by John Barnes
A hundred yards beyond it, there was a paved path almost at the bank of the arroyo. “Let me take this carefully,” Paula said. “This would be one hell of a time to flip, after what we’ve just been through.”
She turned and backed carefully, and got a running start, spraying damp sand and nearly burying first the front bumper and then the back axle, but in one heroic bound, we were up onto the narrow road—path, really, it was barely wide enough for the van and a minute’s nervous maneuvering went into getting us pointed along it.
“Well, roads usually lead to other roads, and bridges are hooked to roads,” Paula said, “so somewhere back there, maybe, this will join a road that will get us out of this valley, and give us a chance to try to head north again. How are they?”
“Both unconscious, now,” I said. “If you want to, we can stop and try to treat them, but I’ve got nothing to stop the bleeding with, and I think they both have rapid internal hemorrhaging. I don’t think either of them will last out the hour.”
Paula pulled the van off the road and into a group of trees where it would be hidden. “Well, then let them die in comfort.” She climbed back to join the rest of us.
Jesús sighed. “I am going to miss Esmé. I worked with her so many years. And I didn’t like Iphwin much—who could? he was half machine!—but he was trying to learn to be human, and I am sorry he never finished the job.”
Terri was wiping her eyes. “We’re like the ten little Indians,” she said. “We just keep getting mowed down. There’s no way that we’ll make it there.”
Paula looked around. “Lyle, how are you feeling?”
“Stressed out and miserable,” I said, “but I’m still here. Sort of.”
Terri was crying, now, steadily, and saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Jesús reached out to comfort her and she pressed her face into his chest, still crying. His eyes were looking into a black vacuum a thousand miles away.
Paula sighed and sat down next to me, in the middle passenger seat. “Put an arm around me, I need some comfort,” she said. I did; for a while I thought she wasn’t going to say anything further, but then she said, “We should be escaping but nobody’s got the energy. And at least Iphwin and Esmé get to die in some kind of peace. One of the Billie Beards saw us down by the stream; do you suppose the others will be along soon?”
“Hard to tell,” I said. “But I’m not fit for much, Jesús is pretty stressed, and—” I brushed her red hair off her face and found that it was partly stuck down with tears “—Paula, you’re not too well off yourself.” Internally I was gibbering on the edge of just sitting down and crying, and demanding that everything go back to making sense, but since everyone else had earned a collapse too, and was taking theirs, mine would have to wait. I fought down the sick feeling in my guts and the scream waiting in my throat, and said, as calmly as I could manage, “At the moment we’re on a road. What if we just drive far enough, right now, to be out of sight of the streambed? This whole ravine seems to be pretty brushy. They might still find us but at least we’d be somewhat concealed—and if they don’t find us, then we’ll get some rest and be ready to start in the dark. If they do, here’s as good a place to fight as any, since we’re going to be surrounded and heavily outnumbered and won’t stand much of a chance.”
“Good enough for me,” she said. “Sit in the passenger seat beside me, okay?”
We climbed forward and started the van. The tires now not only lumped, but rumbled—”Their surfaces must be rough,” Paula said. “Permatires never blow out, but I’d imagine a few dozen bullet holes don’t leave them at their best all the same.”
The narrow strip of asphalt switched back at a very steep angle, and getting around it was difficult. The rise was steep, too, and we could see the creek bottom the whole way up, so we kept going till we found another switchback—and again, the rise and the angle were problems. But halfway through that stretch of road, we were on the inside of a broad ledge, and no longer visible from the creek bed.
“Here we are, then,” I said.
“Esmé is dead, I think,” Jesús said, his voice perfectly flat.
I crawled back. There was no pulse, and the bullet wound was still slowly leaking blood; her pupils didn’t respond to light.
“I agree,” I said. “I don’t think she was in pain for long.”
There was a sudden, overpowering smell, and I saw the front of Iphwin’s pants become wet; his sphincter had let go. No pulse, nothing in the pupils.
It was a strange way to rest, but compared to what had gone before, it was almost restful: Jesús and I used the oil change pan that we found in the back to scoop out two shallow graves. Paula and Terri gathered rocks until there were enough of them to at least put a few obstacles in the path of a bear or coyote.
Nobody had any words to say; we just laid them in and covered them, and sort of said good-bye. Jesús sat by Esmé’s grave till it was dark, while the rest of us slept.
* * * *
As soon as there was moonlight, just after midnight, we drove slowly up the strange, winding asphalt road. “I keep thinking there’s some reason for this road to be the way it is,” I said, “and I can’t figure it out, but it seems to be right on the front edge of my forebrain.”
“Well, this is a very wet ravine, too,” Terri said. She seemed to have recovered as much as she was likely to for a while, and was sitting on the seat immediately behind Paula and me, leaning forward to help us look for obstacles. “That might be artificial, you know. Maybe we’re in a public park?”
