Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

  One of them walked straight into the cabin. He was a tall slender East African man, quite young. Sokolov shot him twice in the chest and then, while the boy was standing there wondering if this was really happening, once in the head.

  Having had plenty of time to inventory the escape routes from this structure, he exploded from under the pile of pine needles, got a leg up on an old table, and vaulted through a vacant window opening. He was fairly certain that this placed most of the log cabin between him and the other jihadist, who was out familiarizing himself with an abandoned truck. Moving around to a location from which he could see said truck, he unslung the rifle, brought it up, and fired four rounds through its sheet metal, distributed through the part of the cab where a terrified man would be likely to throw himself down.

  Answering fire came out of weeds ten meters from the truck and forced him to drop into a lower crouch. Looking back up a moment later, he saw a man in full sprint toward an outhouse. Getting a moving target centered in his sights, at this distance, that fast, was impossible. Instead he drew a solid bead on the outhouse and fired four more rounds through it. The bullets would pass all the way through the structure and out the other side, probably not hitting anything but keeping the runner honest.

  He then embarked on a retreat toward the edge of the woods. The fight had begun too soon: less than a minute since Jones and the main group had departed. They would come back, they would figure out where he was, and they would surround him. Given more time, Sokolov would have won the duel with the man hiding behind the outhouse. As it was, he had no choice but to make himself scarce in the most excellent hiding place he could find, and wait for them to move on.

  On cue the other four jihadists came running back out of the woods firing undisciplined bursts. The man behind the outhouse called for a cease-fire and then stood up, exposing himself in a manner that verged on insolent. This man was both good and brave: he was daring Sokolov to take a shot at him and give away his position. Sokolov, inching out of the mining camp on his back, was tempted. But he was making an obvious track in the mud that they would soon find and follow. His only purpose for the next quarter of an hour was to get into the woods and run and hide. If he survived that, the jihadists would begin moving again, and his pursuit of them could resume.

  THE SUV BOTTOMED out in a dip, angled sharply upward, and vaulted a sharp rise, nearly jumping into the air. In the same instant, they came in view of a wide spot, just ahead, where a smaller road forked off to the left and strayed up into the mountains. Two vehicles had taken advantage of this to pull over to the side of the road. One was the Subaru wagon they’d been tailing. The other was a dust-caked Camry. Both vehicles’ doors were hanging open, in perfect position for them to be sheared off by the bumper of the onrushing SUV. Men had emerged from both cars and were holding an impromptu conference around the back of the Camry. Some were looking at maps spread out on its rear window. One had a laptop open on the Subaru’s hood and was pointing something out to another. A man was pacing up and down the shoulder of the road, talking into a very large phone. No, on second thought that thing was a walkie-talkie. Most of them were smoking. There were at least eight of them—more than could be counted at a glance. All their heads turned to look in alarm at the SUV, which fishtailed wildly at the top of the rise as Csongor twitched the steering wheel. For a moment, nearly airborne, the big vehicle had practically no grip on the road. Then it slammed back down onto its suspension.

  “Left!” Marlon shouted. “Go left!”

  Csongor gunned it up the little road that forked off to the left. As they blew past the parked vehicles, Marlon gave them a cheerful grin and a friendly wave. These pleasantries were not returned. Csongor felt the tires losing traction for a moment as he shifted course, and all the muscles in his neck and back went hard as he imagined bullets coming in through the tailgate. But then they were on their way up the little side road, going considerably slower now as this one was even steeper, windier, and rougher than the one they’d just turned off of. “Just keep going,” Marlon said.

  “I get it.”

  “They have guns.”

  Csongor turned to look at him. “You saw guns?”

  “No. But when we came over the hill, their hands moved.” He pantomimed a jerk of the elbow, a reach of grasping fingers toward a concealed weapon.

  “Crap. So now there’s, what, eight of them?”

  “At least.”

  “Where was that Toyota from?”

  “Some place with a lot of dirt.”

