by Sam Winston
He said to Weller don’t forget to take out that satellite phone you wired in and Weller said yes sir just as soon as I’m finished here. Clicking the seatbelt around his little girl probably just for the fun of it. Shoulder harness and all. Wasting time, putting off the inevitable, and Carmichael saying again that he ought to get on with taking that satellite phone out and he’d appreciate it if he’d be careful not to do any more damage than he’d already done putting it in. Looking at dents and scratches in the paint job that he was just now beginning to notice. Scars that would never go away entirely, no matter how much he paid the best body shop in New York. Not in his mind, anyhow. Carmichael getting a little steamed and watching Weller go around to the passenger side and open the front door and begin messing with the phone. The little girl in the back closing her door and folding her hands in her lap like she was ready to go. A kid going on a trip with her mom and dad. Let her have that. What was the harm.
Weller said something to the girl behind the wheel and she slid over his way. Bent to help him with the phone. Apparently it took two but that was all right with Carmichael. Just as long as they got it done.
God, it was a beautiful car.
He stepped around to the back and admired it from that angle. Ran his hand over the sheetmetal and squinted hard and said didn’t they have any black ones and Weller said this was as close as they had. This dark maroon. He was sorry, but they’d been out of black and what could you do. They sure weren’t making any more. He said you could have it repainted if you wanted to. He said Carmichael could probably afford that couldn’t he and Carmichael laughed. Beginning to enjoy himself for a change.
They were still horsing around with the phone and Weller’s wife was still sorting stuff from the back seat so he went around the front and admired it from there. Down on one knee looking up. That feline car glowering down at the man who owned it now. The headlights were different from the headlights on any other car he’d seen and he studied them thinking he should have asked Weller to get spares. He realized that the whole car was tilting down toward the passenger side and he edged that way to discover the little spare tire they’d put on. Said to Weller of course you saved the tire you blew and the rim that went with it and Weller said sure, sure. Not even paying him any attention. Not wanting to deal with him.
Weller said that about does it and stood up. Dusting off his pantlegs. A sound from inside the car of the doors unlocking and then Weller going around the back and opening the driver’s side and getting in and Liz getting in too and the both of them slamming the doors shut while Carmichael was still down on one knee lamenting that pathetic little spare tire he was stuck with. The transmission slamming into reverse and the engine screaming and the car, the car for which he’d gone to so much trouble, slipping through his fingers just like that.
* * *
The yellow Hummer was no match for the X9 and Carmichael didn’t know the exits the way Weller did. The yellow car ended up southbound back into New Jersey while Weller and Janey and Liz and Penny roared out over the bridge toward Manhattan and beyond. Penny in the back seat looking out the window and saying she hoped this was the last time she’d ever see that city and her father agreeing with her. Once was enough. But at least she’d seen it.
Janey looked too, southward, awed by the approaching glory of Manhattan itself and by the contrasting unplugged ruin of Jersey City. All of the life drained out of it. The Hudson held more water than she had ever seen in her life and she said so. She asked was this a part of the ocean and Weller said he guessed you could say that since it drained into it. He wasn’t much on the geography around here. Liz told her just wait until Long Island Sound if she wanted to see water. If she wanted to see the ocean more or less.
Weller adjusted the rearview mirror to look in Liz’s eyes and tell her he was sorry she’d had to make that trip all by herself. Her first and only time out of Farmington and under such circumstances. Liz said at least she’d ridden in a car instead of having to go the way he and Penny had gone. On foot and hitchhiking and everything else. Everything else Penny had told her about. The man with the knife and the truck driver who’d gotten in trouble. At least she’d had a safe trip down, although that was more than she was going to be able to say about the trip back. The way he was driving. The way they’d run off with Carmichael’s car here. Saying he’d told her it was an emergency and he’d told her what to do about getting in the car, but he hadn’t told her why.
Janey put down her window and stuck her arm out. Pointing south. Saying, “That’s why, right there.”
Helicopters. Tearing up the Hudson toward the bridge. Two of them one after the other, the little black ones that looked venomous with the sun from the western sky glinting hard off their glossy surfaces and gleaming against the bright globes of their windows. Their rotors just a couple of blurs. No sooner had Janey seen them than the telephone came alive all on its own. The Black Rose satellite phone they hadn’t disconnected. A series of lights flashed in sequence on the phone down by her feet and the pictogram throbbed to life on the dashboard screen and she pushed it.
Weller gritted his teeth and shook his head and said, “You think we can listen in? Maybe we can find out where they’re headed.” As if they didn’t already know. Pressing his foot to the floor and the car bounding past a line of National Motors trucks and the helicopters drawing nearer. Truckers gawking southward from their open windows at the murderous pair of them as they approached over the water. The helicopters low and the green surface of the river bucking and shimmering beneath their blades. The truckers waving at them like idiots. Blasting their air horns and gaily greeting death itself.
