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.There was no one on the other side of the chasm because no one had wanted to risk crossing the water in the bottom or hiking into the slippery woods on the far side of the road.He guessed the teenagers might have tried, but two of them had their parents with them and the grown-ups were not about to permit them to even attempt a crossing.It was clear from the conversation around him that everyone believed there were other breaks in the road, too: If there weren't, by now cars would have come this far east from Durham, and they would have seen them before the vehicles would have had to turn back.But none had made it this far.Think people are trapped? one of the teenage boys wondered, and it sounded as if he was reveling in the ghoulish possibilities.You mean like the Willards two years ago? someone--the boy's mother, Alfred suspected--asked.Even he had heard the tale of how this septuagenarian couple had found themselves on the road between Durham and Cornish when the river had destroyed the pavement before and behind them, and forced them to hike across one of the pits it had hewn from the hillside.Yeah, the teen said.Like that.Instantly he thought of Laura, and he wished he knew more about jumping.He wished he knew anything about jumping.Briefly he imagined himself riding the horse into the crevice and then leaping the span where the water was churning up rock and mud.But he could never do that.Not yet, anyway.He could, however, ride up into the woods.He'd go wide of the gorge, twenty or thirty yards into the melting snow and slick brush if he had to, and then he'd return to the road when he was west of the break.Quickly he sought out with his eyes the widest nearby gap in the maples and pine, and before anyone would be able to grab the reins and stop him, he prodded Mesa into the woods.He heard them calling after him--some calling him by his name and others just shouting Boy! and Son! and You there!--all of them shouting that he should come back.But he was in the woods now, lowering his chin almost to his chest so the thinner branches would glance off the top of his helmet, guiding the horse as best he could between the trees and the brush, aware that the animal was struggling on occasion for purchase beneath the melting snowpack.And then he was out and back on the road, well beyond the western lip of the crevasse.He could still hear people yelling for him to return, but it was going to be dark soon and so he soldiered on, and it was easier now because he was on pavement.He pushed Mesa harder--despite his sudden misgivings that she might yet slip and be hurt, and he would have injured an animal he guessed he loved more than most humans he had met in his life--and she started to run and the voices behind him faded beneath the sound of the rain and the river and the distance, and after no more than half a mile he saw another crater.This one was smaller than the first, perhaps a dozen feet wide and barely four or five feet deep.In the pocket there were slabs of asphalt, and while it was a barrier no vehicle could cross, the water had receded and so he slowed Mesa to a walk and the horse gingerly stepped down into the rubble and then climbed back up the other side.He'd ridden more than halfway to Durham, another two or three miles, he guessed, when he saw what looked to him like the searchlights at an airport taking aim at the sky.These weren't as powerful, but he could see them through the fog and the gathering dark.Two of them, he realized as he approached, there were a pair of them.He wondered if he'd reach a chasm and find there a chain of cars on the other side, including one that held Laura.As he neared the lights, however, he understood by their angle that they couldn't possibly be from a vehicle that was parked on the road.The ground was hilly here, yes, but it wasn't so steep that a car would be able to shine its front headlights almost straight up into the air.Then he saw the break in the pavement and he slowed.The lights were beaming up from inside the rift.He rode to the very edge, and there below him he saw the vehicle that was generating the lights.It was flipped upside down against the side wall of a twenty- or twenty-five-foot-deep hole that less than an hour before had been a hillside with a road, and he could see the wheels and black and brown metal of the undercarriage and the engine.There was water pooling around the automobile and so he rode Mesa to the side of the road where there were trees, got off the horse, and looped the reins around a branch.Then he started down into the hole.He realized no one but him knew this car was here, because otherwise there would have been vehicles on the other side.Clearly there was at least one more break in the road between here and Durham.HE GROPED HIS way down the sides, careful to make sure the craggy chunks of asphalt were solid before lowering himself upon them, and digging his boots into the muddy ground wherever he could.He'd descended no more than five or six feet when he realized how quickly the water in the chasm was rising: It was now lapping at the rear wheels of the car--the trunk was completely underwater--and he was sure it hadn't been that near them before.He couldn't make out the color of the vehicle yet, but with relief he decided it was too dark to be Laura's gray Taurus.He wondered if it was possible that whoever was driving had been thrown safely from the vehicle before the water had taken the road out from under it and sent it spinning into this canyon--or, for all he knew, driven the automobile backward into the hole, the water a wave that upended the vehicle like a seashell--but he didn't believe that was likely.He had a sense there would be a person, maybe even people, inside the car.Still, he could hope, and he imagined the driver walking back toward Durham in the rain, cursing his bad luck at having been on this exact patch of the road when the wave had risen up from the river.When he had climbed down so that he was even with the front grill, he looked beyond the headlights and he could see just enough of a front panel to realize the car was a deep olive green [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]