Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  So he kept his light on as he turned south onto the road and built his speed only slowly, giving the tires a quarter mile of free running on the clean blacktop so that they could shed their furry husks of cold mud. Then he opened up the throttle and began to carve the turns toward the Schloss, picking up speed when there was a long clear stretch of road ahead of him, throttling it back a little when he approached blind curves where deer might be grazing in the low rich undergrowth that came to life, at this time of year, in the sunlit ditches and verges that lined the road cut.

  In a few minutes—not long enough, really, since he had begun to enjoy the ride—he swept around the broad leftward curve into the shadow of Baron’s Rock and felt the road angle downward beneath him as it made its plunge for the dam. It broadened, here, into a turnaround for vehicles too long and heavy to cross, and a sort of informal parking area for motorists who wanted to fish in the river or picnic on their tailgates while enjoying the view of the Rock, the river, and the stone turrets of the Schloss rising up above the trees on the other side.

  Because of trees and landscaping, the view of the Schloss did not really open up until one was halfway across the dam. At that point, Chet—who was not going very fast anyway—relaxed his throttle hand and let the bike drop to an idling pace. He had noticed some things that struck him as a bit odd. The alarm bell was still ringing, but it had a flat, muffled sound, as if something had been jammed into it. Why hadn’t Dodge just shut the valve, and turned the thing off, to prevent further water damage to the building? Another thing was that there were no lights on in the place at all. Of course, since Dodge was here alone, you wouldn’t expect a lot of lights to be burning. But you’d expect at least some, especially if Dodge were scurrying around the place trying to deal with a busted sprinkler head.

  But what really got his attention, and told him that something was seriously out of whack, was the smell. The smell of burnt plastic that he associated with house fires. Moreover, there was enough light now to make it obvious that milky smoke was lingering in the trees and the river valley.

  So there actually had been a fire.

  Why hadn’t the alarm system—the electronic one—sent out a call?

  For the same reason that the power was out?

  But the alarm system had battery backup that was supposed to keep running for a whole day.

  Maybe the phones were out too?

  Chet’s first thought was to run into the Schloss and try to find Dodge, but he’d heard too many stories of people who did that, trying to be heroes, and succumbed to smoke inhalation and died along with the people they were trying to save. He had to at least summon help before doing anything else. He brought his chopper to a stop at the Schloss end of the dam and pulled his phone out of his pocket.

  NO SERVICE said the screen.

  Another oddity. The Schloss had its own cell tower. The coverage here ought to be fantastic. But apparently it had gone dead too.

  What could account for so much going wrong all at once?

  He was pondering the question when he heard a clear gunshot.

  It was some distance away, and he was pretty certain that it was a shotgun, not a rifle.

  His instinct was to get the hell out of there, so he got his hand on the throttle, twisted it up, shifted into gear, let go the clutch. The rear tire started spinning in the loose dirt and dead needles that covered the pavement, and he took advantage of that to fishtail the bike’s rear end around and get it pointed back across the dam.

  He was just about to let her rip and go blasting across when he noticed two figures running toward him across the turnaround. They had emerged from hiding places in the trees. Something was weird about their gait. Their legs were moving properly, but their arms weren’t pumping.

  Their arms weren’t pumping, he saw, because each of them was carrying a handgun in a two-handed grip. And they were looking right at him.

  To get across the dam he would have to ride directly at these guys, whoever they were, as they stood in his path. They would have plenty of time to empty their magazines at him.

  He’d already done a one-eighty. He kept the momentum going and turned it into a three-sixty, which was to say that he got himself turned back around with the dam behind him and the Schloss to the front. Fleeing into the Schloss itself wasn’t going to work. Whoever these guys were, they’d already gone into the place, done whatever they wanted to do to Dodge—some old drug-running grievance?—cut the power and the phone lines, set fire to it. He needed to put some distance between himself and them. He aimed the bike, not at the Schloss, but down the road that ran past it, and wrenched the throttle to max and popped the clutch and actually stood her up on her rear wheel, doing a wheelie as he accelerated onto the road.

  As he went by the Schloss he saw in his peripheral vision a shape like a lily, made out of yellow-orange light, and realized that he was staring into the muzzle of a rifle that was firing at him: a rifle with a flash arrester on the end of its barrel, channeling the flame into six equiangular jets, like petals. The rifle let loose one, two, three, four rounds, producing a hammering noise with each one, and behind him he could hear the sharp poppity-pop of those gunmen on the dam, letting loose everything they had in their magazines.

  A rightward bend in the road put some trees between him and the crazy men who were trying to kill him. He finally had the presence of mind to shut off the bike’s headlamp. His arm moved heavily. He had a vague memory of taking a blow a few seconds ago, a rock thrown up by one of his tires or something. It must have deadened a nerve. His body was old and overused and suffered strange infirmities from time to time.

  A light was flashing in the trees, and bobbing as it flashed. Coming down a slope. Headed, not for him, but for a point on the road ahead of him.

  The light bounded onto the road, then swung upward to illuminate the bearer’s face. It was too far away for him to resolve it clearly, and he didn’t want to get much closer. He was out of shotgun range and out of pistol range, but if this person had a rifle—

  “Chet! It’s me! Zula!”

