He feathered the accelerator. The engine sent the power to the rear wheels, and the car groaned as it struggled to come out of the ditch. The undercarriage scraped against grass and gravel as the vehicle slowly extricated itself. Once the front tires touched gravel, Bruce turned the wheel hard and slowly straightened the Caddy out onto the middle of the road, straddling the center line.
“Okay!” Bruce said. “Hop off!!”
Katie slid off the trunk, came around to the passenger side, and got in.
“You want to take over now?” Bruce asked.
“I think I’ve had enough driving for today, but thanks. And if we run into any more of those things, maybe it’s better if you’re behind the wheel.”
Bruce nodded solemnly as he put the car back into drive, but held his foot on the brake. The engine thrummed. “On to the mall. Maybe they’ve got some good sales.”
Bruce took his foot off the brake, tromped down on the accelerator, and the massive car plowed forward. Before long he had it up to seventy.
“Feels like we’re floating on the ocean,” Katie said.
“They don’t call them land yachts for nothing,” Bruce said.
“You ever feel even a little bit guilty about, you know, stealing this car?”
Bruce glanced over. “Nope. Well, not anymore. Guilty those first few years, scared I might get caught. But I’ve moved on.” They drove along in silence for another minute before he said, “So tell me about your dad.”
Katie sighed. “You two would have hit it off. He was a no-bullshit kind of guy, like you. The real deal.” She swallowed. “I miss him every minute of every day.”
“I bet.”
“When he was a lot younger, he was kind of a biker guy. Not in Hell’s Angels or anything, but a rough crowd just the same. And my mom, she ran with him. They grew out of that scene before me and Archie came along, but the motorcycle thing, that was in his blood. He loved fixing them, working on them. He could figure out how anything worked, from a Harley to a lawn mower. Like, if our toaster broke, Mom would say we had to get a new one, but Dad would say, hold on, I bet it’s just a loose wire or something. Something he said to me once, I’ve been thinking about lately.”
“What was that?”
“I was hanging out with him in his shop while he was trying to get some guy’s Kawasaki going again, and he’s got oil on his hands, and there’s this little streak of grease on his cheek, right here.” She pointed to herself. “And it made him look so, I don’t know, cool. Anyway, he stops and he says something like, and I don’t remember it exactly, but he says machines are wonderful things, that they make our lives better and easier, but we can’t ever forget how to do things for ourselves. That if, one day, all the machines disappeared, we’d have to know how to fend for ourselves. You know that he never used a calculator?”
“Seriously?”
“He could pretty much do math in his head, but when it was something tricky, he’d use a pencil and paper. He’d multiply things that way, or do long division. He said calculators had made us all mentally lazy, that we were losing the ability to think.”
Bruce smiled. “You’re right. I would have liked him.”
“He’d have hated these self-driving cars,” Katie said. “Even if they weren’t trying to kill us. He’d probably have—”
“Up ahead,” Bruce said, taking his foot off the gas and letting the car coast.
Katie looked. A bald man was emerging, tentatively, from the woods, scanning the road in both directions. When he saw the Cadillac, he ran out into the road, standing in the center, waving his hands back and forth in the air, signaling them to stop.
“What do you want to do?” Bruce asked.
Katie shrugged. “I don’t think it’d be right to run him down.”
“I concur,” he said, hastening the car’s stop by putting his foot on the brake.
As they got closer to the man, he came into focus. Late forties, early fifties, probably, with a mustache, bit of a paunch. His eyes were wide with fear.
“Oh my God, thank you,” he said, running to Bruce’s open window as he brought the car to a full stop. “I can’t believe it! A real, live car!”
The man was panting and his shirt was soaked almost everywhere with sweat except, strangely, not on his rounded tummy.
“You okay?” Bruce asked.
He nodded furiously. “I was making my way through the woods. Roads aren’t safe. Those crazy cars, they’re everywhere. Have you seen any of them?”
Katie spoke up for the first time. “Oh, yeah. Back there, a couple of miles.”
The man stopped panting long enough to ask, “You mind taking on a passenger?”
Bruce and Katie exchanged a quick look. After a second, Katie shrugged, as if to say, We can’t just leave him here.
Bruce looked at the man and said, “Yeah, sure. I’m Bruce, by the way, and this here is Katie.”
“Glad to meet you,” the man said as Bruce opened the door and leaned into the steering wheel, allowing their hitchhiker to tip the driver’s forward and access the back seat. “I’m Ben. Ben Stapleton.”
“Welcome aboard, Ben,” Bruce said, putting his seat back into place and closing the door.
“I was here for the big Arrival event, if you can believe it,” said the man calling himself Ben Stapleton.
Katie spun around. “Did you see my mom? Is she okay?”
“Your mom?”
“Sandra Montrose? She organized the event! I can’t get hold of her!”
The man slowly nodded. “Right, right, yeah, I did see her. She gave out the press kits. Last I saw, she was okay.”
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure. So... if you were thinking of heading to the community center, I wouldn’t bother. And most people are trying to get away from there, anyway.”
“We’re headed to the mall,” Bruce said. “Looking for Katie’s brother.”
“Oh,” said the man. “I was wondering, you think you could drop me off at the ferry on your way?”
“The ferry?” Katie said. “That’s the opposite direction.”
The man said, “Yeah, I know. But if you were smart, you’d be heading there, too. I mean, you’ve got your own wheels! The ferry’s still got to be running. That’s the best way to get the hell out of here.”
Bruce caught a glimpse of the man in his rearview mirror. “The mall’s our priority at the moment, friend.”
The man in the back seat didn’t look very happy with that. He sat there sullenly for a moment before trying again.
“Maybe I can change your mind about that,” he said, reaching for something in the pocket of his sport jacket.
Twenty-Nine
Once Joe Bridgeman had carried his mother into the house they shared, he deposited her gently into a kitchen chair and asked repeatedly whether she was okay, as though he didn’t believe her the first time she’d said yes.
“I’ll hurt like hell tomorrow,” she told him, rubbing one shoulder and then the other. “But right now, I’m okay, and glad to be alive.” She frowned. “I could use a couple of Advils, and I’m going to need a new wheelchair.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I’ll get you sorted out.”
He was checking her for bruises or cuts or any other injuries she might have sustained while doing battle with the Arrival.
“Really, I’m okay,” Lillian said. She reached up, grasped his arm, and gave it a squeeze. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”
Joe smiled awkwardly. “So, some Advils. Where do you keep those?”
Lillian said, “Forget the Advils. I could use a scotch.”