Castle War

Twenty-four City

It was still dark when they boarded an omnibus heading for the suburbs. The sky was starless and the streets were almost deserted, a lone street cleaner, whirring its way along the curb, the only denizen stirring. The bus driver gave them a cheery smile when they got on.

“Getting an early start, eh?” she said. “Your shop storming for a quota overfulfillment?”

“Better and better!” Gene said.

“Every day!” she responded.

Gene’s hand had instinctively reached into his pocket for fare, and he took comfort that the reflex was still there. The two days he’d been here had seemed the longest stretch of time he had ever experienced.

He held Alice’s hand out of the driver’s sight as they rode. The high rises continued for several miles, then thinned out, the gaps filled by older structures, some that were once single-family homes now carved up into tiny apartments. There were many vacant lots with old foundations still standing. The city had a raw look, as if it were being continually cleared for new development. The past must be obliterated and the present erected over top of it. Soon the landscape would hold nothing but faceless monoliths.

Dawn came, shading the sky purple.

“Do you know how far out the last stop is?”

Alice shook her head. “I’ve never ridden this line.”

The city gave way to suburbs. There were a few factories and more high rises, but no houses. There were some boarded-up apartment buildings.

“Do you know the population of … whatever this is, the country, the state?”

Alice said, “The population? How many citizens? I don’t know.”

“Did it ever strike you that there aren’t a lot of people, that there are less and less as time goes on?”

“Well, not really. What made you ask?”

“Housing doesn’t seem to be a problem. Or is that because of heroic construction-worker efforts?”

Alice shrugged. “I’ve never thought of it.”

They passed light-industrial parks, warehouses, yards full of building materials, lots with parked earth-moving equipment. Everything looked dreary and forlorn.

They rode for about fifteen more minutes, passing through the last of the suburbs. Finally the omnibus pulled over to the side of the road.

“End of the line,” the driver announced.

They got off and walked along the road. There were overgrown fields to either side, trees bordering them.

“Let’s cut across and get into the woods,” Gene said.

Dew drenched their shoes as they made their way through the tall grass.

“Do you know where we’re going?” she asked.

“Only generally. The place I want to get to is due east of the city. The roads are different here, but the lay of the land is the same. As far as I can tell, that road would be U.S. Route 30 in my world. We want to get as far along it as we can. Trouble is, we’re miles from the place I want to get to. Maybe thirty miles. That’s a lot to walk.”

“We’ll get there,” she said gaily.

“Don’t be so goddamned optimistic. I’m sick of the smiles, the phony cheeriness.”

“Sorry.”

He drew her to him and hugged her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

“It’s all right,” she said.

“No, it’s not. You’re the only ray of light in all this darkness. You shouldn’t exist. I —”

She drew back from him. “What’s the matter?”

He turned away. “It’s starting.”

“InnerVoice?”

He nodded. “Nausea. There was a little on the bus but I was hoping it was just nervousness. Let’s keep walking.”

The woods were green and cool, alive with morning birdsong. They followed a deer path through thin maple trees and dense undergrowth: ferns, laurel, wild raspberry bushes, mayapple plants.

“What are you feeling?” she asked.

“Fear,” he said.

“Bad?”

“Yes, getting worse.”

She held his hand tightly. They came out of the woods and crossed a hayfield, entering the trees on the other side. A slope led down to the road, which had curved to the right and crossed in front of them.

“Let’s chance the road for a while,” he said.

They walked for about a quarter mile before encountering a garage with numerous official-looking vehicles parked in front of it. Most were trucks, but there were two cars, nondescript gray sedans. He led her across the parking lot to one of them. He tried the driver’s door — it was unlocked.

“Get in,” he said.

The interior was stripped down and functional, the dashboard made of unpainted metal with minimum instrumentation. The car had a standard transmission with a floor shift. As he suspected, the key was in the ignition.

He looked around a lot. No one was about. He depressed the clutch pedal and turned the key. The engine coughed, turned over, and started chugging and rattling.

He struggled with the gearshift.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

“Feel weak. The nausea. Can you drive?”

“No. I never learned.”

“Fine. I’ll be … fine.”

He got it into reverse and backed out of the parking slot. Jamming the lever into first gear, he started across the lot for the road.

A man in greasy overalls came out of the garage, stopping when he saw the car pulling out. He yelled something.

