Reamde

There was a while, then, when all they did was ride. Chet liked that part of it, riding along the road in the dark, a salmon-colored light spreading over heaven’s vault above, Zula’s arms around his waist.

They didn’t talk at all until they reached the turnaround just short of the wrecked mine complex where a million old gray planks were trying to avalanche down into the river. From here they could ride up a short ramp to the bike and ski path, which the Harley could easily negotiate. But it seemed reasonable to stop.

“I don’t see any choice but to keep going,” Zula said.

“There’s nothing there,” Chet said, nodding down the trail.

“Except the U.S. of A.,” she pointed out. “And you know how to get there, right?”

“Not on this thing! This’ll only take us as far as the tunnel.”

“But that’s a few more miles between us and the jihadists,” she pointed out.

“What did you call them?”

“And you know how to go beyond that point. On foot. Right? You used to do it with Richard.”

“Oh, it’s been years, girl.”

“But you know. You know the way. And they don’t. So we can outdistance them.”

“We should wait for them to pass us. Then double back.”

“They’ll be looking for that. They’re smart. They’ll post someone to guard the crossing at the dam.”

“Still, if we stayed up in the trees, moved through the woods—”

“Listen. Some of those guys have Richard. They have Dodge.”

“Dodge is okay?”

“As far as I know. Anyway, they’re south of us. They don’t have a motorcycle. We can just about catch them.”

“Why the hell would we want to catch them!?”

“All I have to do is show myself to Uncle Richard—let him know they don’t have me hostage any more—and then he’s free, he can run into the woods, get away from these guys.”

Chet said nothing. Not because he didn’t agree. But because he was having difficulty concentrating.

“I have to go save his life,” Zula said. Sounding almost matter-of-fact. Ah, I see I failed to make myself clear… here’s the situation… I have to go save his life.

It gave him something to focus on. “Well, since you put it that way, I’ll take you to the tunnel,” he said, and he let the bike rumble off the end of the road and onto the loose gravel of the trail.

By the time they made it to the end, he was aware, somehow, that he had blood coming out of him. He couldn’t remember how he knew this, how he’d first been made aware of the fact. There was a dim dreamlike memory of the girl on his back—Zula—mentioning it to Chet, and Chet laughing it off and just cranking up the throttle a little higher.

Then he noticed that he was lying on the ground staring up into a blue sky.

Had they crashed?

No. The Harley was parked next to him. Zula had rolled out a camping pad. He had been lying on it, dozing. Covered with a sleeping bag.

She squatted next to him and pulled the sleeping bag away to expose the right side of his torso. His shirt was missing. Bare skin shrank from the cool air. She regretted what she saw, but she wasn’t surprised by it. She’d been looking at it while he lay there.

“How long have we been stopped here?” he asked.

“Not too long.”

He was too embarrassed to come out and ask what was wrong with him. He felt that it must be obvious.

She did something involving a bandage. She had a pathetic little first aid kit.

“Stop it,” he said gently. “It’s a waste of time.”

“Then what do you want to do?”

“Send you on your way. Save Dodge. I’ll follow.”

“You’ll… follow?”

“I can’t go near as fast as you. But there’s no reason for me to just stay here. I want to die on the forty- ninth parallel.”

She was squatting on her haunches with her arms crossed over her knees. She looked south, into the sunlight, toward the border. Then she dropped her head onto her forearms and sobbed for a while.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“No, it’s not. People are dead.” She raised her face, let herself tumble back onto her bottom, stretched her legs out next to Chet. “I didn’t kill them. But they’re dead because of things that I did. Does that make sense? Peter. The pilots. The people in the RV. They’d all be alive if I’d decided differently.”

“But you’re not helping the killers,” Chet said. Something about lying on the ground, combined with her outburst, had revived him a little, made him feel almost normal.

“Of course I’m not helping them.”

“You fired that shotgun, didn’t you? To warn me.”

“Jahandar—the sniper—was drawing a bead on you. Yes. I warned you by firing the shotgun.”

“So you’re fighting against them.”

“Of course I am. But what’s the point, if it just leads to a different set of people getting killed?”

“Too heavy a question for me,” he said. “You just do what you can, pretty lady.”

She tried to fight it, but the corners of her mouth drew back into a smile. “You call all women that.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s been a while since I heard that kind of talk.”

Chet shrugged demurely.

“Well,” Zula continued, “all those people died for nothing unless I help Richard escape. And then we can go for help. But I have to get to the border first. And I need your help for that.”

“American Falls,” Chet said. “That’s where we’re going.”

“How do I—do we—get there?”

He turned his head, raised his good arm, gestured at the ridge that rose above them to the south: a blade of cream-colored granite, patched with snow, skirted by a ramp of boulders that had been flaking away from it and thundering down into the valley for millions of years. The trail had taken them up onto the ridge’s middle slopes, flying on creosoted stilts over the rubble fields, and terminated at a place where a wall of sound rock jumped out of the talus. The tunnel had been blasted straight into it, aimed horizontally through the heart of the ridge.

“We use the mine tunnels to get past this bad boy. See, we don’t have to hike over the top. That would take days. It’d kill me. Hell, it’d kill you. No. We use the tunnels. That’s what Richard discovered. That’s his secret. We go out the other side. Then down the river to the falls. Latitude forty-nine north. That’s where I stop, and you keep going.”

“Then let’s go,” she said, “if that’s what you want.”

“Yes. It’s what I want.”

THE TUNNEL WAS large enough to accommodate a narrow-gauge train, which was to say that a car could have driven into it with room to spare. To prevent just that sort of behavior, the owners had fabricated a massive steel gridiron, bolted into the rock, that blocked the passage. The barrier was situated about ten meters inside the entrance of the tunnel. That ten meters was a tornado of lurid graffiti and an ankle-deep trash heap of discarded beer bottles, chip bags, knotted condoms, and drained batteries. Just at the entrance was a fire ring; Zula, acting in Sherlock Holmes mode, verified that its ashes were still blazing hot. They were only a couple of hours behind Jones and company.

In the middle of the gridiron was a man-sized door. This had clearly been locked and vandalized, chained and vandalized, welded shut and vandalized, so many times as to threaten the integrity of the entire structure. Now it stood slightly ajar and Zula’s flashlight, shining through the grid, revealed that the graffiti and trash on its opposite side were only a little less prevalent. Her nose caught a pungent and familiar odor: fresh spray paint. Playing her flashlight over the steel plate on the door, she saw a few characters in Arabic. She couldn’t read them. She touched one of the glyphs and fresh green paint came away on her fingertip.

“Careful!” called Chet, strolling along slowly in her wake.