Drought (21 page)

‘Forgot to bring some, like a fool.'

‘Well there's plenty of Tylenol inside of that store. I can see it from here.'

‘I don't know. This whole expedition is crazy. What if we get to Lost Girl Lake and find that it's all dried up, just like all of the other lakes?'

‘Come on, Santos. You know that it won't be. Your ancestors went through times much harder than this, didn't they, and they stuck at it until they got where they were going.'

‘Oh, for sure. And then
your
ancestors came and wiped them all out.'

Martin walked back to his Eldorado, reached into the back and picked up the Colt Commando. Ella said, ‘What's happening, Daddy? What are you going to do?'

‘The gas station is closed, sweetheart, but we're all running out of gas so Daddy has to open it up again.'

‘With
that
?' said Saskia, looking at the sub-machine gun.

‘If I had a key, I'd use it. But I don't, so this is the next best door opener I can think of.'

He walked back to the gas station office. He could see his dark reflection approaching in the glass door, his weapon raised. It was like seeing a ghost of himself, the way he used to look in Afghanistan. Santos, who had been standing close to the door, didn't need to be told to back away.

He fired three ear-splitting shots and the door exploded into sparkling fragments, which dropped to the floor in a heap. Immediately, an alarm bell began to shrill, but Martin stepped without hesitation into the office, his shoes crunching on the broken glass, and went behind the counter. He pulled open one drawer after another, looking for the padlock keys, but all he found were dog-eared notebooks and business cards and half a tube of fruit-flavored Lifesavers.

In one drawer, however, he discovered a large screwdriver, and he used it to pry open the cash register. There was no money in it, but the padlock keys were all there, underneath the coin tray, each of them neatly tagged with their pump numbers.

The alarm continued to jangle, and Martin reckoned that it was only a matter of time before the police or an ESS patrol or some local vigilante came to find out what had set it off. He turned around to the control panel on the wall and flicked on all of the pump switches, and then he went back outside to unlock the pumps.

They filled up all three of their vehicles. As they did so, fewer than twenty cars and trucks passed through the intersection, most of them heading south. Some of them slowed down when they heard the gas station alarm ringing, and their occupants stared at them with beady-eyed suspicion, but none of them stopped.

They were almost finished when they heard the
flacker-flacker-flacker
of a helicopter. Martin stepped out of the shadow of the gas station's canopy and shielded his eyes with his hand. A helicopter was heading in their direction from the south-west, flying unusually low and very fast. Martin backed into the shadow again, just as the helicopter flew past them. He recognized it at once: a Robinson R44 Raven in the distinctive dark blue livery of Empire Security Services. It looped around the intersection and then it returned to hover over the parking lot on the opposite side of the street. As it came down it blew up a storm of grit and waste paper, and it clattered and droned so loudly that Martin could hardly think straight.

Saskia screamed, ‘My
God
, Martin, they've found us already!'

Tyler had just finished filling up Peta's Hilux. Peta came over to Martin and shouted, close to his ear, ‘What are they going to do? What
can
they do? They're not going to shoot at us, are they? We have children with us … they must know that!'

Martin turned around. Santos had climbed back into his Suburban now, and Tyler was hanging up his gas pump nozzle. ‘Just get ready to go,' he told Peta. She lifted her head and even though she didn't say anything he could see in her eyes the look that she used to give him when they were first married, before he was sent out to Afghanistan. He could see trust, and confidence, and he hadn't seen those in her eyes for a very long time. He could almost have believed that it was love.

He lifted the Colt Commando out of the back seat, and then he walked out from under the gas station canopy and across the sidewalk, holding the sub-machine gun with its muzzle pointed skyward. The dark blue helicopter continued to dip and dance over the parking lot, hovering so low that Martin wondered if the pilot was preparing to touch down.

Its cabin windows were tinted but he could see that there were four security agents aboard it, including the pilot. Although the agents would all be armed, the helicopter itself was fitted with no external weapons, and so they would have to land and climb out before they could take a shot at him.