Gene floored the accelerator pedal, spinning tires on the gravel. He drove off the lot, swerving onto the road with only a cursory glance to see if traffic was coming. The engine howled but didn’t put out much power. He kept his foot to the floor, though, and the speedometer soon read eighty — miles or kilometers or something else, he didn’t know. He kept at that speed until it was apparent that they weren’t being chased.

He slowed down.

“Well,” Gene said, “the guy is sure to call the … the what? Would he call the army?”

“He might report the incident to the local Committee for the Investigation of Unsocial Behavior,” she said. “They might call Constant Struggle.”

“Does Constant Struggle always patrol the countryside?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s who picked me up. What were they doing out there? Do you have any idea?”

“No, Gene. I don’t.”

“There’s gotta be more to this.” He coughed. “Oh, God, I gotta throw up.” He swallowed bile.

“Stop,” she said.

“No, don’t want to take the chance. If I have to puke I’ll do it out the window. Hope you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind, Gene.”

“The thing is the anxiety, the fear. It’s not as powerful as it was that first day, but it’s getting to me.”

“I don’t understand, Gene. You shouldn’t have InnerVoice at all. You’re a maladapt.”

“Maybe this is psychological? Psychosomatic? I hope.”

“If you’re not a maladapt, maybe you have something that’s fighting InnerVoice.”

“I don’t know what it could be.”

“You must have something.”

The road went into a series of turns and the motion sickened him even more. He slowed down, swallowing the lubricating mucus that had worked its way up his esophagus, preparing the way for the return of his breakfast of near-rotten potatoes. Then the road straightened again, his stomach rumbled, and the breakfast stayed down. He belched.

“Excuse me. Alice, have the maladapts ever gotten together to do something?”

“Like what?”

“Like a revolution? Guerrilla activity?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Any attempt to bring down the system. To fight InnerVoice.”

“But how do you fight something that’s inside people?”

She had a point. He belched again, feeling a little better. The road went serpentine once more, climbing a grade. Woods were dense to either side, an occasional connecting dirt road the only break.

At the top of the hill the woods cleared and they passed through an abandoned hamlet, its weathered houses and stores boarded up and deserted. To Gene it looked familiar and he thought it might be a variant of one of the highway whistle-stops along Route 30. If so, they were getting closer to the site where the portal would be if it hadn’t vanished or shifted. There was still no calculating the chances of the portal still being in place. He put off thinking about what he would do if it wasn’t.

The nausea was making a comeback, rising in yet another wave. His heart fluttered like a wounded bird. The anxiety was something alive in him, scrabbling to get out, wanting to scream, to run away.

The road was blocked off ahead, a red wooden barrier across it. The sign said simply: Road Closed. There was no detour.

He smashed through the barrier. Shards of wood fell off the hood and windshield. It was too far to get out and walk just yet. It would be risky traveling an interdicted road, but he wasn’t ready to give up the car. Piece of junk though it was, it was something he could control. It obeyed his wishes, responded to the dictates of his body and will. It was power. He felt that if he let go of the steering wheel he would cave in and become some whimpering creature seeking only the alleviation of pain. He was afraid that he would give up and go back, do anything to make the hurt stop, even turn Alice in if it would help. The possibility of that scared him even more than the thought of being caught. He was feeling the lash right now. Would there be greater punishment if he was apprehended? Worse than this? He couldn’t imagine it.

He realized he had speeded up. The speedometer read eighty-five. The fuel tank was half full, so no worry there. There was no water temperature gauge, no battery charge meter, but he wasn’t particularly concerned with those readings. The car, clunky as it was, seemed to be in passable condition.

He screeched around a turn, braking in and accelerating out. They raced through another ghost village. Why were these sites abandoned? A matter of population decline, or was it part of a plan to redistribute population? Get people out of the countryside and into compounds of high rises so as to be more easily controlled? Perhaps. There were precedents in Earth history, though sometimes the flow went the other way, from the cities to the country. But dictatorships were notorious for shunting masses of people around, bulldozing villages, deporting ethnic groups, other high-handedness. The only people you’d need in the country would be personnel to work the fields of the huge state-run farms, like those he’d seen from the air, and those workers would live in residence complexes. There were no independent farmers, so no quaint farming villages were necessary.

