“Jed,” Marena’s voice said. “If we don’t catch you, please reconsider. Don’t kill my kid. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please…” There was something that might have been either a sniffle or static and I wondered whether she was crying. I wished I could tell her what was what, that my motivation was utterly simple, that I’d simply seen something so horrible, or rather I’d worked out a truth that was so horrible, that I don’t think even the greatest writer who ever lived could convey it, although maybe H. P. Lovecraft, with the whole thing about the Other Gods gnawing at the crust of the universe, would come closest, except even that seems almost hopeful compared to the bleakness I’d seen when-but this wasn’t the right time for that discussion, even if Marena would have listened. I got on the ramp-and I know this is a bad time to brag, but I really took the speed bumps like Adrian Fernandez-and onto the Teflon-smooth highway, north toward the orange glow of burning houses in Orlando proper.
“Do you like Max?” Marena’s voice went.
“Sure,” I said.
“Do you love Max?”
“This-I, listen, this train of conversation is, I’m not…”
“You do, I know you love Max, so why do you, why, why, why, why…”
“I know what I’m doing,” I said. For some reason, at that moment I realized I’d left the nudibranch book behind. Damn it, I thought, my resolve was getting nicked up. Marena and Max and whoever were, like, real people, people with families, people who cared about each other, and I was just a fake person nobody including myself cared about, just one of those nowhere man losers who manage to take a few other people down with them, or in my case everybody. Damn, I needed to think about things. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I’d made a mistake, maybe Marena’s tone shifted down. “I knew that samlet shit would eat out your brain,” she said.
“It’s tsam lic, ” I said. “That means like ‘blood lightning.’ A samlet’s like a fishling or some-”
“You’re a junkie and like, true to form, you’ve gone-”
“It has nothing to do with the drugs.”
“Sure. You’re just like any other OD’ing psycho.”
“Uh-huh.” The needle crossed over to the sweet side of a hundred. There was a Chevy up ahead of me going just as fast. Evidently the police had given up on the area. Billboards passed me like pages flipping in a magazine: Orlando: It’s All about Options. Spartacus Jones, Opening December 19. Legoland Orlando. I felt a thrilling lack of self-preservatory neuromodulators. When you’re sure that death’s around the next curve, suddenly you can deal with anything. What was too bad, though, was that I figured they had a LoJack and any number of other trackers on me, so I’d need to change cars pretty soon and kiss the ’Cuda good-bye. And for that matter, I could practically feel an itch on my scalp where the Warren Communications ROGS, the RapidEye Operational Geostationary Satellite, was tracking me from a hundred and forty miles overhead. And was Grgur actually chasing me? I couldn’t see any fast cars behind me on the GPS. Weird. Maybe he’d decided the cars they had would be too slow and hadn’t even taken one out. Just get downtown, I thought. They have everything. I clicked up a state police page that I’d marked, that showed where the manned checkpoints were and where they weren’t. It looked like if I just kept on 27 and got off at Revolutionary Road, I’d get downtown without dealing with any PoPos. No prob “Jed, I’m serious,” Marena said, “you’re not thinking clearly.”
“Look, yes,” I said, “I know crazy people think they’re not crazy, but actually I know I’m crazy about a lot of things, it’s just that this particular thing-I mean-oh, fuck. I mean, it really, really checks out. That’s like, suppose I said, ‘two times forty is eighty’ and you said that can’t be true because I’m crazy, that’s just-I mean, it’s that level of certainty.” The road went over an orchard that used to be a swamp and had tried to turn into an industrial “park” before the recession, and now was reverting to swamp. I passed six cars and a semi. There wasn’t much traffic. Even though the Park District had been closed for months, a video billboard advertising the Rainforest Cafe and the Tree of Life was still running a loop of giant rocketing centipedes. Zoom, zoom, zoom.
“Jed, everything-”
“Mister DeLanda?” Grgur’s accented voice interrupted. “We are go to ask you once and we are not go to ask you again. Stop the vehicle and wait of us. We know where you go. Understood?”
“Sorry,” I said. Either he’s bluffing or I’m toast, I thought. Maybe I should just aim this crate into the next overpass upright. I’d be out in a blaze of gory-uh, glory-and everything would still go on according to plan. But like Donald Pleasence in Telefon, I wanted to watch every little thing myself. Dimwit.
“If you do not stop, we are go to shut down your systems. Do you understand?”
“Put Marena back on and we’ll chat,” I said. I was passing a thirty-two-wheel car carrier with Aerostar vans packed into it like ticks in a wound. EXIT 29, a sign read. GAS FOOD LODGING.
“Mister DeLanda?” Grgur asked. “Listen. Get right now away from other vehicles. Understood?”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Say again?” He can’t be really serious, I thought. The variable constellation of molded-acrylic-slab fluorescent signage rose into view against the dark orange sky, Taco Bell, Quiznos, Gulf, Texacoco, Burger King, Jamba Juice, Chicken Itza, McDonald’s, Arby’s, a regular Amalthea’s Horn of affordable dainties.
“We shutting down your systems,” Grgur said again.
“Not understood,” I said. Bullshit, I thought, hopefully. Still, I got into the right lane and slowed a little. If they were watching me I didn’t want them to think I was taking the threat seriously, but then if he was telling the truth I didn’t want to Pain shot through my nose and into my jaw and there was just grayness in my eyes and everything started happening in a confusing way, and I couldn’t see a thing, just this wall of fog.
(12)
— but it wasn’t fog, it was semisolid, and I couldn’t get my arms around it to reach the wheel. Instinctively I stepped on the brake-I brake with my left foot-and the brake was engaging, but I could feel that the car wasn’t quite stopping and at about this time I figured out that the gray stuff was the driver’s-side airbag. There was a rumbling in the belly underneath me and a string of metallic pops as we slid over the line of flexible reflector posts. I could feel my testicles retracting. Cowards. One whiff of trouble and they go skittering back to the inguinal canal. The airbag was already deflating but the car was tipping alarmingly to the right, even though I thought it was totally flat around here, like one inch above sea level, but it was still just tipping and tipping and then there was all this scraping like it was driving over shrubbery and then it was just STOP, an instant absolute stop, and my right hand crunched against the lip of the dash screen and my forehead CHUNKED through the limpening vinyl into the lip of the dashboard with a blue flash of detaching retinas.