crushing weight fractured his arms and his legs. The mountain of rock cracked and crushed his chest, squeezing out every drop of air. As blackness descended, an image flickered in his mind, of Jess as a child, holding Billy in her arms.

Please, no…

41

C
HIANTI,
I
TALY

JESS SHIVERED AND tried to find a comfortable angle to lean on Giovanni, her thigh resting on the wooden floor of the wine cave with her head nestled on Giovanni’s stomach. She knew he was doing his best to accommodate her. He had a gunshot wound through the flesh on the right of his chest, and was beaten mercilessly the night before. Still, Jess needed someone, perhaps for the first time in her life, to hold her close and tell her everything would be all right.

She hated feeling trapped, and the walls of the caves seemed to close in around her. The air felt fetid, and a fine dust covered everything. Buried alive. That’s how she felt.

“I’m sure they’re fine,” Giovanni murmured. He stroked Jess’s hair.

Jess nodded, but she wasn’t so sure. Hector was curled between them, a blanket covering the three of them together. Hector coughed and grimaced.

The air was rancid. It literally stank like hell. Brimstone. Jess knew it was hydrogen sulfide from the volcano. It was one of the last things her mother had explained to her. She wondered what other gases they were breathing in. A headache banged inside her skull. Giovanni had one too. They all did.

Beside them, the shortwave radio hissed. It was attached to an outside antenna, a cable snaking through the wreckage into the outside. Two days ago, her mother had shown her how to use it. They’d been able to raise dozens of channels, but now, everything had fallen silent. Giovanni cycled through the frequencies, but found nothing. Nobody else out there.

For the past ten hours, she’d been digging through the rubble, trying to move the rocks blocking the tunnel to the staircase. Her fingers bled, her shoulders and back burned, but she ripped and tore into the pile. Lucca and Raffael and Leone tried the other tunnel, the one leading to the ledge under the cable car, but that side of the cliff had sheared away. She’d stared into the roaring blackness; thought of trying to scale the sheer wall, but it was madness. So she returned to the tunnel, tore her fingers to shreds until they forced her away.

Forced her to sit down.

The crunching bombardment died down in the first hour as she pulled the stones away, and in the hours since, the world above had gone eerily silent. Hours ago, the hot wind pressing through the rock had turned cool, but the sulfurous stench of rotten eggs remained. The only sound now was the steady thump and groan of Lucca and Raffael, working steadily on the rocks, slowly working their way through the debris blocking the tunnel.

Jess wrapped her arm around Hector tighter, not for him, but for her. Her body and mind were utterly exhausted. She couldn’t remember the last time she slept.

For ten hours she’d been digging.

Ten hours.

By now, Nomad was three hundred million kilometers away after its closest approach to Earth. A staggering number. Three hundred million kilometers in ten hours. Jess turned the number over and over in her head. Three hundred million kilometers was halfway to Jupiter, but Jupiter wasn’t where it used to be. She had a sense of vertigo, like a roller coaster out of control. Nomad was gone, but where was the Earth? Was the sun already receding, disappearing? When they got topside, would they see the sun as just another star in a black sky?

After surviving all this, were they doomed to a frozen death in a matter of days?

The oceans were already slipping back across the land, settling into their basins; the crust relaxing, the surface of the Earth, cracked and damaged, now sinking back. But the damage was done. The tidal effects of Nomad, at this distance, were almost back to what the Earth felt from the moon.

Jess laughed.
The moon.
If
that
was even still there.

“What are you laughing about?” Giovanni asked softly.

“Nothing very funny. Did I tell you that I killed my brother Billy?” She said it matter-of-factly, like she just knocked over a glass of water.

She thought Giovanni would stiffen. She half-expected some outcry, something…but he continued to stroke her hair.