The Chronoliths (21 page)

“There are more Chronoliths outside urban centers than in them,” I told Ashlee. “Touchdown points seem almost random, excepting the large-scale markers like Bangkok or Jerusalem. Nobody knows why. Maybe it’s easier to build a Chronolith out where there’s some free space. Or maybe the smaller monuments are erected before the cities fall to the Kuinists.”

We had a cooler full of bottled water and a couple of boxes of camp food. More than enough to last us. Sue Chopra, back in Baltimore, was still correlating data from her unofficial network of informants and from the latest generation of surveillance satellites. The news about Portillo hadn’t been made public. Officials feared it would only attract more pilgrims. But Internet rumors had done that quite efficiently despite the official veil of silence.

We had food and water for five days at least, which was more than enough because, according to Sue’s best estimate, we were less than fifty hours away from touchdown.

The “goat track” was a rut through rocky chaparral, crowned by the endless turquoise sky. We were still a dozen miles outside of town when we saw the first corpse.

Ashlee insisted on stopping, though it was obvious there was nothing we could do. She wanted to be sure. The body, she said, was about Adam’s size.

But this young man dressed in a dirty white hemp shirt and yellow Kevlar pants had been dead quite a while. His shoes had been stolen, plus his watch and terminal, and surely his wallet, though we didn’t check. His skull had been fractured by some blunt instrument. The body was swollen with decomposition and had evidently attracted a number of predators, though only the ants were currently visible, commuting lazily up his sun-dried right arm.

“Most likely we’ll see more of this kind of thing,” Hitch said, looking from the corpse to the horizon. “There are more thieves than flies in this part of the country, at least since the PRI canceled the last election. A couple thousand obviously gullible Americans in one place is a magnet for every homicidal asshole south of Juarez, and they’re way too hungry to be scrupulous.”

I suppose he could have said this more gently, but what would be the point? The evidence lay on the sandy margin of the road, stinking.

I looked at Ashlee. Ashlee regarded the dead young American. Her face was pale, and her eyes glittered with dismay.

Ashlee had argued that she ought to come with us, and in the end I had agreed. I might be able to rescue Kaitlin from this debacle, but I had no leverage with Adam Mills. Even if I could find him, Ashlee said, I wouldn’t be able to argue him out of the haj. Maybe no one could, including herself, but she needed to try.

Of course it was dangerous, brutally dangerous, but Ashlee was determined enough to attempt the trip with or without us. And I understood the way she felt. Sometimes the conscience makes demands that are non-negotiable. Courage has nothing to do with it. We weren’t here because we were brave. We were here because we had to be here.

But the dead American was a demonstration of every truth we would have preferred to evade. The truth that our children had come to a place where things like this happened. That it might as easily have been Adam or Kaitlin discarded by the side of the road. That not every child in jeopardy can be saved.

Hitch climbed behind the wheel of the van. I sat in the back with Ash. She put her head against my shoulder, showing fatigue for the first time since we’d left the United States.

There was more evidence that we weren’t the only Americans to have taken this route into Portillo. We passed a sedan that had ridden up an embankment and broken an axle and been abandoned in place. A rust-eaten Edison with Oregon plates scooted recklessly around us, billowing clouds of alkaline dust into the afternoon air. And then, at last, we topped a rise, and the village of Portillo lay before us, dome tents clustered on the access roads like insect eggs. The main road through Portillo was lined with adobe garages, trash heaps generated by the haj, poverty housing, and a nearly impassable maze of American cars. The town itself, at least from this distance, was a smudge of colonial architecture bookended by a couple of franchise motels and service stations. All of it belonged now, by default, to the Kuinists. Haj youth of all kinds had gathered here, most with inadequate supplies and survival skills. The town’s permanent residents had largely abandoned their homes and left for the city, Hitch said; those who remained were the infirm or the elderly, thieves or water-sellers, opportunists or overwhelmed members of the local constabulary. There was very little food outside of the supply tents set up by international relief agencies. The army blockade was turning away vendors, hoping hunger would disperse the pilgrimage.

