Worlds in Chaos (58 page)

“Do you guys know the road down that way?” Mitch asked.

“Sure we do. Been driving it for four years.”

“Okay. Then this is the deal. We pick up some people south from Alice and then head on into Mexico. Not too far past the border there’s a space base that’s got a shuttle down a silo, ready to go.” Keene marveled at the unqualified uncertainty that allowed Mitch to say this, but he wasn’t about to muddy any waters. “We launch and meet up with the Kronian ship that you’ve been hearing all about, and we go back with them. There it is.”

The trucker looked at Mitch warily. “Man, you
are
crazy! Even if it was still up there, you think it’s going to hang around for you? What makes you think they’d even have heard of you?”

Mitch fumed impotently for a second, then threw out a hand to indicate Keene. “Do you recognize this guy?” he snapped. The two truckers looked, shrugged, obviously didn’t. “On TV all the time just a couple of weeks back,” Mitch said. “The guy in that nuclear stunt that made the Air Force look stupid, who’d been trying to tell the world to wake up to what the Kronians had been telling it.”

The smaller trucker peered more closely at Keene, squinting his eyes against the wind. “You know, it could be him too,” he pronounced. “Tried to take their side in that stuff that went on in Washington.”

“Landen Keene. I am,” Keene confirmed.

“That’s him, Buff. That’s the name, all right,” the smaller trucker said, nodding. Buff, the larger of the two, looked back at Mitch, uncertain now.

“You see, they know him. He’s with them,” Mitch said. “That’s why they’ll wait. Now are you with us? I’m telling you, there won’t be anything for you in El Paso, even if you got there. This is gonna get a whole lot worse yet.” He looked at Keene. “We could fit a couple more in, right?”

Keene just showed his hands and shook his head. “Why not? Sure.” He didn’t know. It wasn’t a time to be calculating liftoff weights.

The two truckers looked at each other in bewilderment. “What do you think, Luke?” Buff asked, seemingly willing to be sold now.

“I dunno. . . . Goin’ off somewhere all that different. Where is it? Saturn out there some place? . . .”

“There isn’t going to be anything for you here,” Mitch said. He looked from one to the other. “What do you have? Any folks you can get to?”

Buff looked down at the ground. “Mine were in Virginia. . . . I don’t want to think about it.” Luke just shook his head bleakly. Keene turned his head away, not sure how much more of this he was going to be able to take. Mitch seemed about to say something, then stopped, trying to let the obvious speak for itself.

Finally, Luke said, “Maybe, if it’s like they say. . . . We should give it a try, I reckon.”

Buff looked back at Mitch, tightened his mouth for a second, then nodded. “I still think you’re crazy. But Luke’s usually right. We’ll do it.”

Leaving Keene to give Buff and Luke a hand filling the cans, Mitch went back to the rendezvous point to round up the others. “So who else you got with you in that group back there?” Luke asked Keene as they moved on to check another tank.

“One’s from SICA—one of the guys who went with the Kronians on their tour. There’s a scientist from the tracking labs in California. And then we have one of President Hayer’s aides from the White House.”

“Holy shit,” Buff breathed, shaking his head.

The others appeared in a gaggle, Mitch in front, Legermount shepherding from the rear. With the soldiers taking some of the cans, Buff and Luke led the way through to the rig they had found. It was an eighteen-wheel Freightliner, aluminum sided full-box, its windows still intact and showing just a few dents in the trailer. “Are you sure this will handle in the wind?” Mitch yelled dubiously to Buff, looking up at it.

“There’s only one way to find out. It’ll run. That’s the main thing. You wanna go looking around the whole of San Antonio for something better, go right ahead.”

The two troopers helped Buff and Luke finish filling the tank, while the others loaded whatever they could find that might come in useful. Then everyone climbed aboard except Mitch, who would ride up front in the cab. Buff closed the rear doors. A minute or so later, the truck began moving.

It started rocking violently almost at once. As they went into a turn, Keene sensed it veering erratically, trying to lift. Moments later, there was a crash as they struck something, followed for a few seconds by a rending noise outside. A short distance farther on they halted again.

“Don’t tell me this isn’t going to work,” Cavan muttered, sounding worried.

“I suppose they
are
truckers,” Colby mused. “Did anyone think to check their licenses?”

“Colby, you’re insane,” Cynthia told him.

“That was a prerequisite for anyone wanting to work in the White House,” Colby said. The truck remained at a standstill.

“Seems like they’re having a conference up front,” Keene observed. The troops sat stoically, waiting for what they couldn’t change to reveal itself.

Cavan produced his pocket radio, usable at short range, and buzzed Mitch. “What’s the problem?” he said into the mike end. There was a short pause. “He says something about a shopping trip,” Cavan told the others. “Don’t ask me. I don’t understand it either.”

At last the truck pulled away again. For what felt like a mile or two it slowed, speeded up again, turning and stopping several times. It didn’t feel as if they were on a highway or making discernible progress anywhere. All the time, the trailer heaved and bucked, seeming a couple of times to be on the verge of turning over. Then they stopped again, reversed slowly, and a few seconds later the shock came of the tail hitting something, accompanied by crashing and the sound of breaking glass. The gears shifted, and the truck moved forward again and stopped. Doors slammed up front. Moments later the rear was opened to reveal Mitch and Luke.

