I shut my eyes, turned away for a moment, and it came: a shiver of finality like the one when you decide, in your own mind, that you’re going to have to tell someone who loves you that you don’t want to be with them anymore. Terror, and relief; relief and terror, so intermingled that they feel like the same thought.
I leaned down unsteadily, picked up my drugs, and straightened again.
“Just understand one thing,” I told Vinaldi. “if you’re thinking of atoning to Yhandim, you’re taking the wrong guy along with you. When I find the man who’s got Nearly and Suej I’m going to tear his fucking head off.”
“That’s more like it,” Vinaldi said, slapping me on the back. “The old reasonableness we know and love.”
“Piss off,” I muttered. “Where’s this fucking truck?”
Four o’clock found us driving as fast as we dared through Covington Forge, through snow falling in flakes the size of small dogs. It was dark, the heating in Vinaldi’s truck didn’t work, and both of us were frozen. A bottle of Jack’s bought at a gas station in Waynesboro was trying its hardest to alleviate the season’s weather, but it was only a veneer at best. Vinaldi was pissed at me because he’d wanted an almond cappuccino. The gas station attendant and I had a good laugh about that. I guess it had been a while since Johnny’d had to deal with the real world.
The Matrix junction box at the town limits had burned out long ago and subsequently been used for target practice. Covington Forge was off the net, abandoned to the past and left to cannibalize itself. As Vinaldi steered through the deserted streets, I saw America itself as one big matrix: bright, dangerous cities crammed with sharp and needy people, interconnected by a spider’s web of highways and toll roads and bordered at the edges by the slow coasts peppered with perambulating old people. And in between, in the gaps, a sagging mass of flat line towns that hadn’t made it into the twenty-second century—alive and technically equal to everyone else, but actually breaking up, losing their cohesion like skin on the face of someone who’s been very ill for a long time. The nose might still look sharp, the eyes bright, the cheekbones in place; but the flesh in between falls loosely between the peaks.
It wasn’t an especially profound observation, but then I was very cold. The buildings around us looked as if they agreed with me, and as if they were only too aware of their position in history. They looked pissed off, to be honest. The pavements were scarred, the walls bulged, the roofs a millimeter away from collapsing onto the fetid life within. It felt like we were driving over a corpse that was fermenting inside, but whose chest still rose and fell, and probably always would. It was great.
We’d thought maybe Ghuaji was meeting someone here, but as we followed his car from a distance it became clear that we were going straight through and out the other side. I was beginning to come down by then, though it still felt as if someone was slowly stirring my brains with a warm finger. Sounds were now distinguishable as such, and I believed that the majority of what I saw was real. For most of the afternoon what I’d seen had mainly consisted of a dark bulk of trees against mountainous hills, as we headed higher into the Appalachians. In the last of the afternoon light we’d piled up Interstate 64, through the glittering sprawl of Charlottesville and then higher into the beginnings of the Blue Ridge. After Waynesboro, Ghuaji had taken 81 Southbound, turning into Route 60 at Lexington, the roads getting smaller and smaller, away from what passes for civilization these days and into a murky area in between.
While Vinaldi drove in silence I’d busied myself by chain-smoking and watching the Positionex attached to the dashboard. This showed Ghuaji’s whereabouts as determined by a Global Positioning Satellite, mapped onto a layout of the local roads to within a couple of yards’ accuracy. Following him wasn’t going to be difficult. Working out what we had to do when we caught up with him was, and that looked like it had to happen soon. Covington Forge is pretty much the end of the line.
“Where the hell’s he going?” Vinaldi muttered as we came out the other side of town into yet more countryside. “This is the land that time forgot. I can’t believe that at my time of life I’m driving down a road to nowhere, most particularly in this kind of weather.” His voice was steady, and betrayed to only a tiny degree the fact that irritation was not the only emotion he was currently struggling with.
“Christ knows,” I said, shivering suddenly in a whole body spasm. “From now on, there’s squat until you’re in West Virginia.”
Vinaldi grunted and stared out of the windshield with a kind of tense gloom, making no bones about the enmity he felt toward the gnarled trees and crags outside. Then I noticed that the readout on the Positionex indicated that Ghuaji had lessened his speed.
“Looks like he’s going to make a turn. Maybe we should get a little closer.”
“Got any more good advice?” Vinaldi muttered, his breath a cloud in front of his face, “like ‘Don’t run into the back of him’ or ‘Drink your coffee before it gets cold,’ not that we have any coffee because you bought whiskey instead, despite my very clear instructions?”
“There,” I said.
Vinaldi pulled the truck to a halt and peered out distractedly. I’d almost missed it. On the right side of the road, barely discernible in the snow and darkness, was a narrow road leading up into the hills.
“That’s not a proper road,” Vinaldi said in the snow-padded silence.
I looked at the map, and saw that he was right. Another hundred yards up the mountain on the left was an exit for 616. On the right there was nothing, and yet the car had clearly gone that way. The light on the Positionex showed it heading off up toward what used to be Douthat State Park.
I shrugged, and Vinaldi turned the wheel and took us onto the road, There was no sign at the top of it, and the surface was completely covered with snow except for the tracks left by Ghuaji’s vehicle. Trees pressed hard into either side, much closer and thicker than you would expect. Vinaldi stopped the truck again for a moment, peering eloquently out into the wilderness.
“You’re sure about this,” he said, dubiously.
“Johnny, I’m not sure of anything. But if we’re following Ghuaji then we have to follow him, and this is where he went.”
And so we set off, keeping to the middle of the road to avoid the branches which stretched halfway across. Using the Positionex, I tried to ensure that we kept a fixed distance between us and Ghuaji, and this meant driving a little more quickly than either of us would have liked—though still not exactly fast. Any quicker than thirty miles an hour sent the tires spinning and the truck sliding toward the side of the road. Any slower and the truck threatened to throw its hand in with gravity and slip back down the steep incline. Vinaldi had the headlights turned as low as possible, but I was still worried that sooner or later Ghuaji was going to spot them.
The slope began to level off about ten minutes later. The snow had slackened by then and through the slowly drifting flakes we could see a stretch of straight road in front of us. We also saw a smallish tree growing up out of the left-hand lane, oddly lit by the truck’s headlights. As we passed it, Vinaldi risked turning toward me.
“This is weird,” he said.
“Tell me about it.” I noticed something on the side of the road and leaned forward to squint through the windshield. An old shack, obviously unused in decades. And in front, the remains of what looked like gas pumps. As Vinaldi stared at it I fiddled with the map overlay panel on the Positionex, trying to get a more precise fix on where we were. The panel still refused to show the existence of a road along our path, even going back to the late 1990s.