I could do nothing for her, and nothing for Iphwin, who was now lying still but had a faint pulse. I had a hard time even keeping my balance back there as the Chevy van rocked and bucked from side to side.
“Ha!” Terri sang out. “Can we get up there?”
“One way or another, but I think the odds are better below it.”
I grabbed a seat back, with my blood-soaked hand leaving a horrid stain, and peered forward to see what they were looking at. We were passing under a high bridge, part of some small county road.
A hundred yards beyond it, there was a paved path almost at the bank of the arroyo. “Let me take this carefully,” Paula said. “This would be one hell of a time to flip, after what we’ve just been through.”
She turned and backed carefully, and got a running start, spraying damp sand and nearly burying first the front bumper and then the back axle, but in one heroic bound, we were up onto the narrow road—path, really, it was barely wide enough for the van and a minute’s nervous maneuvering went into getting us pointed along it.
“Well, roads usually lead to other roads, and bridges are hooked to roads,” Paula said, “so somewhere back there, maybe, this will join a road that will get us out of this valley, and give us a chance to try to head north again. How are they?”
“Both unconscious, now,” I said. “If you want to, we can stop and try to treat them, but I’ve got nothing to stop the bleeding with, and I think they both have rapid internal hemorrhaging. I don’t think either of them will last out the hour.”
Paula pulled the van off the road and into a group of trees where it would be hidden. “Well, then let them die in comfort.” She climbed back to join the rest of us.
Jesús sighed. “I am going to miss Esmé. I worked with her so many years. And I didn’t like Iphwin much—who could? he was half machine!—but he was trying to learn to be human, and I am sorry he never finished the job.”
Terri was wiping her eyes. “We’re like the ten little Indians,” she said. “We just keep getting mowed down. There’s no way that we’ll make it there.”
Paula looked around. “Lyle, how are you feeling?”
“Stressed out and miserable,” I said, “but I’m still here. Sort of.”
Terri was crying, now, steadily, and saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Jesús reached out to comfort her and she pressed her face into his chest, still crying. His eyes were looking into a black vacuum a thousand miles away.
Paula sighed and sat down next to me, in the middle passenger seat. “Put an arm around me, I need some comfort,” she said. I did; for a while I thought she wasn’t going to say anything further, but then she said, “We should be escaping but nobody’s got the energy. And at least Iphwin and Esmé get to die in some kind of peace. One of the Billie Beards saw us down by the stream; do you suppose the others will be along soon?”
“Hard to tell,” I said. “But I’m not fit for much, Jesús is pretty stressed, and—” I brushed her red hair off her face and found that it was partly stuck down with tears “—Paula, you’re not too well off yourself.” Internally I was gibbering on the edge of just sitting down and crying, and demanding that everything go back to making sense, but since everyone else had earned a collapse too, and was taking theirs, mine would have to wait. I fought down the sick feeling in my guts and the scream waiting in my throat, and said, as calmly as I could manage, “At the moment we’re on a road. What if we just drive far enough, right now, to be out of sight of the streambed? This whole ravine seems to be pretty brushy. They might still find us but at least we’d be somewhat concealed—and if they don’t find us, then we’ll get some rest and be ready to start in the dark. If they do, here’s as good a place to fight as any, since we’re going to be surrounded and heavily outnumbered and won’t stand much of a chance.”
“Good enough for me,” she said. “Sit in the passenger seat beside me, okay?”
We climbed forward and started the van. The tires now not only lumped, but rumbled—”Their surfaces must be rough,” Paula said. “Permatires never blow out, but I’d imagine a few dozen bullet holes don’t leave them at their best all the same.”
The narrow strip of asphalt switched back at a very steep angle, and getting around it was difficult. The rise was steep, too, and we could see the creek bottom the whole way up, so we kept going till we found another switchback—and again, the rise and the angle were problems. But halfway through that stretch of road, we were on the inside of a broad ledge, and no longer visible from the creek bed.
“Here we are, then,” I said.
“Esmé is dead, I think,” Jesús said, his voice perfectly flat.
I crawled back. There was no pulse, and the bullet wound was still slowly leaking blood; her pupils didn’t respond to light.
“I agree,” I said. “I don’t think she was in pain for long.”
There was a sudden, overpowering smell, and I saw the front of Iphwin’s pants become wet; his sphincter had let go. No pulse, nothing in the pupils.
It was a strange way to rest, but compared to what had gone before, it was almost restfuclass="underline" Jesús and I used the oil change pan that we found in the back to scoop out two shallow graves. Paula and Terri gathered rocks until there were enough of them to at least put a few obstacles in the path of a bear or coyote.
Nobody had any words to say; we just laid them in and covered them, and sort of said good-bye. Jesús sat by Esmé’s grave till it was dark, while the rest of us slept.
As soon as there was moonlight, just after midnight, we drove slowly up the strange, winding asphalt road. “I keep thinking there’s some reason for this road to be the way it is,” I said, “and I can’t figure it out, but it seems to be right on the front edge of my forebrain.”
“Well, this is a very wet ravine, too,” Terri said. She seemed to have recovered as much as she was likely to for a while, and was sitting on the seat immediately behind Paula and me, leaning forward to help us look for obstacles. “That might be artificial, you know. Maybe we’re in a public park?”
“Ha! That’s got to be it. Paved hiking trail in a public park. Probably we’re moving up toward a reservoir or something,” Paula said. “Good news, anyway, whatever the case, because we’ve got more vegetation to provide cover.”
Fifteen minutes of going slowly along the dark road by moonlight brought us up to the top, and we discovered that the guess had been right—it was a state park built around a reservoir. We drove out the main gate and found a road that would take us north; moonlight was more than bright enough, and we had three hours of cruising along it at about thirty miles an hour.
“I guess it’s a miracle that all those shots didn’t knock out the motor,” Terri said.
“Naw,” I said. “No moving parts except in the motor and transmission, and those had metal cages around them to shield people and electronics from the magnetic fields. Nothing much to hit. They might have got a wheel bearing, and they got two of us, but the basic propulsion system was pretty hard to stop.”
As if it had heard me, a wheel bearing began a dull screaming sound, and within another three miles, we had sparks flickering under the car. We left the van there and walked till almost dawn, when we found another tiny, deserted town, with what we needed—a motel with beds and some stores to loot. By the night afterward, we had four reasonably well-equipped backpacks, a sleeping bag each, and two lightweight tents. The only thing we didn’t find was another Telkes battery car, but that was less urgent. We thought it might take a few days to walk, or perhaps we’d turn up another car when we reached Albuquerque, in a couple of days.