Ashlee gazed at this dust-bleached Mecca with obvious despair. “Even if they’re here,” she said, “how do we find them?”

“You let me do some leg work,” Hitch said, “that’s how. But first we have to get a little closer.”

We drove across rocky soil to a stretch of cracked tarmac. The stench of the haj came through the windows with the subtlety of a clenched fist, and Ashlee lit a cigarette, mostly to cover the smell.

Hitch parked us behind a fire-blackened adobe shack roughly half a mile out of town. The van was hidden from the main road by a stand of dry jacarandas and stacks of excrement-encrusted chicken coops.

Hitch had bought weapons after we crossed the border and he insisted on showing Ashlee and me how to use them. Not that we resisted. I had never discharged a weapon in my life—I had grown up in a gun-shy decade and had learned a civilized loathing of handguns—but Hitch left me a pistol with a full clip and made sure I knew how to disengage the safety mechanism and hold the weapon so that I wouldn’t break my wrist if I fired it.

The idea was that Ashlee and I would stay with the van, guarding our food, water, and transportation, while Hitch went into Portillo to locate Adam’s haj group and broker a meeting. Ashlee wanted to head directly into town—and I understood the need—but Hitch was adamant. The van was our major asset and needed protection; we would be useless to Kaitlin or Adam without the vehicle.

Hitch took a weapon of his own and walked toward town. I watched him vanish into the dusk. Then I locked the van’s doors and joined Ashlee in the front seat, where she had fixed us a meal of trail bars and apples and tepid instant coffee from a thermos. We ate silently while the light drained from the sky. Stars came out, bright and sharp even through the smoke haze and the dusty windshield.

Ashlee put her head against me. Neither of us had bathed since we entered the country, and that fact was conspicuously obvious, but it didn’t matter. The warmth mattered, the contact mattered. I said, “We’ll need to sleep in shifts.”

“You think it’s that dangerous here?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I don’t believe I
can
sleep.”

But she was fighting a yawn as she said it.

“Crawl into the back,” I said. “Cover up with the blanket and close your eyes for a while.”

She nodded and stretched out on one of the rear benches. I sat at the wheel with the pistol next to me, feeling lonely and futile and foolish, as the day’s heat leached away.

It was possible even at this distance to hear the night sounds of Portillo. It was one sound, really, a white rush of noise compounded of human voices, reproduced music, crackling fires, laughter, screams. It occurred to me that this was the millenarian madness we had escaped at the turn of the century, hundreds of hajists cashing in on the moral carte blanche of a guaranteed end-of-the-world. Redeemer or destroyer, Kuin owned tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, all the tomorrows, at least in the minds of the hajists. And at least on this occasion they wouldn’t be disappointed: The Chronolith would arrive as predicted; Kuin would put his mark on North American soil. Probably a great number of these same hajists would be killed by the cold shock or the concussion, but if they knew that, and in all likelihood they did, they didn’t care. It was a lottery, after all. Great prizes, grave risks. Kuin would reward the faithful… or at least the survivors among them.

I couldn’t help wondering how much of this madness Kait had bought into. Kaitlin was imaginative, and she had been a solitary child. Imaginative and naive: not a good combination, not in this world.

Did Kait genuinely believe in Kuin? In some version of Kuin she had conjured out of her own longing and insecurity? Or was this all just an adventure, a melodramatic lunge out of the cloistered household of Whitman Delahunt?

The fact was, she might not be glad to see me. But I would take her out of this nightmarish place if I had to do it by main force. I couldn’t make Kaitlin love me, but I could save her life. And that, for now, would be enough.

The night dragged. The roar of Portillo ebbed and rose in an elusive stochastic rhythm, like waves on a beach. There was a cricket in the wild sage east of the van adding his own distinct voice to the cacophony. I drank more of Ashlee’s coffee and left the van briefly to relieve myself, stepping around a rusted axle and drivetrain that lurked in the high weeds like an animal trap. Ashlee stirred and muttered in her sleep when I closed the door again.

There was a little traffic on the road, mainly hajists joyriding, hooting from the windows of their cars. Nobody spotted us; nobody stopped. I was beginning to doze in place when Ashlee tapped me on the shoulder. The dash clock said 2:30.