They were at a shopping mall and had demolished the side entrance of a Montgomery Ward store. Buff was climbing in over the wreckage of the wall and doors, probing into the darkness with a flashlamp beam. “We need everybody out again,” Mitch called inside. “This thing will never take the wind. We’re going to have to turn it into a flatbed ourselves.”

The store had been broken into already from a different entrance and was well ransacked. However, there were still axes, sledges, and other heavy tools in the hardware and garden sections, which was what they needed. For the next two hours they labored to cut and hammer the side and roof panels from the trailer, leaving the supporting ribs. From the pieces and the doors, and with the help of line and wire from the store, they fashioned a crude, ridged shelter, looking like a shallow tent, standing on the trailer’s chassis between what had been left of the sides. For ballast and protection they lashed mattresses from the bedding department over the top, weighed down with bags of fertilizer and lawn food, to be supplemented by sandbags when they came across some.

Finally, Keene stood looking at the result of their handiwork. It looked oddly inappropriate. A moment of doubt assailed him. “I don’t know,” he said to Cavan, shaking his head. “Are we wasting our time? Is there really any point to any of this, do you think, Leo?”

“Who knows?” Cavan replied. “There’s an old Irish saying: ‘Now is the time for the futile gesture.’ I’ve always thought it had a wonderful ring of magnificence about it. If anything does, it surely characterizes this obdurate species of ours. . . . Without it, I doubt if we’d even be here at all.” Keene was really beginning to believe that Cavan was enjoying it.

The time by now was well into the small hours of the morning. Everyone was exhausted. They rested up until dawn, and then set out for the ring road on the south side of the city. As they negotiated their way around blocked streets and through burning suburbs, sometimes having to bulldoze wrecked or abandoned vehicles aside, a huge fireball came out of the sky and exploded to the north, sending up burning tracers dripping flames. Minutes later, another fell farther away to the west. The frequency increased as the truck made its way onto Interstate 37 South, signposted for Pleasanton.

But at least it handled manageably now.

47

Progress was slow but steady. The surroundings became emptier of people, the vehicles fewer, all going the other way. A couple of hours after leaving San Antonio, Mitch voiced the question that perhaps had been forming in many of their minds. He had come back to allow Cavan a spell of riding up front in the cab.

“Look, I know she’s important to you, Lan, and it has to be a big thing in your book, but in a situation like this we have to be realistic. . . . I mean, how likely is it, really, that anyone is still going to be at this place? If this shuttle that we’re betting on is down over the border, wouldn’t we be doing everyone here a favor by being honest and heading straight on there direct? I hate having to say this, but . . .” He gestured at the desolation around the roadway unrolling behind them, and left it at that.

“It isn’t just Vicki and Robin,” Keene replied. “We need a pilot too. I told Halloran to try and find one.”

Mitch looked puzzled. “But I thought you could fly it,” he said.

Keene shook his head. “What gave you that idea?”

“You were on that ship that all the news was about, the one that outflew the spaceplane, right?”

“Sure, as an observer-engineer. I helped design the propulsion unit, that’s all.”

Mitch stared at him for a few moments of revelation while the universe took on a new perspective suddenly. “Well, shit,” he pronounced resignedly. The others exchanged ominous looks but said nothing. Colby took out a handkerchief to wipe his indestructible spectacles. “Isn’t it funny how life always has one more thing in store that you hadn’t thought of,” he remarked to nobody in particular.

Interstate 37 continued all the way into Corpus Christi. The plan, however, was to exit at Highway 281, seventy miles before, which followed a direct route south to San Saucillo, where Keene had told Vicki to wait. Since they were now entering his home territory, he changed places with Cavan to ride up front in the cab.

If anything, the bleakness of the depopulated surroundings was even more unnerving than the scenes they had witnessed from California to San Antonio. The smoke and clouds had mingled into a heaving canopy of orange and brown from which hissing streamers of flame and bursting fireballs continued to lash down over the hapless landscape of deserted townships and abandoned farms. Buff and Luke were silent, staring out in awed, uncomprehending dread. Closer to the coast now, with two circulation systems in collision, the winds alternated between violent spasms and sudden calms. With the windows closed, the cab quickly became unbearable in the heavy, humid heat that had descended. Opening them brought in fumes that produced burning nostrils and smarting eyes. The air had a greasy stickiness that matted the hair, permeated clothing, and lodged in the throat, giving everything an oily taste.

As the miles rolled by from Orange Grove to Alice, recognition of familiar places and old landmarks triggered images of the world that Keene had known. The contrast between his recollections and the things he was seeing at last brought on the dispiritedness that he had been fighting. How far, and for how long, had he been fooling himself? Whatever chance there might once have been of finding anyone had faded long ago. He’d had the chance to escape to the stars. Instead, all he was coming back to was a graveyard. He pushed the thought from his mind, wiped the sticky film from his lips, and waved away the flies.