Hell, he thought, huffing and puffing, you ought to be able to outrun a girl, right?
Wrong, he told himself. Don’t be an asshole. That was no girl, that was a superhuman artificial being, and she had a hundred-meter head start on him. Besides, he was fifty years old. Not exactly a boy any more. It was nutty to go chasing after her like this through the woods.
But he kept on all the same. His shirt was soaked now and his heart was pounding and there were sharp little pressures all up and down his chest, but he couldn’t let himself be bested this way. “Goddamn you, Allie, wait up for me!” he yelled, running even harder. He couldn’t even see her now: a close-set stand of enormous redwoods rose like a wall before him. Screw her. I’ll just let her run away and get lost, he thought. I’ve got all the food, right? But still he didn’t slow down. And then he caught his foot in some sort of gopher hole and went toppling heavily to the ground, and felt the ankle twist beneath him as he landed.
Pain blazed in his whole leg. He sat up, touching himself here and there. The ankle was throbbing. He tried carefully to stand and discovered that he couldn’t: the leg wanted to buckle when he put the slightest weight on it. How was he going to get to Ukiah now? He cupped his hand to his mouth and called to her: “Allie? Allie? Come on back, I hurt myself!”
Five minutes, no sign of her. Ferguson massaged his ankle, hoping it would unsprain itself fast; but when he tried again to get to his feet it felt worse than before. His foot was beginning to swell up.
“Alleluia? God damn you, Alleluia, where are you?”
“Easy, easy. I’m right here.”
He looked up and saw her loping toward him like a gazelle, running in high splendid bounds. When she halted beside him she was not in the least winded: her breathing was as calm as if she had been sauntering.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“Tripped. Sprained it. I can’t walk, Allie!”
“Sure you can. I’ll make a crutch for you.”
“Jesus, a crutch? I don’t know how to use a crutch. And what am I going to do, hobble for thirty miles? Why the hell did you have to go running off like that? I wouldn’t have tripped if I hadn’t been chasing after you. And—”
“Take it easy,” she said. He watched in astonishment as she bent a little tree to ground level, broke off the top third of its trunk, and began stripping away the branches. “You don’t have to go that far. There’s a road just up ahead. We’ll flag somebody down and ask for a ride into Ukiah. They don’t want to go to Ukiah, we’ll persuade them.”
“A road?”
“A little paved highway, just on the other side of those big trees, maybe five minutes up ahead. I was there when I heard you calling. A few cars going by, even. Don’t worry, okay?” She scooped him to a standing position as if he were a sack of feathers and propped the improvised crutch under his armpit. It was a little too long. Supporting him with one arm, she brought the crutch up across her shin and snapped off the tip. “There,” she said. “Ought to be the right length now.” If he hadn’t seen it done, he wouldn’t have believed that she had been able to snap a green sapling as thick as her wrist with one quick little gesture. How hard would it be for her to break someone’s arm or leg?
The crutch helped. It was a clumsy business, but he limped along, letting his injured foot dangle. She walked beside him, her arm around his shoulders, giving him an extra lift. The ground sloped upward until they reached the dense stand of redwoods, but then on the far side it angled down and leveled out and before long they emerged into a clear space and saw the highway. It was an old two-lane county road, potholed and worn, no vehicle-control devices visible at all in it, the sort of road they had had a hundred fifty years ago. He listened for cars but heard nothing: total silence. Behind them, the sun was getting low, starting to drop toward the Pacific.
“Something’s coming,” Alleluia said.
“I don’t hear a thing.”
“Neither do I. But I can see it, down the road. And now I can hear the engine, more or less. Probably a ground-effect car, since it’s so quiet.”
He saw no sign of anything, not even a speck in the distance. Her senses were awesome. A couple of minutes went by, and then he began to make it out, a dark van coming toward them from the south. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to creep a little way back into the woods. You stand out here and flag them down.”
“Will they stop?”
“People got to be out of their minds not stopping for a woman looks like you, out here by yourself with night coming on. They’ll stop. When they do, you tell them your husband’s back there with an injured leg, will they mind driving us to Ukiah. I’ll be coming out. Not much they can do about it then, when I come out. Meanwhile you get close to the driver. He show any sign of pulling out, you reach in the window, you put your hand on his throat, right? Not to hurt him, you understand, just to keep him cooperative.”
“Okay,” she said. “You better get out of sight.”
“Yeah,” Ferguson said, and went hobbling off into the underbrush. He settled in behind a tree to watch. A moment later the van appeared. It was a ground-effect job, all right, a real antique, maybe even a prewar model, with big garish bolts of lightning painted in red and yellow along its sides. Alleluia was standing in the middle of the road, wigwagging her arms; and, sure enough, the van slowed to a stop a short distance in front of her. He saw a couple of men in the front seat. They probably figured they were in for a night’s hot fun, terrific brunette, lonely country road. They tried anything with Allie, though, they’d find out different in a hurry.
He heard them talking with her. Ferguson started to emerge from his hiding place. We won’t even bother hitching a ride, he thought. I’ll just have Allie toss them out into the shrubbery and we’ll drive to Ukiah ourselves and take it on north tomorrow morning to Oregon.
Then he got a closer look at things and realized that beside the ones in the front seat there was a whole mob of men in the back of the van—three, four, maybe five of them. Scratchers, most likely. Or maybe even bandidos.
Damn, he thought. Even she can’t take on seven guys. I can’t even take on one, with my leg like this. Abruptly he saw how their escape from the Center was going to end: with him lying in the weeds with his throat slit, and Alleluia, kicking and screaming all the way, being dragged off somewhere for a night of gangbanging.
They were getting out of the van. Four, five, six, seven, yes. No, eight. Coming up to Alleluia, clustering around her, looking her over appreciatively. One of them, an evil-looking cat with a greasy face and a lot of untidy red hair, was staring at her breasts as if he hadn’t touched a woman in three years. Another, with washed-out blue eyes and a face full of acne scars, was actually licking his lips. Ferguson wanted to turn and get away, but it was too late, too late, they had seen him. At his hobbling pace they’d catch him in half a second.
“That your husband over there?” one of the scratchers asked, a stocky, tough-looking one with a short thick black beard. He pointed toward Ferguson. What a dumb way to die this is going to be, Ferguson said to himself. He prayed for Alleluia to go into action, grab three or four of them and snap their necks the way she had snapped that sapling, fast, before they knew what was happening. But she didn’t seem about to do that. She looked calm and cheerful and relaxed. Goddamn weird woman. He halted, leaning on his crutch by the side of the road, wondering what was going to happen next.