The Low Rumble of Distant Thunder
The cloud was like a wave, and yet not like a wave, like a storm, yet not like any storm we had seen (not since the initial Flashback, at least). Nor, in truth, could we be sure it was a cloud; for such was the distance that it remained as elusive and ephemeral—or nearly so—as when Maria had first noticed it: there beyond the cornfields near Sioux City, Nebraska (now an ashen necropolis); there beyond what had been our home before the arrival of the Flashback—but which now stood only as a gravestone and a cenotaph, a monument to the dead.
I looked at Caleb, who was still grinding the binoculars—peering at the racetrack. “Well? What do you see?”
He scanned left to right, slowly. “People,” he said, adjusting the focusing ring. “Lots and lots of them. The
