“Should we pull over and just bump our way over that curb?” Paula asked.
“It keeps getting lower,” I suggested, “so—oh!”
There was a sign that directed us to get into the left lane to get onto I-25 North. We followed that lane and in less than a minute we were on the big highway, headed north. Paula cautiously played around and found that she could get the van to do about seventy miles per hour without shaking us up too much. “I still don’t know why they built this road, but I’m glad they did,” she said. “Maybe this was an event sequence that got robots relatively late, and so America built these things before whatever it was happened.”
“Or maybe there’s an obvious answer that we’ll learn once we find out where and when we are,” I said. “Meanwhile at least we’re making good time.”
The landscape was, weirdly, not familiar; it took me a while to remember that most of the Westerns I had grown up seeing were in black and white, and besides had been shot mainly in south California. They had captured some spectacular scenery, but nothing like the wild array of jagged shapes that seemed to leap and dance in the desert light here; California has mountains and deserts, but New Mexico is a desert ripped by mountains. And as far as we could tell, on that magnificent highway that leaped ravines and slashed through hillsides on pillars of shining white concrete, we were alone.
“Iphwin,” I said, “I have a thought to ask you about. When did the various event sequences first begin using quantum systems to communicate?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Not much before 2015, I think, in any event sequence that contained America. Not much after 2050 in any of the event sequences we’ll have had contact with. The presence of a United States of America sort of dictates a given technical level, and of course if they don’t have it yet then we aren’t yet bleeding over into their reality, nor they into ours.”
“So it coincides,” I pointed out, “with the disappearance of America.”
“Very roughly,” he said. “There must be a thousand other things that coincide with it. And everything we know about the quantum switching process would argue that since exchanges and shuffles between very similar event sequences are far and away the most common, on the average the number of people moving out of America via the phone, net, or self-piloted vehicle must have been about the same as the number coming in. It’s a random process, after all.”
“Random unless you select,” I said. “Same way you got all of us into one world—you just kept shuffling till it happened.”
“Trouble,” Paula said. We were just topping a rise, and when I leaned forward to see what was happening, I nearly fell forward because she was pumping the brake like crazy and downshifting clear to first gear. At the bottom of the hill, stretching clear across the road, and bank to bank, was a pile of wrecked cars, ten or twelve high.
“It’s a trap and it might be a current trap—” Paula said, as she fought to get the car slowed down. “—but I hope it’s from sometime long ago.”
A shot burst through the windshield and pinged off the roof. There were bright flickers along the top of the pile—it looked like they had half a dozen shooters.
“This damned thing will roll if I do anything effective,” Paula grunted, crouching low. We were slowing rapidly now, but still that terrible wall was getting closer, and more shots were hitting the Chevy van. Jesús pushed me out of the way, yanked a window open, and returned fire, but shooting from the rocking, bouncing van, he hit nothing.
“Get the batteries against the back door and crouch down!” Paula shouted. I grabbed one and put it in place; beside me Terri and Esmé were doing the same. The back window rolled down and she shouted, “Jesús, I’m going to try a J-turn. Everyone, hold on!”
I wasn’t sure why she had shouted that specifically to Jesús until I saw him duck in from the side window and face the back. The van was bucking and pitching as its misshapen tires tried to slow it against its own momentum on the steep slope.
Paula drove onto the right shoulder and stepped on the clutch and brake; we skidded down the shoulder, and just as we came to a stop, the shots now hitting the van in great numbers and all of us crouching on the floorboards, Paula threw it into reverse and threw the wheel hard left. The van shot across both lanes of traffic, going backwards, until its rear end pointed at the snipers below; then Paula threw it into gear and stood on the accelerator, ratcheting slowly up through the gears. Jesús got off a few wild parting shots that probably went nowhere near the barrier below.
We roared back up the hill, and I hollered, “Who’s okay?”
“Me,” Paula said.
“Okay here,” Esmé said.
“Okay,” Terri said.
“Okay but very angry,” Jesús said.
And there was a long silence. “Oh, god damn it to hell,” I said, when I looked down. “Iphwin is hit.”
He was lying there, breathing fast, maybe conscious and maybe not, with a gory mess where his left shoulder had been. Probably the bullet had smashed the bone and driven fragments into the blood vessels around it; he was likely to be slowly bleeding to death, and from what I remembered of my Navy first aid, this kind of thing was just about impossible to stop.
We were halfway down the hill when Terri shouted, “Look up the next hill!”
There was a big truck parked there, and men with guns were getting out.
“Shit again,” Paula said. “We’re boxed in.” She was pulling to a stop as fast as she could. “Okay, everyone brace. There’s a ranch access road over to our left, and I’d just bet that that’s where we’re supposed to go but I don’t feel like meeting up with Billie Beard in a dry gulch. Therefore I’m gonna try to take us over an embankment and down that dry creek bed to the right. I don’t expect it to work, but if we roll I’ll try to roll it so the side door opens.”
We were already peeling out even as she spoke. “Use the van as a fort if you have to, but try to slip away just as soon as we wreck—maybe you can get away before they see you getting away.”
She made a sweeping S-turn so that we went over the edge of the shoulder nose first, and miraculously we skidded down the loose gravel and onto the grass without tipping. I thought she might have low-saddled us with one bumper on the shoulder and one on the ground and no wheels touching, but she gunned it and we dropped and then rolled forward.
The bed of the arroyo was firm packed sand and loose gravel, not ideal for a highway car, but I have to give that old van some credit—it stayed upright and it kept rolling.
The shots stopped hitting almost right away, and I noticed that the soil in the dry arroyo was just damp enough so that we didn’t leave a rooster tail of dust behind us. A lot would depend on how many of them there were and what contingencies they had gotten prepared for.
We whipped around a bend and Billie Beard—one of her, anyway—was standing there with a submachine gun. She sprayed us, and Jesús shot at her; I don’t know if she fell down or took cover. I heard Esmé’s low grunt, and turned to find that she was gut-shot, holding her belly. “Christ, that one was high,” she said.
“Just relax, as best you can,” I said, “and as soon as we get away from these guys we’ll get you taken care of.”
“Hit high, high, high,” she repeated. “Might’ve been hit in the kidney, liver, large bowel... getting kind of dark and I’m fading out, but there’s not much blood coming out of me, so I think it’s going into the ab cavity. Messy way to go.”
I checked for an exit wound, and she didn’t have one; the bullet had gone in below the left side of her rib cage, not very far below, and I was afraid she was probably right; the bullet had gone in where it was likely to hit her liver, stomach, or kidneys, and probably also sever some major blood vessels.