“Nice thought if we can make it happen fast,” Paula said. We came around a switchback and there were a few cars parked on the road. We kept looking for one with Telkes battery power instead of an internal combustion engine, but there weren’t many of those, and the few there were didn’t have keys in them.
“I don’t suppose any of us is a proficient car thief,” Esmé said, after the fourth Telkes battery car turned out to be without keys, “and unfortunately because the motors on these things are controllable PDC, there’s no way we can just jump one of them to make it run. It won’t run without the computer consenting to the process.”
“Have you ever stolen one?” Iphwin asked hopefully. “You sound like you know what you’re doing.”
“No, but I’ve arrested a lot of people who have,” she said, “and paid attention when they talked. Are we still headed for Santa Fe?” she asked Paula.
“Definitely,” Paula, Iphwin, and I said in unison.
Naturally enough a little explanation was required, so we managed to get most of it explained as we walked at a more relaxed pace down the highway toward the ruins of El Paso that we were beginning to catch glimpses of in the distance.
“Whatever happened here wasn’t particularly sudden or violent,” Jesús said, suddenly. “Not like some of what happened in the northern part of Mexico.”
“How do you know that?” Terri asked.
“Because every one of these cars was parked and locked. None of them has a bullet hole or any other kind of scar. No one has looted them for spare parts, either. And we haven’t found one that was wrecked, as you might expect if something happened that killed or disabled the driver, or the brain. For that matter I haven’t seen a human bone since we crossed over, which is really a contrast compared to the charnel house that the area right around the other side of the bridge was—there were bones and skulls and desiccated corpses everywhere, if you looked for them.
“I must say it looks to me like whatever happened here gave people more than enough time to park their cars and go into their homes. When we get further out of the high-risk zone, here, and have some time, I want to look in the houses. I wouldn’t be surprised to find everyone dead in their beds with the covers pulled up.”
“Or nobody at all,” Terri said. “What if they all just vanished?”
Jesús shuddered and crossed himself. “I’m a policeman,” he said, firmly, “and I like simple explanations for not seeing people. Everyone dead in his bed, that’s a simple explanation, and starting from that I can figure everything else out. But everyone just vanished into thin air—that’s a much tougher one. I’m not sure I can cope with that.”
“Hey—Telkes generator and keys in it!” Paula cried, running forward to an old Chevy van. “And a seat for each of us. Can’t beat that.”
It was locked, but it only took a moment to smash out a window and get in. We all piled in, and Paula said, “Okay, this is an ‘assisting robot’ model, one where the robot cuts in if it thinks you’re doing something stupid. I’m going to switch that out. Doorplate says Detroit made it in 2008, which means it was already old when the thing happened, and now it’s fifty-four years old. Tires are early-model permatires, though, so maybe it won’t go flat on us. Anybody knows any prayers, y’all say ’em.”
The motor started with a scream and a grind. As I watched, Paula disengaged the hand brake and let the car start rolling down the hill. “By the way,” she added, “if any of the radioactivity leaked from the Telkes batteries, we’re all gonna glow in the dark. Keep crossing those fingers.”
We shot down the hill, but it didn’t sound like the motor was working—I thought we were probably in some kind of free roll rather than under power. “What’s that pedal your left foot is working?” I asked her.
“Show you in a second, as we get to the bottom,” she said.
We whipped around two switchbacks, going faster and faster, but she never touched the brake. The second switchback put my heart into my mouth with the feeling that this contraption might just roll over any second, and the permatires, while they couldn’t really go flat or blow out, seemed to have distorted over the years, so that each of them was just a little less of a wheel and a little more of a cam, making the whole car rise and fall alarmingly.
We hit the bottom of the hill and Paula said, “Here goes.”
She jammed her foot all the way down on the accelerator and let her left foot slip off that mysterious third pedal. With a shriek of metal against metal, the van leaped forward like a rocket, and she yanked the stick that I had thought was the drive selector around frantically, pumping the left side pedal as often as she did. “We got it!” she shouted, over the rumble. “Enough force to break any rust there might have been and get it turning. The motors in these things are pretty durable but they never had much umph for starting.”
In a few moments we had slowed to a reasonable pace, and we were rolling almost smoothly, except for the camlike motion of the tires that still gave a feel of rolling over the ocean. “The tires all settled on their bottoms, and so now they hit their flat spots in unison. That’s why this thing is moving like a kid’s gallopy-horse.”
“Yep,” Paula said. “The pedal on the left is a clutch. The stick here is a gear selector. When they first came up with the Telkes battery, they weren’t thinking in terms of distributed direct drives; instead they just put in a big electric motor and used it like the old internal combustion engines. I can teach you how to drive it, but I don’t know how long this poor old thing will go.”
As it turned out, we covered almost sixty miles, and even with the broken window that we’d gotten in through, the air-conditioning managed to make it pleasant enough. We drove over the empty highway at a nice steady pace, not going nearly as fast as we could have, and it was midafternoon before there was a groan and a low-pitched thrum from the motor. We slowed down rapidly and stopped in a valley between two long, sage-blanketed ridges.
“Well, damn,” Paula said. “That’s a case of out of juice. But this thing runs pretty well. Anyone up for seeing if there’s a Telkes battery somewhere around here that we can find and swap in?”
“Makes sense,” I said, getting out. It seemed strange to stand on a narrow, crumbling highway, the van stalled dead in the middle of it, and not worry about any car that might be coming. We hadn’t seen a thing moving around Las Cruces, miles behind us.
“Well,” I said to Jesús, “if we are in charge of heavy lifting, maybe we should just walk over the ridge and get a look.”
“It’s a plan,” he said. Ten minutes later, sweaty and thirsty, we stood on top of the hill, squinting at a sign a hundred meters beyond us. A few more steps confirmed that it said: “RADIUM SPRINGS 4.”
“That’ll be four miles,” I said. “Not a great walk, normally, but figure that those batteries are apt to be heavy. And it will be a long while to go get them and then come back. I think we should all go, rather than leave people here.”
“That would be my guess, too,” Jesús said. “Christ, if we’d just had time to take our water bottles with us. But at least there should be shade there, and maybe some way of getting water we can drink. And we can’t leave everyone to sit in the desert while we go for batteries—they’ll be in big trouble by the time we get back.”
We trudged back and explained matters; nobody was happy about a walk in the hot sun, but choices were few and far between. Tired as we were, and thirsty, it was past four in the afternoon before the six of us managed to drag ourselves into the little town.
The drugstore, with its soda fountain, seemed sort of promising, and to our delight there were cases of bottles of Coke— “the real stuff,” Esmé pointed out, “not expat formulas. This would be worth a fortune for a chemical analyst to get his hands on—they’ve had to duplicate it from people’s memory of taste.”