Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

  “Why is channel 13 special?” she called back to Jake, who was jogging along about fifty feet behind the ATV.

  “Community emergency channel,” he said. “Why?”

  “I think there’s an emergency.”

  “That’s why Elizabeth hasn’t answered,” John suggested. “She must have switched over to 13.” He gunned the ATV ahead and gave Zula a few hundred yards’ rough ride to a spot where the trail swung around a root of the mountain and gave them a view—albeit distant, dusty, and cluttered by trees—down into the valley. Sporadic gunfire and sounds of roaring engines were spiraling up from below.

  The voices on channel 13 were a bit clearer now, but still fragmentary as different transmissions stepped on each other. A man kept breaking in to insist on the need for radio discipline. “Cut the chatter!” “Copy.” “Pennsylvania plates…” “Come again?” “Multiple vehicles…” “Black SUV, two subjects…” “Frank is dead, repeat, they ambushed him in his truck…” “Camry…” “Full auto…”

  It required a minute or two for Zula to absorb this. She assumed at first that word of Jones’s approach had preceded him into the valley and that she was listening to the sounds of the community preparing to be invaded from out of the north. But this could not be reconciled with all that she was hearing about vehicles—vehicles that had to be coming up out of the south.

  “He must have friends,” she concluded, “come up here to meet him.”

  John knew who he was, and approximately what he was doing, because Zula had been giving him an update during the ride. He considered it and shrugged. “It’s not like he was going to hitchhike around the U.S. He’d have to have confederates. I guess they’re here.” He thought about it some more, gazing back at Olivia and Jake who were huffing and puffing along in their wake. “I wonder what they were expecting. Probably just empty logging roads. Jake’s community doesn’t have a name, doesn’t show up on maps. Still, it’s odd that they would come in shooting.”

  Jake had not heard the radio traffic, but the gunfire coming up out of the valley was clear enough, and he had a look in his eye that Zula hoped she’d never again see on a loved one’s face. He was up here, and his wife and children were down there, where the fighting was.

  John saw it too. “They know what to do,” he reminded his kid brother. “You can be sure that they’re bunkered down and they’re fine.”

  “I have to get down there,” Jake said.

  Without a word John hopped off the ATV, turning it over to Jake. Zula rolled off the back and came up on her feet, a little unsteady but feeling much better.

  Jake turned off the trail and began plunging down the slope, cutting across switchbacks wherever he could.

  “It’s about one click from here,” John said. “Descending steep slopes is not my strong suit. I suggest you healthy young ladies proceed together and I’ll bring up the rear.” Slung over his back had been a hunting rifle of the old school, with a brown wooden stock and a telescopic sight. Zula knew he had carried it along only in case he needed it to deal with an enraged bear. He now stripped this weapon off his shoulder and held it out to Zula. “Pump action,” he said. “Thirty ought six, four rounds in the magazine.”

  Some part of Zula—the small-town upbringing—wanted to say, Oh no I couldn’t possibly, but she stifled it; the look on the face of her uncle—who, for all practical purposes, had been her father for the last fifteen years—said that he would not brook any argument. She remembered, just for an instant, the day that the meth heads had come to the farm to steal their anhydrous ammonia.

  So she only uttered a single word, which was “Thanks.”

  OLIVIA TURNED OUT to be pretty spry—more than a match, anyway, for Zula in her current condition. They hewed mostly to the trail and occasionally crossed tracks that had been carved across it by Jake in his impetuous plunge. Zula’s expectation that Jake would soon get far ahead of them turned out to be wrong. When the ATV moved, it moved faster than they could run, but he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time hung up on obstacles or working his way around slopes too steep for it to negotiate. Its sound was always there, just a bit ahead of them, occasionally drowned out by gunfire. Some sort of weird, inappropriate family-competitive instinct made Zula want to catch and surpass it. But before this happened, they came in view of the cabin itself, its green sheet-metal roof nestled among the peaks of the surrounding trees, and then it became all about getting there as fast and as directly as possible.