“My turn,” she said.

I didn’t argue. I showed her where I’d left the pistol and I stretched out on the back bench. The blanket was warm with her body heat. I slept as soon as I closed my eyes.

“Scott?”

She shook me gently but urgently.

“
Scott
!”

I sat up to find Ashlee leaning over the driver’s seat, rocking my shoulder with her hand. She whispered, “There are people outside.
Listen
!”

She turned forward and slumped down, keeping her head out of sight. The darkness was not absolute. A half moon had risen. There was, for a long moment, utter silence. Then, not very far away, a woman’s terrified moan, followed by stifled laughter.

I said, “Ashlee—”

“They came by a minute ago. A car on the road. They pulled up and stopped and there was a little, uh, yelling. And then—I couldn’t really see this until I turned the side mirror, and even then the tree was in the way, but it looked like somebody fell out of the car and ran into the field. I think a woman. And two guys ran out after her.”

I thought about this. “What time is it?”

“Just four.”

“Give me the pistol, Ash.”

She seemed reluctant to hand it over. “What should we do?”

“What we’ll do is, I’ll take the pistol and get out of the van. When I signal, you turn on the high beams and start the engine. I’ll try to stay in sight.”

“What if something happens to you?”

“Then you pull out of here fast as you can. If something happens to me, that means they’ve got the gun. Don’t hang around, Ash, all right?”

“So where would I
go
?”

It was a reasonable question. Into Portillo? Back toward the relief camps, the roadblock? I wasn’t sure what to tell her.

But then the woman outside screamed again, and I couldn’t help thinking that it might be Kaitlin out there. It didn’t sound like Kaitlin’s voice. But I hadn’t heard Kait scream since she was a toddler.

I told Ashlee I’d be careful but if anything happened the important thing was for her to get away—maybe hide the van closer to town and keep an eye out for Hitch come morning.

I left the vehicle and eased the door shut behind me. When I was a few feet away I signaled for her to hit the lights.

The van’s high beams sprang out of the starry night like military searchlights, and in the stillness the engine roared like some throaty wild animal. The woman and her two assailants froze in the glare, not more than ten yards distant.

All three were young, possibly Adam’s age. The men were engaged in an act of forcible intercourse. The woman was on her back in the weeds, one man pinning her shoulders while the other parted her legs. She had turned her face away from the light, while the men had raised their heads like prairie dogs sensing a predator.

They seemed not to be armed, which made me feel a little giddy with the weight of the pistol in my hand.

I raised the weapon toward their dumbfounded faces. I would have ordered them to get away from her—that was the plan—but I was nervous, and my finger twitched on the trigger and the pistol went off unexpectedly.

I nearly dropped it. I don’t know where the bullet went… it didn’t hit anyone. But it scared them very effectively. I was still half-blind from the muzzle flash but I tracked the would-be rapists as they ran for their car. I wondered if I should fire again, but I was afraid that might happen whether I wanted it to or not. (Hitch told me later the gun had been modified for low trigger resistance and had probably been used for criminal purposes before we got hold of it.)

The two men leaped into their automobile with a startling economy of motion. If there had been weapons in the car I might have been in trouble—that occurred to me, belatedly—but if they had them they didn’t use them. The car came alive and roared off toward town, spraying gravel against the stacked chicken coops.

Which left only the girl.

I turned back to her, remembering to keep the muzzle of the gun toward the ground this time. My right wrist still ached with the shock of the unexpected recoil.

The girl had stood up in the blaze of the headlights and was already buttoning a pair of torn Levis. She looked at me with an expression I could not quite fathom—mostly fear, I think; partly shame. She was young. Her face was smudged and tear-stained. She was so thin she looked almost anorexic, and there was a long clotting scratch across her left breast.

I cleared my throat and said, “They’re gone—you’re safe now.”

Maybe she didn’t speak English. More likely, she didn’t believe me. She turned and ran into the high weeds parallel to the road, exactly like a frightened animal.

I took a few steps but didn’t follow her. The night was too dark, and I didn’t want to leave Ashlee alone.