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All sorts of debris and bloated organic matter Mike preferred not to think about clogged the waterways,
riding the top of the wind-tortured waves in the same way that the logs had jammed the lake back by the
volcano.
As they looked around them the wind pounded the water and the clouds, blowing them away from the
eastern horizon.
Mike looked back toward Tacoma. A gigantic crater, hundreds of times bigger than the fire mountain
they had just visited, belched steam into the patch of sky surrounding it. Seeing it dominate the
southeastern section of the sky, Mike wondered how any amount of cloud could have masked it.
"My God," Toni-Marie said. "That's Mount Rainier.It's grown. I mean, it blew its top but it's so much
taller. It must have been building every minute of the last twenty years. It's enormous."
Even as they watched, Rainier spewed forth a plume of ash and steam, as if the Pacific Ocean was
nothing to the volcano but a spittoon.
"I think I know some of what happened to Seattle," Toni-Marie said.
"It was buried, wasn't it?" Mike asked. "Just like Shambala."
"Probably that's all that would have happened if it had been farther inland," she said. "But, uh, I think
maybe if we go for a swim we'd find out for sure, only I don't want to go swimming inthat."
"Why not?" he asked, letting himself sink feet first into the ashy waves."You're already dead. What could
hurt you?"
She sniffed, "That's no reason to neglect simple hygiene."
The water beneath them began to boil, and strangely-shaped objects suddenly poked above the surface.
In a few moments, a broad white seemingly solid expanse had become exposed, topped by a
smokestack and antennae and wide outer walls perforated by windows. The water poured down the
windows and away as the object rose to a level even with Mike and Toni-Marie, and skulls grinned back
at them from windows along the walls. At other windows they saw ectoplasmic faces like their own.
About that time the deck surfaced. It was broader than the cabin, and was followed by another, barnlike
level. A horn blew, sounding not unlike the great bone horns Mike and his dad had uncovered in the
lower levels of Shambala.
"This ferrynow departing Seattle for Bremerton. Sailing time will be approximately sixty minutes."
The barnlike level held the rusted and barnacle-wrapped chassis of dead cars and trucks. "Please clear
the car deck," a weary-looking male ghost in an orange life vest told them.
They wafted back to the passenger deck and watched the boat cut through the polluted water.
"Wow, this is amazing. No cities, no people, but the ferries are still running," Toni-Marie said.
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"Nah, it's still running late," said a new voice, and they turned to find a ghost in a sailor's uniform standing
behind them, smoking a translucent cigarette. "And it only makes one run a day. This was the last run
before the earthquake hit and the volcanoes blew all at once."
"And it just keeps doing it?" Mike asked. "Making this run back and forth across the water?"
"Old habits die hard," the sailor said, shrugging. His tone was several degrees less friendly than it had
been when talking to Toni-Marie. "So every day at about 12:25, which is ten minutes after it was
supposed to leave at twelve-fifteen, the Bremerton ferry surfaces from the ruins of Seattle, sails across
the Sound, and sinks down to where the Bremerton dock used to be. The next day we do it all over
again. Don't ask me how it gets back to Seattle without anybody noticing. That's the spooky part, I
guess."
"Well, I'm relieved that something's still the same, even if it only works in one direction," Toni-Marie
said, sidling up to the sailor ghost. "We've been here for hours and we saw a little bit of what was left of
Tacoma but no other people-not even dead ones, till the ferry surfaced-and no city or anything. We were
looking for Bellingham but we haven't even been able to find Seattle."
"Oh, you found it. You just didn't look low enough. It's all down there, under Elliot Bay, even the Space
Needle. Look over there on the horizon through the mist and you can see what's left of the Olympic
Mountain range sticking up out of the water."
"Those little islands over there?"Mike strained his eyes and could barely see the mounds of darkness
outlined against the clouds and the mist rising from the water.
"Yep."
"Are you passengers and crew of this boat the only people left in the whole place?" Toni-Marie asked
him. "Aren't there any living people left?"
"Not as such, no ma'am, not that I know. Some of the passengers, the professional folks with doctorates
and briefcases who commute to work, they already reincarnated at the first possible opening. Thanks to
the pollution we had up the Duwamish, and in the Hood Canal, there were already plenty of mutant
marine life-forms well adapted to our current conditions. The ambitious ones just got right back in the
swim of it, you might say."
"But you didn't?"
"Well, no ma'am, I'm an undersea warfare specialist for NACAF and was trained as a marine biologist.
Bein' a ghost isn't as bad as bein' some things I could name." He gave them a significantlook out of eyes
the color of glacial crevasses.
"It must have been pretty bad here then, the day the world ended," Mike said.
"What makes you think it was any specific day?" the sailor's ghost asked. "It took several days-weeks, if
you want to know-while missiles fell all around the world. We were monitoring itreal close, I can tell you,
hoping our sophisticated defenses were working-they were- hoping nothing could touch us. I am proud
to say it couldn't."
"Then what happened?" Toni-Marie asked. "Obviously something destroyed the place."
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"Bad vibrations, I guess the old folks might have said. Anyhow, that's what the experts thought when the
San Juan fault shifted and we had the earthquake, then the tsunamis, of course. Though some of them
were caused by the volcanoes all blowing at once like that."
"Whatvolcanoes?" Mike said.
"Just about all of them.Mount Saint Helens, Mount Hood, Shasta down in California, then Baker, and
finally, well, it was Rainier that did in Seattle and Tacoma. Tacoma just didn't get the earthquakes and the
tsunamis as bad. Those last ones, from when the coast of Siberia got hit, those were what sank the
peninsulas. Anyhow, that's my guess. My buddy said it was going to happen and I told him he was nuts.
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