As soon as he was within laser communication range and they were sure the SolarFord had a good charge, Derek would assemble the scanner and its short-range laser communicator, then check in, claiming to have been shot by a mal ambush—a motorcycle gang would be a good, credible tale. That way he could say the mals took off at high speed to the west. As soon as the report was done, Maria would shoot him—seriously enough to be life threatening, but not so seriously that he wouldn’t last the thirty or forty minutes ‘til a ConFoe patrol could arrive.
This part of the plan would be difficult, as Maria would need to stand far enough away from him when shooting so as to ensure there were no powder burns that might suggest a self-inflicted wound. He hoped she was a good shot. After all, she had gotten Manning square in his Kevlar vest, but that had been at point-blank range.
Afterwards, Maria would take off to the east at full speed and head back to Colorado. She probably wouldn’t be caught, although Derek would need to remember to say in his report that the attackers were guys, so she wouldn’t be accused of the ambush if she were picked up—not that the treatment she would receive would be that different from the torture and death awaiting any mal who refused to convert. Even some who did not resist the process did not, he knew, fare well at the hands of his compatriots—especially the females.
It would be best if the patrol were to use the scanner to convert him as soon as they arrived—he could say he had set it up while awaiting them. But if the ConFoe patrol didn’t show up promptly and he was beginning to feel woozy or, worse yet, they came too fast or his wound was not sufficiently life threatening, he would be forced to press the button to start the conversion and hope that he had not doomed himself and Katy for eternity. Once started, the conversion process could not be safely stopped.
Derek turned southward yet again, crossing into New Mexico, as Maria slept fitfully in the passenger seat—her eyes moving rapidly beneath her eyelids.
Even as he thought it through, Derek knew his plan wasn’t a great one. It was filled with pain and danger and risk—both in this world and the next—and that was before the snafus that inevitably came up when you tried to put a plan into action in the real world.
It was a nightmare.
* * * * *
The trip back was a nightmare beyond comprehension for Kelly. Already exhausted from her race down to Larkspur during the previous night, she nevertheless maintained a steady pace back north and west toward Sanctuary—a testament to discipline as well as her physical conditioning. Having read the Lieutenant’s missive, she gave Denver a wider berth than she had on the way down, skirting into the twisting, turning scenic drives of the foothills that were punctuated with bright yellow hairpin turns and six-percent-grade road-signs. Her legs screamed in agony on the uphill climbs, but the forest provided some shade from what was turning out to be a hot day. She also had several opportunities to refill her plastic water bottle—staving off for now the worst of the dehydration that this kind of prolonged exertion brought on.
She knew that the Lieutenant’s message was important and could have a meaningful impact on the relocation and military plans that were being implemented when she had left Sanctuary, but she was too tired to think much about what that impact might be. Her mind, deprived of oxygenated blood by the altitude and the demands of her leg muscles, flitted from random thought to random thought. She tried to corral it, to bring her attention to bear on the consequences of her message and her future, but it was more elusive than the dappled shade patterns that flowed over her as she pedaled on and on and on. She eventually gave up on higher thought altogether and, instead, merely focused on the mechanics of her task—the pedals, the trail, her breathing, the number of miles yet to go. There was no future for her beyond the end of the trip.
Somewhere, unbidden, in her musings, she thought of the nameless runner of antiquity, the one that had delivered his message to Marathon. She was that runner. Today she was cycling the first sanctuary.
The steady rhythm of her pedaling became the focus of her existence.
One, two, three, four.
She would be released from her nightmare, but not before she arrived.
One, two, three, four.
* * * * *
Maria saw them first.
As they crested a small hill, Derek spied a fallen juniper tree blocking the road and hit the brakes hard. He cursed the antilock brakes that prevented him from skidding the truck sideways into the barrier. That alternative foreclosed by technology, he opted, instead, to steer for the more distant and, hopefully, less damaging left ditch, its reddish soil cut by veins of erosion. The front bumper of the SolarFord thumped softly, but solidly, into the opposite bank before the front wheels had even dropped fully into the ditch. The hit on the bumper caused the airbags to deploy with an explosive bang, followed by a cloud of whitish gas as they almost instantly deflated.
But in that instant—that slow-motion moment before the inevitable impact—Maria saw the gang members emerging from the scrub beyond the log, scurrying toward the vehicle.
In the startling clarity of that moment, she recognized the rightmost one—the one shouting orders she could not hear above the tumult of the impending crash—as Greco, the gang leader that had tortured and violated her before she had found Sanctuary, the inhuman monster that had ruined her chance of ever having children. As the bumper dug into the soft, red dirt and the airbag unfurled toward her, she wondered at how she was even able to recognize her nemesis. All of the gang members were grotesque, their faces hideously mutated by their encounter in the city with the radiation from Yucca Mountain. Somehow, the radiation made them even more frightening and loathsome, not because it made them more ugly, but because they had soaked up the nuclear death and it was leaking from them like phosphorescent fluid from a rusted barrel at Rocky Flats.