  Jake and his family had gone through the forest within a hundred-meter radius of the cabin and removed all small scrubby undergrowth and pruned away the dead, ladderlike branches that tended to project from the trunks of mature conifers. This was supposedly an anti-forest-fire measure; it would prevent blazes from storming through the dry understory and consuming the house. It had the side effect of vastly increasing visibility. In the natural woods of these parts, you couldn’t see farther than a few dozen yards because of all that clutter, but from the windows of Jake’s cabin you could see all the way to the edge of the zone they had cleared. Which made Zula suspect that it was also a tactical measure, making it more difficult for people to sneak up on them through the woods. Whatever its purpose, the upshot was that when Olivia and Zula burst into that zone, they suddenly had a clear view all the way to the back of the cabin, where Jake had just finished jumping off the ATV. He made straight for the cellar door, a pair of heavy-gauge steel hatches mounted on an angled frame of reinforced concrete. Zula watched as those doors opened and Elizabeth, strapped with a shotgun in addition to her usual Glock semiautomatic, came out to throw her arms around her husband and give him a kiss.

  But it was not a long, fond sort of reunion, for her next act was to grab Jake’s face between her hands and tell him something that looked very important. As she spoke, she turned her head significantly toward the front side of the cabin.

  Jake nodded, gave Elizabeth a peck, and stepped back. Elizabeth backed down the steps and hauled the doors closed on top of herself. Zula, now sprinting through the trees no more than fifty paces away, had an impulse to call, No, wait for us! But she was too out of breath to make any sounds other than gasping, and—on second thought—being trapped in a bomb shelter with Elizabeth and the boys did not actually sound that appealing.

  Jake meanwhile had unslung his rifle and chambered a round and gone into a style of movement that he must have learned by attending a tactical rifle combat seminar or else by watching DVDs of action films. The gist of it was that he kept the rifle aimed in the same direction as he was looking, and he tended to go very cautiously around corners.

  Zula managed to call out, “Coming at you from behind, Uncle Jake!” since there was something in his body language that suggested he might not take kindly to being surprised.

  He turned back and made a shushing gesture, then ventured around the corner of the building and disappeared from their view.

  Zula was trying to make sense of it. Lots and lots of armed bad men in front of the cabin would call for Jake to go down below with his family and to gather Zula and Olivia with him. So whatever was in front couldn’t be that bad.

  “I want to see what is there,” Zula said, breaking stride, and making a lateral move, swinging wide around the same side of the cabin up which Jake was creeping. “I might be able to help.” She swept the rifle down off her shoulder.

  “May I join you?” Olivia said between gasps for air.

  “Of course.” Olivia seemed to be joining her in any case.

  The ground was uneven, the sight lines interrupted not only by tree trunks but by piles of firewood and outbuildings. They were moving in a wide swing around the property while Jake advanced in a straight line up the side of the cabin. So an anxious and confused minute passed as they tried to get Jake back in view without exposing themselves to whomever might be coming up the driveway. They ran afoul of chicken-wire enclosures that the Forthrasts had erected to keep rabbits away from their vegetables, coyotes and
lynx away from their chickens, wolves and cougars away from their goats. But finally Zula swung into position where she was able to see Jake from the waist up, standing in his driveway, leveling his rifle at a target nearby, and shouting.

  Zula stood up cautiously. Two heads came into view, down at the level of Jake’s waist. Were they kneeling? Both of them had their hands on tops of their heads, fingers laced together.

  One of them looked awfully familiar. But what she was thinking could not be real. Checking to make sure that the safety was engaged, she raised the rifle and used its telescopic sight to peer at the one on the right. A big man, not much shorter than Jake even on his knees. Burly. Close-cropped copper hair and a sunburned neck.

  “OMFG,” she said.

  “Two men are coming in through the gate,” Olivia said, “and I don’t much like their looks.”

