“Excuse me. Alice, have the maladapts ever gotten together to do something?”
“Like what?”
“Like a revolution? Guerrilla activity?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Any attempt to bring down the system. To fight InnerVoice.”
“But how do you fight something that’s inside people?”
She had a point. He belched again, feeling a little better. The road went serpentine once more, climbing a grade. Woods were dense to either side, an occasional connecting dirt road the only break.
At the top of the hill the woods cleared and they passed through an abandoned hamlet, its weathered houses and stores boarded up and deserted. To Gene it looked familiar and he thought it might be a variant of one of the highway whistle-stops along Route 30. If so, they were getting closer to the site where the portal would be if it hadn’t vanished or shifted. There was still no calculating the chances of the portal still being in place. He put off thinking about what he would do if it wasn’t.
The nausea was making a comeback, rising in yet another wave. His heart fluttered like a wounded bird. The anxiety was something alive in him, scrabbling to get out, wanting to scream, to run away.
The road was blocked off ahead, a red wooden barrier across it. The sign said simply: Road Closed. There was no detour.
He smashed through the barrier. Shards of wood fell off the hood and windshield. It was too far to get out and walk just yet. It would be risky traveling an interdicted road, but he wasn’t ready to give up the car. Piece of junk though it was, it was something he could control. It obeyed his wishes, responded to the dictates of his body and will. It was power. He felt that if he let go of the steering wheel he would cave in and become some whimpering creature seeking only the alleviation of pain. He was afraid that he would give up and go back, do anything to make the hurt stop, even turn Alice in if it would help. The possibility of that scared him even more than the thought of being caught. He was feeling the lash right now. Would there be greater punishment if he was apprehended? Worse than this? He couldn’t imagine it.
He realized he had speeded up. The speedometer read eighty-five. The fuel tank was half full, so no worry there. There was no water temperature gauge, no battery charge meter, but he wasn’t particularly concerned with those readings. The car, clunky as it was, seemed to be in passable condition.
He screeched around a turn, braking in and accelerating out. They raced through another ghost village. Why were these sites abandoned? A matter of population decline, or was it part of a plan to redistribute population? Get people out of the countryside and into compounds of high rises so as to be more easily controlled? Perhaps. There were precedents in Earth history, though sometimes the flow went the other way, from the cities to the country. But dictatorships were notorious for shunting masses of people around, bulldozing villages, deporting ethnic groups, other high-handedness. The only people you’d need in the country would be personnel to work the fields of the huge state-run farms, like those he’d seen from the air, and those workers would live in residence complexes. There were no independent farmers, so no quaint farming villages were necessary.
He heard the whine of turbine engines above. He craned his neck to look. A VTOL craft was following, swooping low.
He floored the accelerator, taking the next bend fast enough so that the car went up on two wheels. The vehicle’s weight was obviously ill distributed. Any good car would have taken the curve in stride. He cursed the industrial system that produced such shoddy design and manufacture. It felt good to get angry. Anger fought back the anxiety. Maybe that’s what was keeping him going.
“Stop your vehicle immediately! Pull over to the side of the road!”
The voice boomed from the craft. He pressed his foot against the metal floor.
“Pull over or you will be fired upon!”
He glanced at Alice. She looked amazingly calm. What would be her fate? They would probably shoot her up with new nanocomputers, better ones. No more evening walks, no more filching an extra dessert. Not even those peccadilloes would be allowed her then. Would it be better for her to surrender, or to die in a mad attempt to gain her freedom?
“What should I do, Alice?”
She looked at him with defiance in her eyes. As if she’d been reading his mind she said, “Don’t let them take us. I’d rather die.”
The VTOL fired, the sound like the buzzing of a chain saw. Dust rose from the shoulder. The miss had been deliberate. Gene began swerving all over the road. The craft’s guns sounded again, and this time the miss may not have been intentional. Another bend came up, trees intervening between the car and the craft. The gunship veered away.
He looked ahead for cover, for a road to turn into, a building to hide behind, anything. There was nothing but dense forest to either side of the road, which was temporarily to the good, because the gunship had to keep well above the high trees and had a bad firing angle.
“Alice, get down.”
She obeyed, tucking herself down between the dashboard and the seat.
The trees gave out and they were in wide-open country. He started weaving again. He couldn’t see the gunship but could hear its vacuum-sweeper roar. The forest picked up again about a tenth of a mile down the road, and he decided to trade defensive maneuvering for time. He mashed the pedal and drove straight, hoping to make it to cover before the craft could maneuver for a killing shot.
There wasn’t time. When he saw the craft again it was coming straight for him, its gun pods chattering. Asphalt exploded from the road, then the windshield shattered as the gunship whooshed overhead.
He spat out glass. It took him a few seconds to realize that he was miraculously unhurt. Wind from the rent in the glass tore at his face.
“Are you okay?” he yelled.
Alice nodded.
The car reached the trees and he thought that they had gotten through with no extensive damage, but telltale white smoke trailing from the hood told him otherwise. Slugs had probably hit the radiator.
He rolled another quarter mile before a red light appeared on the instrument panel. Engine overheating. A bullet must have taken out a water line. White smoke was billowing out of the hood now. Another red light came on — oil pressure dropping. He wouldn’t be able to go another mile at this rate.
The right berm graded off to a steep drop, leading down to woods. He made a decision. He braked and pulled off the road, skidding to a stop.
“Get out!” he told her.
She did, and he put the transmission in neutral, got out, and let the car roll down the slight grade, steering to the right as he walked with the car. The car crossed the berm and headed for the edge. He closed the door and let it go. It rolled down the embankment and crashed through a wall of underbrush, and when it stopped at the bottom of the gully it was wheel-deep in a creek and was very hard to see from the road.
He took Alice’s hand and led her down the embankment. She slipped on the loose shale and slid most of the way on the seat of her pants. At the bottom he hoisted her up and they splashed through the creek, ducking into woods on the other side.
They clambered up a hill. There was no trail and they had to hack through weeds and nettle. At the top they went straight until they came to the end of the woods and the edge of an overgrown hayfield.
They went to the left, keeping well inside the tree line. For the next few minutes they ran, trying to get as far from the road as possible.
When they heard the craft, they hid underneath a pine tree. The gunship whined irritably above them, searching the woods. The loudspeaker blared but the words were indistinguishable. The craft continued its pattern for a good ten minutes before going away. They listened to the engine sounds die in the distance.