She screamed in fear and warning, but Derek never heard her above the sounds of his own cries of anguish and pain as the airbag snapped his right forearm and flung his hand with an audible thwack into his nose. Blood flowed as the white haze of the airbag gas enveloped her and a hand reached for her shoulder.
* * * * *
It was a nightmare.
Derek hit the brakes hard, thankful that the antilock brakes would slow the vehicle safely, preventing any skid even though he paid minimal attention to the steering wheel. He reached over with his right arm and began to shake Maria awake as the SolarFord slowed to a stop in the parched, open land of northeastern New Mexico.
Maria screamed again and grabbed at his arm, then stopped screaming as her eyes opened, squinting and blinking in the bright midday sun streaming through the dusty, cracked windshield of Kyle’s truck. She looked suddenly to her right and turned back to Derek more slowly, her face a picture of confusion.
“You fell asleep and had a nightmare,” he said, even though he knew she would have figured it out for herself in a second or two.
She looked about with increasing understanding and concentration. “Where are we?”
“A bit north of Farley, New Mexico. The map says that there’s a picnic ground on the next road, a few miles away. We’ll take a stretch there, if you like.”
“Yeah, sure,” Maria replied softly.
Derek took his foot off the brake and the truck started rolling forward once again.
“You want to talk about it?”
“It was just a dream.”
“They can seem real enough. You sure screamed like it was real.”
Maria blushed. “Uh. Sorry.”
Derek made a dismissive motion with his right hand, which, happily enough, had never broken and thwacked into his nose. “Not a problem.”
Maria took a moment to compose herself, taking a drink of warm water from her canteen, before responding. Derek suspected she didn’t like looking weak and girlish in front of him. He hoped she knew he was just trying to be a friend and did not want to discourage that.
Finally she spoke again. “It just seems . . . s
tupid to be afraid of something that’s not real.”
Derek shrugged his shoulders as the truck, now fully back up to speed, continued cruising southward. “But you think it’s real. That’s why it’s scary.”
He didn’t understand her point. “It seems stupid to think it’s real.” She struggled to explain, her left hand gesturing minutely before her as if plucking her thoughts from the ether. “There are always clues in dreams—things that you realize after the fact make it obvious that it had to be a dream all along. I guess I beat myself up for not picking up on them sooner.”
“Yeah, except just knowing that it is a dream doesn’t always make it less scary.”
“What do you mean?”
This time Derek blushed. “Well, for instance, I used to have this recurring dream that I was in bed and there was some evil, ominous presence in the room that was about to attack me and all I had to do was move before the knife thrust or whatever came down on me, but I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move. And then, finally, I would move and that would wake me up.” Derek gave Maria a sheepish, sidelong glance. “The scariest thing was that the room wasn’t always the same identical, generic room. Instead, it always looked just like whatever room I was sleeping in looked when I went to bed the night before, so it was always like it was really happening.”
“Sounds like a pretty typical nightmare, but I don’t get what it has to do with your point.”
Derek continued to drive, turning onto a somewhat wider roadway, heading west toward the promised rest area. “Eventually, I had the dream so much that I knew when I was having it that I was having a dream and all I had to do was move and I would wake up. But I was still paralyzed and I couldn’t move and when I did wake up I was sweaty and thrashing about. I was still scared—not about being attacked, but about not being able to get out of the dream.”
He saw a sign for the picnic grounds and nodded towards it as he continued. “Finally, I got to the point where I would have the dream and I would thrash about to wake myself up and I would wake up and the room would look just the same, just like it did when I fell asleep, but there would be this ominous presence in the room where I had just woken up and I had to move to escape it.”
Maria pointed at the turn-off to the picnic grounds. “You mean you were still dreaming. In your dream, you woke up, but you were still actually in the dream.”
“Yeah.”
Maria looked at Derek as he turned off the truck. “And how many layers did this go? Did you awake from this second-level dream and find you were still in a dream?”
Derek shook his head as he gently brought the SolarFord to a halt in the sunlight and turned off the ignition. “Not that I remember. But, y’see, the scary thing was that once the second-level dream occurred, I could never wake up and know for sure that I was awake, that the dream didn’t have more and more layers. The dream wasn’t scary because it was real, it was scary because I never could know for sure that when I woke up that the world that I had awoken into was real.” Derek hesitated, his eyes cast momentarily downward in embarrassment. “I would wake up every morning afraid.”
Maria gazed out at some small butterflies flitting above the surface of a maroon-stained picnic table nestled amidst some scrawny pines. “No,” she said softly as she watched the silent, colorful dance, “the really frightening thing is that you were not in control and that the layers might never stop, that you might be trapped in the dream forever with no escape.”
He closed his eyes and looked up, letting the sun warm his eyes through the lids. “I never thought of it that way,” he said simply. He opened the door to the sound of birds trilling in the bushes and trees nearby and headed toward the picnic table with the last of their elk leftovers. “I guess it wouldn’t be so bad, being trapped in a dream forever, if you knew it would be like this . . .” He gestured about at the sun and the high fluffy clouds and the birds, “. . . you know, a nice dream.”
