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.