A row of mercenaries stood facing the overpass. Once again Seth was forced to explain themselves and negotiate passage, this time out of the Republic instead of in. He invented a story about Blaise going to see his mother.
“Do you understand the risks you take by leaving?” asked the leader. “Repeated gun battles have broken out among the refugees coming up 75, and your safety beyond this border cannot be guaranteed.”
“We understand, but my friend needs to see his mother before it’s too late.”
“Very well,” said the leader. “You folks are welcome to go. But watch out for those boys with the truck. They’re up to no good.”
It was depressing, Thomas thought, that no matter how awful a man’s own behavior was, he always assumed the other guy was in the wrong.
Skylar had never been a religious person, but for the first time in her life she could understand the allure of spiritual faith, how intoxicating it was to believe in something larger than yourself. The only way she had managed to walk so far in this heat was to consider their journey part of a larger plan (a story) that would eventually come to a satisfying close. But after so many hours without a change of scenery, without a reversal, Skylar’s faith in reality as fiction had begun to falter. In a well-told story, something should have happened by now. Good or bad, something dramatic should have altered their trajectory. Instead, it was minute after minute and hour after hour of the same, flat, suburban desert.
She kept thinking about the disgusting scene with the racists, the river of minorities being forced out of the city. When they were finally allowed to pass, Skylar couldn’t bring herself to make eye contact with anyone in the crowd, even though she wanted to. She wanted to explain how Thomas had written an almost identical scene in The Pulse.
Don’t worry, she might have said, this is just a scene in a film. But Skylar had been afraid to do anything that might upset the course of events. If she broke the fourth wall, maybe the illusion would collapse and she would find herself back in the real world. Maybe she would cease to exist at all. How could she know?
The problem was she couldn’t. She wasn’t sure anymore (if she had ever been sure) that all this was a story. What if she had walked through that crowd of human beings, prisoners in their own country, having said nothing and done nothing? How could she live with herself?
In a typical tragedy it was easy to know who or what was to blame, and the obvious antagonist in this case was the pulse. But there were more factors to consider, because a similar electromagnetic event had happened in 1859 with minimal effect. In the years since, mankind had made itself uniquely vulnerable to these invisible attacks from space, and who was to blame for that? The primacy of the marketplace?
Capitalism, after all, was a reflection of life itself, of the will to survive. Even an educated woman like Skylar could not deny the primal desire to acquire resources, to maximize her chance for survival. Still, she was not an animal. She was a human being with advanced cognitive functions who knew constant growth and endless profit were unsustainable. And once enough people understood the limits of the marketplace, they should have been able to make corrections. Should have realized that a culture always striving for more would create an overstimulated population with little interest in deeper thought or meaning. By reducing success to sheer numbers, humanity had traded short-term achievements for long-term failure.
Had essentially committed suicide.
Skylar was losing focus. She was losing faith. She was losing herself.
When they reached the east side of Highway 75, a group of armed men stood waiting, loosely gathered around a white 70s-era pickup that had been ravaged by rust. One of the men, clean-shaven, grinning wide, approached Seth and Blaise as if he’d been expecting them.
“Hello, boys!” he said. “I’m Floyd White. Welcome back to the United States of America.”
Skylar immediately understood what the Texas unit leader had meant about the men with the truck. Floyd was off-putting in a way that made her sweaty skin crawl. Natalie and the boys moved closer to Seth. Larry stood directly behind Skylar, as if using her like a shield.
“Hi,” said Seth. “Got a sick friend here. On our way to Melissa.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Floyd. “Where at, exactly?”
“Near Milrony.”
“Milrony?”
“Yes. Off 121.”
“You mean Milrany?”
“Right. That’s it. I’ve never been there but I’m helping my friend.”
“Can we give you a ride?”
Skylar heard Blaise grunt. She looked over to see him shake his head decisively.
“No ride,” he croaked. “Make me sick.”
“I get that, I get that,” said Floyd agreeably. “But you could be there in minutes instead of hours.”
As leery as she was of these men, Skylar wondered if this scene was the reversal she’d been waiting for. She cleared her throat. She wanted the ride.
“Thanks,” said Blaise. “But we’re just going to walk.”
“Suit yourself,” said Floyd. “But I’d take McDonald if I were you. Lots of shots fired on the highway this afternoon. People are desperate. They’re hungry.”
“Great,” Seth said. He reached protectively for his boys.
“You people don’t look too hungry,” said Floyd. “You got any food in those bags?”
“No food,” Seth said. “I can’t even feed my kids at this point.”
“We know you got rations over there,” said another fellow, this one also tall but thicker around the middle. He wore a NASCAR-branded trucker hat. “And if no one is going to share, we’re gonna go get ‘em.”
“We didn’t come from McKinney,” said Thomas unexpectedly. He’d been mostly quiet during the journey, probably because the safe room had been the sole source of his confidence. Skylar wished he would figure out a way to end this whole charade. She wished he would stand closer to her. “We started farther west but had to walk through that shitty Republic to get here.”
“All right,” said Floyd. “Just head that way to McDonald and then go north. Road turns into Highway 5 and will take you straight to Melissa. ‘Bout nine or ten miles.”
Skylar watched Seth nod and push his family in the direction Floyd had pointed. Blaise walked alongside them. Thomas and Skylar followed. Larry drifted behind her, his head cocked at a weird angle, as if listening to a song only he could hear. Their progress was painfully slow, and every time Skylar looked over her shoulder, Floyd was watching them like he might watch a ribeye cooking over an open flame.
“How are you feeling?” Seth asked Blaise.
“Like someone stabbed me with a knife. And I’m shivering, even though it’s like a hundred degrees out here. I think this may be the end.”
“It’s not the end,” said Seth.
For a while their walk was uneventful, and Skylar imagined an orchestral score playing in the background: dark strings floating above a heavy layer of bass. Before Roark betrayed her, Skylar had planned to visit him on location to hear the Iceland Symphony Orchestra perform Jóhan Jóhannsson’s iconic score for Arrival live at the Harpa. But she hadn’t gone and now she never would. Instead, she faced the bleak reality of never hearing Jóhannsson’s work again, and possibly never hearing another piece of recorded music for the rest of her days.
Her faith waxed and waned, like the wind, like the signal of a distant radio station.
Natalie had been quiet for much of their journey, often staring into the distance like someone who’d lost her bearings. But now she drifted closer to Seth and spoke to him in a low voice. Eventually Blaise joined her and the three of them seemed to argue.