I dragged my mind back from the Joycean power of the C-matrix and grasped at the Cora volume. Already the smoke was returning, at my brief interval of distraction. The sounds and the smells were rising again, the balance tipping once more in Big Mac’s favor…
I opened the blue-leather, gold-stamped volume. . .
Cora read the title page, fading even as I regarded it…
… Cora, still safe, in the hot Southwest… Cora, in… New Mexico? Arizona? “Southeastern quadrant of that section of northernmost New Spain…”
“New Mexico.” Ann could not hide the thought from me in her excitement at witnessing a problem almost solved—the universal impulse to kibitz—“near Carlsbad.”
Smoke billowed up about me. I let go the jaws of the trap. My troops retreated…
Careless now, I rushed away, leaving Big Mac to scream and gnash his teeth. . .
Ann, shocked, recovered in a moment with something almost like a sob. She went her way and I went mine…
Somewhere along the homeward trail, I sensed the shadowy presence once again. This time it did not beckon…
“Top of the morning to you,” I broadcast. “Let’s get together for lunch sometime.”
… And then the spiral.
I opened my eyes for a few moments. Bright daylight flooded the cab. The truck’s speed was undiminished. I thought I had what I wanted, but I did not feel like sorting through it all and making plans. A certain numbness had come to fill my head, slowing the thinking machinery.
I closed my eyes again, to dream I was the cargo of a coffin on wheels, and other things…
Chapter 10
ere driving. A long stretch of Texas highway… I was reading a book in the rear seat. Nevertheless, I was peripherally aware of the desolate countryside, bleaker now beneath mountains of clouds than it had been when we had commenced this journey. Aware, too, of the heavy crosswinds, gusts of which occasionally slammed our light car—blows from the palm of a giant hand. The thunder was long, deep rumbles somewhere in the distance, considerably later than the flashes which crawled like rivulets of molten gold spilled from the heights, the cloud-peaks… The sound of a horn dopplered toward us and passed. Dad was driving. My mother was in the front passenger seat. The radio was playing softly, a Country and Western station… I was home for a brief holiday, and we were on our way to visit Dad’s older brother’s family. I had a lot of studying to do, though, and the books were stacked on the seat at my side. The first drops of rain hit the rooftop like bullets, and shortly after that I heard the windshield wipers come on. The guitar and the familiar nasal twang of someone singing about cheatin’ and drinkin’ and sneakin’ around and not havin’ any fun doin’ it was interrupted with greater and greater frequency by bursts of static, unless it was the irate husband shootin’ at him. In either case, my mother switched it to an FM station where the music was all instrumental and less strenuous. A car passed us, going pretty fast, and I heard Dad mutter something as he put the lights on. Another slap of the giant hand and Dad twisted the wheel to bring us back off of the shoulder. A clap of thunder seemed to come from directly overhead, and a moment later the rain came down like a waterfall. I closed the book, holding my place with a finger, and looked outside. Heavy, gray, beaded curtains cut visibility to a few car-lengths. The wind began screaming at us between buffets. “Paul,” my mother said, “maybe you’d better pull over…” Dad nodded, glanced at the rear and side-view mirrors, peered ahead. “Yeah,” he said then, and he began to turn the wheel. As he did, another gust struck us. We were on the shoulder and then beyond it. He’d hit the brakes and we were skidding. My stomach twisted as we suddenly nosed downward. A scraping noise passed beneath me, and I heard my mother scream, “No!” Then we were falling, and I heard a crash that was thunder and one that was not thunder, smothering the music and my mother’s final scream and everything else…
I screamed. My eyes opened wide—unseeing for several moments—moist… It had been a dream, but it had been more than a dream. It was something that had really happened. It was how my parents had died. It was—
There was a star-shaped hole in the windshield and we were drifting gently to the right. My real-life truck was in the process of doing the same thing that had happened… nine years ago… though there was no storm, no deep arroyo near the road. A cornfield invited me to wallow amid its green ranks…
I catapulted myself into the driver’s seat, this time locating the switch for manual operation quickly, having intentionally noted its placement in the wiring scheme that last time I’d coiled through the onboard computer.
I twisted almost savagely into the computer again, simultaneous with turning the wheel and pulling back onto the highway. The sideview showed the truck behind me dropping back. The one ahead pulled forward. The dance without the dancer…
There were other holes—they had to be bullet-holes—which I could see now had stitched the truck’s body, forward and to the left. Little whistling noises filled the cab. A greater, thrumming noise moved through the air overhead.
My coil-scan showed me that the computer had been damaged. I had to keep it on manual if I wanted to keep it on the road.
The thrumming sound grew louder, and the shadow of the helicopter passed—something like a piece of the night.
Then I saw it, and I heard the gunfire. I felt the impacts as the slugs tore into my truck. I smelled hot oil.
I was out of the truck’s computer by then and reaching, reaching… Up, high… Trying to feel the computer that ran the ’copter’s autopilot…
I felt stupid. I had thought I’d done such a clever thing in altering the track’s identification code. I had been tired, I had been wrapped up in the joy of self-discovery over the new aspect of my power, but still—
I had stupidly thought to hide myself by that single change of code. If anything, it had made me more vulnerable. I was probably part of a convoy—I hadn’t even bothered to check—with maybe a couple of dozen of us all headed for Memphis from the same warehouse or factory somewhere in the East. Mine—whatever its number in line—might as well have had a red X painted on its roof. I should have checked first and then altered the descriptions of the whole lot of us. Barbeau hadn’t even needed Ann’s efforts against me. Without any special skills, he had beaten me at my own game. I should have foreseen it I should have…
Up, reaching… I felt it now, the autopilot’s brain. I coiled into it and began a rapid scan of its systems as the pilot circled to come at me again. In the meantime, I smelled smoke and my engine was starting to make funny noises; there were intermittent hesitations…
The ’copter swooped in, and I seized the autopilot controls and activated them, trying to drive it off course to the right…
The helicopter jerked just as a gun began to flash, forward. The firing stopped immediately. The shots went wide.
The ’copter commenced a little dance. Wisps of smoke were now drifting past me, there in the driver’s seat. I felt a warmth near my right foot. My engine coughed. The truck stalled and pulled out of it, stalled and pulled out of it…
Overhead, the ’copter veered to the right, corrected and then was gone as I flashed by beneath it. I could feel the pilot struggling with the controls, fighting the automatic system which had come awake to oppose him. I continued my efforts, striving to sweep the vehicle away, downward…