  Csongor had been gradually tapering the SUV’s speed down to little more than a walking pace. They had rapidly gained altitude and now found themselves creeping along the edge of a slope so steep that some might accuse it of being a cliff. In any case, it was too steep for trees to grow on, so Marlon now had an excellent view down toward the river and the main road that snaked along its bank. “Okay, they are moving again,” he announced, from this Olympian perspective.

  “We must have spooked them.”

  “We should turn around and go back,” Marlon said, “because this road goes friggin’ nowhere.”

  But Csongor, lacking Marlon’s view to the side, had been scanning the territory ahead and begged to differ. “These roads are for the men who cut down the trees,” he said. He was unsure of the English term for that occupation, and even if he had known it, Marlon might not have recognized it. “They go all over the place.” And indeed, in another few hundred meters—once they had gotten clear of an out-thrust lobe of mountain that accounted for the steep slope—the road forked again, the left fork winding up a valley into the mountains, the right plunging downhill. Csongor took the latter. A few seconds later they passed through another such intersection and found themselves on a short spur that dropped straight down to rejoin the road along the river. Once again they were following a dust trail. But it was so dense now that they could not see more than a hundred or so meters into it; the Subaru and the Camry might be just ahead of them, easily close enough that they could shoot back out their windows and hit the SUV. Csongor had to steady his nerves by reminding himself that the dust was even thicker in the wake of those vehicles; they could peer back out their rear windows all they wanted, but they wouldn’t be able to see anything, not even a vehicle as big as this one.

  Along a curve of the river they caught sight of the lead vehicle—the Camry—just a short distance ahead of them, and Marlon exhorted him to drop back a little bit, lest they be spotted.

  “What the hell are we going to do when we get to the end of the road?” Csongor asked.

  The question elicited a slack-jawed, distracted expression from Marlon. It occurred to Csongor that Marlon, born and raised in a colossal, densely packed city, had no instincts that were useful for being out in the middle of fucking nowhere.

  “Hide,” Marlon said, “and wait for them to come back out. Then we follow them out. When we get to that town, we stop and call the cops.”

  “We could just do that here.”

  “There’s no place to hide here.” Marlon spoke an evident truth; the road was a narrow graveled ledge trapped between a mountain and a river.

  But Marlon’s rejoinders had been coming more and more slowly, and after this one he went silent for a while.

  “We should start looking for a place to hide,” Csongor offered, just trying to be agreeable. “Maybe there will be something up here.” For the valley was now broadening, as if the river were about to divide into tributaries. The distance between the road and the riverbank grew rapidly, and soon their view of the stream was blocked by dense coniferous forest, brightened here and there by the fresh shoots and buds of deciduous trees. The general trend was uphill, but the terrain was flatter than what they had passed through minutes before; they seemed to have found their way into some high, broad valley among the mountains. Until seeing this, Csongor had supposed that they had ventured beyond the limit of civilization and entered into wilderness, but now he understood that they had
merely been driving through a natural bottleneck. Cleared land, livestock, mailboxes, and houses began to complicate their view.

  “We should keep going,” Csongor said. “Maybe there is a town or something.”

  “There is no town on the map,” Marlon said, fixated upon the Atlas and Gazetteer. “Just a mountain, name of Abandon. Then Canada.”

  “Then maybe we should just pull into one of these places and ask for help,” Csongor said. He slowed down and took the next right, turning into a driveway that ran into the woods for a few meters—just enough to accommodate a stopped vehicle—before terminating in a gate.

  “TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT,” Marlon said, reading words spray-painted in foot-high letters on a sheet of plywood that covered most of the gate. “What is a trespasser? Some kind of animal?”

  “It’s us,” Csongor said, throwing the SUV into reverse and gunning it backward onto the road.

  They proceeded without further discussion for a kilometer or so, then slowed down as they approached a whorl of dust filling the whole road cut, from tree line to tree line. Csongor took his foot off the accelerator and let the SUV idle forward. The windshield was a dusty mess, so he motored his window down and leaned out to get a clear view.