* * * * *
Maria walked with him, soaking in the serenity and peace of the place. Still, she was overwhelmingly sad. She looked him in the eye as they set things out on the table.
“But if it was forever, would you ever go to sleep if you didn’t know for sure, for absolute certain, that it was going to be a good dream?”
Derek shrugged. “Everyone has to sleep sometime. Most of my dreams are bad, but you get used to it, I guess. Besides, you’re the one who just had the nightmare. Are you afraid to go to sleep?”
Maria shook her head, unconsciously reaching up to trace her scar with her thumb. “Not anymore, not all the time. I used to have nightmares a lot, but that was a long time ago.” Suddenly, she realized what she was doing and dropped her hand back to her lap.
“It barely shows, but it is a scar,” Derek said quietly. “Would it help to talk about it?”
Maria blushed, the rush of blood momentarily accentuating the light scar by contrast. “There’s not really that much to tell. Back when . . . the gangs were in control of the cities, I was foraging for supplies in one of the outlying subdivisions. Unfortunately, the area was the turf of one of the feuding gangs, one led by a freak named Greco.” She looked at the clouds lazing overhead, seeking to capture their peaceful serenity. “I . . . I was only looking for canned goods, but Greco thought I was a spy from a rival gang.” Maria’s hand flittered nervously, as she continued. “He went pretty much ape-shit when they brought me to him. He kept asking me questions about gangs and people I didn’t even know. I . . . I had no information to give, but he wouldn’t believe it.”
“At first he just cut me a little,” she said self-consciously as her fingers traced her scar, “to see if I would talk, but, then, well, he turned me over to his minions to see what they could get out of me.” Her voice trailed off into nothingness. She looked away, her eyes wide to prevent the tears forming from escaping down her pale cheeks.
* * * * *
Derek yearned to reach out and comfort her, but he feared even a gentle hand on her shoulder would inadvertently bring back memories she was doing her best to force down. Instead, he spoke in quiet, soothing tones. “And they hurt you. You don’t need to say more.”
She looked back at him as he continued. “It does, however, make me even more glad that the gangs are gone.”
Tears continued to well in Maria’s eyes, but he could tell she still refused to let her emotions go. Instead, she merely nodded silently.
“More glad that Manning is gone, too,” Derek added simply.
Maria nodded again, with just a flicker of a smile of gratitude registering on her tightly controlled countenance.
“How’d you get away, if you don’t mind my asking?” asked Derek.
Maria shook her head slowly and her jaw relaxed somewhat as she apparently gained the upper hand on her emotions. “I don’t really know. There was an attack or a battle of some sort. I heard a commotion outside of the house where they were keeping me and then yelling and the dull bark of weapons firing. I wanted to help whoever was shooting at Greco’s people, but I didn’t know what was going on, so I hid under the bed.”
“Smart move,” said Derek reassuringly. “For all you know, the guys shooting would have treated you even worse.”
“No, not worse . . . maybe the same,” said Maria quietly. She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s really not much of a story. There was an explosion, I think, and I must have been knocked out. The next thing I remember, I was in . . . I was with the people I stay with now.”
“Enough said,” indicated Derek quickly. “I don’t want to press for information you don’t want to give and I really don’t want to have.”
She nodded and he knew that she was grateful for both his compassion and his understanding of her situation.
“Anyhow,” Derek continued, “I’m glad for you that you got out of a bad situation, at least when you did. Try not to look back. Nothing ever changes there.”
* * * * *
Hank and Ali slept the day away. They were used to being
up nights and, so, that is when they did their compiling and final research entries. Besides, the days were hot and thirsty and they had nothing to do. Their dream was over and they no longer had a purpose in life.
* * * * *
General Fontana forced himself to sleep for at least a few hours. The relocation of the women and children was underway and well in hand. Now his only purpose was to lead the final march on the forces of evil. The march would depart at first light tomorrow. He knew he needed to take rest while he could today—he would be up most of the night with last-minute preparations—but his mind would not quiet. The names and locations of the major salt domes danced in his head.
Had he chosen the right one?
The march would be arduous and could not remain hidden from the ConFoes’ eyes in the sky indefinitely. Even if he chose to attack nothing more than a vacant salt mine, the commitment of forces would come to the attention of the enemy. Except for the element of surprise, he had no weapons to match those of his formidable foe. There was no doubt that he was leading his forces into certain death. The only question was whether it was a march to the glory of the final battle or a march off a cliff to oblivion.
He prayed for a sign.
* * * * *
The sign read: “Bucksnort Tavern, 1 mile.” The thought permeated the haze of pain and exhaustion of Kelly’s mind, registering a few moments later as a realization that she knew where she was and how to get to Sanctuary from here, though there was still a long way to go. She pressed on, without slowing.
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.
Kelly was much too tired to smile at the realization that she was still on track. Smiling required energy. Smiling required happiness. Kelly knew neither of those. Besides, the thought that she was still on track flitted out of her mind almost immediately, replaced with random musings more akin to dreams than reality.
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