But even at a reasonable pace, that last hundred miles or so could get pretty tiring. Maybe he’d put on some music, something lively to stay awake to. “Radio, search, find coustajam,” he said. He liked that new stuff.
The computer answered, “Searching, interruptions very frequent in IBIS, some scrawk.” Then it fell dead quiet.
“Radio, acknowledge.”
No sound.
“Radio, reboot.”
“Rebooting and loading—” a harsh squeal, then silence.
“Computer, internal check.”
A brief, rumbling hiss—then nothing.
Shit, he’d spent a fortune on a good voice-actuated system.
He pulled over at the next roadside rest. When he popped the cover, crusty gray-white stuff that looked like dried toothpaste fell out into his hand from the fuse box. He stared at the mess. It stung and burned where it had touched his fingers.
Del shook the mess off his hand into his litter bag, grabbed a wipe from his box, and swabbed his hands, looking in consternation at the tiny red dots that peppered his palms and fingers.
That gray-white stuff looked like battery corrosion. He took his flashlight around to take a look.
There were drifts and piles of that white crud everywhere, clustering and spilling around every little electronic gadget, engulfing every electric motor and encrusting every cable. The battery sat in a ball of crusty white goo the size of a beach ball.
“Holy shit,” he muttered. He closed up the compartment, got in, prayed—not something he did often, and seldom this sincerely—and tried to start it again. There were clunks and thuds on the first try; fewer of them after he’d tried a few times and then nothing at all.
Furious, thinking about a late load and all that would cost him, and about the bed and shower waiting for him in Des Moines, he took out his cell phone to make the call to the dispatcher. The phone’s screen was an unrecognizable scrawl of light and dark. Fighting panic, Del tried turning it off and on; it came on, wavered, and turned itself off. After that, it wouldn’t come on at all.
On a hunch he didn’t quite understand, he turned his phone over, pulled the battery, and tapped the phone in his hand; little gray-white crumbles fell out, stinging his hand again. The light in his cab went out, and wouldn’t come back on.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. I-90 EAST OF GILLETTE. WYOMING. 7:40 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
It was warm without being stifling in Zach’s Dadmobile. He drives like my dad, too, Jason thought. Dad always said it was his “precious cargo habit”—all those years of never looking away from the road because he couldn’t stand to have one of his kids hurt. Cool, actually, once you understand it. “You must be dying to get home.”
“Oh, yeah. Wrap up tight, down into the burrow with the cubs.” Zach smiled. “I still want to take down the Big System—but not before the Big System gets me home and lets me find out that everything’s basically okay. Speaking of that, I wonder why we haven’t heard from the President yet?”
“That is weird, isn’t it?” Jason said. “All I can find is recaps of what’s already been in the news.” His connection was still up and clear, and still tracking IBISNuStream Samuelson. In a fresh window he called up Goo- 22. “We’re not the only ones worrying. ‘Pendano’ is one of the five most searched words. But there’s just one statement out of the White House—he won’t be appearing at a fund-raiser in West Virginia in the morning. That’s it.”
“What do you suppose he’s doing?”
Jason shrugged. “The media always made a big deal about what good buds Pendano and Samuelson were. Maybe he’s crying.”
“I never liked him, but I hope that’s not true.”
“Yeah. I liked him, but I know what you mean. Funny how it still matters even when we know it’s all going away.”
“What’s all going away?”
“Dude. The Big System. I mean, Daybreak’s here. Whoever grabbed Samuelson, why they did it, everything—it’s all old stuff with no meaning, just history. This is just like a hangover or something. Once the Big System is down, we’ll stop having all these emotional attachments to media figures.”
“I don’t know about that,” Zach said. “I read history a lot. After Lincoln was assassinated, a few hundred thousand people dropped everything and went to Washington.”
“I was kind of hoping Daybreak would mean going, you know, like all the way tribal, no government past the next hill.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think it will turn out people still want to build some steam trains and sailing ships, and maybe even a few dirigibles or some telegraphs if they, you know, keep them clean and wrapped in antiseptic cloth all the time…”
“You mean if they practice safe machinery?”
“Exactly.”
“I was kind of hoping to maybe get rid of the wheel.”
“Wheels let you raise clean water from depth, and clean water means healthy babies,” Zach said. “You can have my wheel when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”
Jason liked to argue, and he was about to, but he felt that familiar, comforting internal hug, the reminder that you didn’t quibble about Daybreak matters. Take down the Big System and then work out how it was supposed to be after. He felt a surge of warm friendship toward Zach, and it was a while before they talked again.
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. KENNEBEC. SOUTH DAKOTA. 8:56 P.M. CST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Marshalene was loving the drive across South Dakota. She’d pumped up some nice loops in a random feed so that the whole drive had been her favorite high points from her favorite songs, maybe two minutes of music over and over in random scramble. She wouldn’t make it back to B-town tonight, but she’d keep going till she was sleepy, and if she was up till morning, that would be okay; someplace some hotel would take her money to let her sleep for a while.
She’d be over in fucking Iowa before she even had to think about refueling, pissing, and buying more munchies to keep her going till dawn or tired, whichever came first.
Then this unholy screaming, grinding noise scared the piss out of her, and the car tried, all by itself, to run off to the right. She pulled it back onto the road but it wasn’t easy; in her remaining headlight (when had that other one gone out?) she saw a sign for an exit to County Road 19 and Kennebec. Kennebec reminded her of an East Coast name; it seemed like maybe there’d be someone there that got her when she talked.
The passenger-side rear motor had to be what it was, she realized, just like that hippie mechanic dude said. Damn, he’d been good, just not good enough to save what was obviously a dying POS car. Better go into a town and get some help. She took the exit.
Half a mile more, as that grinding noise built up, she was wondering if she’d reach Kennebec; it sounded like the left rear motor was going out too. She’d get it towed, first thing in the morning, from the motel parking lot, if she made it to a motel.
She sort of did. The engine had turned itself off but tried to come back on as the battery snapped and banged, and the number on the screen went up and down too fast to read—a bad short, for sure. The starter cranked twice, a funny, screeching noise, and died, but here she was at the driveway of a boarded-up gas station next to the COUNTRYSIDE INN MOTEL VACANCY, so she coasted into it as far as she could, set the brake, and lugged her bag across the parking lot.