He crossed the intersection, ignoring the four or five cars which passed him, blasting their horns, and then he hopped over the low wire fence around the parking lot. As he approached the helicopter, he had to narrow his eyes against the blizzard of dust, and his shirt and pants were furiously flapping like yacht-sails in a force-eight gale. All the same, he walked right up to it and stood in front of it. He hefted up his sub-machine gun in his right hand until it was pointing at the pilot. Then he held up his left hand with his fingers folded.

‘One,' he mouthed, and stuck up his index finger.

He could see the agent sitting next to the pilot lean over and grip his shoulder as if he were saying, ‘
What's he doing
?
What the hell is he doing
?'

‘Two,' said Martin, and held up his middle finger.

The pilot nudged the helicopter lower, and tilted it forward, so that Martin could feel the rotor blades whistling only five or six feet above his head. The noise was almost unbearable, and the flying grit was stinging his eyes. He felt that he was going to be blinded and deafened for the rest of his life.

‘Three,' he said, and raised his third finger, holding back his pinkie with his thumb.

Again the pilot tried to intimidate him by pushing forward his collective lever and tilting the helicopter toward him, but Martin knew from his service experience that even if he landed it, the rotors would still be ten feet clear of the ground. His hair was being wildly blown about and the slipstream was drumming in his ears, but there was no danger of him being beheaded.

‘
Four
,' he mimed, holding up four fingers.

The security agent sitting next to the pilot was furiously gesticulating now that he should land. He had even taken out his gun and was jabbing it in Martin's direction as if he were prepared to shoot at him through the cockpit bubble.

Martin lifted his thumb, and he didn't even have to say ‘
Five
,' because the pilot ignored the security agent's rage and lifted the helicopter up and away in the fastest spiral climb that Martin had ever seen, so that its rotors screamed like some horrified choir. Within seconds it was high above the treetops and well out of range of his sub-machine gun; and as soon as it was high enough, it angled back toward the south-west, where it had come from. Within less than half a minute it had gone, and all Martin could hear was the droning of its engine.

He lowered his gun and stood for a moment in the middle of the parking lot with his eyes closed. He felt drained, in the same way that he used to feel drained after a firefight in Afghanistan. He had never been able to describe the feeling to anybody who hadn't been through it. He had never felt triumphant that he had beaten the enemy. He hadn't even felt elated that he was still alive. He had felt as if all of his humanity had been emptied out of him, as if his soul had been bleached by fear, and he was nothing but a ghost of what he once was. He had felt transparent, as if nobody could see him any more.

He turned and walked back across the intersection to the gas station. They were all waiting for him. Even the children had climbed out of the Suburban and were standing by the pumps.

‘That was some face-off,' said Santos, giving him one of his eagle's-claw handshakes. ‘I never saw nothing like that in the whole of my life.'

Peta was standing by the open door of her Hilux with her arms folded, but she was giving him a tight, proud smile. As he returned the Colt Commando to the trunk of his car, though, Saskia turned around in the passenger seat and said, ‘They'll come after us again, though. They won't give up. There's no way that Wrack is going to let us get away now.'

‘Let's worry about that when it happens,' said Martin. ‘Meanwhile, since we're already guilty of vandalism and larceny, let's raid that food mart and load ourselves up with some supplies. It doesn't look like they have any water, but there's plenty of soda.'

Little Mina came up to him and held out her hand. Her nose was running but she was looking less flushed than she had before. ‘Can I have some Oreos?' she asked him, solemnly.

Martin said, ‘Sure you can.' At the same time, from the direction of downtown, they heard a deep, resonant boom.

‘What was
that
?' asked Ella.

Santos said, ‘Sounded like a bomb, or a gas main blowing, who knows?' He paused, and then he said, ‘Whatever it was, it sounded like a reason for us to keep on going.'