  Zula panned the rifle down the length of the driveway until the crosshairs found the big timber gate. This was ajar. A half-wrecked SUV was partly visible through it, blocking the road. And just as Olivia had said, two men had just circumvented the vehicle and were now coming around the edge of the gate. They perfectly matched the profile of the jihadists Zula had been hanging around with for the last three weeks. One of them had a pistol drawn, the other had a carbine, which he now raised to his shoulder, apparently drawing a bead on Jake: the most obvious target. And the most vulnerable.

  Zula got the crosshairs on the latter and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

  “Look out!” Olivia screamed.

  Zula flicked the safety off and tried it again. The shot apparently missed; she was breathing hard and she hadn’t really braced herself properly. But it had a remarkable effect on the two jihadists, who jumped back around behind what they perceived as the shelter of the gate and threw themselves down on the ground.

  Shouting now from the driveway. She clearly recognized Csongor’s voice, and she understood his tone: Are you crazy? We’re the good guys!

  “The Asian gentleman,” said Olivia, “I recognize from his hoops career in Xiamen. Marlon, it must be. And may I assume that the big lad is the famous Csongor?”

  Lady, who the fuck are you? was what Zula wanted to say. Instead, what came out was: “Uncle Jake!” Zula came into the open, calling, “Let them in! It’s okay!”

  Two heads—Marlon’s and Csongor’s—turned around to look in her direction. They seemed astonished. Especially Csongor.

  “Go! Go!” Jake said, pivoting to face the gate. Moving somewhat uncertainly, Csongor and Marlon took their hands off their heads and clambered to their feet. They began moving toward the cabin. Jake went the other way, getting well clear of them and raising his AR-15 to his shoulder. He was aiming it straight down the driveway toward the gate. He fired a spread of several rounds, then began backing up, keeping his sights centered on the gate while closing the distance between himself and his house. Zula meanwhile had braced herself against a tree and obtained a clear view of the same target, ready to fire again if either of the two jihadists should show themselves. But nothing happened. Nothing moved.

  WHAT HAD HAPPENED to Richard Forthrast’s ankle was clearly a sprain, not a break. He could hop and hobble, but not walk. This created an interesting situation for Seamus. Not that the situation hitherto had been devoid of fascinating qualities. According to Richard, they were only a few minutes’ walk (for an able-bodied person, anyway) from breaking out into an open space where they would be able to move south, traversing the western face of the mountain, and drop down into a valley where Richard’s brother lived in a cabin. Richard wanted Seamus to leave him behind and move in that direction as fast as possible, because he was worried that Jones’s main group was about to attack the place.

  Which Seamus was more than willing to do. He was suffering a bit of survivor’s guilt, having left Jack the chopper pilot behind earlier in the day, and getting ready, now, to abandon the lamed Richard. This was made a lot easier by Richard’s insistence that he should just get on with it, and that he, Richard, could take care of himself in the meantime.

  Yuxia was a different matter. Seamus had sort of imagined that she would be a good girl and hang around to look after Richard and keep him company. That being in a chopper crash and being chased through the American wilderness by a fanatical sniper might have sated her taste for adventure, at least for one morning. Barring that, that the heavy psychological aftermath of having just killed a man with a shotgun blast from point-blank range might have left her with a need to sit in a quiet place for a while and think about what it all meant.

  But no, everything in her face and body language said that she was going with Seamus. That she was kind of irked by the stupid deliberation that Seamus had been displaying, in the sixty seconds since Jahandar had gone to meet his seventy-two black-eyed virgins, and that if Seamus spent any more time thinking it through, she might just grab a weapon and take off without him.

  The inevitability of Yuxia’s participation in the operation’s next phase caused Seamus to think about its details a bit harder. It sounded as though they would be traversing a slope in the open, where they could be shot at from a distance by men with good rifles.

  “Is there any way of getting to the same place without going across an exposed slope?” he asked Richard.

