He continued to move forward, skirting a pocket of radiation that had not died in the four years since last he had come this way.
They came upon a place where the sands were fused into a glassy sea, and he slowed as he began its passage, peering ahead after the craters and chasms it contained.
Three more rockfalls assailed him before the heavens split themselves open and revealed a bright-blue light, edged with violet. The dark curtains rolled back toward the Poles, and the roaring and the gunfire reports diminished. A lavender glow remained in the north, and a green sun dipped toward the horizon at his back.
They had ridden it out, and he killed the infras, pushed back his goggles, and switched on the normal night lamps.
The desert would be bad enough, all by itself.
Something big and batlike swooped through the tunnel of his lights and was gone. He ignored its passage. Five minutes later it made a second pass, this time much closer, and he fired a magnesium flare. A black shape, perhaps forty feet across, was illuminated, and he gave it two five-second bursts from the fifty-calibers, and it fell to the ground and did not return again.
To the squares, this was Damnation Alley. To Hell Tanner, this was still the parking lot.