Jody looked over at me. “I don’t think subduing him’s going to be easy. If he’s in the NORAD command centre, then I don’t know if we’ll even be able to get to him.”
“We’ll figure out something when we get there,” I said. I was trying to convince myself as well as her. I didn’t have any idea what we’d do, but what else could we do but try?
Thin as our plans were, the car put an unexpected twist in them just south of the Wyoming-Colorado border. The vibration in the rear fans had been getting steadily worse, and I’d brought us down closer to the ground to reduce the strain on them, hoping to make it to another city before they died completely, but we were still quite a ways north of Fort Collins when the right one gave up with a shriek and the car dropped on that side, hit the ground, then slewed halfway around and flipped completely over. The air bags whooshed out to hold us in place again, but the one in front of Jody burst with a bang and I heard her shriek in surprise as she fell head first into the windshield.
“Jody!” I fought to reach her over the bags still holding me in place. We skidded to a stop, but with the car upside down they deflated slowly, so we wouldn’t fall to the roof and break our necks. I managed to squeeze out through the gap between the one in front of me and the one between the seats. Jody lay in the hollow made by the roof and the curved windshield, her face bloody from a gash in her forehead. She was groping for something to pull herself up against.
My first thought was that she should lie flat in case she’d hurt her neck or spine, but then I realized there wasn’t enough space for that and she’d probably be better off sitting upright anyway. I took her hand in mine and helped her twist around until she could sit on the roof. The seats were just over our heads. “Is anything broken?” I asked as I looked in the gap between seats and floor for a medical kit.
“I don’t know.” She flexed her arms and legs, then said, “Doesn’t feel like it.” She held a hand to her forehead to keep the blood out of her eyes while she blinked to clear them. “Both eyes are okay,” she said after a moment. Her voice was a little slurred but completely calm, the result of years of training for emergencies.
I couldn’t find a medical kit, so I tore a strip of cloth from my shirt and used that to sop up the blood from her wound. She winced when I blotted her cut with it, but I was glad to see muscle instead of bone before the blood welled up again.
“I think you’ll live,” I said, trying not to let her hear the worry in my voice. Her injuries probably wouldn’t kill her, but a night outside in Colorado in the wintertime just might. I bent down so I could look out the windows. The Sun was still fairly high over the mountains. We had a couple of hours of daylight left, but I couldn’t see any houses and I didn’t know how far we could walk to find one. The wind wasn’t as strong here as it had been farther north, but it was still blowing hard enough to drop the chill factor by twenty degrees or so. It was already sucking the heat out of the car.
Jody had been thinking along the same lines. “All of a sudden I’m not so happy the world’s empty,” she said.
“We’re not in trouble yet,” I told her. “For one thing, the world’s not empty.” I flicked on the car’s phone, dialled upside down, and waited, hoping the transmitter could make contact with its antenna underneath us.
“Who are you calling?” Jody asked. “Dave?”
“That’s right. He’s the only one anywhere close to us.”
“What makes you think he’ll help us?”
“I don’t know if he will or not. But it can’t hurt to ask.”
We waited for ten or fifteen seconds while the phone tried to make a connection. Finally we saw a flickering, snowy phantom on the windshield, and Dave’s voice, shot through with static, said, “What now?”
“This is Gregor,” I said. “We’ve been in a wreck just north of Fort Collins. Jody’s been hurt. Can you come get us?”
His upside-down face looked us over suspiciously. “This is a trick to get me out of here.”
“No it’s not,” Jody said. “Here, have a look.” She bent down toward the camera eye and took the blood- soaked rag from her forehead. Dave’s expression grew a little more sympathetic, but not enough.
“Sorry,” he said. “You got yourselves into this, you can get yourselves out.”
I said, “Dave, we’re not just asking a favour. We could die of exposure out here.”
“Quit being melodramatic. You’re resourceful—” His image broke up for a second, then came back. “—must have brought coats and hats and stuff.”
“We’re in an upside-down car in the middle of nowhere and you’re telling us to put on our coats? Damn it, Jody’s injured! We need to get her to a hospital and see if she’s broken anything. She could have internal injuries.”
It was hard to read his expression in the snowy, upside-down image. I thought he was scowling, then for a brief moment the scowl reversed itself. “All right,” he said. “I’ll come. It’ll take me a while to get out of the mountain, and an hour or two more to get up there and find you. Just sit tight.” Then before either of us could say anything more, he switched off.
I thought for a moment about his sudden capitulation. I didn’t like the feel of it, and pretty soon I realized why.
“The bastard isn’t going to come.”
Jody looked around at me sharply. “What? He just said—”
“He wants us to think he’s coming, but he’s going to wait for us to die of exposure. Think about it. What better way to get God’s attention than to send a couple of free souls to go knock on Heaven’s gates for him?”
“But… he… would he do that?”
“Sure he would. He just said so. It’s going to take him a ‘while’ to get out of the mountain, and a ‘while’ to fly up here, and a ‘while’ longer to find us. He’ll make sure it takes a long while, so when he gets here he can honestly say he tried to rescue us, but he was just too late.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think he’d do that.”
“I do. I’m not waiting around to find out the hard way.”
“What are you going to do?”
I reached under the seats into the back for our coats. As I helped Jody into hers, I said, “I’m going to walk toward Fort Collins and see if I can find a house or another car that works. I won’t go any farther than I can walk back before dark.”
She thought about it, then said, “All right. While you’re doing that I’ll call Gwen and see who else might be able to come get us.”
“Good.” I pulled on my coat and hat and gloves, then opened the window and slid out onto the frozen ground. A cold blast of air swirled snow inside. I leaned in to give Jody a kiss, then backed away and made sure she closed the window tight before I stood up.
The car was a dark oblong against white snow; I wouldn’t have much trouble finding it again if I got back before dark. I started off toward where I hoped town would be, turning back periodically to make sure I could spot the car again until the slope of the land hid it from view. The Colorado foothills didn’t have nearly as much snow as Yellowstone, but there was enough to leave a pretty good set of tracks. It would take a few hours for them to fill in, so I wasn’t that worried. I trudged along, hands in pockets and head tilted to the side to keep the wind from blowing down my neck, looking for any sign of civilization.
As I walked, I realized how much I was going to hate living a primitive life when all the machinery started falling apart. By the time I was an old man, I’d probably be walking everywhere I went. I might even be burning wood for heat, depending on how long the colony’s power plant lasted. No wonder Dave was so desperate to have God come back for him.
I thought about Jody waiting for me in the car, possibly dying of injuries or exposure before I got back. At the moment I didn’t mind the idea of a God watching over us, either, provided He’d actually do something to help if we needed it. Even if He wouldn’t-or couldn’t-keep her alive, the idea that I might somehow join her again after we both died was at least a little comfort. Not much, because I could never be sure it would happen until it did, but the possibility might keep me going for a while.
It came to me then that if Jody died, I could easily join Dave in his quest. But she wasn’t going to die. All I needed was to find some shelter and we’d both be fine.
I eventually spotted what I was looking for down in a gentle valley: a house and barn set in among a stand of tall, bare cottonwood trees. There were a couple of vehicles parked out front and a long, winding road leading down