Voices snarled over the air. Numbers mostly. This vector and that heading. None of it meant much. Weller said Penny, we’re headed for that tobacco farm. Remember the tobacco farm?
She said she did and Liz said she’d told her all about it.
“The bad news is that these fellows in the helicopters are headed there too. They mean harm to our friends, I’m sad to say. And they’re an awful lot faster than we are.”
Janey said, “Maybe we can slow them down.” Pushing on a corner of the touchscreen and sending it into some other mode. Asking Liz to hand her that black box with the screen on it from behind the seat and hooking the scanner up to something under the dash with a pair of alligator clips. Switching it on. One black helicopter beginning to rise up from the water now to arc over the bridge and the other one not far behind it. Its path the upward movement of a cobra.
Numbers streamed across the screens on both the dashboard and the scanner. Numbers too fast for anyone to read. The high rasping bark of men’s voices came from the car speakers and straight from the little grainy speaker in the satellite phone too, but none of it was intelligible. Janey typed something into the scanner and cursed and looked back at Penny and said she was sorry and typed something else into the scanner and cursed again. Oops, she said.
They were halfway across the bridge. The traffic had slowed to let a hundred National Motors drivers gawk like little children, and Weller used the brakes. Softly at first and then harder. Stuck in the middle of a hundred oversized imbeciles and no way out. The first Black Rose helicopter disappearing from sight as it neared the bridge and then surging up and back into view with its engine roaring and its rotors beating the world into submission. The noise too much to bear. It was pretty much straight overhead, Penny and Liz looking up at it through the sunroof.
A beeping came from the scanner and the same beeping with the same urgent steadiness came from the satellite phone and Janey said she had it. She was in. Weller said in what. Hollering over the roar. She said in the system. The helicopter’s navigation system. She could bring it down, she was pretty sure. Take it out of the air just like that. Janey hollering too. Weller said not now and she said I know not now. With any luck she could bring it down, though, just like they did back home in Spartanburg. Black Rose would never know what had hit them.
The t
rucks were still crawling but they picked up a little speed now and small gaps began to open up between them and Weller threaded the car through. The first helicopter barreling on north and the second one disappearing now in its approach to the bridge. Dropping out of sight. Liz and Penny turned around to look for it between the trucks. Janey studying the screens and saying I think I can do it. I actually think I can.
“It’d be one way to stop that convoy,” Weller said, “if you could time it right.”
The traffic continued to ease up and Weller found more spaces between trucks and longer ones too and the car gained speed. The first helicopter upriver now, hanging from the blur of its rotors and getting smaller and smaller and the roar of the second one already deafening even though they couldn’t quite see it yet. Then a great blaring of air horns from behind and the helicopter itself bursting into view over the lip of the bridge and just clearing the tops of the trucks like the pilot was already getting a thrill out of terrorizing people. Like he usually didn’t get chance enough.
They were a quarter of a mile from the New York side and Janey was flicking between two different displays on the scanner and the helicopter was almost dead-centered over the eastbound lanes, rising and moving fast. Tilted nose-down. Janey saying how much faster can you drive and Weller saying no faster. Exactly no faster than this is how much faster I can drive and you can’t bring that thing down with us still on the bridge. We’ll go into the water and what then. What good will that do anybody. Janey saying no, it can’t be that heavy. You saw one hanging from a tree for Christ’s sake it’s not that heavy it won’t bring down the bridge and Weller saying don’t you dare. Looking in the rear view at Liz and Penny and yanking the wheel left to veer around a truck and saying don’t you dare do it or we’ll all drown and if we don’t all drown I’ll drown you myself. Just for trying.
She didn’t put the scanner down but she didn’t push anything on it either. She waited two seconds until the helicopter was clear of the bridge altogether and then she keyed in a command and pressed a sequence of keys to execute it and nothing happened. Almost nothing. Maybe a little kind of a stagger from the helicopter. As if it had forgotten which way was up or its forward motion had been arrested for an instant by a cable strung across the sky or the engines driving its rotors had skipped a beat. Just a little hiccup as if the pilot had lost control for a minute and then gotten it back.
Weller watched it pass from his rear view mirror into the sky to his left and said, “So much for that.”
“I almost had it.”
“Do you think?”
“Yes. I do. I almost had it.”
“Better luck next time, then.”
“I don’t know that there’ll be a next time.” Sitting there looking like it was all over already.
“It’s only two helicopters,” Weller said. “Four men. They’ll just be scoping things out for the convoy, don’t you think? It’s the convoy that they’re counting on to do the serious work.”
“I hope so.”
