It's hard to grasp the endless vastness of America, its landscapes which just go on and on. We drove for two hours and the mountains didn't seem to get any nearer. Maybe I'd died during the gun battle in Oklahoma, or on the beach at Miami, even back at the base, and this was the afterlife I'd been condemned to, this endless journey. Punishment for taking that young soldier's life.
The scenery was hypnotic in its monotony. I'd chosen to drive, glad of anything that used up cognitive space and stopped me thinking about anything else, like how the hell I thought I was going to face up to Ash. Or whether, when it came to it, I'd even want to. I was down to two doses of anti-psychotics now. In two days time, if I didn't find more, I'd be Ash.
At first the dust cloud was just a distraction at the edge of my vision. A micro-storm, I thought, a dust devil weaving a solitary path across the desert. Except, no natural storm ever kept going in a line that straight. A line that ran entirely parallel to ours, and had done for at least fifteen miles now.
Kelis followed the direction of my gaze and tensed. 'Convoy,' she said. 'Off-road vehicles out in the desert.'
She was right. I could see the glint of metal and something brighter in the heart of the dust cloud now. Another minute and I could make out the individual vehicles, bigger than cars or even trucks. Winnebagos maybe, sturdy enough to travel over sand and rock.
'They're heading towards us,' Haru said.
Ingo nodded. 'Our paths will converge in approximately ten minutes' Despite the cold jolt of alarm in my stomach I smiled. There was something reassuring about his inability to react in a normal human way to anything.
'Stop and fortify or try to outrun them?' Kelis asked.
My hands tightened on the wheel. 'How do we know they're hostile?'
'How do we know they're not?'
We opted to stop, in the end. There was no telling what the maximum speed was on their vehicles. And even if we could outrun them, did we really want to be heading into Vegas with another batch of enemies on our tail?
The desert was eerily silent when we switched off our engine. The air shivered with heat, foxing my eyes as I strained into the distance, trying to see if our shadows were turning to face us or continuing on their original course.
'Why did I ever leave Japan?' Haru said suddenly. 'I'm so tired of this. I thought danger would be exciting. Isn't that what the stories tell you? But all it does is wear you down.'
'You're welcome to leave,' Kelis said. She hooked a thumb back over her shoulder. 'Santa Fe's three hundred miles in that direction.'
Haru grimaced and looked away, but I knew just what he meant. I was tired too, of the constant fights, particularly the one going on inside me. Surrender seemed to be an increasingly attractive option. Just… giving up.
The convoy was definitely heading towards us. The dust cloud's shape had shifted, seeming to shorten as the vehicles turned and sped towards us straight on. I could hear them now, the rattle of wheels over rocks, the grind of motors – and something else. After a few moments I realised that it was music. The deep bass beat of it seemed to resonate through the rocks beneath us and up into our bodies.
The closer they came, the odder the convoy looked. I could see now what the bright flash I'd seen earlier had been – solar panels on the roof of each of the dozen or so vehicles, iridescent and delicate as butterfly wings. The vehicles themselves seemed to be buses. But they were definitely home-made because no factory could possibly turn out machines that crazy looking; sides meeting at every angle except ninety degrees, paint covering every inch of them, and each inch a different colour.
The first of them swerved to a halt a hundred yards ahead of us, and I saw that there was a big yellow smiley face painted on its side, grinning out at us from beneath a painting of a dove. I felt the barrel of my gun slowly drooping from horizontal to vertical.
Kelis frowned at me. 'Could be trying to lull us into a false sense of security.'
'It's working,' I told her. Up close, I'd finally recognised the music: it was Hello by the Beloved. Either there was some very complex psychological warfare going on, or these people were no sort of threat.
Five of them came out of the first bus as the others begun to pull up behind it. They were all young, twenties to thirties, and the kind of dishevelled that took some effort to achieve. I stared at them, disbelieving, because I thought that kind of studied cool had disappeared from the world along with ninety-three per cent of its population. None of them was armed which meant either that there were more people hidden behind the mirrored windows of the bus pointing something lethal at us, or they were suicidally stupid. Looking at their dazed, slightly vacant faces, I was going to opt for the latter.
'Hey,' the leader said, a tanned, sandy haired boy who wouldn't have looked out of place on a surfboard.
'Hello,' I said cautiously. My hand was still on my gun and so was Kelis', but he didn't seem to mind.
'We're not looking for a fight,' another of them said. She was tall and stringy with features that were okay individually but didn't quite match up on her face.
'Us neither,' I said. 'On the other hand, we weren't following you, so I think we've got less explaining to do.'
Surfer boy laughed and so did the others, and for the first time I realised why they were so relaxed: they were stoned. I holstered my gun, the jittery adrenaline rush easing off.
'Who are you people?' Haru said.
'We're the party at the end of the world,' surfer boy said. 'Want to have some fun?'
'You know what,' I said, 'I think I've already had about as much fun as I can handle.'
He shrugged. 'Also, we're going to Vegas, and the Collector thought you might be looking for an escort.'
'So, is Las Vegas a big party town these days?' I asked later, when we'd driven in convoy with the party people till a few hours past sunset. We all stuck to the road this time, finally leaving it only to park up on a camping spot they told us they'd used before.
There were stockpiles of wood here, twisted and bleached like bones, and they'd lit fires, several smaller cooking fires and one huge central bonfire whose heat radiated out into the night, chasing away the creeping cold. The flames were bright, although above us the stars seemed brighter, a perfect spread of them across the sky, pin-sharp. There wasn't a flicker of light pollution from horizon to horizon, probably not even back before the Cull.
Mike, the surfer-boy leader of the group, shrugged. 'Everyone needs to relax now and again.'
'You've been to Vegas?' I pressed. 'Recently?'
The young black-haired Goth who'd twined herself around his arm the moment he sat down, laughed. 'Yeah, but wherever we go there's a party – that's, like, the point.'
I looked across the cooking fire to Haru, clutching a metal bowl of soup between his hands. He rolled his eyes. These guys were worse than useless as a source of information, but if they could slip us into Vegas under the radar they'd be worth their weight in gold.
There were a lot of them – more than I'd realised; at least a hundred. They were sitting around their own small cooking fires in huddles of three or four. The flames of the central bonfire shot thirty, forty feet into the air, advertising our presence to anyone with their eyes open – but they didn't seem to care. They seemed supremely confident that nothing in the world would hurt them. Could be the drugs – could be something else. And if we were hooking up with these people I wanted to know for sure.
When the meal was done I turned to Mike and asked as casually as possible if it would be OK to take a look at the buses. 'We're running low on fuel ourselves – solar power's got to be the way forward.'
'Sure,' he said, waving a lazy arm towards the distant, misshapen silhouettes of the vehicles. 'Just be back in time for the burning – it's kind of a bonding ritual.' His other hand was in the young Goth's hair, gently running the strands through his fingers, and I noticed for the first time that she was pregnant. Only a few months gone, the little creature inside her was adding just a slight roundness to her belly. For a second I couldn't take my eyes off them: the tenderness of his gesture, the blind hopefulness of bringing another life into this world. With an effort I blinked and looked away.
Kelis was out on the periphery of the group, a darker blot against the night sky. I didn't like sitting with the vast emptiness of the desert behind me, but I knew she'd rather have that at her back than these strangers. When