  He gunned it forward and stopped next to her. As he drew closer, he noted with interest that she was carrying a pump shotgun.

  “We thought you were dead,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  “Where’s Dodge?”

  “Not here. Come on, we have to get moving.”

  “No shit.” Because he could now hear the voices of the gunmen, who were running after them.

  Zula safetied the shotgun. She was wearing a large, haphazardly made-up pack. She got a foot on one of the passenger pegs, then swung her leg over and sat down. As soon as he sensed the weight of her body against his back, he let out the clutch and began moving down the road again, just at a running pace at first—so the gunmen wouldn’t be able to gain any more ground—then faster, once he felt as though Zula had got her balance and wasn’t liable to flip off the bike backward.

  There was a while, then, when all they did was ride. Chet liked that part of it, riding along the road in the dark, a salmon-colored light spreading over heaven’s vault above, Zula’s arms around his waist.

  They didn’t talk at all until they reached the turnaround just short of the wrecked mine complex where a million old gray planks were trying to avalanche down into the river. From here they could ride up a short ramp to the bike and ski path, which the Harley could easily negotiate. But it seemed reasonable to stop.

  “I don’t see any choice but to keep going,” Zula said.

  “There’s nothing there,” Chet said, nodding down the trail.

  “Except the U.S. of A.,” she pointed out. “And you know how to get there, right?”

  “Not on this thing! This’ll only take us as far as the tunnel.”

  “But that’s a few more miles between us and the jihadists,” she pointed out.

  “What did you call them?”

  “And you know how to go beyond that point. On foot. Right? You used to do it with Ri
chard.”

  “Oh, it’s been years, girl.”

  “But you know. You know the way. And they don’t. So we can outdistance them.”

  “We should wait for them to pass us. Then double back.”

  “They’ll be looking for that. They’re smart. They’ll post someone to guard the crossing at the dam.”

  “Still, if we stayed up in the trees, moved through the woods—”

  “Listen. Some of those guys have Richard. They have Dodge.”

  “Dodge is okay?”

  “As far as I know. Anyway, they’re south of us. They don’t have a motorcycle. We can just about catch them.”

  “Why the hell would we want to catch them!?”

  “All I have to do is show myself to Uncle Richard—let him know they don’t have me hostage any more—and then he’s free, he can run into the woods, get away from these guys.”

  Chet said nothing. Not because he didn’t agree. But because he was having difficulty concentrating.

  “I have to go save his life,” Zula said. Sounding almost matter-of-fact. Ah, I see I failed to make myself clear … here’s the situation … I have to go save his life.

  It gave him something to focus on. “Well, since you put it that way, I’ll take you to the tunnel,” he said, and he let the bike rumble off the end of the road and onto the loose gravel of the trail.

  By the time they made it to the end, he was aware, somehow, that he had blood coming out of him. He couldn’t remember how he knew this, how he’d first been made aware of the fact. There was a dim dreamlike memory of the girl on his back—Zula—mentioning it to Chet, and Chet laughing it off and just cranking up the throttle a little higher.

  Then he noticed that he was lying on the ground staring up into a blue sky.

  Had they crashed?

  No. The Harley was parked next to him. Zula had rolled out a camping pad. He had been lying on it, dozing. Covered with a sleeping bag.

  She squatted next to him and pulled the sleeping bag away to expose the right side of his torso. His shirt was missing. Bare skin shrank from the cool air. She regretted what she saw, but she wasn’t surprised by it. She’d been looking at it while he lay there.

  “How long have we been stopped here?” he asked.

  “Not too long.”

  He was too embarrassed to come out and ask what was wrong with him. He felt that it must be obvious.

  She did something involving a bandage. She had a pathetic little first aid kit.

  “Stop it,” he said gently. “It’s a waste of time.”

  “Then what do you want to do?”

  “Send you on your way. Save Dodge. I’ll follow.”

  “You’ll … follow?”

  “I can’t go near as fast as you. But there’s no reason for me to just stay here. I want to die on the forty-ninth parallel.”

  She was squatting on her haunches with her arms crossed over her knees. She looked south, into the sunlight, toward the border. Then she dropped her head onto her forearms and sobbed for a while.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “No, it’s not. People are dead.” She raised her face, let herself tumble back onto her bottom, stretched her legs out next to Chet. “I didn’t kill them. But they’re dead because of things that I did. Does that make sense? Peter. The pilots. The people in the RV. They’d all be alive if I’d decided differently.”

  “But you’re not helping the killers,” Chet said. Something about lying on the ground, combined with her outburst, had revived him a little, made him feel almost normal.

  “Of course I’m not helping them.”

  “You fired that shotgun, didn’t you? To warn me.”

  “Jahandar—the sniper—was drawing a bead on you. Yes. I warned you by firing the shotgun.”

  “So you’re fighting against them.”

  “Of course I am. But what’s the point, if it just leads to a different set of people getting killed?”

  “Too heavy a question for me,” he said. “You just do what you can, pretty lady.”

  She tried to fight it, but the corners of her mouth drew back into a smile. “You call all women that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “It’s been a while since I heard that kind of talk.”