He heard the whine of turbine engines above. He craned his neck to look. A VTOL craft was following, swooping low.

He floored the accelerator, taking the next bend fast enough so that the car went up on two wheels. The vehicle’s weight was obviously ill distributed. Any good car would have taken the curve in stride. He cursed the industrial system that produced such shoddy design and manufacture. It felt good to get angry. Anger fought back the anxiety. Maybe that’s what was keeping him going.

“Stop your vehicle immediately! Pull over to the side of the road!”

The voice boomed from the craft. He pressed his foot against the metal floor.

“Pull over or you will be fired upon!”

He glanced at Alice. She looked amazingly calm. What would be her fate? They would probably shoot her up with new nanocomputers, better ones. No more evening walks, no more filching an extra dessert. Not even those peccadilloes would be allowed her then. Would it be better for her to surrender, or to die in a mad attempt to gain her freedom?

“What should I do, Alice?”

She looked at him with defiance in her eyes. As if she’d been reading his mind she said, “Don’t let them take us. I’d rather die.”

The VTOL fired, the sound like the buzzing of a chain saw. Dust rose from the shoulder. The miss had been deliberate. Gene began swerving all over the road. The craft’s guns sounded again, and this time the miss may not have been intentional. Another bend came up, trees intervening between the car and the craft. The gunship veered away.

He looked ahead for cover, for a road to turn into, a building to hide behind, anything. There was nothing but dense forest to either side of the road, which was temporarily to the good, because the gunship had to keep well above the high trees and had a bad firing angle.

“Alice, get down.”

She obeyed, tucking herself down between the dashboard and the seat.

The trees gave out and they were in wide-open country. He started weaving again. He couldn’t see the gunship but could hear its vacuum-sweeper roar. The forest picked up again about a tenth of a mile down the road, and he decided to trade defensive maneuvering for time. He mashed the pedal and drove straight, hoping to make it to cover before the craft could maneuver for a killing shot.

There wasn’t time. When he saw the craft again it was coming straight for him, its gun pods chattering. Asphalt exploded from the road, then the windshield shattered as the gunship whooshed overhead.

He spat out glass. It took him a few seconds to realize that he was miraculously unhurt. Wind from the rent in the glass tore at his face.

“Are you okay?” he yelled.

Alice nodded.

The car reached the trees and he thought that they had gotten through with no extensive damage, but telltale white smoke trailing from the hood told him otherwise. Slugs had probably hit the radiator.

He rolled another quarter mile before a red light appeared on the instrument panel. Engine overheating. A bullet must have taken out a water line. White smoke was billowing out of the hood now. Another red light came on — oil pressure dropping. He wouldn’t be able to go another mile at this rate.

The right berm graded off to a steep drop, leading down to woods. He made a decision. He braked and pulled off the road, skidding to a stop.

“Get out!” he told her.

She did, and he put the transmission in neutral, got out, and let the car roll down the slight grade, steering to the right as he walked with the car. The car crossed the berm and headed for the edge. He closed the door and let it go. It rolled down the embankment and crashed through a wall of underbrush, and when it stopped at the bottom of the gully it was wheel-deep in a creek and was very hard to see from the road.

He took Alice’s hand and led her down the embankment. She slipped on the loose shale and slid most of the way on the seat of her pants. At the bottom he hoisted her up and they splashed through the creek, ducking into woods on the other side.

They clambered up a hill. There was no trail and they had to hack through weeds and nettle. At the top they went straight until they came to the end of the woods and the edge of an overgrown hayfield.

They went to the left, keeping well inside the tree line. For the next few minutes they ran, trying to get as far from the road as possible.

When they heard the craft, they hid underneath a pine tree. The gunship whined irritably above them, searching the woods. The loudspeaker blared but the words were indistinguishable. The craft continued its pattern for a good ten minutes before going away. They listened to the engine sounds die in the distance.

Presently birds began singing again. A cricket chirped nearby.

They were lying on their bellies on a bed of brown pine needles. He rolled to his side and looked at her.

“You okay?”

She smiled. “Yes. How are you?”

“Adrenaline must do something. I feel better now.”

“Good.”

“But our situation isn’t. We’re still a long way from where we want to go, and now they’re looking for us.”

“We’ll make it,” she said.

“Yeah, even I’m beginning to believe it.”