Reality is the concrete of Highway 80 blurring beneath his motorcycle. Reality is the sweat running down the back of his gray tank-top. Reality is the snarling in his stomach, the burning in his throat, and the steady sinking of the fuel gauge. Reality is hard.
He has not slept since leaving New York. He has moved beyond fatigue into delirium, and he is distantly aware that this is foolish, that the road is rough and his motorcycle is shaky and a dead father is no use to anyone. But he keeps riding until the sun is a red blaze behind the black treetops, and then he rides in darkness.
“What is your job?” he murmurs to himself.
“To protect my daughter,” he replies.
“What are you doing right now to move toward success?”
“I’m going to Post to find her.”
He repeats this drill every sixty seconds, the way they made him do it in his early days in Pittsburgh. Path Narrowing, his father-bosses called it. When he was an angry, grief-stricken teenager struggling to accept his new life in Axiom’s workforce, this was an effective focusing exercise, especially when combined with Physical Disincentive. Every night he fell onto his cot, bruised and numb, the questions still shouting in his head, following him into his dreams. He never imagined he’d use the drill voluntarily.
He starts again:
“What is your job?”
“To protect my daughter.”
“What are you doing right now to—”
He kills the engine and lets the bike coast to a stop. A dark shape ahead. A little round mini-van parked in the grass to the side of the road. And in the trees nearby: firelight. A camp. His eyes go round—
The mountain passes of Montana, then Idaho, searching for his family but afraid to call out for them, because what monsters might hear him instead? Every camp, every car, every human encounter a deadly flip of the coin…
He brushes off these old fears. He has his own coin now, and he knows how to flip it his way.
He stashes the motorcycle in the bushes and approaches the camp on foot, whistling loudly. By the time he’s close enough to see the campers, they’re standing at the ready, watching and waiting. A man and woman in their late forties. Thin. Pale. Soft clothes unsuited to life on the road, already worn and torn. Their hands are tensed but empty.
“Hi there!” Abram calls from a safe distance at the edge of the little clearing, raising his pitch and softening his timbre. “Hope I didn’t startle anybody. Been walking all night and was just hoping you might let a stranger share your fire for a minute.”
They relax slightly, and he knows it’s the voice as much as the words. His real voice crouches low inside him like a soldier in a trench, gritty and hard, but this one perches high in his sinuses, quavery, prepubescent, unthreatening. Vocal Placation, they called it in training, just one element of the broader skillset called Adaptive Inducement. At first he had scoffed at how many acting techniques Axiom employed—was he in a troop or a troupe?—but soon enough he understood the motivational poster above his father-boss’s desk:
Use YOUR Head To Get Into THEIRS!
Force Is The Least Efficient Means of Control!
“Well…” the man says, “I don’t see why not.” His face is thickly stubbled but his graying hair is trim, suggesting a fairly recent exile from more civilized realms. “It’s a hard road for all of us. Come on in.” He steps aside and gestures toward the fire. His other hand hovers instinctively above a holster that isn’t there. No hidden weapons, then.
“I sure appreciate it,” Abram says, forcing a grin onto his face and playing up his Montanan drawl. A counterintuitive choice—most of his classmates used drawls for the opposite effect, to boost their masculine swagger—but Abram thinks it pairs well with the boyishness, a wholesome rural charm. “Plenty warm tonight but it’s the loneliness that’ll get you, right? Real good to see some friendly faces.” He reaches out a hand. “Name’s Denny.”
The man looks at it for a moment, then shakes it, and the woman does the same. Their grips are weak. Palms silky. They give him their names but he redacts them immediately.
“You folks coming from Manhattan?” he asks as they take seats around the fire, a shared log for them, a boulder for him.
“That’s right,” the man says, growing more cautious as he recognizes Abram’s khakis and tank-top. “They downsizing soldiers now too? I figured anyone with combat training had a job for life.”
Abram notes the bitterness. Edits his backstory. “Believe it or not, I quit. Ethical differences.”
They both raise their brows.
“I didn’t know you could quit Axiom,” the woman says.
“Things got a little loose in the evacuation. I took my chance.” He looks ruefully at the ground. “They were splitting up families. Taking the high value folks, leaving the rest to die. Sending kids off in buses to God knows where…I said heck with this. Saw my window and jumped out.”
The man nods. “Is it true the whole city went under?”
Abram sighs. “We all knew it was gonna happen but nobody wanted to think about it. Just kept plugging our ears and raising the walls and hoping we’d be gone before it got bad.” He gazes into the fire, sinking deeper into his character, but he keeps the man and woman in his periphery. Poisoner, Electrocutioner…there are plenty of Aggression Skillsets that don’t harden the hands.
“I guess that plan worked out for us,” the woman says dryly. “We missed all the fun.”
“You quit before the storm? How’d you manage that?”
“We didn’t quit exactly.” Her bob of gray-brown hair ends in a choppy line, suggesting a hurried snip while on the move. “The new Management’s been making big cuts to the soft departments. Science, education…if they can’t fit your job into Orientation—”
“Or if you won’t let them fit it,” the man adds bitterly.
“If you can’t or won’t be a part of that horror show…you’re out on the street.”
“So you were scientists?” Abram asks.
“Anthropologists,” the man says. “Some of the last in America, I’d guess.”
Abram nods to himself. “Anthropologists. Okay.” He takes a deep breath and straightens up on his boulder. “Hey listen, I hate to be any trouble, but my canteen ran dry two days ago and to be honest, I’m in a bad way. You folks happen to have any water?”
They don’t even hesitate. The woman gets up, lifts a blanket off a big plastic jug, and fills a paper cup. She hands it to him without a word and he downs it like a shot. “Thanks a million,” he gasps. “And now I’m really gonna feel like a jerk, but any chance you’ve got a spare bite to eat? Food ran out way before the water.”
A brief hesitation at this, then the man digs into a duffel bag and pulls out a Carbtein kit still sealed in its original box, the US Army markings faded but still legible.
“Oh wow, y’all are saints.” Abram gets up and moves toward the man. The man reaches into the bag again and pulls out a pocket knife. Abram pauses. The man runs the knife along the box’s seal and pops the lid. Abram moves closer, watching over the man’s shoulder like a hungry child waiting for dinner. The man lifts a cube from the box, still wrapped in its translucent foil, and hands it to Abram, who takes it with a grateful duck of the head. “Really can’t thank you enough,” he says. “Can I ask for just one more favor, though?”
He’s standing awkwardly close now. The man takes a half step back, looking up at him as if just now noticing how much taller Abram is.
“Can I borrow some gas for my motorcycle?”
The man shoots an uneasy glance at the woman. “Uh…”