  “It can be done through the woods,” Richard allowed, nodding off the trail into some formidable-looking forest. “Much more slowly.” He thought about it. “I heard some shooting from that direction a minute ago.”

  “So did I. Either Jones met with opposition, or he decided to ambush a meth lab.”

  “Up here, a marijuana grow would be more likely. Too far from the road for a meth lab.”

  “Anyway, they seem to be going through the woods,” Seamus said, “which would slow them down.”

  “If you take the high road,” Richard said, “you’ll be way up above them. You’ll be able to reach cover if you have to. And you’ll have the advantage if you are packing the A.I.” For he had recognized Jahandar’s rifle and assumed Seamus had done the same.

  “The high road it is,” Seamus said, trying to put a lot of decisiveness into his voice, as a way of appeasing Yuxia, who was bouncing around in her camo like the little sidekick bruin in the old Yogi Bear cartoon. “Which gun, or guns, would you like me to leave you with?”

  “You can take them all, if your intention is to shoot lots of bad guys with them.”

  “I should have mentioned that it was a trick question,” Seamus continued. “We are being tailed by a mountain lion that is most definitely not as afraid of us as we are of it.”

  “I know.” Richard looked around. “As much as I covet the A.I., in these woods, I can’t see far enough for its excellent qualities to be of any use beyond assuaging certain masturbatory gun-nut impulses.”

  “What about the shotgun?” Seamus asked.

  “Yuxia should take that. She knows how to use it, and it looks cute on her.” This, at least, elicited a dimpled grin from Yuxia as she basked for a few moments in the scrutiny of the two men.

  “No argument.”

  Seamus approached the pellet-riddled corpse and rolled it over. “Here’s a wheel gun, if you can believe it.”

  “I thought it sounded like a six-shooter,” Richard said.

  “Five-shooter, more like. Large caliber.” Seamus dropped to his knees and studied the revolver, which had been concealed under Jahandar’s body and was now lying in the middle of the trail. He carefully uncocked it, then held it up. “Trophy piece. Must have taken it off a dead American contractor.”

  “Seems like just what the doctor ordered for last-ditch cougar defense. I’ll take it. You get the A.I.”

  “Done,” Seamus said. Less than a minute later, he and Yuxia, regeared and rearmed, were jogging up the switchbacks.

  DURING THE QUARTER of an hour that Sokolov spent fleeing from the jihadists and hiding in a cold and wet place beneath a fallen log, he thought about age. These ruminations were triggered by all
that he had done in the last half hour or so. He had created an effigy, seen it shot to pieces, run across a big rock, and then made a helter-skelter descent of a large open slope. Twenty times he had dived and rolled into cover on a surface consisting largely of big sharp rocks, each of which had left some kind of mark on him, some of which had inflicted bone bruises that would take weeks to get better. Another twenty times he had dived and rolled in ice-cold mud. He had sprinted into an unfamiliar abandoned mining camp with no idea of what he was going to do, then found an ideal place to take cover and taken advantage of it. He had rested there for all of about three minutes before blowing it by shooting the tall African jihadist, whereupon he had been obliged to abandon the position and go into another intense fugue of running, diving, vaulting, rolling, and hiding in uncomfortable places.

  All this effort, all these risks taken and damages sustained, had achieved one thing for him, which was that he had killed exactly one of his numerous foes.

  Now, had he been a seventeen-year-old, he’d have harbored foolish and unrealistic expectations of what could really be achieved in a situation such as this one, and he’d have believed that the payoff for all that work and risk and pain ought to have been greater than bagging one enemy. Driven by that misconception, he would have been slower to abandon the log cabin, slower to give up on the hope of shooting the man who had hidden behind the outhouse. He would have adopted a combative stance toward the main group of jihadists who had come running back to the camp. As a result, they would have surrounded him and killed him. All because he was young and imbued with an unrealistic sense of what the world owed him.