Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny Read Free Book Online

don't see anything."
    "Put on your infras."
    Greg did this and stared upward at the screen.
    Bats. Enormous bats cavorted overhead, swept by in dark clouds.
    "There must be hundreds of them, maybe thousands . . ."
    "Guess so. Seems there are more than there used to be when I came this way a few years back. They must be screwing their heads off in Carlsbad."
    "We never see them in L.A. Maybe they're pretty much harmless."
    "Last time I was up to Salt Lake, I heard talk that a lot of them were rabid. Someday someone's got to go,   them or us."
    "You're a cheerful guy to ride with, you know?"
    Tanner chuckled and lit a cigarette, and, "Why don't you make us some coffee?" he said. "As for the bats, that's something our kids can worry about, if there are any."
    Greg filled the coffeepot and plugged it into the dashboard. After a time it began to grumble and hiss.
    "What the hell's that?" said Tanner, and he hit the brakes. The other car halted, several yards behind his own, and he turned on his microphone and said, "Car three! What's that look like to you?" and waited.
    He watched them: towering, tapered tops that spun between the ground and the sky, wobbling from side to side, sweeping back and forth, about a mile ahead. It seemed there were fourteen or fifteen of the things. Now they stood like pillars, now they danced. They bored into the ground and sucked up yellow dust. There was a haze all about them. The stars were dim or absent above or behind them.
    Greg stared ahead and said, "I've heard of whirlwinds, tornadoes, big, spinning things. I've never seen one, but that's the way they were described to me."
    And then the radio crackled, and the muffled voice of the man called Marlowe came through: "Giant dust devils," he said. "Big, rotary sandstorms. I think they're sucking stuff up into the dead belt, because I don't see anything coming down...”
    "You ever see one before?"
    "No, but my partner says he did. He says the best thing might be to shoot our anchoring columns and stay put."
    Tanner did not answer immediately. He stared ahead, and the tornadoes seemed to grow larger.
    "They're coming this way," he finally said. "I'm not about to park here and be a target. I want to be able to maneuver. I'm going ahead through them."
    "I don't think you should."
    "Nobody asked you, mister, but if you've got any brains, you'll do the same thing."
    "I've got rockets aimed at your tail, Hell."
    "You won't fire them, not for a thing like this, where I could be right and you could be wrong, and not with Greg in here, too."
    There was silence within the static, then, "Okay, you win, Hell. Go ahead, and we'll watch. If you make it, we'll follow. If you don't, we'll stay put."
    "I'll shoot a flare when I get to the other side," Tanner said. "When you see it, you do the same. Okay?"
    "Okay."
    Tanner broke the connection and looked ahead, studying the great black columns, swollen at their tops. There fell a few layers of light from the storm which they supported, and the air was foggy between the blackness of their revolving trunks. "Here goes," said Tanner, switching his lights as bright as they would beam. "Strap yourself in, boy," and Greg obeyed him as the vehicle crunched forward.
    Tanner buckled his own safety belts as they slowly edged ahead.
    The columns grew and swayed as he advanced, and he could now hear a rushing, singing sound, as of a chorus of the winds.
    He skirted the first by three hundred yards and continued to the left to avoid the one which stood before him and grew and grew. As he got by it, there was another, and he moved farther to the left. Then there was an open sea of perhaps a quarter of a mile leading ahead and toward his right. He sped across it and passed between two of the towers that stood like ebony pillars a hundred yards apart. As he passed them, the wheel was almost torn from his grip and he seemed to inhabit the center of an eternal thunderclap. He swerved to the right then and skirted another,