"Right, the pickup," Chase said breathlessly when they were on the ground. The rifle was sticky in his hands.
They ran with Nick leading the way across the compound where the old truck and the Dodge pickup were parked next to a small shed with a door paneled in metal sheets. Holding his shoulder, Nick raised his foot and kicked at the padlock on the door.
"Gasoline," he gasped, and Chase brought the rifle butt down and sheared the padlock from its mountings. In a few minutes they had loaded ten large jerry cans into the back of the Dodge.
With Chase at the wheel and headlights blazing, they accelerated across the compound and through the gate and roared past the council halclass="underline" silent of gunfire now, silent of screams of pain and suffering, but shrill with the cries of triumph and victory.
They were between Sulphur and Tungsten when the pickup blew a front tire. Chase thought the geographical symbolism apt--on one side a bitter, acrid chemical associated with hellfire, on the other a hard gray metallic substance used as an abrasive.
He backed the jeep onto the sandy shoulder, taking care not to jostle his passengers. They had driven nonstop for nine hours and it was now a few minutes after 10:00 a.m. There was no cloud and no welcoming shade and the temperature was already high in the eighties.
Chase climbed down, cramped and stiff, and turned to the two women, one cradled in the arms of the other. "How is she, Ruth? Would it help if we stopped for a while?"
"Her pulse is weak. I could give her an injection, but I'm afraid her system isn't strong enough to take it." Ruth moved her arm and winced as the renewed circulation jabbed her with a thousand needles. "I think we ought to carry on; I can't do anything for her until we get to Desert Range. How long would you say?"
"About fifteen hours without stopping or holdups. Maybe we should have something to eat now while they're changing the tire." It was anguish for him to look at Cheryl. In the harsh sunlight her face had the color and consistency of wax.
Nick and Dan were squatting by the pickup, loosening the bolts on the wheel. As Chase went over to them the two women got down from the cab and stretched themselves. Everyone went still, his head lifted to catch the low throbbing sound of an engine, and moments later a small red car loaded down so that the body was pressed onto the hubs toiled around the bend toward them. The roof rack was piled high with boxes, furniture, and household goods. Through the dust-smeared windows it was possible to make out a man and two women, one of them elderly, and two young children with wide curious eyes. The car labored past in the direction of Sulphur without any kind of greeting being exchanged.
Chase helped them fit the jack and began to crank it. "What condition is the spare in?"
Nick straightened up and smiled wanly. "Let's hope we have a spare."
"We'll be in a hell of a mess if you haven't," Chase said. "Dan, will you take a look?" His son nodded and wandered off like a sleepwalker. "How's your shoulder, Nick?"
"Jen dressed it for me, but I'll never be able to play the violin again. Is Cheryl holding up?"
"I think so." He didn't want to tempt fate by any show of optimism. He gazed around at the baking hills, the grass burned brown and threadbare. There was a low mountain range ahead topped by Star Peak. "We're not far from Interstate eighty. We'll take that as far as highway ninety-three and then head south. Can you make it without rest? Ruth thinks we should press on."
"Jen can take over for a few hours. What about you? Jo's a good driver. She can handle the jeep while you get some sleep in the back of the pickup."
Dan appeared pushing the spare wheel. His frail arms looked incapable of supporting it. Chase went to his assistance and had to clench his teeth to keep his emotion in check.
While Chase and Nick worked at replacing the wheel, Jen distributed biscuits, chocolate, and fruit. She knelt down to offer some to Dan, who was sitting exhausted in the thin shade of the pickup, head thrown back, eyes closed. When he opened them there was such misery written there that she instinctively pulled him to her in a gesture of pity and forgiveness.
Chase went back to the jeep and rigged up the canvas sheet as a shelter. Not only was the heat oppressive but the sun's rays caused a prickly, smarting sensation, as if the skin were being bathed in a weak acidic solution. The air itself tasted tart and coppery.
As he tucked the flaps of the canvas behind the rolled-up camping gear, leaving a tentlike opening to give them the benefit of what breeze there was, Chase found a reassuring smile from somewhere. "Jo's going to drive for a while. We'll stop at nightfall for something to eat and then I'll take over. We'll be all right. We're going to make it."
"I know," Ruth said and gave him a smile too. "I trust you."
For just a moment Cheryl's eyes opened and looked straight at him. There was no expression in them and he wasn't sure whether it was simply a reflex action, performed unconsciously, but nevertheless he felt a surge of fresh hope.
Chase walked back to the pickup and crawled underneath the sunshade Nick had fashioned from a blanket and stretched out on top of a sleeping bag. His bones seemed to creak with tiredness. Beside him, cushioned against the jolting and swaying in a cocoon of baggage and clothing, Nick was already fast asleep.
Chase closed his eyes and dreamed that Baz Brannigan was trailing them with an ax buried in his head. The landscape was a bleached sulfurous yellow. Baz pursued them to the edge of a cliff using a giant hypodermic syringe as a crutch. The jeep (they were all of them in the jeep, with Cheryl, miraculously fit and well, at the wheel) went over the edge of the cliff and sailed through the air. Chase tensed every muscle in his body for the expected crash. When they hit the ground he sat bolt upright, arms forming a cross to shield his face.
It was growing dark and the pickup had stopped.
There was no one in the cab. They had pulled over onto the hard shoulder of a main highway, presumably Interstate 80. Chase slid down, his mouth filled with the most foul taste, and spat out. What he wouldn't give for a cup of sweet scalding coffee!
Jen and Dan were standing by the jeep. As Chase went up he saw Jo collapsed over the wheel with her head cradled in her arms. At first he thought there'd been an accident and then he knew there hadn't. There was no need to ask and nothing he wanted to see.
Nick helped his daughter from the driver's seat and held her in his arms. Chase did what he could to comfort Ruth. She clung to him and wept, but he could think of nothing to say.
Afterward, when Cheryl's body had been wrapped in a blanket and placed in the back of the pickup, they turned onto 93 and drove without stopping until they reached Desert Range at two o'clock the following morning.
V
2021
27
The war between the prims and the mutes was getting closer. There had been fierce and bloody clashes in the hills and forests to the west, but so far Desert Range had remained undetected and unmolested. Lying in the middle of an arid plain and well away from the main routes north, it was on the periphery of the tribal conflicts that raged across California, Nevada, and Utah.
Dan had never been able to understand what the fighting was about. Every time he led a reconnaissance party from the furthermost tip of the western network of tunnels (chosen because it was several miles distant from the Tomb itself), he was struck afresh by the sheer mindless lunacy of conducting a war for no conceivable gain. Not territory. Not natural resources. Not plunder in even the crudest sense of the term. And certainly not patriotism or pride or any of the other emotional intangibles that traditionally had sent men to war. It was fighting for the sake of it--merely obeying some atavistic impulse as natural as breathing and sleeping.