“Yes.”
“So am I. Let’s do something about it.”
They stopped at a woebegone highway cafe in the middle of nowhere, where the heat outside the car closed around them like a great fist. She bought a dinner of sorts for them both simply by showing her I.D. card. It was terrible food, some sort of cardboardy and tasteless grilled meat on a bun and a cold bubbling drink, but Khalid was used to terrible food of all sorts by this time.
Onward, again, through the sandy emptiness. There was very little traffic. None at all going in the direction they were traveling; perhaps one car every half hour going the other way. Whenever they passed someone, Cindy kept her eyes fixed rigidly on the road ahead, and Khalid noticed that the drivers of the other cars never looked toward them, either.
The road was climbing, and good-sized mountains were visible all around them now, bigger than he had ever seen before. But the landscape was still as ugly as ever, rocky and sandy, not much vegetation and most of that stunted and gnarled. At one point Cindy said, as they went flashing past a sign by the edge of the road, “We’re in California now, Khalid. Or what used to be California when this country still had such things as separate states. When there were still such things as countries.” He imagined palm trees and soft breezes. Not so. Everything was just as ugly here as it had been on the Nevada side of the line.
“Getting dark,” Cindy announced, an hour later. “The driving’s going to get tougher. These old crates are a lot of work to operate on a bad road. So I’m going to pull off and rest for a little while before we try to go further. You’re sure you don’t know how to drive?”
“Would you like me to try?” “Maybe not, I think. Just stay awake, keep watch, let me know if you see anything strange.”
She left the freeway at the next exit and brought the car to a halt just off the road. Pushing her seat back until it was practically horizontal, she reclined against it, closed her eyes, and seemed to fall asleep almost at once.
Khalid watched her for a while. There was a look of great peace on her face.
She was, he thought, an unusual woman, very much in control of herself at all times, self-assured, confident. A very capable person. Possessing much inner serenity, of that he was certain. Inner serenity was something Khalid admired very much. He had worked very hard to attain it himself, and he had, he believed, succeeded; surely he would never have been able to kill that Entity without it.
Or did he have it? What had she said, on the plane? I think you’re angry all the time. A seething volcano inside him, she said, with a tight lid clamped down on it to keep it from erupting. Was that true? He didn’t know. He always felt calm; but perhaps, somewhere deep down inside, he was really raging with red-hot fury, killing Richie Burke a hundred times a day, killing all those who had made his life such a misery ever since the moment when he had understood that his mother was gone and his father was a monster and the world was under the control of bizarre, bewildering creatures who ruled, so it seemed, purely by whim and savage caprice.
Perhaps so. He didn’t choose to look within and see.
But he was sure that there were no hidden volcanoes in this woman Cindy. She seemed to take life as it came, easily, day by day; very likely always had. Khalid wanted to know more about her, who she was, what her existence had been like before the Entities came, why she had become a quisling, all of that. But probably he would never ask. He was not used to asking people such things about themselves.
He left the car, walked around a little, glanced up at the moon and stars as night settled in. It was very quiet here, and with the coming of darkness the day’s blistering warmth was fleeing into the thin desert air. Already it had become quite cool. There were scrabbling sounds somewhere nearby: animals, he supposed. Lions? Tigers? Did they have such things in California? This was a wild land, fierce and harsh. It made England seem very placid. He sat on the ground beside the car and watched shooting stars go streaking across the black dome overhead.
“Khalid?” Cindy called, after a time. “You out there? What are you doing?”
“Just looking at the sky,” he said.
She had rested enough, she told him. He got back in, and they drove onward. Sometime during the night they came to the exit for Barstow.
“We died ten miles back,” she said. “It was all over so fast we never knew what was happening.”
A little before dawn, as they were descending a long gentle curve in a hilly part of the route, Khalid saw the turquoise lights of an Entity transport convoy far below, making its way uphill toward them. Cindy did not appear to notice.
“Entities,” he said, after a moment.
“Where?”
“That light down there.”
“Where? Where? Oh. Shit! Sharp eyes you have.—Who would expect them to be driving around in a place like this in the middle of the night? But of course, why wouldn’t they?” She swerved the car roughly to the left and brought it to a screeching halt on the outer margin of the freeway.
He frowned at her. “What are you doing?”
“Come on. Get out and let’s run for it. We’ve got to hide in that ravine until they go past.”
“Why is that?”
“Come on,” she said. She was anything but serene now. “We’re supposed to be dead! If they detect us, and decide to check out our I.D.—”
“They will pay no attention to us, I think.”
“How do you know? Oh, Jesus, Jesus, you idiot\” She could not wait any longer. She made a furious snorting sound and leaped from the car, plunging off straightaway into the steep brushy drop alongside the highway. Khalid remained where he was. He watched her dwindle into the darkness until the angle of the ravine hid her from his sight; and then he leaned back against the head-rest of his seat and waited for the Entity transport to approach.
He wondered whether they would notice him, sitting here in a parked car by the side of a dark road in an empty landscape, and whether they would care. Could they reach into his mind and see that he was Khalid Haleem Burke, who had died in an accident some hours earlier on this road, on the other side of the city called Barstow? Would they know anything about the supposed accident without consulting their computer net? Why would they bother? Why would they care?
Perhaps, he thought, they would look into his mind as they went past and discover that he was the person who had killed a member of their species seven years ago on the highway between Salisbury and Stonehenge. In that case he had made a mistake, very likely, by remaining here, staying within range of their telepathy, instead of running off into the underbrush with Cindy.
The image blossomed in his mind of that night long ago on the road to Stonehenge, the beautiful angelic creature standing in the transport wagon, the gun, the crosshairs, the head perfectly targeted. Squeezing the trigger, seeing the angel’s head burst apart, the bright fountain of flame, the radiant fragments flying outward, the greenish-red cloud of alien blood swiftly expanding into the air. The other Entity going into that frantic convulsion as its companion’s spirit went whirling out into the darkness. He was as good as dead, Khalid knew, if the Entities detected that image as they passed by.
He pushed it aside. He emptied his mind entirely. He sealed it off from intruders with iron bands.