by J L Bryan
They left the highway and kept to worn back roads as they traveled northeast through the desert. Again he enjoyed seeing the rich vistas of sand painted in warm tones by the late afternoon sun, which glowed fat and orange in the rearview. It was like another planet, a beautiful place where nobody was watching you.
Lucia found a Spanish-language station playing traditional songs, and in time the cheerful music and the fantastically empty desert soothed Ruppert’s overstrained nerves, and gradually lulled him into a light sleep. When he woke again, he asked Lucia where they were, then checked the map.
“That can’t be right,” Ruppert said.
“What?”
“It looks like you’re taking us right through Las Vegas.”
“That is the fastest way,” Lucia said.
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Daniel, you have to switch your brain around,” she told him. “What is safe and what is dangerous have changed places.”
“I don’t think Vegas is safe no matter whose side you’re on. Do we have any weapons?”
“I have my blade.”
“Great. We couldn’t be more prepared, then. One stone knife.”
"Good for evading metal detectors," Lucia pointed out.
"But that's not what I'm worried about."
They stopped for a restroom break by the side of the road-once they got close to Vegas, they wouldn’t want to stop. Then Lucia claimed the driver's seat again, and they continued driving. Within minutes, the towers of Vegas became visible, illuminated by red sunset reflecting off the acres of glass windows.
The city looked attractive until you drew close enough to see the burned-out cars heaped along the sides of the road, turning the Vegas strip into a shooting alley. They drove between high ramparts of rusting vehicles. Ruppert watched the car-piles for snipers.
They passed a giant black pyramid, a medieval fairy-castle, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State building. All looked frayed at the edges, their facades chewed by years of bombs and machine gun fire. Scattered open-pit fires provided the only lights in the deepening gloom.
Las Vegas was a corpse of a city. Its demise had been brought about in part by a zealous Secretary of Faith and Values in Washington, who outlawed prostitution and gambling nationwide; in part by the Western Resource and Energy Committee's stringent water restrictions on Nevada; and ultimately by water riots in the streets. Now trash filled those streets, sometimes narrowing the strip to a single lane, and gangs of armed men and women inhabited the great husks of theme parks and casinos.
In front of a replica of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomph, the street narrowed again, and iron gates spanned between the piles of rubble, blocking the road. Men flanked the gate, armed with machine guns, dressed in berets and lacy, puffy, beaded coats that looked like they'd been designed during the late Bourbon dynasty, just before its bloody, frilly end.
Lucia slowed as several of the longhaired, unshaven men stepped forward, signaling with velvet-gloved hands for Ruppert and Lucia to stop.
“This is not good,” Ruppert said.
“Don’t worry,” Lucia said. “I doubt they’re Terror informants.”
“That hadn’t occurred to me yet, but thanks.”
A bearded man approached Lucia’s window, and she reached for the handle to roll it down. Ruppert wanted to tell her to stop, but what could they do? Two rough-looking male faces appeared outside his own window, their hostile glares a steep contrast to their puffy silk apparel.
“Toll gate,” the bearded man said through Lucia’s open window. “Ride the king’s road, pay the king’s taxes."
“What's the toll?" Lucia asked him.
“Depends what you carry,” the bearded man said. “Got drugs? Ammo?”
“Sorry,” Lucia said. “We have a little cash, that’s it.”
“Cash?” The bearded man looked to his comrades, who laughed. “Cash doesn’t buy around here. We wipe with cash. Get out of the truck. Your man, too.”
The armed men directed Ruppert and Lucia out into the dusty air and stood them against the grill of the truck. Two of the bandits patted them down and searched their pockets. More searched inside the truck. They unrolled two tarps stored in the back of Archer's truck, one printed with forest camouflage and another with desert camouflage, but were disappointed that nothing was hidden inside them. The bandits dug out the paper bag holding their food and water, Lucia’s worn, patched duffle, Ruppert’s embossed leather suitcase.
“This one looks expensive,” one of them muttered, stroking his fingers across over the suitcase.
“You’re welcome to the suitcase,” Ruppert said. “But the clothes inside are all I have.” He didn’t realize how true those words were until he said them aloud. He was even traveling in a stolen truck.
“We got a million suitcases,” said the bearded man, who seemed to be the group’s leader. “People left quick, back during the riots.”
The men had no interest in Ruppert’s thrift-store clothes, but the contents of Lucia’s duffle drew their attention.
“What’s this here?” A bandit held up her modified remote control, the colored wires tumbling in every direction.
“It’s for housebreaking,” Lucia said, surprising Ruppert with her bluntness. “Really only works on residential systems. Some liquor stores.”
The man snorted and laid it on the truck’s hood. He lifted out a blue data disc the size of a silver dollar, one of fifty in her bag.
“What are all these?” he asked.
“It’s fifty copies of the same video,” Lucia told him.
“Starring you?” he asked, drawing snickers and leers from the others.
“I doubt it would interest you,” she said. “Just a historical document, really.”
“If it’s so not-interesting,” the bearded man asked, “Why you smuggling fifty copies?”
