Linda Evans - Far Edge of Darkness

Sibyl Johnson didn't own a rifle.

She wouldn't have known how to shoot one, if she had. And Tony Bartlett had vanished, apparently right off the edge of the world.

None of which stopped Sibyl from wanting to center his face in the sights of an honest-to-God, high-powered varmint gun. Sibyl had spent her formative years increasingly disgusted with small-town drunken quarrels that led to knifings and shootings on Saturday nights. But if she ever saw Tony Bartlett again...

She'd do a whole lot more than wish for a gun.

Sibyl banged a fist against the steering wheel. How could I have been so... so...

Stupid?

Blind?

Nave?

Any number of scathing put-downs would be appropriate.

Another lightning strike jerked Sibyl back into the present reality of creaking VW Beetle and steaming Florida heat. She tightened sweaty hands around the cracked plastic of the steering wheel. Another searing flash momentarily erased everything beyond her car: the rutted dirt road, the dust-white trees clinging to the hillside like forlorn mushrooms, the looming storm that had boiled up out of a clear sky the way storms always did on summer afternoons.

An aftershock of thunder, shaking the very frame of her battered car, was louder than the assorted groans, screeches, and bangs issuing from the rear of the decaying vehicle. "C'mon, Nuggie, you can do it," she encouraged the faltering car.

Nuggie didn't want to climb the long, shallow grade. She was glad the old car was running at all, given the repairs it needed. If she'd lived in mountainous country, like West Virginia or Colorado, Nuggie would've gone to slag-heap heaven years agoalthough things might have turned out very differently, if she had lived somewhere else. Tony Bartlett would've picked a different victim, for one thing.

Sibyl punched the gas pedal savagely. Lightning flared again, even closer. Thunder rattled side windows in their loose frames. Sibyl winced and glanced through the driver's window, the one that would roll neither up nor down all the way. The air trickling through was cooler than the inside of her car, but not much. Sweat dripped down the back of her neck and prickled under her bra strap. Hot as it was, it was little wonder the inevitable afternoon storm promised to be a dilly. The hotter the day, the crazier the storm, that's what Granny Johnson had always said.

Industrial Light & Magic, Inc., would have been proud to claim this storm. Greasy black clouds boiled across the sky, just clear of the treetops. Nonstop lightningnot bolts, but fantastic, sky-arching pink columnsjabbed the blackness to strike beyond the hill crest. Nuggie's headlights barely dented the gloom. Although it wasn't yet four in the afternoon, cattle egrets had already started to roost. Their wings flashed white against the backdrop of black clouds and dusty, cringing trees.

Sibyl Johnson had lived through a lot of Florida thunderstorms. But she'd never seen one like this and she still hadn't hit the worst of it. She hadn't even hit the leading edge of rain yet.

Her car wheezed and lost acceleration. "C'mon, Nuggie," she muttered again as she downshifted. Gears clashed and groaned somewhere in the VW's battered innards. The dying car wouldn't survive the summer. She wasn't even certain it would survive the trip to campus. She growled under her breath. Campus... Sibyl knew confronting those smug, lily-white fat cats wouldn't do any good. It was just something she had to do, to retain what was left of her battered self-respect. She would do it, get it over with, and leave the rest to fate.

Another sky-cracking column of lightning set roadside trees aflame, backlit with mad, pink light. She gripped the steering wheel harder and tried to ignore a frosty prickle of fear, left over from childhood tornadoes and the death of her parents. I am not afraid of thunderstorms. I am not. Really, I'm not...

She tried to focus on practicalities to distract herself from unreasoning fear. Driving straight into the storm like this, she didn't have much hope of avoiding the rain. Once it cut in... Nuggie's tires were balder than her department chairman. Eight-year-old tires just wouldn't cope with blinding rain on a washboarded dirt road. And there wasn't moneynot nowto buy new ones or fix the roof on the house, either. She savaged her lower lip and blinked rapidly.

Car... house... career... Sibyl wanted to bawl like a baby. But with a gullywasher in the making, she couldn't afford to cry about it now. So she pushed the Beetle as fast as she dared and eyed the storm for tell-tale funnel shapes. She found herself muttering a snatch of music that matched her mood. When would Rod Serling step out from wherever it was dead TV MCs went and say something appropriate about the mess her life was in? Maybe he could tell her the last three months had been a nothing more than a terrible delusion, caused by some foreign germ to which she had no resistance.

Yeah, right. And Tony Bartlett really is the answer to your dreams.

Another column of nightmarish pink slammed into the crest of the hill. Sibyl jumped, so badly the car swerved toward a ditch. Cattle egrets took wing in a blur of pink-edged white as she dragged Nuggie back on course. The storm grew madder with each shaky breath. I'm not panicked, I'm not... But with the whole sky on fire like the edge of a Tesla ball, she could imagine driving over the top of this hill into anything at all: a black-sand beach beside an ammonia sea, even a stampeding herd of tyrannosaurs.

Come to think of it, a T. rex might be useful. One little enough to fit in Wilkins' office. Yeah, that'd be just about right.

Anger simmered to a boil again. Tony Bartlett's mocking grin floated in front of her eyes. She dragged the back of one hand over her cheek and said an ugly word aloud. At least her grandmother hadn't lived to see this. Had Sibyl not been Cora Johnson's granddaughter, the shattering end of everything she had worked for might have destroyed her. Granny not only would've understood, she probably would've been in Nuggie's passenger seat, ready, willing, and able to do battle.

And Granny Johnson would've had that rifle, toothe one Sibyl had sold right after the funeral so it wouldn't be in the house, the one she'd never understood the need for, propped so sinisterly in her grandmother's bedroom corner next to the quilt stand. She growled aloud another word which would've shocked her grandmother speechless. When Sibyl got to campus, there was going to be a storm in the chairman's office, one to match the gullywasher brewing overhead, and only an act of God would prevent it!

She gritted her teeth. I'd have saved myself a lot of grief if I'd lived up to my ancient namesakes. Rome's famous sibyls, priestesses of the Magna Materthe Phrygian Great Goddess Cybelehad read portents that revealed the future.

"Some oracle I turned out to be." Sibyl wiped her cheek fiercely. "Displayed all the clairvoyance of a rock, didn't we, Sib?"

She should've seen through all that flattering swill Bartlett had fed her. She was a good student and motivated, but not brilliantand overly eager. Her grip tightened down again on the steering wheel. Bartlett had set her up like the pro he was. And she'd walked right into his arms. Must be laughing himself sick, wherever he was by now. At the rate she was going, maybe life in the T. Zone would be a change for the better.

"Enough! First, you confront those tenured fat cats. Then, if they're stubborn, find a lawyer who works cheap and sue them."

Cora Johnson's granddaughter was not a quitter.