* * *
They didn’t even slow down for the next checkpoint. The one in Stamford where they’d gotten through clean on the way south. They didn’t have time to talk and they didn’t care to find out if anyone had thought to set National Motors security after them. Probably not. That would require contracts and the exchange of money, and nothing involving large sums of money happened fast. Thank God for the fracturing of law enforcement into a million little pieces, each one working for itself and as greedy as it could be. Once that happened, things got easier down at this level. Weller just flashed the lights and gunned the engine and swerved around the trucks, throwing a handful of red white and blue AmeriBank scrip out the window as they tore past.
That was about the last of it, but then again they were just about at the end of the line.
* * *
Finding the spot where they’d come through the fence wasn’t going to be easy. Everything looked the same along this stretch of Ninety-Five. The same gray concrete buildings falling to ruin. The same little bunches of underbrush and trees sprouting up among them as if life went on anyhow. The road was one long elevated arc, a single steady stretch punctuated by fenced off-ramps that led to nowhere every quarter-mile or so. The population had been dense here and the commerce had been rampant and together they had generated a tangle of roads that National Motors had spared no expense in blocking off. Nothing left now but a straight line and a million broken promises. Penny unbuckled and stuck her head between the front seats and said, “It wasn’t here, Dad. It was someplace greener. There was grass along the side of the road.”
She was right. He remembered clambering up a steep berm into tall grass. He remembered kneeling and getting shocked when he touched the fence and using the plastic tarp folded over on itself for insulation. Bending the chain link back to let her squeak through. It was so long ago now. A different life. Leave it to Penny to remember the color of things and by remembering to bring it back. He told her to buckle herself in now, and he drove on.
The grass was a little paler and a little yellower with the passing of the high summer and the coming of the fall but they found the spot all the same. A half-mile or so of grass running alongside the westbound lanes opposite them, and a sign on this side announcing a checkpoint in one mile, and Weller saying, “This is it. I remember now. It’s here.” And sure enough there it was, over on the southbound side. Not the hole he’d cut in the fence but a new length of fence replacing what he’d damaged. One panel of ordinary National Motors chain link replaced with a brand new panel gleaming silver and stretched tight.
They stopped at the first off-ramp, not caring where it led. Weller and Janey bailing out and going at the fencing with wirecutters, starting near ground level on each side. Weller could reach higher than Janey could, and when he was done he went over to her side and made more cuts. About to work his way across the top when he heard a car door and looked back to see Liz climb behind the wheel and guessed what she was up to. She blew the horn and he and Janey stepped back and she dropped the transmission into gear, the car plowing through the fencing and losing paint in long parallel strips about three inches apart because why wait for them to cut the top of the hole when they were in a hurry.
“Did you see that?” he said to Janey. “That’s my girl right there.” And then they were on the road again.
* * *
Northward through nothing. The car had a compass built into it but it didn’t work. All those electronics and you couldn’t tell one direction from another. Weller still had a pocket compass with a Black Rose logo on it. He hated looking at it but it worked and the electronic one didn’t so they followed it through the maze of ruined roads. Angling north by northeast and trying to approximate their old steps even if they couldn’t quite recreate them.
They thought they remembered a few landmarks, but it was impossible to be certain. They wove through intersections jammed with abandoned cars where people had lived for a little while until the coyotes and the bears had moved in and where the coyotes and the bears had lived for a little while until they were supplanted by foxes and crows and rabbits and mice and so on down the food chain all the way to bugs and then not even bugs anymore. Weeds and lichen and mold. The world of living things winding down all the way. They passed squat buildings that could have been shopping centers or offices or hotels, and tall buildings that looked more or less like the squat ones stood on end. There was no particularizing mark on anything beyond stains where electrical signage had been taken down long ago for scrap, and the sameness of it all merged into one compounded uncertain thing that disoriented them and made them desperate. Weller said he wished he’d taken notes or blazed a trail or something. He’d never thought. Penny on the other hand said she was pretty sure she would remember every inch of this on her next time through if there should be a next time, since she could see perfectly now and every single object looked just like itself, and even though her father wasn’t so certain about that he d
idn’t say.
They passed through the commercial districts and into the moonlike landscape of the drained-out suburbs. House after emptied house. Cars left where their gas tanks had run dry. A school bus the same, yellow and black and rust-red, squatting on bare wheels stripped of rubber. Penny had never seen a school bus and her father didn’t tell her what it was. It was just another wreck.
Weller looked at the road. Penny looked at everything but. And Liz and Janey watched the sky for helicopters.
They pressed forward. Along blacktop roads gone back to gravel and gravel roads gone back to dirt and dirt roads gone back to plain earth. The fencing on either side was PharmAgra now, not National Motors, for there were crops to fence in but not highways. Strange as it seemed it felt like home. In the distance a handful of people walking slow down a dirt lane, their day finished and their tools shouldered, men and women and children all alike. Their people, in their world.
They knew they were heading in the right direction when they saw the smoke.