“Why do you assume we’re smuggling?” Ruppert asked.
“You’re driving through Vegas, ain’t you?” the bearded man said. He looked back to Lucia. “What is it?”
“It’s restricted information,” Lucia said. Ruppert wished she would stop there, but she continued. “Letting people know about some covert operations, state secrets, that kind of thing.”
The bearded man stared at Lucia, then gave her a wry smile. He gestured toward one of his men: “Rico, let’s have a look at the lady's data.”
The man named Rico was short and dark, his skin weathered by long exposure to the desert, though he looked no more than twenty. He wore data goggles over his eyes and assorted plastic and metal components strapped to his arms and belt. He took the disc in question, ejected it from its transparent case, and popped it into a console on his arm. Rico then pointed his arm at an empty, sandy patch of road beside the truck. Ruppert and Hollis Westerly appeared in a life-size hologram.
As the interview played, the bandits ceased talking among themselves. Ruppert and Westerly’s voice echoed through the quiet streets, bouncing off the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Sphinx. More bandits emerged one or two at a time for a better look at the video, leaving their hidden guard posts, including two who’d been hiding behind the Eiffel Tower.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Ruppert whispered to Lucia.
“Did you have a better one?” she whispered back.
When the entire video had played, the men stood in silence. Finally, Rico flipped off his projector and spoke up.
“Terror would pay a good bounty for these two, I bet,” he said. “Whatever we wanted.”
A couple of the men grumbled what might have been agreement, but they looked at their shoes as they spoke. To Ruppert’s surprise, most of them remained quiet, their eyes distant. Gradually they turned their attention to the bearded man, who continued to stare at the patch of road where Westerly’s image had been.
“What are you planning to do with this?” he finally asked.
“We’re going to distribute as wide as we can,�
� Lucia said. “There are others doing the same. Lots of others.” Ruppert found this to be an exaggeration, but said nothing.
The bearded man released the disc from Rico’s arm, returned it to its case. “You have fifty copies. I’m keeping one.”
“Of course,” Lucia said. “Make as many copies as you can, too.”
The bearded man looked south along the strip, possibly checking whether any other cars were approaching. None were.
“Let them go,” the bearded man said.
“But there could be a bounty-” Rico protested.
“Shut up.” One of the older bandits cut him off.
“We at least oughta siphon some gas,” another bandit said.
“Quiet,” the bearded man said. “I served four years in the Marines, in the old world. We talked about something called honor. You brats don’t even know what the word means.”
“Sure,” Rico spoke up. “My uncle told me, greed and honor. Greed is killing someone else for your own profit. Honor is when you kill for someone else’s greed, and they keep the profit.”
“Nobody wants to hear your bullshit, Rico.” The bearded man turned back to Ruppert and Lucia. “This is treason, and people need to know it.” He shook his head. A waxing moon was rising behind him. “We used to be a country.”
He turned his back to them and walked towards Paris, his head low, saying nothing. The other men began to peel away. Ruppert and Lucia gathered their belongings and loaded them back into the truck, then climbed up into the cab. Ruppert started the engine, but the sentries at the gate ahead of them didn’t move.
Ruppert leaned out the window. “He said we could go.”
“One minute,” a sentry said, and nodded towards the Eiffel Tower. Rico was returning, holding some kind of large, red container in one hand. He wore a broad, clearly false smile as he approached Lucia’s passenger window.
“I don’t like him,” Lucia whispered. “Tell them to open the gate.”
“Just wait.”
“He’s coming towards me.”
“Have your blade ready.”
“I do.”
Ruppert studied the length of black obsidian resting in her fingers. Not for the first time, he considered how helpful a gun could be to their situation. Legally, only police, government agents, and specially approved citizens could own firearms, but supposedly there were a million or more still circulating the countryside. He imagined firearms stashed away, in small caches of firearms dispersed all over the country, like dry tinder waiting for the match..
Rico approached with his unnaturally wide smile.
“A parting gift for you,” he said. “From the mayor.”
He held it up, and now Ruppert could make out the word stamped on the rectangular five-gallon jug: GASOLINE.
Lucia reached for the jug with one hand, while her other hand positioned the blade just below the edge of the window, ready to strike. She accepted the jug and quickly retreated into the truck, setting it on the floorboard.
Rico backed away, still grinning. “Drive safe,” he said.
“Thanks,” Ruppert said. Lucia did not look at him.
At last, the sentries used a chain-and-pulley system to open the gate. Ruppert drove through it and on along the potholed Vegas strip, passing groups of shriveled people in rags huddled around trash fires in the cluttered streets, while moonlight illuminated the dark, soaring Roman and Chinese palaces behind them. The deprived condition of the people reminded him of south Los Angeles. He was beginning to wonder if most people in the country were living this way, and if his walled and protected suburb was the exception and not, as he'd somehow been led to believe, the norm.
He stomped the accelerator-there would be other armed gangs lurking in the windblown city ahead, and he didn’t want to tempt any of them.
“We have to dump this.” Lucia lifted the five-gallon gas can.
“What? Why?”
