Datasets:
BlinAI
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Testo

Dataset card Data Studio Files
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With the SEND button depressed, the background static disappeared and was replaced by a smooth, dark silence. Void, waiting for him to fill it. Harold sat cross-legged on the picnic table, summoning himself up.
Then he raised his arm, and at the end of the arm one finger pointed out of his knotted fist, and in that moment he was like Babe Ruth, old and almost washed up, pointing to the spot where he was going to hit the home run, pointing for all the hecklers and badmouths in Wrigley Field, shutting them up once and for all.
Speaking firmly but not loudly into the walkie-talkie, he said: “This is Harold Emery Lauder speaking. I do this of my own free will.”
A blue-white spark greeted This is. A gout of flame shot up at Harold Emery Lauder speaking. A faint, flat bang, like a cherrybomb stuffed into a tin can, reached their ears at I do this, and by the time he had spoken the words of my own free will and tossed the walkie-talkie away, its purpose served, a fire-rose had b...
“Breaker, breaker, that’s a big ten-four, over and out,” Harold said softly.
Nadine clutched at him, much as Frannie had clutched Stu only seconds ago. “We ought to be sure. We ought to be sure that it got them.”
Harold looked at her, then gestured at the blooming rose of destruction below them. “Do you think anything could have lived through that?”
“I… I d-don’t kn… ooow, Harold, I’m—” Nadine turned away, clutched her belly, and began to retch. It was a deep, constant, raw sound. Harold watched her with mild contempt.
She turned back at last, panting, pale, wiping at her mouth with a Kleenex. Scrubbing at her mouth. “Now what?”
“Now I guess we go west,” Harold said. “Unless you plan to go down there and sample the mood of the community.”
Nadine shuddered.
Harold slid off the picnic table and winced at the pins and needles as his feet struck the ground. They had gone to sleep.
“Harold—” She tried to touch him and he jerked away. Without looking at her, he began to strike the tent.
“I thought we’d wait until tomorrow—” she began timidly.
“Sure,” he jeered at her. “So twenty or thirty of them can decide to fan out on their bikes and catch us. Did you ever see what they did to Mussolini?”
She winced. Harold was rolling the tent up and cinching the ground-cords tight.
“And we don’t touch each other. That’s over. It got Flagg what he wanted. We wasted their Free Zone Committee. They’re washed up. They may get the power on, but as a functioning group, they’re washed up. He’ll give me a woman who makes you look like a potato sack, Nadine. And you… you get him. Happy days, right? Only i...
“Harold—please—” She was sick, crying. He could see her face in the dim fireglow, and felt pity for her. He forced it out of his heart like an unwelcome drunk who has tried to enter a cozy little suburban tavern where everybody knows everybody else. The irrevocable fact of murder was in her heart forever—that fact shon...
“Get used to it,” Harold said brutally. He flung the tent on the back of his cycle and began to tie it down. “It’s over for them down there, and it’s over for us, and it’s over for everybody that died in the plague. God went off on a celestial fishing trip and He’s going to be gone a long time. It’s totally dark. The d...
She made a squeaking, moaning noise in her throat.
“Come on, Nadine. This stopped being a beauty contest two minutes ago. Help me get this shit packed up. I want to do a hundred miles before sunup.”
After a moment she turned her back on the destruction below—destruction that seemed almost inconsequential from this height—and helped him pack the rest of the camping gear in his saddlebags and her wire carrier. Fifteen minutes later they had left the fire-rose behind and were riding through the cool and windy dark, h...
For Fran Goldsmith, that day’s ending was painless and simple. She felt a warm push of air at her back and suddenly she was flying through the night. She had been knocked out of her sandals.
Whafuck? she thought.
She landed on her shoulder, landed hard, but there was still no pain. She was in the ravine that ran north-to-south at the foot of Ralph’s back yard.
A chair landed in front of her, neatly, on its legs. Its seat-cushion was a smoldering black snarl.
WhaFUCK?
Something landed on the seat of the chair and rolled off. Something that was dripping. With faint and clinical horror, she saw that it was an arm.
Stu? Stu! What’s happening?
A steady, grinding roar of sound engulfed her, and stuff began to rain down everywhere. Rocks. Hunks of wood. Bricks. A glass block spiderwebbed with cracks (hadn’t the bookcase in Ralph’s living room been made of those blocks?). A motorcycle helmet with a horrible, lethal hole punched through the back of it. She could...
Oh Stu, my God, where are you? What’s happening? Nick? Larry?
People were screaming. That grinding roar went on and on. It was now brighter than noontime. Every pebble cast a shadow. Stuff still raining down all around her. A board with a six-inch spike protruding from it came down in front of her nose.
–the baby! —
And on the heels of that, another thought came, a reprise of her premonition: Harold did this, Harold did this, Harold —
Something struck her on the head, the neck, the back. A huge thing that landed on her like a padded coffin.
OH MY GOD OH MY BABY —
Then darkness sucked her down to a nowhere place where not even the dark man could follow.
Chapter 59
Birds.
She could hear birds.
Fran lay in darkness, listening to the birds for a long time before she realized the darkness wasn’t really dark. It was reddish, moving, peaceful. It made her think of her childhood. Saturday morning, no school, no church, the day you got to sleep late. The day you could wake up a little at a time, at your leisure. Yo...
Birds. She could hear birds.
But this wasn’t Ogunquit; it was
(Boulder)
She puzzled over it in the red darkness for a long time, and suddenly she remembered the explosion.
(?Explosion?)
(!Stu!)
Her eyes flashed open. There was sudden terror. “Stu! ”