“Ha! That’s got to be it. Paved hiking trail in a public park. Probably we’re moving up toward a reservoir or something,” Paula said. “Good news, anyway, whatever the case, because we’ve got more vegetation to provide cover.”
Fifteen minutes of going slowly along the dark road by moonlight brought us up to the top, and we discovered that the guess had been right—it was a state park built around a reservoir. We drove out the main gate and found a road that would take us north; moonlight was more than bright enough, and we had three hours of cruising along it at about thirty miles an hour.
“I guess it’s a miracle that all those shots didn’t knock out the motor,” Terri said.
“Naw,” I said. “No moving parts except in the motor and transmission, and those had metal cages around them to shield people and electronics from the magnetic fields. Nothing much to hit. They might have got a wheel bearing, and they got two of us, but the basic propulsion system was pretty hard to stop.”
As if it had heard me, a wheel bearing began a dull screaming sound, and within another three miles, we had sparks flickering under the car. We left the van there and walked till almost dawn, when we found another tiny, deserted town, with what we needed—a motel with beds and some stores to loot. By the night afterward, we had four reasonably well-equipped backpacks, a sleeping bag each, and two lightweight tents. The only thing we didn’t find was another Telkes battery car, but that was less urgent. We thought it might take a few days to walk, or perhaps we’d turn up another car when we reached Albuquerque, in a couple of days.
That long walk was very strangely peaceful; we had none of us known each other well, even ten days before, and since then we had lost friends, lovers, our very worlds and realities, we four, and we had little to look forward to except solving a riddle posed by a machine, and yet we kept going as if we were four old friends out for a pleasant backpacking trip.
Albuquerque had been partly wrecked by flood and fire, but not looted; the further we walked into it, the more apparent it was that the people had vanished, and all the damage we saw was merely a case of things not being repaired. We found intact buildings next to burned ones, with useful and valuable stuff lying around; a city prone to flash floods, as its canals and sewers became blocked, had been partially washed away, but there was no plan to the damage. It was just as if everyone had walked away, a few decades ago, and left it to do this on its own.
After about forty minu
tes of wandering up and down residential streets, looking fruitlessly for a car with the keys in it, Terri said, “I have an idea.”
“That puts you ahead of the rest of us,” Jesús said.
“It might. I was just thinking, everything here looks like people just vanished, doesn’t it? And took nothing of any value with them?”
“Right.”
“So would they have taken their car keys?”
“Only if they were in their pockets,” Jesús said. “And besides, lots of people keep a spare in the house. This is a great idea, Terri. All we have to do is break into a house with a car we want in the driveway.”
Half a block later we found a suitable-looking Jeep with low miles and Telkes batteries, parked under a carport. We went around back to minimize visibility, in case someone hunting for us should be not far behind, and found a dog skeleton still chained to an overhead wire. “Poor thing,” Terri said, “don’t you just bet he starved or died of thirst?”
That cast kind of a pall over things, but in a minute we had discovered that there was no lock on the tool shed, and a perfectly fine crowbar was in there. With a little effort, the back door opened, and we were inside.
Not a thing had been touched; everything looked as if the owners had just planned to be gone for a few minutes. We scattered through the house to look for the keys; a moment later I heard Jesús swear, and ran to see what he’d found.
There was a desiccated cat on the floor, clearly mummified in the dry indoors, but that wasn’t it. Near the cat was a crib, and in the crib there was a scattered tumble of bones. “You see?” Jesús said. “They must have vanished with no time at all. They left their baby behind. And then after a while, the cat was hungry, the baby had probably already starved ...” He shuddered and crossed himself.
“What did you find?” Paula said, cheerfully, from the hallway.
“Something we’d rather not have seen,” I said. “There’s a corpse of a baby in here.” I looked around further and said, “And two plugged-in VR headsets on the bed. As if the people wearing them just vanished.”
Paula came in anyway, and, practical sort that she was, got a towel from the bathroom and made a makeshift shroud for the little pile of bones. “We can bury it in the backyard,” she suggested to Jesús.
Shortly Jesús and I were digging a small grave in back, in the hot desert sun, working our way through the hardpan soil. While we were doing that Terri came out to let us know that they had discovered a fairly large supply of soda in the basement, and a much larger supply of wine—”and the car keys,” she said. “On the worktable in the garage. We didn’t even have to come into the house to find them, if we’d known.”
By the time we had buried the little body, and put the birth certificate that we had found in the desk into a freezer bag under a rock on top of the grave, it was getting later in the evening, and we decided to stick around, have a dinner of canned vegetables and wine, and get started in the morning.
“The clue to it all, I think, if I could sort it out,” I said, “is the headsets on the bed. VR connect time is incredibly expensive everywhere, even today. And that VR box that they have is stamped with a US government insignia and says it was issued by the Department of the Pursuit of Happiness.”
“We’ve seen people appear and disappear, while talking on the phone,” Jesús pointed out. “And VR goes through the same quantum compression and decompression as the phone does.”
