“According to the maps this road should never have been here at all.”
“I thought I’d left that kind of stuff behind,” Vinaldi said. “I thought that was all gone.”
“Me, too,” I said quietly.
Suddenly, Vinaldi’s head snapped to the left, and his eyes seemed to pan quickly across the trees by the side of the road.
“What is it?” Tasked quickly.
“Thought I saw something,” he said, voice thick in his throat.
“Saw what?”
“A woman. Or something. Something in white, running through the trees alongside us.”
“Along the road?”
“No. About thirty feet into the trees.”
Uh-huh, I thought, pulling my coat a little tighter around me. I glanced out my side window. The trees seemed a little less dense for the moment, and I realized we were passing something that might once have been a picnic area. It was long, long gone, but for a moment I saw a shape out in the overgrown clearing. Like a picnic table, with four clumps of darkness around it. For a second I even thought I could see four pairs of orange pinpoints turn to watch us pass, but that was probably only because my eyes were held so wide open, and because I hadn’t blinked in an awfully long time. The one thing I knew for sure was that it was nothing to do with the Rapt I’d taken. This was exactly the kind of thing I’d become a Rapt addict to avoid.
Vinaldi heard the intake of my breath. “You see something?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing real, just more dreams.”
“We’re getting closer, aren’t we?”
“We must be. Look at the panel.” Ghuaji’s light had stopped moving, about half a mile ahead. Wherever we were going, we were nearly there.
Vinaldi let the truck grind to a halt, and his head lowered slightly until it was resting on the steering wheel.
“Mother of God on a skateboard,” he said, his voice for the first time very shaky. “Now I realize you may have been right about going back. Suddenly, your whole sitting-very-quietly-somewhere-and-hoping-it-will-all-go-away option seems to speak of immense good sense and judgment.”
“Yeah,” I said, lighting a pair of cigarettes. “But you were right. I have no choice. If Suej and Nearly are in there I have to be, too. You don’t, though. You can leave me here, and go back.”
Vinaldi stayed still for a moment, breathing heavily. I knew this was not for show. I knew he was really thinking about it.
“You wouldn’t stand a chance on your own,” he said eventually.
“No one ever does. But we’re all still here.”
At that he pulled his head up and looked at me, and, slowly, started laughing. “Any more glib crap like that,” he said, “and I’ll kick you out into the snow and go back and find a hot meal and a warm woman and sit and laugh at the thought of you freezing to death.”
I grinned and passed him a cigarette. “It’s a deal.”
Shaking his head, Vinaldi gunned the motor and we surged along the road which now seemed even darker, even more abandoned.
And that’s when the indicator light on the Positionex went out.
“Shit,” Vinaldi said. “What’s wrong with that thing?”
I reached forward, banged it. Pointless, as it was a lump of solid-state inexplicability, but instincts die hard. Nothing happened, then two seconds later the light came on. It immediately disappeared, and further thumps made no difference.
“Hit it again,” Vinaldi said. “Fuck—threaten to shoot it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said quickly. “He must be nearly there. If we don’t catch him he’s going to get pulled in without us.”
Vinaldi slammed his foot down on the pedal—too hard. The back wheels spun, the truck skewed sideways on the ice. He managed to back it off enough for the tires to catch and we slewed toward a corner at the end of the patch of level road.
“We’re never going to catch him,” Vinaldi said between gritted teeth, as he tried to keep the truck under control. “I can’t go fast enough. We’ll go off the road.”
“Just go as fast as you can,” I said, fumbling in my pockets. I got out another clip and slammed it into the gun, then took a couple of foil packets out. “If-we lose him we might just as well go off the road anyway. Both you and me. Our lives are over. And it’s not just us, either.”
“What are you talking about?”
“if we don’t stop Yhandim from flashing back and forth, then more of this stuff is going to spill out. Everything will change, and it won’t be for the better.”
“Maybe you should get into writing greeting cards. Like ‘Happy wedding—bet it doesn’t last.’ Or ‘Sorry to hear you’re dead.’”
Vinaldi increased the truck’s speed until we were careening toward the corner, trying to stay within the tracks created by Ghuaji. Trees flashed by, black branches flicking hard against the windows. Much later than I would have, he pulled the steering and the wheels locked, sending us sliding toward a wall of rock. I shut my eyes, wishing I’d phrased my last sentence differently, and when I opened them again saw that he had somehow pulled the truck round the corner on the skid.
“Nice one,” I said. “But don’t ever do it again.” Then I fell silent just as Vinaldi stepped on the brakes and killed the lights.
We were in a roughly circular clearing. Sixty yards ahead of us I could see the taillights of Ghuaji’s vehicle. The car was stationary.
We were there, wherever the hell “there” was.
“What do we do now?” Vinaldi asked.
“Roll forward,” I whispered. “As quietly as you can.”
We went about twenty yards until the truck was mostly hidden behind an outcrop of rock, then I motioned for him to stop. By then we could see two things. The first was that although the engine was still running, Ghuaji wasn’t in his vehicle. The second was that on the left side of the road was a building, it was made of old, battered concrete and looked disused. No lights showed in any of the windows, most of which were broken. The shape of the walls was naggingly familiar, but it wasn’t until I realized that the level patch was a compound that I understood what it was.
“It’s a Farm,” I said, bewildered. “It’s an abandoned SafetyNet Farm.” Once it clicked, the whole scene fell into place and I turned in my seat, taking it in.
An electrified fence must once have bordered the area. The main building lay up against the wall of the mountain, where tunnels doubtless led away into the hillside like abandoned concrete wombs. I hoped they were empty. Of course, they would be—they’d hardly abandon valuable spares along with the real estate—but for a moment the alternative possibility seemed all too real. Shambling naked bodies, crawling in darkness until the end of time, feeding off each other’s bodies and excrement until there was nothing left.
Until that moment I hadn’t realized what an extraordinary place the Farm had been, what it really said about humanity. As I stared out at the ruins of this one a shiver went down my back, a shiver which had nothing to do with the cold, or even with The Gap. I was thinking how right it was that the Farms should be connected with that other place, how in some way the mentality behind them was identical.
“Why here?” Vinaldi asked.
I shrugged, stirring sluggishly out of my thoughts. “I have no idea. It’s no closer to The Gap than anywhere else.”
“Unless Maxen’s found some method of forcing a way.”
“Can’t be done.”
“Why not? They got us out, in the end.”
“They didn’t get us out. The Gap got rid of us. They just shipped us home.”