I said, “Last chance, Plum.”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. I can help you, you know. You are a stranger in my land, Evan. You do not know the customs of the people or their speech. The geography is foreign to you. My assistance will smooth the way for you.”
“I’m not sure it will be safe for you.”
“Griggstown would not be safe for me either.”
“I don’t see-”
“They are probably searching for me right this moment,” she said. “To arrest me for helping you escape from the grave. Or for violating house arrest. Or for mmmmmfrzzz.”
“Huh?” I turned again, and she was asleep.
It had never occurred to me to take her along. During our traipse through the suburbs I had mentioned something about having to get her back to her house, and it was then that she insisted on coming with me. I offered up the usual sort of objections, citing her age and her sex and the fact that Griggstown was her home and that, if she left it, she might not find it easy to return to it.
None of these arguments carried much weight. She defeated them by agreeing wholeheartedly. She admitted that she was fifteen and female, and that it would be far easier to get out of Griggstown than to get back into it. But she went on to insist that it would be less dangerous for her to come with me than not, and that Griggstown wasn’t much of a home for her at all because she couldn’t possibly belong in it. “I’m neither white nor black,” she said. “I’m in-between. Everybody gives me a funny look. I make people nervous. White or black, I make them nervous. Even the people in the MMM. They insist it’s perfectly all right for the races to intermarry and that someone like me is as good as anyone else, but they don’t like to look at me. I get on their nerves.”
“Where would you want to go?”
“I don’t know. Once I wanted to go to Capetown. There are mixed-blood people there, the Cape Coloreds. I thought I would go there and be one of them, but they seem to have the same problem, only it’s worse for them because the whole country is so involved with race. Perhaps you will take me back to America.”
I wasn’t sure that was the answer, but neither was sending her home again. And I couldn’t really see how it would be that much more dangerous for her to come along. We would just drive up into the interior of Modonoland far enough to establish that Bowman and Knanda Ndoro were with their ancestors. If there was any sign that Ndoro’s treasure still existed, maybe we would have a shot at it. If not, we would find a border and get over it and find civilization and think of someplace to go next. There would be a certain amount of adventure, but that was what we were all here for. But there shouldn’t be much in the way of danger.
Ha.
Chalk it up to shock – the burial bit, the madmen with their cattle bones, the rain and the chill. Or write it off as the system’s tolerance for terror; after all the various anxieties I had suffered in the past few hours, nothing as far away as the remote Modonoland hinterlands held any fear for me. Besides, I was the Corpse That Walked. You can’t kill a dead man, so what was there for me to be afraid of?
I drove through the geometrical precision of suburban streets until I came to the highway running northwest out of the city. I turned obliquely into it and held the car at a steady eighty kilometers an hour. Almost at once the suburban pattern thinned out and gave way to stretches of open farmland with houses few and far between. It began raining again. I hoped I hadn’t ripped out the wiper system. I hadn’t. They worked, flipping hypnotically back and forth. They didn’t keep the windshield clean, but they did their best.
Plum sighed occasionally in her sleep, and made little purring noises. She shifted in her seat and wound up with her head against my shoulder, her little body curled up beside me. In sleep her face looked even younger and more completely innocent than it did when she was awake. I put a paternal arm around her. I thought of Minna, I thought of Kitty. I removed the arm and kept both hands on the wheel.
I went on driving. The rain stopped again, and shortly thereafter the sky lightened up and dawn broke rather abruptly. I thought about food. At first I just sort of thought about it, as one will, and then it began to become an obsession. I thought about the last meal I had eaten, and calculated the number of hours that had elapsed since then, and remembered the ingredients of that last meal, and compared it with other meals, and began to consider all of the meals I had eaten over the course of my life, and remembered what one after another of them had tasted like, the appearance and aroma of the various foods. I thought of the cheese and the ham sandwich which I had abandoned in the coffin. I cursed myself for abandoning them. I devised plans for returning to the grave and digging them up again. I was not wholly irrational – I knew that this was absurd, but I was driving on a dull road with nothing to do but think, and my body was determined that those thoughts would concern food, since that was what it wanted, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.
I knew very well that this was foolish. The human body can easily go a month without food. I have occasionally fasted for three or four days at a time for one reason or another, and while there are things I would rather do, it’s painless and harmless. You just need the right mental attitude, that’s all. And that was the one thing I didn’t have now. The human body can go a month without food, but the human mind isn’t that reasonable.
I looked at Plum and wondered if she was as hungry as I was. She was asleep, and thus didn’t know if she was hungry or not. I wished her name didn’t happen to be the name of a sort of food. I looked at her shoulder. It was the color of a toasted English muffin. I found myself wondering what human flesh tasted like.
Plum went right on sleeping. The sun came up and blazed through her window without waking her. She didn’t wake up until we ran out of gas.
This was somewhat less surprising than it may sound. It will happen to any car if you drive it long enough without filling the tank, and on a road totally lacking in filling stations it’s just a question of time. Or miles, more precisely. The VW was a recent enough model to possess a gas gauge, and for the past couple of hours I had watched the needle hover closer and closer to the big E. Eventually it touched the E with no discernible decline in performance, and I had just about decided that the blessed bug would run without gas when it coughed dryly, uttered a droll belch, and quit on me. I popped it into neutral and managed to coast to the crest of a slight rise, passed the crest, and rolled on for about a half mile. It did this rather well, but it finally stopped, as everything does, and Plum woke up and asked where we were and why we had stopped. I told her, and she said that was nice. She wasn’t asleep, but she wasn’t exactly awake, either.
“Almost two hundred miles,” I said. “That’s not bad at all, really.”
“Perhaps we can stop another car and get more petrol.”
“There aren’t any other cars. I haven’t seen another car in a hundred miles.” I cleared my throat. “I don’t understand it, actually. The road is flat and wide and perfectly paved, and it doesn’t look as though there’s ever been another car on it.”
“Perhaps we are the first.”
“It certainly looks that way.”
“You see, the road does not go anywhere, Evan.”
“Huh?”
“The Retriever built it. Knanda Ndoro. Your country and many others gave him much money, and he built things throughout the nation for the glory of Modonoland.”
“I thought he just kept the money.”
“Some he spent on the country. There were beautification projects and modernization projects and improvement projects and, oh, many projects. You know the cultural museum in the square? This was built with aid from the Soviet Union.”