“But usually what people do is trade places between universes,” Paula pointed out. “How come no one traded in for these people?”
None of us could think of anything. Nobody wanted to sleep in the master bedroom, where we’d found the body, but there were two kids’ beds in other rooms, a guest bed, and the couch. Feeling noble, I took the couch, and fell asleep at once. It made two good nights’ sleep in a row, which left me feeling practically human.
The next morning we discovered, in the fridge, an unopened gallon of irradiated milk. Sure enough, it was still perfectly drinkable, though of course it had separated; there were also unopened packets of cereal, also irradiated and therefore not spoiled, though they had managed to become very dry. We all had two or three bowls of cereal and a large glass of milk. “Breakfast of seven-year-olds,” I said, “and look at how much energy they have.”
Just as we were getting up from the table—something about the niceness of the place made us stack our dishes in the nonfunctioning sink—Paula looked up over my shoulder, stared, and said, “Oh, shit.”
“Oh shit what?”
“This place has a silent alarm, people.” She pointed at a box on the wall where a little red light pulsed like a tiny, evil heart. “See? It says the alarm was activated.” She got up, walked over to it, and looked at the readout. “All the while we’ve been asleep, the house has been phoning for help. We can hope it’s been dialing a number that isn’t hooked to anything, but I don’t think we can count on it. Grab your stuff and run to the car—we’ve got to move.”
We were out the door and the Jeep was rolling, two minutes later. “How can whoever picks up that alarm be sure it isn’t an animal opening the door, or the door just falling down after all these years, or something?” Terri asked.
“They can’t be, but if they’ve got the resources to send, what, twenty people or so after us, so far, into this place, they probably can check out all the alarms eventually,” Paula said, making her third U-turn in ten minutes. She was jigging around, trying to find a way through a city of fallen bridges and washed-out roads. “We’ll just have to do what we can.”
Though it took hours to find our way through the ruins of Albuquerque, with so many bridges down, once we found a way back to I-25 it was just a bare hour to reach Santa Fe. We expected to be shot at, at any moment, or the car to die and leave us halfway between, but neither happened. “Here we are,” I said, pulling off the highway and heading into town, “and to judge by the number of signs telling us where to find the Department of the Pursuit of Happiness, we’ll probably find it pretty soon. That will put an end to one part of the adventure, and start another. Anyone have any profound thoughts?”
“I wish we’d never come,” Terri said, tears in her voice, speaking better for me than I had for myself.
The Department of the Pursuit of Happiness turned out to be on the old town square, facing the cathedral; it was a huge building and though forty years or more had gone by, it was conspicuously newer and in better shape than anything around it. It was huge, square, and forbidding, taking up at least one whole city block and reaching at least ten stories into the sky— we had seen it from the highway without knowing what it was.
“The building is built like a bank, a mint, or a prison,” Jesús said. “Big thick walls, windows far off the ground and very small, no good hiding places along its sides. There’s either something they want to keep in, or something they are trying to keep out.”
“Well,” I said, as we all got out of the car, “I don’t suppose they’ll have any active measures around to keep us from going in the front door. It does say ‘Lobby.’ And this seems to be a lucky day—no sign of pursuit yet, and no evidence that anyone knows we’re alive. Maybe the silent alarm just wasn’t hooked up to anything anymore.”
Paula shrugged. “Or maybe Iphwin—the cyberphage, I mean —is acting on our behalf, or maybe the bad guys can’t travel to anywhere this far north for reasons known only to the bad guys.”
“Or maybe they know where you have to go, and there’s no point chasing you all over the field when they can just wait for you there,” a familiar voice said.
We turned around and there was Geoffrey Iphwin, perfectly healthy, wearing his old ridiculous bright white ice cream suit with a painfully loud gold and purple tie. He looked at our slack-mouthed stares and laughed aloud. “Now don’t look so startled. Remember I was only dead in a few thousand of my existences; I crossed over here, with the assistance of the machine-Iphwin. Now a few thousand of me are talking to a few thou
sand of you. And here I am. I think the adversary is probably coming after us fast, so we should get moving. As for how I found you, I knew where you were headed and how you were traveling. Now, if everyone is ready, let’s go.”
We all were ready enough physically; we just didn’t have a clue as to how to deal with a person we all remembered as dead. But then, why fret about it? He seemed comfortable enough.
“We are coming up on the end of things,” Iphwin said as we crossed the public square. “I think when we get closer there will be some kind of attack. I still don’t know what’s going on and the knowledge may destroy me, or the program of which I’m an avatar, but I see no way I could avoid trying to learn it now. Suppressed curiosity, I bet, has killed more cats than exercised curiosity.”
Jesús said, “If they really want to stop us, why don’t they just hit this whole area with hydrogen bombs until it glows? That would be much more likely to work than trying to hunt us like deer.”