"Don't mention it," she told him, and gunned the car back into the flowing traffic.
She had some money in her bag and her credit cards and there was no reason why she should go back.
On the lam, she thought. But not really on the lam. Going to someone, not running from someone.
God grant, she thought, that he's still all right!
28
He had swung far south of Chicago. Once, from far off, he had seen the distance-misted towers and blocks of masonry that rose beside the lower end of the lake. Now he was west of it and heading north, still following the tiny, twisting, oldtime roads. At times they dwindled out or became impassable and he would be forced to turn around and retrace his way, looking for another of the primitive, grass-grown highways that trended in the right direction.
It had been like that all the way from the East Coast and he had not made good progress. Although there was no reason now that he should make good progress. There was no reason, he told himself time and time again, that he go anywhere. He had no actual destination; the destination that he did have was an emotion-charged fantasy in which there could be no real meaning and no purpose. The comfort and identity which it seemed to hold was no more than delusion; when he arrived it would be as empty and as barren as any mile along the road he took to reach it. But knowing this, he still made his way toward it, driven by an inner urge which he failed to understand.
He met few people. Through the areas he traveled there were few inhabitants. Occasionally there would be a down-at-heels family living—camping might be a better word—at one of the many abandoned sets of farm buildings. Occasionally there were tiny villages still inhabited, a few families still lived there in a stubborn refusal to join the now all but completed movement to the vast urban centers, existing in a small nucleus of humanity surrounded by the empty and decaying structures which at one time had housed a healthy community.
At times he drove past monitor-and-rescue stations, with the rescue cars and helicopters standing on the ramp, ready at an instant to dash out to retrieve a body when the monitor housed within the building detected the cessation of a transmitter signal, indicating that a heart had stopped its beating, pegging with exactitude the geographic coordinates where the stoppage had occurred.
There could not, Frost imagined, be much work to do at stations such as these, for due to the thinly scattered population months might go by without a single death within the quadrant covered by a station. And yet, even in those areas where, for long periods of time, there might be no signal except for some transient passing through, the stations still were maintained against the chance that within the area some life might flicker out.
For, despite what might be said of it, despite the rumors and the watchful critics, Forever Center still kept the ancient faith, still carried on the tradition of service which was implicit in the purpose for which it had been founded. And that, Frost told himself, with a surge of pride, was the way it had to be. For faith was the one solid foundation upon which such a social structure could be built.
The roads he traveled did not allow the piling up of any great amount of mileage in any single day. The necessity of finding food delayed the progress further. He foraged for berries and from scraggly trees still surviving in old orchards he gathered early-ripened fruit. He fished with fair success in many tiny streams, in some larger rivers. From a strong hickory sapling he fashioned a bow and trimmed arrows from ash sprouts, spent hours in trying to learn how to handle the weapon he'd devised. But the bow and arrows did not pay for the time expended in the making of them. Inexpertly fashioned, the bow admitted of little accuracy. The only game he gathered with it was an ancient wood-chuck, tough and stringy, but at least red meat, the first that he had tasted in many weeks.
In an abandoned farmhouse he found a kettle, with some rusty spots, but still intact. A few days later, on the edge of a scummy pond, he captured a snapping turtle that had strayed too far from water, butchered it, and put it in the kettle to boil. He was not entirely sure that he liked the soup, but it was food and that was the thing that counted.
He began to have a sense of leisure. No longer hiding, no longer running, he moved down a long and twisting avenue of contented time. Finding a camping place that appealed to him, he'd stay for several days, resting, fishing, swimming, foraging, and eating. He attempted to smoke some of the fish he caught, to build up a food supply against a future day. The experiment did not work out.
He no longer watched the road behind him. Marcus Appleton undoubtedly still was hunting for him, but the chances were, he told himself, that he had not learned as yet his prey had left the city. The theft of the car
would have been long since reported, the car to which he'd switched the plates might have been discovered, but there was no way, he felt sure, that the theft could be traced to him. The recognition and recovery of a stolen car was not an easy thing, for all cars were alike, all turned out by one company, which no longer bothered, since there was no competition and no customer demand, to change the models every year—or every ten or twenty years.
For the cars were standard, engineered to certain well-established specifications. All small, so they took less space. All powered by lifelong batteries—silent, fume-less, slow of speed, all with low centers of gravity. The kind of car to fit the crowded street conditions under which most of them were used and equipped with safety devices to protect their occupants.
Now Chicago was behind him and he was heading north. One day he reached the river and knew exactly where he was. The old iron bridge, red with rust, still bridged the stream, and off to the east were the gray and weathered bones of a deserted village, and to the west, just short of the bridge, was an ancient track that flanked the river, running between the water and the limestone-ribbed, tree-covered bluffs.
Twenty miles, he thought—twenty miles was all and he would be home. Although, even as he thought about it, he knew it wasn't home and it had never been. It was simply familiar, a place he once had known.
He swung the car to the right and was on the river road, a narrow set of wheel tracks with a ribbon of grass between them and brush and drooping tree branches so close they rasped against the body of the car.
A hundred yards and the brush and trees ended and ahead was a little meadow, which had been at one time, most likely, a cornfield or a pasture. Beyond the meadow the trees and brush closed in again. A short distance up the hillside a few tumbledown farm buildings sat amidst weeds and sprouting brush.
In the center of the clearing, just off the road, lay;camp. Dirty patched tents stood in a circle. Thin spirals of blue smoke swirled up from cooking fires. Three or four battered, rusted cars stood to one side of the tents and there were animals which must have been horses, athough Frost had never seen a horse. And there were dogs, and people, all turned to look at him some of them starting to move toward him and crying back and forth to one another-shrill, triumphant cries.
In the instant that it took for the scene to register noon Frost's mind, he knew what he had stumbled on-o band of Loafers, one of those strange and vicious tabes which roamed the countryside, that small percentage of unemployed and unemployable who through the years had resisted all attempts to find a place for them in the economic structure. There were not many of them, perhaps; but here was one of the bands and bed run headlong into it!
He slowed the car, then changed his mind and accelerated, heading down the road, building up his speed in hope that he'd be able to run clear of the pack of humans who were streaming from the camp.
For a moment it seemed that he might have made it, for he pulled even with and was forging past the largest body of the running men. Looking out the window, to the side, he could see their screaming faces, bearded, dirty, mouths open in their shouting, lips peeled back to show their teeth.