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A little further on, concrete barriers had been set up to keep the ruin crushed more firmly off to the side, funneling down the warped highway to a single widened lane. Someone, she thought, no. Many someones. The people who did this are still alive.

It had taken many men to do this. The only thing she could think of was the military. Sophie doubted an invading force, however cautious, would have bothered to take such drastic steps to clear a portion of the highway. If Americans had done this, it meant they were not hunkered down under fire. Yet. But if they were fortifying a stretch of road, forcing entry through only a narrow path, securing a perimeter…

She knew she needed to go off the road.  She drove under an overpass, and there in the distance with unbelieving eyes she saw the first tease of almost-lights, fluorescent illuminations threaded across the interstate perhaps a mile or two away.

How bright did those lights have to be, and how many of them were there, for her to almost discern the shapes of vehicles and crane towers through the gloom?

Get off the road Sophie, she was telling herself. Get off. Go around somehow. Now.

She turned her high beams down to normal brightness, and all at once the dark crush of night seemed to engulf her. Three frail beams pierced the shadows. She slowed drastically, a little too quickly, then steadied and considered her dwindling options.

The land to either side of I-25 was clear pasture, filled with debris and ash but almost untouched. There were dunes of wet ash, yes, but dead grasses dominated the spaces between. Could she get across the center and back to the northbound lanes? They did not seem to have been bulldozed, many more wrecks were standing there. But where was she going to drive off of the highway and onto the frontage road? And even that would not be enough. To avoid being spotted, she would need to four-wheel out over open ground, risking getting stuck in mud or on the ruins of a fence or something worse. And if the H4 ever became mired, she would never make it to Kersey.

You’ve got to try. You have no choice.

She slowed, looked to the center with more care. There was a gap up ahead, a connecting dirt road of the kind once used for speed traps by patrol cars. There were piles of trash there, but the way looked relatively clear. She drove off there, made her way into the northbound lanes, found a smoother slope of rain-slickened grasses beyond that. She forced the Hummer into four-wheel, and the gears did not transition easily. The entire frame shuddered and the engine threatened to gutter to a halt. She eased off the gas, coasting down off the highway at ten miles an hour, and jumped in her seat as the tires caught wet ground and began to spin.

She tapped the gas again, forced the H4 down into the ditch, through standing black water and up the other side. The resulting jolt shook another crate of water bottles off the roof, more supplies gone she refused to stop for. What if the H4 got stuck here, if she was stupid enough to park it in the mud and get out? She kept on moving.

A sudden voice cried out from the back: “Jenny!”

She gasped, swallowed. “Silas?”

He stirred, his body moving with the H4’s sluggish crawl over mud and the grassy earth. He murmured something more.

“Silas, are you awake?”

“Wish…” he moaned. Sophie waited. “Wish… I wasn’t,” he said then. He grunted as the H4 bumped around. “Hell are we?”

“Off road,” Sophie answered. She did not tell him about the road block, the silvery line of lights up ahead and now almost out of sight off to the northwest.

Silas did not reply. Sophie drove on for a few minutes longer, struggling to keep both hands on the wheel. She feared the Hummer would not be able to take this rough handling for very long, with all the damage it had suffered and the uneven and shaky load. How far off would she have to go, to go around the light-barrier over I-25 and make her way back onto the highway unseen? She guessed that the best she could do would be to keep driving until she could not see the line of crane-lights at all. Then she would need to guess at a northwest angle and slurry her way back to the northbound interstate on the farther side.

But it’s a miracle you haven’t run into any fences yet, she chided herself. You’re not going to be able to keep this up. Not for long.

Should she dare put on the high beams again? No. She could barely see, but it was safer to be shrouded. In the near distance off to the right loomed a fenced-in border-wild of churning cornfield, to the left a grass-lost remnant of some dirt pasture road. Sophie headed toward this. Once she was past the cornfield, she would need to go further out east until she could not see the lights at all, then find her way north again.

As she neared the road, Silas scrabbled fingernails up the back of Sophie’s seat. He said something she could not discern. She let her foot off the gas, and heard him again, “… you hear that?”

She let the H4 coast on, down to almost nothing. She thought she had heard something upon the wind, a gathering rumble. Thunder? But should couldn’t hear it any longer over the H4’s own tortured engine.

The H4 coasted to a halt. “Silas?” Sophie turned in her seat. “What did you hear?” She released her safety belt, looked back at him. He was parched, eyes pale and blinded, his hand was out searching. “Your water,” she said, “it’s empty, let me—”

“Soph. Keep. Moving.”

“I will, I just want to see if I can get you—”

“No, keep moving,” he insisted. “Now. Something. Ain’t right.”

“Okay. Okay.”

She turned and buckled herself in again, just in time to see the looming black shape of some military vehicle now parked not even twenty out in front of her. A gas-masked and camouflaged soldier riding up on the back had a swivel-mount machine gun pointed at her. She had time to say only, “Oh my God,” and then there was a violent glare of green light as a searchlight flooded the entire H4 with violent illumination, and the window tinting kicked in.

Another man’s voice crackled in over the static cry of an amplified bullhorn: “Stop your vehicle! Raise your hands!”

VI-3

The Honor of Silence

The burst-glare coming in from the rear-mounted spotlight on the Oshkosh Special Purpose All-Terrain Vehicle burned a greenish sun through the H4’s windshield, flooding over Sophie’s skin and bathing her in a sickly emerald glow. A US Army Sergeant in full combat gear and a chromium-visored helmet, carrying a holographic sight-mounted M4 carbine, stalked up to the H4 and tapped on the now-locked door beneath Sophie’s window.

“Ma’am? Put this window down. Now, or I’ll do it for you.” The Sergeant signaled across his neck, and the corporal at the S-ATV’s machine gun raised the searchlight arc into the air. The Sergeant raised his visor as Sophie lowered her window by several inches. “Please,” she said, “I’m just finding my way through, a citizen, I don’t want—”