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She drove off without saying anything. They rounded a bend, leaving the scoutmaster standing in the road. "I couldn't tell him either," Eileen said. "Are they safe there?"

"I think so. We seem to be pretty high."

"The top is about three thousand feet," Eileen said.

"And we're no more than a thousand below it. We're safe," Tim said. "Maybe it would be better to wait here, until the lightning stops. If it ever does stop. Then we can go on or go back. Where do we get if we go over?"

"Tujunga," Eileen said. "It's a good eighteen hundred, two thousand feet elevation. If we're safe, Tujunga should be." She continued to drive, winding further into the hills.

Tim frowned. He had never had a good sense of direction, and there were no maps in the car. "My observatory is up Big Tujunga Canyon—at least, you can get to it by going up that road. I've done it. And the observatory has food, and emergency equipment and supplies."

"Hammer Fever?" Eileen teased. "You?"

"No. It's remote up there. I've been snowbound more than once, a week at a time, more. So I keep plenty of supplies. Where are we going? Why don't you stop?"

"I'm—I don't know." She drove on, more slowly, almost crawling along. The rain had slackened off. It was still pouring down, hard for Los Angeles, unheard of for summer, but just then it was only rain, not bathtubs of water pouring out of the sky. In compensation the wind rose, howling up the canyon, screaming at them so that they were shouting at each other, but the wind was such a constant companion that by now they didn't notice.

They came around another bend, and they were on a high shelf looking south and westward. Eileen stopped the car, despite the danger of slides from above them. She turned off the motor. The wind howled, and lightning played above and ahead. The rain beat down so that the San Fernando Valley was obscured, but sometimes the wind whipped the rain in a thinner pattern and they could see blurred shapes out there. There were bright orange flares down on the valley floor. Dozens of them.

"What are those?" Eileen wondered aloud.

"Houses. Filling stations. Power-plant oil storage. Cars, homes, overturned tank trucks—anything that can burn."

"Rain and fire." She shivered, despite the warmth inside the car. The wind howled again.

Tim reached for her. She held back a moment, then came to him, her head against his chest. They sat that way, listening to the wind, watching orange flames blur through driving rain.

"We'll make it," Tim said. "The observatory. We'll get there. We may have to walk, but it's not that far. Twenty, thirty miles, no more. Couple of days if we walk. Then we'll be safe."

"No," she said. "No one will ever be safe. Not again."

"Sure we will." He was silent a moment. "I'm … I'm really glad you found me," he said. "I'm not much of a hero, but—"

"You're doing fine."

They were quiet again. The wind continued to whistle, but gradually they became aware of another sound—low, rumbling, building in volume, like a jet plane, ten jets, a thousand jets roaring for takeoff. It came from the south; and as they watched, some of the orange flares ahead of them went out. They didn't flicker and die; they went out suddenly, snuffed from view in an instant. The noise grew, rushing closer.

"Tsunami," Tim said. His voice was low, wondering. "It really did come. A tidal wave, hundreds, maybe thousands of feet high—"

"Thousands?" Eileen said nervously.

"We'll be all right. The waves can't move far across land. It takes a lot of energy to move across land. A lot. Listen. It's coming up the old Los Angeles River bed. Not across the Hollywood Hills. Anyone up there is probably safe. God help the people in the valley … "

And they sat, holding each other, while lightning played around and above them, and they heard the rolling thunder of lightning and above the thunder the roar of the tsunami, as one by one the bright orange fires went out in the San Fernando Valley.

Between Baja California and the west coast