Reamde

They proceeded without further discussion for a kilometer or so, then slowed down as they approached a whorl of dust filling the whole road cut, from tree line to tree line. Csongor took his foot off the accelerator and let the SUV idle forward. The windshield was a dusty mess, so he motored his window down and leaned out to get a clear view.

This made it possible for him to see that a big vehicle—a pickup truck, red—was stopped in the oncoming lane, pointed toward them. No silhouette was visible behind its steering wheel. This struck Csongor as deeply wrong.

A figure emerged from the dust, walking up along the driver’s side of the truck. Behind him was a second man, moving in the same way. The first of them reached the driver’s door and pulled at the handle but found it to be locked. He then reached in through the window, which was apparently open, and got it unlocked. This was accompanied by some strange pawing gestures that caused little cascades of sparkly bits to tumble out of the window frame and scatter on the ground.

“Broken glass,” Marlon said.

The man hauled the door open and then backed away, as if aghast at what he was seeing there. He paused for a moment, pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt, and said something into it. Then he reholstered the radio and nodded to his companion. The two of them bent forward as one and reached into the truck’s cab, then hauled back.

What they dragged out of the cab was clearly recognizable as a limp human form even though its head had been blown apart into a soggy mushroomlike thing trailing gray stuff that had to be brains. The feet came out last; clad in a pair of high-topped work boots, they bounced off the truck’s running board and then hit the ground heels first.

“Shit, Csongor. Csongor! CSONGOR!” Marlon was calling.

Csongor was so transfixed by the sight of the body that he had stopped paying attention to the two living men who were dragging it by the arms. He now noticed, dully, that those men were staring directly up into his face from no more than about ten meters away.

Then he felt something come down hard on his knee and sensed the steering wheel moving free of his hands. The SUV surged forward, veered left, then right, then left again. The corpse-dragging men were filling the windshield; then they disappeared beneath the edge of its hood and the vehicle thumped and bucked as it smashed them back into the pavement and rolled over them.

Csongor looked down to see Marlon’s left hand on his knee, shoving his foot down into the gas, and his right hand on the steering wheel. Marlon had flung himself sideways across the SUV’s cab and was practically in Csongor’s lap.

“I got this,” Csongor said. “I got it! Fine!” Marlon relented and wriggled back into the passenger seat.

“Maybe we should go back and get their guns,” Marlon suggested.

“That’s how it would work in a video game,” Csongor said, which was his way of agreeing. He allowed the gas pedal to come up off the floor for a moment.

Then Marlon hollered as the rear end of the Subaru became visible just ahead of them. Men were standing around it, looking up in alarm. Csongor twisted the wheel to avoid them. Then remembered that these were the guys they wanted to run over. Tried to correct the error. Felt the vehicle tilt beneath them as it went up on two wheels.

In his peripheral vision, something was coming at him. He looked out Marlon’s window to see that it was the road, hinging straight up into the glass. Marlon was spinning away from it, bringing his hands up to protect his face.

That they had rolled over was obvious enough. What didn’t become obvious for several moments was that they had rolled over all the way and ended up sitting upright on all four wheels, sideways on the road, rocking gently from side to side on the suspension.

Csongor looked out his open window and saw jihadists (it was time to start calling them that) reaching into their garments, just as Marlon had pantomimed a few minutes ago.

He swung the wheel. “Get down!” he said.

Glass was breaking all around him. His door had been sprung off its hinges during the rollover. He pushed it open to provide some space for him to lean sideways. Looking straight down at the road, using its edge as a guide, he got the SUV pointed in what he hoped was the correct direction and punched the accelerator.

A few moments later he sat up straight, just in time to see that he was making for a head-on collision with a fat man riding down the middle of the road on an all-terrain vehicle, a rifle in his lap. Some mutual swerving occurred, and they just avoided hitting each other.

He looked over to see that Marlon was, at least, moving. He had banged his head on something during the rollover and was bleeding from a laceration, stanching it with a wad of Gazetteer.

The road went into a gentle leftward curve. Rustic houses went by them, mostly on the right.

Some of them began to look familiar, and he understood that he was driving in circles. The road had terminated in a big loop. There was nowhere he could go from here.

Except, possibly, up a driveway? He had to do something because the jihadists would be coming soon—might be running laps on the same loop already—and they had him bottled up here, at the head of the valley. He paused at the entrance to one driveway, saw a white man coming down it holding an assault rifle. An assault rifle! He gunned it forward to the next driveway, but this one was blocked, just off the road, by a gate. No place to hide from vengeful jihadists.

The driveway after that seemed to wind off into the woods for some distance. Csongor, reacting without thinking, turned down it, praying that the move wasn’t being observed by any of the people who were pursuing them. Because this not was a decision he could take back; he couldn’t assume that there was a handy infinite loop at the end of this road.

It went around a single bend and terminated in a massive timber gate. Csongor crunched it to a stop, then took advantage of a little wide spot that had been cleared, just in front of this barrier, to make it possible for wayward vehicles to turn around. Even so, getting the SUV reversed in such a tight spot required many back-and- forths. During a few of these, he found himself gazing curiously out his window at a panoply of documents that had been laminated in weatherproof plastic and stapled to the wood. None of them seemed to be direct threats to kill him. They were more in the way of legal filings and political/religious manifestos.

A word passed in front of his eyes that took a moment to sink in. When it did, he stomped the brake. Reversed the vehicle’s direction. Then crept back the way he’d come, as slowly as he could make the vehicle move. Scanning the documents on the gate, unwilling to believe he’d actually seen it.

“What is up, bro?” Marlon demanded. Then he called out “Aiyaa!” as Csongor stomped the brake again, jerking the vehicle, and him, and his aching head.

“I think I get it now,” Csongor said.

“Get what?”

“What’s happening.”

He was staring at a document—a sort of open letter—signed at the bottom. The signature was so neat that you could actually read it. It said, JACOB FORTHRAST.

UNCLE JOHN DROVE the all-terrain vehicle back toward Jake’s cabin with Zula sitting on the luggage rack behind him. Jake rode her bicycle. Olivia and Jake chivalrously suggested that those two ride on ahead as fast as possible, the bicyclists catching up as soon as they could. John, though, was averse to any plan that involved splitting up; and the intensity of his reaction as much as proved that he was recollecting something that had not worked out very well in Vietnam. The journey back was therefore carried out in a tortoise-and-hare mode, the ATV running forward for a few hundred yards and then idling along while Jake and Olivia caught up with them.

During these pauses, John would try to communicate with persons not present. The people who lived around Prohibition Crick had gone there specifically to get off the grid, and so excellent phone reception was not among their priorities. They were not the sort to look benignly on phone company technicians crawling around the neighborhood hiding cables under the ground and setting up mysterious antennas to bathe every cubic inch of their living space with encoded emanations. In spite of which, you could sometimes get one bar if you stood in a high, exposed place in just the right posture. But they were in some combination of too far from the down-valley cell towers and too deeply trapped in the folds of Abandon Mountain’s lower slopes for this to work.