  Chet shrugged demurely.

  “Well,” Zula continued, “all those people died for nothing unless I help Richard escape. And then we can go for help. But I have to get to the border first. And I need your help for that.”

  “American Falls,” Chet said. “That’s where we’re going.”

  “How do I—do we—get there?”

  He turned his head, raised his good arm, gestured at the ridge that rose above them to the south: a blade of cream-colored granite, patched with snow, skirted by a ramp of boulders that had been flaking away from it and thundering down into the valley for millions of years. The trail had taken them up onto the ridge’s middle slopes, flying on creosoted stilts over the rubble fields, and terminated at a place where a wall of sound rock jumped out of the talus. The tunnel had been blasted straight into it, aimed horizontally through the heart of the ridge.

  “We use the mine tunnels to get past this bad boy. See, we don’t have to hike over the top. That would take days. It’d kill me. Hell, it’d kill you. No. We use the tunnels. That’s what Richard discovered. That’s his secret. We go out the other side. Then down the river to the falls. Latitude forty-nine north. That’s where I stop, and you keep going.”

  “Then let’s go,” she said, “if that’s what you want.”

  “Yes. It’s what I want.”

  THE TUNNEL WAS large enough to accommodate a narrow-gauge train, which was to say that a car could have driven into it with room to spare. To prevent just that sort of behavior, the owners had fabricated a massive steel gridiron, bolted into the rock, that blocked the passage. The barrier was situated about ten meters inside the entrance of the tunnel. That ten meters was a tornado of lurid graffiti and an ankle-deep trash heap of discarded beer bottles, chip bags, knotted condoms, and drained batteries. Just at the entrance was a fire ring; Zula, acting in Sherlock Holmes mode, verified that its ashes were still blazing hot. They were only a couple of hours behind Jones and company.

  In the middle of the gridiron was a man-sized door. This had clearly been locked and vandalized, chained and vandalized, welded shut and vandalized, so many times as to threaten the integrity of the entire structure. Now it stood slightly ajar and Zula’s flashlight, shining through the grid, revealed that the graffiti and trash on its opposite side were only a little less prevalent. Her nose caught a pungent and familiar odor: fresh spray paint. Playing her flashlight over the steel plate on the door, she saw a few characters in Arabic. She couldn’t read them. She touched one of the glyphs and fresh green paint came away on her fingertip.

  “Careful!” called Chet, strolling along slowly in her wake.

  “Why?”

  “They used to booby-trap it.”

  “Who did!?”

  “Back in the day,” Chet said, “the business got a little competitive. A little nasty. Crazy people got into it. People who’d kill you. That’s when Dodge and I decided to go straight.”

  Zula painted the light beam up and down the length of the door crack, and noticed, way up at the top, a steely glint. Piano wire. It had been made fast around the vertical bar that served as the edge of the door, and routed horizontally across the gap between door and frame, across the grid and all the way to the tunnel wall. There it disappeared into a mound of trash that had been piled up in the corner formed by the wall and the steel grid.

  By the time she finished piecing this all together, Chet had caught up with her and was following the wire with his own eyes as he leaned against the gridiron, breathing raggedly and gurgling as he did so. “Holy crap,” he said, “I didn’t actually expect to see it.”

  “You think there’s something hidden in that trash pile?”

  “Must be.”

&nb
sp; In a pocket of his leathers, Chet was carrying a Leatherman that included pliers and a wire cutter. After insisting that Zula go back outside and stand with her back to the mountain, he reached up, snipped the wire, and pushed the gate open—she could hear the massive hinges groaning. “All clear,” he announced, after counting to ten. “But before we go through, I’m going to take a little rest here while you go back to my bike and get something.”

  The something turned out to be a massive cable lock. Zula fetched it back into the tunnel and helped Chet thread it through the bars of the gridiron and the gate, locking it securely behind them.

  After that, they proceeded with extreme caution, which was not that difficult anyway since Chet couldn’t move very fast. Once they got past the drifts of party trash that cluttered the floor near the grid, there weren’t that many places to hide booby traps. And if the first one was anything to go by, Jones would have marked them all with spray-painted warnings so that the follow-up group—presumably Ershut, Jahandar, and anyone else deemed worthy to follow—wouldn’t run afoul of them. So her nose became extremely sensitive to the sharp perfume of spray paint, and her eyes keen for the fluorescent green color that Jones had been using.

  After a few minutes, they came to a place where the tunnel terminated in a rock wall pierced by a mouse hole just big enough for Chet to walk upright. “See, this thing was an adit,” Chet was explaining, “which is what the miners call a tunnel that runs horizontal, flat enough that you can run rail cars on it. Straight into the ore body in the heart of the mountain. Only this first part of it, here, got expanded for the railway. But now we’re going into the adit proper.” There was another pileup of trash and another steel door, barring the entrance to the adit, that had been jimmied open and left hanging askew. It would have been a natural place to put another booby trap. But Zula did not see or smell spray paint, and Chet’s minute inspection of the trash and the door revealed nothing suspicious. They stepped into the much more confined space of the adit and discovered that, as always, revelers and graffitists had been there first.