Although, if you believed the rhetoric of his opponents, critics and detractors, such a thing was exactly what they expected. The latest bill he had spoken out against, blocking it at every turn, was an environmental protection legacy plan. Riddled with earmarks, sponsored by fear-mongering Democrats and laden with catastrophic tax burdens. With heavy lobbying from environmental alternate energy firms with deep pockets, the bill had implied just such doomsday scenarios if we didn’t act, or in this case, enact this legislation.
For Aickerman, it wasn’t a matter of lobbying, and wasn’t a question of loyalty. It all came down to common sense—and science. That was the fact of the matter: the science wasn’t compelling. Weather was not significantly changing across the world, their tricked-up charts and Al Gore’s nonsense aside. Even if it could be definitively proven that temperatures were rising and carbon concentrations were so much higher, the cause and effect wasn’t consistent. If the environment was a murder scene, the evidence was far from air tight, circumstantial in fact, implicating man as the culprit. Other suspects, such as solar radiation, tidal forces, volcanic action and the natural cycles of the earth, were far more likely. Aickerman had his feet firmly in the camp believing that no matter what, now wasn’t the time to force-feed problematic and impractical solutions on a world that could be further thrown into chaos and poverty by overwhelming regulation and controls.
More pounding hail, another clap of thunder and a burst of supernova-like lightning.
Agent Reynolds leaned forward and said something to the driver; something lost in the shrieking of twisted glass and tortured metal. A grunt, and suddenly Aickerman was on his side, staring at the broken windshield and a mass of dark spikes protruding through it, branches that had slammed instantaneously through the glass—and through the driver who was still twitching, coughing up blood. His hands, gouged with splinters and broken glass, feebly worked at dislodging a telephone pole sized branch from his ribcage.
Reynolds made a choking sound and threw his body over Aickerman’s just as the roof collapsed in a shower of shattered metal, branches, leaves and hailstones.
The headlights faded.
In the dark, Aickerman tried to move, to free himself. “Reynolds?” He pushed, twisted, struggled against unyielding weight. “Reynolds! I think … a tree landed on us. Can you …?”
A tree, Aickerman thought with a silly laugh. A goddamned tree landed on us! In a hailstorm, in—
The pounding of hail had stopped, he realized, only to be replaced by a deep and constant wet driving sound, an epic thunderstorm. The heat had returned, dragging humidity along with it. Rain fell into the car, driven sideways with the wind. Aickerman grunted again, and in a flash of lightning, he saw Reynolds—his head twisted around impossibly, vertebrae jutting out from his neck; blood dripped from his nostrils, his eyes, his ears.
Aickerman turned from Reynolds, turned to his side, seeing the world mixing with the pooling rain and …
Mud. Mud, seeping into the car from the shattered doors.
How was that possible?
The tires! He realized they had been flattened with the tree’s impact for sure, but the ground … Softened, turning to mud, the car sinking. Rain falling so fast, so powerfully, turning the land into mush, and—
Another flash of lightning, and Aickerman could see out the gap in the door. The hill was moving. The entire hill and everything on it in motion as if the land itself was melting. Trees slid down gleefully like ungainly skiers. Bushes, shrubs and boulders, all swept along. Everything tumbling, slipping, surfing down the waterfall of mud.
Toward his car.
Aickerman screamed. He kicked, flailed, jarred a shoulder free, then his upper body. Slipped into the seat well, face down in a rising pool of mud and water.
He tasted the earth, a bitter, gritty taste like choking on embalming fluid. The sound of his vomiting was drowned out by another thunderclap, and the storm raged even harder, its volume snapping another octave. A raging, relentless onslaught. The water rose past his knees. He saw a gap in the door. Tried it, but the door wouldn’t budge, trapped by three feet of rising muck.
He tried the window, which miraculously descended. Halfway. Good enough, he thought, and squeezed through it carefully. Pulling himself up, balancing on the window and climbing up to the roof where in the darkness he could just make out the shape of the monstrous tree that had flattened his car.
He stood, awed by nature’s ferocity, fighting to stay upright