  This made it possible for him to see that a big vehicle—a pickup truck, red—was stopped in the oncoming lane, pointed toward them. No silhouette was visible behind its steering wheel. This struck Csongor as deeply wrong.

  A figure emerged from the dust, walking up along the driver’s side of the truck. Behind him was a second man, moving in the same way. The first of them reached the driver’s door and pulled at the handle but found it to be locked. He then reached in through the window, which was apparently open, and got it unlocked. This was accompanied by some strange pawing gestures that caused little cascades of sparkly bits to tumble out of the window frame and scatter on the ground.

  “Broken glass,” Marlon said.

  The man hauled the door open and then backed away, as if aghast at what he was seeing there. He paused for a moment, pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt, and said something into it. Then he reholstered the radio and nodded to his companion. The two of them bent forward as one and reached into the truck’s cab, then hauled back.

  What they dragged out of the cab was clearly recognizable as a limp human form even though its head had been blown apart into a soggy mushroomlike thing trailing gray stuff that had to be brains. The feet came out last; clad in a pair of high-topped work boots, they bounced off the truck’s running board and then hit the ground heels first.

  “Shit, Csongor. Csongor! CSONGOR!” Marlon was calling.

  Csongor was so transfixed by the sight of the body that he had stopped paying attention to the two living men who were dragging it by the arms. He now noticed, dully, that those men were staring directly up into his face from no more than about ten meters away.

  Then he felt something come down hard on his knee and sensed the steering wheel moving free of his hands. The SUV surged forward, veered left, then right, then left again. The corpse-dragging men were filling the windshield; then they disappeared beneath the edge of its hood and the vehicle thumped and bucked as it smashed them back into the pavement and rolled over them.

  Csongor looked down to see Marlon’s left hand on his knee, shoving his foot down into the gas, and his right hand on the steering wheel. Marlon had flung himself sideways across the SUV’s cab and was practically in Csongor’s lap.

  “I got this,” Csongor said. “I got it! Fine!” Marlon relented and wriggled back into the passenger seat.

  “Maybe we should go back and get their guns,” Marlon suggested.

  “That’s how it would work in a video game,” Csongor said, which was his way of agreeing. He allowed the gas pedal to come up off the floor for a moment.

  Then Marlon hollered as the rear end of the Subaru became visible just ahead of them. Men were standing around it, looking up in alarm. Csongor twisted the wheel to avoid them. Then remembered that these were the guys they wanted to run over. Tried to correct the error. Felt the vehicle tilt beneath them as it went up on two wheels.

  In his peripheral vision, something was coming at him. He looked out Marlon’s window to see that it was the road, hinging straight up into the glass. Marlon was spinning away from it, bringing his hands up to protect his face.

  That they had rolled over was obvious enough. What didn’t become obvious for several moments was that they had rolled over all the way and ended up sitting upright on all four wheels, sideways on the road, rocking gently from side to side on the suspension.

  Csongor looked out his open window and saw jihadists (it was time to start calling them that) reaching into their garments, just as Marlon had pantomimed a few minutes ago.

  He swung the wheel. “Get down!” he said.

  Glass was breaking all around him. His door had been sprung off its hinges during the rollover. He pushed it open to provide some space for him to lean sideways. Looking straight down at the road, using its edge as a guide, he got the SUV pointed in what he hoped was the correct direction and punched the accelerator.

  A few moments later he sat up straight, just in time to see that he was making for a head-on collision with a fat man riding down the middle of the road on an all-terrain vehicle, a rifle in his lap. Some mutual swerving occurred, and they just avoided hitting each other.

  He looked over to see that Marlon was, at least, moving. He had banged his head on something during the rollover and was bleeding from a laceration, stanching it with a wad of Gazetteer.

  The road went into a gentle leftward curve. Rustic houses went by them, mostly on the right.

  Some of them began to look familiar, and he understood that he was driving in circles. The road had terminated in a big loop. There was nowhere he could go from here.

