helpful a gun could be to their situation. Legally, only police, government agents, and specially approved citizens could own firearms, but supposedly there were a million or more still circulating the countryside. He imagined firearms stashed away, in small caches of firearms dispersed all over the country, like dry tinder waiting for the match..
Rico approached with his unnaturally wide smile.
“A parting gift for you,” he said. “From the mayor.”
He held it up, and now Ruppert could make out the word stamped on the rectangular five-gallon jug: GASOLINE.
Lucia reached for the jug with one hand, while her other hand positioned the blade just below the edge of the window, ready to strike. She accepted the jug and quickly retreated into the truck, setting it on the floorboard.
Rico backed away, still grinning. “Drive safe,” he said.
“Thanks,” Ruppert said. Lucia did not look at him.
At last, the sentries used a chain-and-pulley system to open the gate. Ruppert drove through it and on along the potholed Vegas strip, passing groups of shriveled people in rags huddled around trash fires in the cluttered streets, while moonlight illuminated the dark, soaring Roman and Chinese palaces behind them. The deprived condition of the people reminded him of south Los Angeles. He was beginning to wonder if most people in the country were living this way, and if his walled and protected suburb was the exception and not, as he'd somehow been led to believe, the norm.
He stomped the accelerator-there would be other armed gangs lurking in the windblown city ahead, and he didn’t want to tempt any of them.
“We have to dump this.” Lucia lifted the five-gallon gas can.
“What? Why?”
“He could have put a tracker in it.” She thumped the large black cap with her fingernail. “Maybe even a listener.”
“They’re just desert people,” he said. “It was a gift. They support us.”
“Desert people with computers on their arms,” Lucia said. “The one wanted to contact Terror for a bounty. He must have done it before.”
Ruppert’s good mood, which had just begun to develop, now evaporated. “But the bearded guy said to let us go.”
“Bigger share for Rico and his friends.”
Ruppert frowned. Maybe she was paranoid, but he’d learned to be paranoid, too. “All right. We’ll pour the gas in the truck and dump the can.”
“Not happening.”
“We need it. We can’t afford to keep gassing up your pal’s monster truck.”
“If he’s calling Terror, he could also taint our fuel to make us an easier catch. Probably pay him a bonus. And a tracker could be floating in there, too.”
“You want to throw away six hundred dollars’ worth of gas?”
“It could cause thirty thousand dollars in damage to the truck. And I prefer to be alive and free, if it all possible. Why are you slowing down?”
“Look.” They’d reached another barricade, this one erected of I-beams, more wrecked cars, and glittering curtains hung on chainlink. Already, men with machine guns were appearing at their windows.
Lucia rolled down the window and addressed the largest man in rapid-fire Spanish. She held up the jug, spoke a bit more, and he nodded and accepted it. He waved them through, and the sentries pulled their tangled metal gate aside.
“Two problems solved.” She smiled at Ruppert, something he hadn’t seen before. He’d seen her as dangerous, tough, resourceful, but now it occurred to him that beneath the angry glare etched into her face, she might be beautiful, too.
“What are you looking at?” she said.
“Just you.”
She dipped her head away and looked out the window. “Drive. I don’t want to stop until we’re in Utah.”
TWENTY-SIX
It was six more hours of rough driving through canyons, washouts, and choppy dirt roads before Lucia, who’d drifted in and out of sleep since Las Vegas, announced they should stop to rest. Ruppert kept checking his rearview, expecting an armada of armored cars and black helicopters to erupt over the horizon at any moment, but there was nothing but desert and night sky. They’d been traveling for more than twenty-four hours, and though he hadn’t seen a Terror agent in many days now, Ruppert felt pursued. Maybe they were toying with him, watching him through satellites. There could even be a drone cruising above the Bronto, keeping a special tab on them, and Ruppert would never know.
“This is far enough,” Lucia said, blinking away sleep. “We need a place to hide.”
“We still have another hour to Goblin Valley.”
“And we don’t want to get any closer. I’m the extractions expert, remember?” She zoomed to a closer view of their location on the digital dashboard map. They were near a region marked Capitol Reef National Park. “Utah. We should find a slot canyon.”
For the first time, Ruppert enjoyed the fact that the Party had gutted the parks and conservation budget long ago. There would be hardly any rangers to find them. Not much risk of tourists, either. The wilderness teemed with the insane, the murderous, and the criminal, or so Ruppert had frequently reported. The Dominionists preached against visiting the wild, insisted it was home to demons, emphasized that time in the wilderness had made even Jesus vulnerable to the devil’s temptations. The only real sanctuary was the church and the company of fellow believers.
“Turn off here,” Lucia said. They turned down a narrow rut of a path littered with boulders and rocks. Ruppert eased the truck around, and sometimes over, the rocks. The truck seemed like it could handle the terrain, but he worried about the tires.
She directed him through a series of sharp, steep turns. His headlights shone on irregular rock surfaces pitted with long, deep shadows, like Rorschach blots, and his tired brain could hardly interpret any meaning from what his eyes told him.
“Okay, slow down,” she said. She leaned until her nose almost touched the screen, scrutinizing the old satellite image of the park. “You want to slow down…and turn to the left…right…here.”
Ruppert gingerly turned the wheel to the left, unable to understand the strange rock patterns around him, and drove them over a cliff. His fingernails bit into the steering wheel as the front tires reached out into empty space, and then the whole front end of the truck dropped like the heavy end of seesaw. They slammed into a hard, steep slope, rattling everything inside the cab and shoving Ruppert and Lucia upward against their seatbelts, which dug deep into their thighs and abdomens. He thought he felt his brain splosh against the dome of his skull.
The truck charged forward at an extreme downhill angle, out of his control, fishtailing down a washed-out gully.
“Gas!” Lucia screamed. “Give it gas!”
“What?” he asked, but his foot, which had been searching for the brakes, took her advice instead and stomped the accelerator. They roared down the slope. In the headlights, a high, solid ridge appeared in the distance and rapidly swelled to consume his field of vision.
“Turn!” Lucia yelled, but his hands were already moving. Ruppert’s instinct was to wrench the wheel as hard as possible, but his numbed shock at the situation saved him, and he only turned it a little. The truck spun to the right, and they skittered down the remainder of the slope and then skipped across an uneven surface of eroded rock.
The canyon narrowed quickly around them-ahead, Ruppert could see where the smooth boulders of the opposing canyon walls nearly touched each other. A man on foot would have to climb his way through.
He eased down the brake, then stomped it. Again the seatbelt lashed diagonally across him, and now he