“He could have put a tracker in it.” She thumped the large black cap with her fingernail. “Maybe even a listener.”
“They’re just desert people,” he said. “It was a gift. They support us.”
“Desert people with computers on their arms,” Lucia said. “The one wanted to contact Terror for a bounty. He must have done it before.”
Ruppert’s good mood, which had just begun to develop, now evaporated. “But the bearded guy said to let us go.”
“Bigger share for Rico and his friends.”
Ruppert frowned. Maybe she was paranoid, but he’d learned to be paranoid, too. “All right. We’ll pour the gas in the truck and dump the can.”
“Not happening.”
“We need it. We can’t afford to keep gassing up your pal’s monster truck.”
“If he’s calling Terror, he could also taint our fuel to make us an easier catch. Probably pay him a bonus. And a tracker could be floating in there, too.”
“You want to throw away six hundred dollars’ worth of gas?”
“It could cause thirty thousand dollars in damage to the truck. And I prefer to be alive and free, if it all possible. Why are you slowing down?”
“Look.” They’d reached another barricade, this one erected of I-beams, more wrecked cars, and glittering curtains hung on chainlink. Already, men with machine guns were appearing at their windows.
Lucia rolled down the window and addressed the largest man in rapid-fire Spanish. She held up the jug, spoke a bit more, and he nodded and accepted it. He waved them through, and the sentries pulled their tangled metal gate aside.
“Two problems solved.” She smiled at Ruppert, something he hadn’t seen before. He’d seen her as dangerous, tough, resourceful, but now it occurred to him that beneath the angry glare etched into her face, she might be beautiful, too.
“What are you looking at?” she said.
“Just you.”
She dipped her head away and looked out the window. “Drive. I don’t want to stop until we’re in Utah.”
TWENTY-SIX
It was six more hours of rough driving through canyons, washouts, and choppy dirt roads before Lucia, who’d drifted in and out of sleep since Las Vegas, announced they should stop to rest. Ruppert kept checking his rearview, expecting an armada of armored cars and black helicopters to erupt over the horizon at any moment, but there was nothing but desert and night sky. They’d been traveling for more than twenty-four hours, and though he hadn’t seen a Terror agent in many days now, Ruppert felt pursued. Maybe they were toying with him, watching him through satellites. There could even be a drone cruising above the Bronto, keeping a special tab on them, and Ruppert would never know.
“This is far enough,” Lucia said, blinking away sleep. “We need a place to hide.”
“We still have another hour to Goblin Valley.”
“And we don’t want to get any closer. I’m the extractions expert, remember?” She zoomed to a closer view of their location on the digital dashboard map. They were near a region marked Capitol Reef National Park. “Utah. We should find a slot canyon.”
For the first time, Ruppert enjoyed the fact that the Party had gutted the parks and conservation budget long ago. There would be hardly any rangers to find them. Not much risk of tourists, either. The wilderness teemed with the insane, the murderous, and the criminal, or so Ruppert had frequently reported. The Dominionists preached against visiting the wild, insisted it was home to demons, emphasized that time in the wilderness had made even Jesus vulnerable to the devil’s temptations. The only real sanctuary was the church and the company of fellow believers.
“Turn off here,” Lucia said. They turned down a narrow rut of a path littered with boulders and rocks. Ruppert eased the truck around, and sometimes over, the rocks. The truck seemed like it could handle the terrain, but he worried about the tires.
She directed him through a series of sharp, steep turns. His headlights shone on irregular rock surfaces pitted with long, deep shadows, like Rorschach blots, and his tired brain could hardly inter
pret any meaning from what his eyes told him.
“Okay, slow down,” she said. She leaned until her nose almost touched the screen, scrutinizing the old satellite image of the park. “You want to slow down…and turn to the left…right…here.”
Ruppert gingerly turned the wheel to the left, unable to understand the strange rock patterns around him, and drove them over a cliff. His fingernails bit into the steering wheel as the front tires reached out into empty space, and then the whole front end of the truck dropped like the heavy end of seesaw. They slammed into a hard, steep slope, rattling everything inside the cab and shoving Ruppert and Lucia upward against their seatbelts, which dug deep into their thighs and abdomens. He thought he felt his brain splosh against the dome of his skull.
The truck charged forward at an extreme downhill angle, out of his control, fishtailing down a washed-out gully.
“Gas!” Lucia screamed. “Give it gas!”
“What?” he asked, but his foot, which had been searching for the brakes, took her advice instead and stomped the accelerator. They roared down the slope. In the headlights, a high, solid ridge appeared in the distance and rapidly swelled to consume his field of vision.
“Turn!” Lucia yelled, but his hands were already moving. Ruppert’s instinct was to wrench the wheel as hard as possible, but his numbed shock at the situation saved him, and he only turned it a little. The truck spun to the right, and they skittered down the remainder of the slope and then skipped across an uneven surface of eroded rock.
The canyon narrowed quickly around them-ahead, Ruppert could see where the smooth boulders of the opposing canyon walls nearly touched each other. A man on foot would have to climb his way through.