"Cause you're a chick, and cause I didn't want to see you croak."
"Thanks. You got anything to eat in here?"
"Yeah, there's food in there." He pointed to the refrig erator door. "Help yourself."
She did, and as she ate, Tanner asked her, "What do they call you?"
"Corny," she said. "It's short for Cornelia."
"Okay, Corny," he said. "When you're finished eating, you start telling me about the road between here and the place."
She nodded, chewed, and swallowed. Then, "There's lots of other gangs," she said. "So you'd better be ready to blast them."
"I am."
"Those screens show you all directions, huh?"
"That's right."
"Good. The roads are pretty much okay from here on in. There's one big crater you'll come to soon, and a coupie little volcanoes afterward."
"Check."
"Outside of them there's nothing to worry about but the Regents and the Devils and the Kings and the Lovers. That's about it."
Tanner nodded. "How big are those clubs?"
"I don't know for sure, but the Kings are the biggest. They've got a coupla hundred."
"What was your club?"
"The Studs."
"What are you going to do now?"
"Whatever you tell me."
"Okay, Corny. I'll let you off anywhere along the way that you want me to. If you don't want, you can come on into the city with me."
"You call it, Hell. Anywhere you want to go, I'll go along."
Her voice was deep. and her words came slowly, and her tone sandpapered his eardrums just a bit. She had long legs and heavy thighs beneath the tight denim. Tanner licked his lips and studied the screens. Did he want to keep her around for a while?
The road was suddenly wet. It was covered with hundreds of fishes, and more were falling from the sky. There followed several loud reports from overhead. The blue light began in the north.
Tanner raced on, and suddenly there was water all about him. It fell upon his car, it dimmed his screens. The sky had grown black again, and the banshee wail sounded above him.
He skidded around a sharp curve in the road. He turned up his lights.
The rain ceased, but the wailing continued. He ran for fifteen minutes before it built up into a roar.
The girl stared at the screens and occasionally glanced at Tanner. "What're you going to do?" she finally asked him.
"Outrun it, if I can," he said.
"It's dark for as far ahead as I can see. I don't think you can do it."
"Neither do I, but what does that leave?"
"Hole up someplace."
"If you know where, you show me."
"There's a place a few miles farther ahead, a bridge you can get under."
"Okay, that's for us. Sing out when you see it."
She pulled off her boots and rubbed her feet. He gave her another cigarette.
"Hey, Corny, I just thought, there's a medicine chest over there to your right… Yeah, that's it. it should have some damn kind of salve in it you can smear on your face to take the bite out."
She found a tube of something and rubbed some of it into her cheek, smiled slightly, and replaced it.
"Feel any better?"
"Yes. Thanks."
The stones began to fall, the blue to spread. The sky pulsed, grew brighter.
"I don't like the looks of this one."
"I don't like the looks of any of them."
"It seems there's been an awful lot this past week."
"Yeah. i've heard it said that maybe the winds are dying down, that the sky might be purging itself."
"That'd be nice," said Tanner.
"Then we might be able to see it the way it used to look, blue all the time, and with clouds. You know about clouds?"
"I heard about them."
"White, puffy things that just sort of drift across, sometimes gray. They don't drop anything except rain, and not always that."
"Yeah, I know."