There was a long pause and we all realized we didn’t have any more questions just then, and we had come to the moment of decision.
“Do we have any kind of plan?” I asked. “If the bridge is right ahead ...”
“Well, if something tries to stop us from crossing, we either fight it or run away from it, depending on how strong it is,” the Colonel said. “And if we get to the other side, then if we’re under attack, we fight back, and if not, we group up and decide what to do next. There’s a good chance that Beard and her sidekicks will be guarding that bridge, and that means we really don’t have any options until we either get past them or around them. After that, when we’re on the other side, since we might know something then, is the time to try to figure out what to do next. Till then it’s just theorizing in the absence of data. Let’s see if there’s still a bridge there, and if so, let’s see if we can just drive straight over it. Till we try, we don’t have any way of knowing that we can’t—or why we can’t.”
It was disagreeably true, and no one had much to add. A few minutes later, we were in the esty at the top of a low rise. I was driving, again, so that Paula could work the top gun. Terri and Iphwin crouched in the center, and I quietly hoped that they didn’t notice that they were on top of spots and spatters of dried blood. Bits of rubbled safety glass from the rear window still lay all around the inside of the bus. I did my best to forget about all that and just drive forward slowly and carefully; meanwhile, Paula kept working the guns around the ninety degrees facing us, looking for anything that moved or was the least bit suspicious.
“Any reason to think they won’t have planted a mine?” I asked Iphwin.
“No reason I am aware of except a pattern in her behavior: she seems to prefer one-on-one killing to blowing up large numbers of people,” he said. “But remember she could have put an atom bomb under the road yesterday and wiped us off the face of the earth—and that’s not what she did. I really hope it isn’t only because she didn’t think of it.”
I drove slowly down the street. There was a bridge there, at least, and nothing obviously between us and it. The river had shifted during the years since anyone had been here—it flowed against the opposite bridgehead and had eroded away most of the road facing it—but it looked like there was still more than enough solid ground to get the truck through. No buildings showed beyond the ridgeline, but there were phone or electric poles, without cables, standing like bare sticks, going up the hillside. For a first sight of the country I had pledged allegiance to all my life, it wasn’t impressive, but no doubt there would be more.
Unlike Torreón, Juárez had not been leveled, and unlike Chihuahua, it hadn’t been burned. It had merely been abandoned, and we had crawled through its empty streets past miles of crumbled and collapsed buildings without seeing anything of note. The road wasn’t even particularly badly potholed, and toward the bridge it was almost decent, as if it had had no traffic at all and been sheltered. I took it slowly all the same.
As we reached the bridgehead, I slowed further.
“Roadbed looks decent,” the Colonel said. “It should take our weight easily.”
There was a huge crash that made my ears ring so hard that I couldn’t hear a thing. The bus slewed sideways as if a giant child had slapped its back end. The motors all stopped dead, and I looked to see what had become of the others. From the way their mouths opened, they were screaming. From the way my throat felt, so was I.
The roof had been torn right off the bus, leaving a rim of jagged metal. The windshield and windows were shattered and the bus stood, its sides peeling away in immense jagged pieces, sideways across the bridge.
I barely heard the Colonel shout, but he pointed, with big violent waves of his cane, across the bridge, shouting “Run! Run! Go! Hurry!”
I jumped off the bus and dashed for the other end of the bridge, running for all I was worth. There was an old painted line, probably the center line of where the river had once been, I thought, in bright green paint—then I saw that it didn’t go all the way across the bridge, stopping just short of the edge. Where it ended there was the shape of a human body printed in the green paint, and an old bucket lying on the other side. Someone had been painting that line when something had knocked him flat; then he had—gotten up and walked off and never tried to paint that line again? died and been carried off? decayed in place? I had no idea.
There was a sort of orange fire dancing all around the bridge, and though I still could not hear, I could sense that there was a loud roar around me, and feel other people running beside me. Not wanting to touch that line, I jumped over it. Things hit the deck and walls around me. Someone was shooting at me. I dashed on, zigging and zagging, trying to present a lousy target, and a few terrifying seconds brought me to the foot of the bridge, where I got behind a column and flattened myself to the ground.
I drew a long breath and exhaled, drew another, peered again. We had some people down on the bridge, and I tried to see if there were any of them that I should be going back to get, but naturally they were lying still—I couldn’t tell if they were dead or playing dead.
Paula jumped in beside me, clutching a rifle, and shot back, shouting to the others to run, run, run, she would cover for them. I tugged her pistol from its holster, rolled to the other side, and started to shoot too, not sure at what, just thinking that perhaps we could draw fire away from any living comrades who were stranded on the other side or lying on the bridge itself.
Then I was nowhere and remembered nothing.
PART FOUR
The Pursuit of Happiness
It was odd that no one else had put a cottage out here. Maybe the landlord owned more of the beach than I thought, but then couldn’t he have made more money by building more cottages? And there was certainly plenty of room out here.
Whatever the reason for its isolation, that was part of what kept us coming back to the cottage, even though we always figured that the next summer, or the one after, there would be miles and miles of new construction going up, and our old refuge would be a refuge no more. As far as I could recall, in thirty years of marriage, Paula and I had been here every summer. Maybe longer. I had memories of being a child here.
Jeff the mailman came by every morning, with replacement groceries and the overnight mail that would contain requests and orders from our employer, a firm named ConTech, about which we knew very little. Apart from Jeff’s visits, we had the house and the beach to ourselves. Of course we had to keep doing the work that arrived, but it always seemed to be easy work and not the least bit time consuming. It was so dull and so easy that we seldom remembered, the next day, what we had done the previous day.
Every so often Paula and I made a little joke that the big nightmare of the job was the total absence of weekends. Packages arrived every day, with a couple of hours of work to be done in them, and we sent them out every day, with the previous day’s work done. There was never a day in which we didn’t put in our couple of hours, so in that sense we had no days off—but there was never a day with much more than two hours of work, three at most on rare occasions, now and then just half an hour, so we didn’t care much. We always made sure we had a pot of coffee the way Jeff liked it on the stove when he came by.