  Except, possibly, up a driveway? He had to do something because the jihadists would be coming soon—might be running laps on the same loop already—and they had him bottled up here, at the head of the valley. He paused at the entrance to one driveway, saw a white man coming down it holding an assault rifle. An assault rifle! He gunned it forward to the next driveway, but this one was blocked, just off the road, by a gate. No place to hide from vengeful jihadists.

  The driveway after that seemed to wind off into the woods for some distance. Csongor, reacting without thinking, turned down it, praying that the move wasn’t being observed by any of the people who were pursuing them. Because this not was a decision he could take back; he couldn’t assume that there was a handy infinite loop at the end of this road.

  It went around a single bend and terminated in a massive timber gate. Csongor crunched it to a stop, then took advantage of a little wide spot that had been cleared, just in front of this barrier, to make it possible for wayward vehicles to turn around. Even so, getting the SUV reversed in such a tight spot required many back-and-forths. During a few of these, he found himself gazing curiously out his window at a panoply of documents that had been laminated in weatherproof plastic and stapled to the wood. None of them seemed to be direct threats to kill him. They were more in the way of legal filings and political/religious manifestos.

  A word passed in front of his eyes that took a moment to sink in. When it did, he stomped the brake. Reversed the vehicle’s direction. Then crept back the way he’d come, as slowly as he could make the vehicle move. Scanning the documents on the gate, unwilling to believe he’d actually seen it.

  “What is up, bro?” Marlon demanded. Then he called out “Aiyaa!” as Csongor stomped the brake again, jerking the vehicle, and him, and his aching head.

  “I think I get it now,” Csongor said.

  “Get what?”

  “What’s happening.”

  He was staring at a document—a sort of open letter—signed at the bottom. The signature was so neat that you could actually read it. It said, JACOB FORTHRAST.

  UNCLE JOHN DROVE the all-terrain vehicle back toward Jake’s cab
in with Zula sitting on the luggage rack behind him. Jake rode her bicycle. Olivia and Jake chivalrously suggested that those two ride on ahead as fast as possible, the bicyclists catching up as soon as they could. John, though, was averse to any plan that involved splitting up; and the intensity of his reaction as much as proved that he was recollecting something that had not worked out very well in Vietnam. The journey back was therefore carried out in a tortoise-and-hare mode, the ATV running forward for a few hundred yards and then idling along while Jake and Olivia caught up with them.

  During these pauses, John would try to communicate with persons not present. The people who lived around Prohibition Crick had gone there specifically to get off the grid, and so excellent phone reception was not among their priorities. They were not the sort to look benignly on phone company technicians crawling around the neighborhood hiding cables under the ground and setting up mysterious antennas to bathe every cubic inch of their living space with encoded emanations. In spite of which, you could sometimes get one bar if you stood in a high, exposed place in just the right posture. But they were in some combination of too far from the down-valley cell towers and too deeply trapped in the folds of Abandon Mountain’s lower slopes for this to work.

  John also had a walkie-talkie, which Jake and members of his family tended to take along with them as a safety measure when they ventured into the wilderness on hunting and huckleberry-picking expeditions. This was of a common brand, pocket-sized, and notoriously fickle when used in the convoluted landscape of the Selkirks; sometimes they could reach people from twenty miles away, sometimes they were no better than shouting at each other. John’s first few efforts to reach Elizabeth back at the cabin were unavailing.

  After that, Zula took the device from him and hit on the idea of trying some of the other channels. The device was capable of using twenty-two of them. John had left it set on channel 11, which was the one that the Forthrast family was in the habit of using. Zula hit the Down button and indexed this all the way to 1, pausing on each channel for a few moments to listen for traffic. Then she worked her way back up to 11 and attempted to hail Elizabeth a few more times, with no results. Then up to 12. Nothing. Then she moved up to 13. A barrage of noise came out of the thing’s tiny speaker, and she had to turn the volume down. Several people were trying to transmit on the same channel all at once, and all of them were shouting.