The moon was out, although there were no city lights out here and the night was much darker than it usually seemed. He remained in place, allowing his eyes to adjust, and gradually became aware of the fact that there was a slight reddish glow coming from an area off to the left. Moving carefully, putting one foot deliberately in front of the other, he slowly made his way across the dirt in that direction. The reddish glow, he soon saw, came from the taillights of the car, which were still on, though there was no sound of an engine. The car lay downhill from where he stood, in a kind of gulch, its front end mangled, the metal accordioned. He had apparently gotten out of the vehicle after it had crashed, then somehow walked up here, though he remembered none of it.
Now Gary stared down at the wreckage, feeling dizzy and disoriented. He didn’t know if the three men were alive in there, but he had no desire to walk over and find out. He hoped they were dead, but he couldn’t count on it, and he knew the safest thing to do would be to get out of there as quickly as possible and put some miles between himself and the car while it was still dark. He turned, started to walk off—
—and promptly threw up.
He dropped to his knees, heaving in a way he hadn’t done since he was ten years old and had the flu. It was probably a balance thing, an inner ear thing, and he hoped against hope that it would go away quickly so he could try to make his escape, but he remained on his knees even after the stomach spasms had passed, afraid to make any sudden movements.
Slowly, Gary stood. He couldn’t see it from here, but he knew that he had to be close to the dirt road that had taken them to the ranch house. He looked down at the wreckage again, closing his eyes after a few seconds to ward off the dizziness, then calculated back to where he figured the road should be. Sure enough, there was a flat area past the rocks that, even with only the minimal illumination of moonlight, he could tell was the trail they’d taken to get from the highway to the ranch.
Gary tried to remember how far it was to pavement, but he’d been blissed out on his way in and things like distance and time had not mattered to him and were now impossible to measure. He was not even positive in which direction the highway was, so he reached the dirt road and decided to head left because that felt right. He chose correctly: after ten minutes of walking, the route still wound through rocky hills rather than sloping down to the bowl-shaped meadow that housed the ranch.
With only moonlight to guide him, Gary trudged through the darkened countryside. He had one hellacious headache, and the dizziness had not entirely gone away, but he walked quickly and made good time, and after what felt like an hour or so, he reached the turnoff.
He stopped to rest, feeling tired and discouraged. The road was not as big as he’d expected. He’d assumed they’d been traveling on a major highway, but the route turned out to be a two-lane blacktop that ran straight into darkness in both directions. There were no cars, no lights, no buildings, nothing visible but that unbending track of asphalt cutting through a barren, inhospitable landscape.
Gary’s throat felt dry, rough with the afterburn of vomiting, but that couldn’t be helped; he had no water with him. And though he wanted to remain here and rest awhile longer, he knew that wasn’t a good idea. He needed to keep moving. Even if the men who’d abducted him had been killed, it was more than possible that they were supposed to have been at a certain place by now or that they should have checked in with somebody. For all he knew, the woman and man from that ranch might come speeding out from the dirt road at any second, gunning for him.
He had to get out of here.
Once again, he turned left, for no other reason than that it had worked for him the last time. He kept to the side of the road and, after twenty minutes or so, discovered that what he had taken for the darkness of night was in fact more hills, and that after the road passed through them, it opened onto a flat plain on which he could see, spread out over a wide distance, individual twinkling lights that had to be homes.
He had no wallet, Gary realized. He didn’t know what had happened to it. It had been in his pants when he’d returned to his room after class, but sometime between then and now it had been taken from him.
He patted his front pockets. His keys, too. They’d taken his keys.
So he had no money or ID.
Even if he did run into anyone, he had no way to prove who he was, no way to prove he wasn’t an escaped convict or some loony from a mental hospital. And if he lurched out of the darkness to knock on the doors of the cabins or farmhouses whose lights he could see from the road, the people living there would probably shoot him, thinking he was a crazed criminal.
But he wasn’t going to walk up to any of those homes. This was their country, and for all he knew every single one of those structures housed Outsiders who’d been told of his escape and were on the lookout for him. Logically, of course, that couldn’t be true. But it might as well be. Because even if only one out of a hundred houses was theirs, he was dead meat if that was the one he approached.
What was that old bumper sticker joke? Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not after you? He was being paranoid. And it might be a side effect of whatever they’d used to drug him. But he’d also been abducted from his UCLA dorm by three Amish-looking guys, one of whom looked like a mutant. He had reason to be wary.
He continued on, wondering if one of those lights might be a gas station or a store, wondering if the road curved up ahead and led there. If he could find a pay phone—
Do they even have pay phones anymore?
—he could dial collect and call… call… call… 911? The FBI? Reyn? His parents? He didn’t know—maybe all of them.
By the time the sun was starting to rise, his legs were aching, and Gary sat down on a rock to rest. If a car or truck came up the road, he decided, he would try to flag it down and catch a ride. But no vehicles appeared, and after a half hour or so, he decided to keep going. He could tell that the dawning day was going to be a hot one, and he needed to find some water. His parched throat felt more sandpapery than ever, and he kept swallowing saliva constantly, knowing that if he didn’t, he would cough and gag and probably throw up again.
In the light of morning, he could see the road ahead, and while he’d made his way through most of the plain and had gone nowhere near any of the scattered shacks and cabins whose lights he’d spotted in the darkness, he saw now that there was something shiny on the road ahead, where it started to slope up the side of a low plateau. Maybe it was a car. Maybe it was light reflecting off the windows of a building. Whatever it was, it was man-made, not natural, and he walked forward with renewed hope, able to ignore the throbbing muscles in his legs, the rumbling in his stomach, the sandpaper in his throat.
A plane flew by, high overhead, the first sign of anything human since he’d left the crash site.
As he drew closer, the shine became brighter until it was a silver glare he could not bear to look at. Then something changed—the angle of the road or the angle of the sun—and though he was still a mile or two away, he could see that the object was indeed a building of some sort, its metal or glass reflecting back the rays of the rising sun.
He was drenched with sweat, but he used the bottom of his shirt to wipe his face and kept going.
The building had once been a gas station, he saw as he approached, but now there was only the skeleton of a Shell sign atop the pole next to the road, and what had been the pump island consisted of bent metal braces affixed to a concrete slab. The office and garage were still being used and were open, however, and though there was no sign on the structure, a crudely painted stencil on the side of a tow truck parked parallel to the road read: TOW-TO-TOW TOWING. It made Gary think of that garage in the desert outside of Lancaster where Reyn’s water pump had been replaced—