Remember Tomorrow Read Online Free

of the valley. It was only about eight feet above the valley floor, but it still afforded them a decent vantage of the land surrounding.
    “Dark night, it’s bleak,” J.B. said with admirable understatement as he joined them, casting his eyes over the terrain. The valley walls had to have been higher at some time, but the nuclear winter and the harsh climate changes over the past century had beaten them down to the dry husks of hillocks that they now were. The topsoil and any grasslands had long since blown away, only the hardiest of scrub remaining, shallowly rooted in the powdery dirt. The land had been flattened by the intemperate climate, leaving nothing but a flat, despairing landscape that tried and failed to support life.
    “Sure as heck won’t be many folks trying to eke a living round here,” Mildred commented. “And not much shelter from the elements for us, either.”
    “I figure that ville me and J.B. were talking about must be north-northwest from here, so if we head in that direction…” Ryan looked to J.B., but the Armorer was ahead of him. Taking the highest point of the land and using the sun and the mini-sextant he always carried with him, J.B. was sighting their position and plotting their direction. “It might be a couple of days hike from here,” Ryan stated, “so we need to keep a sharp eye for water and shelter.” He looked up—clear skies with nothing to shield the sun as it beat down. “I don’t like skies this clear when there’s land this dry. It gives me a bad feeling.”
    “My dear Ryan, it would give me the perfect opportunity to top up my tan. I feel all this living underground is giving me somewhat of an unhealthy pallor,” Doc remarked with a crooked grin, the irony of his words emphasized by him removing his hat to mop his already sweating brow.
    Direction defined, they set off on the long march. Strung out in a line with J.B. now on point, they kept their heads down, avoiding the glare of the sun as it grew brighter in the sky, and remained silent. What was there to say? They were hiking through a desolate landscape with nothing to remark upon and wasted words would just use energy, making them thirsty when they needed to conserve water.
    Apart from scrub and the occasional lizard, there was little sign of life. In the distance they occasionally glimpsed a solitary bird of prey or the intimation that there were flocks of smaller birds—a misty cloud moving in the blue that could be a wisp of cumulus or a flock on the wing. Nothing closer. Any mammals that scratched some kind of a living from the land were safely burrowed away, the occasional hole in the ground being all that betrayed their presence.
    The companions trudged on, measuring the tedium of time only by the achingly slow movement of the sun across the sky. At least it wasn’t quite as hot as they feared. They had been through worse. In fact, there were even a few breezes that gently crossed the empty land, relieving the beat of the heat.
    Breezes that slowly, almost unnoticeably, grew stronger.
    It was Mildred who first noticed it. Quite by chance, she looked to her left to relieve the boredom of looking at the ground in front of her.
    “Oh shit…Ryan,” she said softly.
    Lost in some reverie of his own, Ryan snapped back to attention when he heard her voice. He looked back at her and followed the direction in which she was pointing. All the companions followed the direction of her finger.
    “By the Three Kennedys,” Doc breathed. “It was Montana, 1878, when I was last privy to such a sight.”
    “Yeah? And this might be the last time you see it unless we can find some cover,” J.B. murmured.
    What had caught their attention was awesome and beautiful, but almost certainly deadly. In the distance, gaining ground rapidly on them, a zephyr was whipping the earth into a turmoil. Clouds of dust and dirt were flying at strange trajectories as the currents of air flung them from their path. Now they