Martin pointed to the inside of the store and said, ‘Painkillers, Santos. Go get them. Make sure you get plenty. Who knows how long we're going to be away.'

T
hey drove eastward on the Rim of the World Highway, which twisted its way higher and higher up into the mountains. Behind them the sun was touching the horizon, and it had become bloated and elliptical, like a huge orange face with features made of drifting smoke. It made Martin feel as if they were being watched impassively by God, and that God was not going to help them because they were getting what they deserved.

In his rear-view mirror, he could see that three or four more major fires were burning downtown. Otherwise the sky was clear but that in itself was ominous. There were no criss-cross vapor trails, as there usually were, which meant that no planes were flying in and out of San Bernardino International Airport, nor any of the municipal airports around it, like Redlands or Riverside or Ontario.

Saskia kept turning around and shading her eyes with her hand. ‘No sign of them yet,' she said.

‘I can't see them sending a helicopter after us up here,' said Martin. ‘They probably haven't even figured that we've come this way. Even
I
haven't figured why we've come this way. I thought Santos was taking us to the Joshua Tree National Park. This road takes us to Big Bear Lake and then turns up north toward the Mojave Desert. If we keep on going we'll end up in Barstow or even in Vegas.'

‘Didn't you
ask
him why we're taking this route?'

‘I trust him. Sometimes you just have to trust people.'

‘I don't trust anybody.'

‘Well, you should. Being too cynical is just as dangerous as being too gullible.'

‘You don't know Halford Smiley.'

The higher they climbed, the more dramatic the scenery around them became – mountains covered with grayish-green chaparral and shadowy valleys and mile after mile of pine forests. The air was unusually warm for this altitude, but it was much fresher than it had been in the city, and the breeze was light for this time of year. In the fall, hot, dry Santa Ana winds would frequently come down from the high desert at anything up to eighty or ninety miles an hour, bringing depression and sickness to people in the city, and fanning wildfires in the canyons. Martin knew about both of those effects from bitter experience. Santa Ana winds always made him feel moody and quick-tempered, but apart from that he had bought a small cabin eight years ago just outside Running Springs where he and Peta and the children could spend weekends. During the wildfires of October 2007, the cabin had been burned to a blackened skeleton. That had been yet another reason for him to believe that God had turned his back on him.

They reached the western end of Big Bear Lake, and Martin could see that even here, where the lake was at its deepest, the water level had dropped dramatically. The sun had gone down now, and although it was still light the sky had turned a deep shade of violet. He flashed his headlights and blew his horn to tell Santos to pull over by the side of the road.

He walked up to Santos' Suburban and looked inside. Nathan and George and little Mina were asleep, and so was Rita, whose head was resting against the window. The bottle of Maker's Mark was lying on the seat beside her and it was nearly empty.

Susan said, ‘Can't we stop here for the night? The kids are beat, and so am I. There must be someplace that will have us.'

Santos looked at Martin and said, ‘It could be a risk. If those friends of yours know that we have come this way, they will soon catch up with us.'

‘So what were you planning on doing?'

‘Driving for another hour into the mountains. There are many places where we can turn off the main highway and settle ourselves down for the night. Old campsites, places like that. I have one particular place in mind. If we do that, nobody will know where we have gone.'

‘I'm not surprised. Even
I
don't know where the hell we're going. This highway turns north, doesn't it, into Nevada? I thought Lost Girl Lake was pretty much off to the east.'

Santos tapped the side of his nose with his finger. ‘Don't forget that this is
our
country, the Yuhaviatam. You bacon stealers know only the roads on your maps, and on your NeverLost. But in the same way that I can see shadows that you cannot see, I can also see roads which to you are invisible.'

‘So you're going to tell me which route we're taking?'

‘No. You will have to wait until you see it with your own eyes. I am prepared to take you that way, but not to speak of it.'

‘What if something happens to you? Like you get sick or something?'