The hurricane hit us with the force of a glacier thundering into the sea. It was a
palpable presence. Winds that tore at us, flinging us back the way we had come,
down the twisting, computerlined corridors of the darkway. Ellen screamed as she
was lifted and hurled faceforward into a screaming shoal of machines, their
individual voices strident as bats in flight. She could not even fall. The howling wind
kept her aloft, buffeted her, bounced her, tossed her back and back and down and
away from us, out of sight suddenly as she was swirled around a bend in the
darkway. Her face had been bloody, her eyes closed.
None of us could get to her. We clung tenaciously to whatever outcropping we
had reached: Benny wedged in between two great cracklefinish cabinets, Nimdok
with fingers clawformed over a railing circling a catwalk forty feet above us,
Gorrister plastered upsidedown against a wall niche formed by two great machines
with glassfaced dials that swung back and forth between red and yellow lines whose
meanings we could not even fathom.
Sliding across the deckplates, the tips of my fingers had been ripped away. I was
trembling, shuddering, rocking as the wind beat at me, whipped at me, screamed
down out of nowhere at me and pulled me free from one sliverthin opening in the
plates to the next. My mind was a roiling tinkling chittering softness of brain parts
that expanded and contracted in quivering frenzy.
The wind was the scream of a great mad bird, as it flapped its immense wings.
And then we were all lifted and hurled away from there, down back the way we
had come, around a bend, into a darkway we had never explored, over terrain that
was ruined and filled with broken glass and rotting cables and rusted metal and far
away, farther than any of us had ever been ...
Trailing along miles behind Ellen, I could see her every now and then, crashing
into metal walls and surging on, with all of us screaming in the freezing, thunderous
hurricane wind that would never end and then suddenly it stopped and we fell. We
had been in flight for an endless time. I thought it might have been weeks. We fell,
and hit, and I went through red and gray and black and heard myself moaning. Not
dead.
(399 words)
