Termination Shock

The Columbia River

Laks’s sixth sense—or maybe his seventh or eighth, he’d lost count—told him when it was time to dog-paddle to the left bank of the Columbia and clamber up onto the rocky shore. The sun had broken the horizon as he had snorkeled along beneath the dark surface of the river, but the place where he crawled up onto the land was still deep in the shade of the precipitous eastern bank. On the opposite shore there was practically nothing visible in the way of human habitation—just the same sort of pine scrub where his uncle had dropped him off north of the border. Laks peeled out of the wet suit and changed into the outfit that had been stashed at the top of his waterproof pack: T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a bandanna that he could use for the time being as a keski. He weighed the wet suit down under rocks beneath the water. The pack itself looked scarcely less ominously tactical, but it contained a rolled-up duffel bag into which he transferred the other stuff they’d given him: a change of clothes, some American snack food, a water bottle.

It was very quiet here, as there was next to no traffic on the roads and only a faint lapping of water along the bank. Laks’s ears—which were better now than they had been before he’d been fixed up in Cyberabad—picked up a faint whir. He swiveled his head to and fro until he picked out its source: a little drone hovering just above the river’s surface about a hundred meters away. It smelled safe. He paid it no further mind. There had been no drones shadowing him in Canada, but apparently the United States was a different story. It was, as all the world knew, a completely insane and out-of-hand country, unable to control itself. Men like the Texan could get away with anything; but by the same token, so could Indian military intelligence.

A two-lane highway ran along the top of the bank. He followed it south along a sweeping curve and came in view of an old bridge where the river was crossed by another such road. Around their intersection, half a mile farther along, was a small town built on a generous stretch of flat territory. The shoulder of the road broadened and flowed without any clear dividing line into the gravel parking lots of a few roadside bars, diners, and convenience stores. Laks’s ride was idling in one of those. It was a semi-trailer rig carrying a forty-foot shipping container. They hadn’t told Laks anything he didn’t actually need to know, but it was easy enough to guess that the container had arrived recently at Tacoma or Seattle and been collected by this driver. Laks walked right past it without looking very closely. But there was nothing to see. It looked like a million other trucks.

Half a minute later he heard it revving up, now a couple of blocks behind him. It pulled out onto the road, which doubled as the town’s main street. Laks turned around and stuck out his thumb. The truck slowed.

It could be inferred that the driver—who looked Indian—had been instructed to talk to him as little as possible. When asked his name, he simply glanced up at the dome light and then looked pityingly back at Laks. Thanks to Uncle Dharmender, the meaning was clear. “You can sleep back there” was the extent of his conversation. Oh, and he held up a certain kind of widemouthed plastic container that Laks well recognized. During the months he’d spent bedbound from vertigo, he had made frequent use of them. “For urination, please!”

Running athwart the semi-tractor behind the seats was a foam mattress. Tucked into clever built-in cabinets around that were a tiny fridge, a microwave, and some other conveniences. An overhead rail supported a blackout curtain that could divide the cabin in two. It looked tempting to Laks. On the other hand, it was a beautiful morning in eastern Washington. So he sat there and gazed out the windshield for an hour or so as the driver silently, patiently, and at no point exceeding the posted speed limit, maneuvered the rig along a country road that wound through rocky, rolling ranch territory, going brown in the heat of summer, framed by hills carpeted with dark evergreens. It was evident from the sun and from road signs that they were headed generally south, toward Spokane. They passed through a couple of small towns and a reservation for the other kind of Indians. In due time they verged on the outer fringes of the city, with the same lineup of big-box stores and fast-food places as everywhere else, and sleepiness overtook Laks. He took off his shoes, crawled into the back, and pulled the curtain.

He was awakened by the unaccustomed stillness of the truck. Its engine was still idling but it had ceased moving. He pulled the curtain back and was surprised to see that dusk had fallen. He must have slept for something like ten hours. They were just off an interstate highway, in the vast parking lot of some kind of commercial truck stop. The highway ran north-south and was bracketed between ranges of rugged hills. The last light of a gaudy sunset was silhouetting the ones to the west and reddening the scrub-covered slopes of those to the east. The truck driver was nowhere to be seen.

When Laks leaned forward to look around, he was able to get a better view of the plaza’s main building, a flat-roofed, mostly windowless corrugated-steel slab. This was surrounded by a branching system of walkways protected by roofs on high steel stilts and feeding out to a vast array of gas pumps and electric vehicle charging stations. At least a hundred of them, with special affordances in some areas for trucks, RVs, and other rigs that needed a lot of room to turn around. Signage on the main building announced that restaurants and other amenities were to be found there. The driver must have gone in for a well-deserved meal.

Laks was glad of the truck driver’s absence; this was the first moment he’d had to himself in a long time, unless you counted snorkeling down the river, which had not exactly been relaxing. He peed in the urinal and screwed the lid on carefully. But this somehow caused his bowels to start moving and he realized he was going to have to go inside that huge building and find a proper toilet.

He opened up his bag and found basic toiletries, including a small wooden comb. Traditionally this would have been tucked into his hair, but the circumstances of the wet suit and so on had not allowed it. He used this to comb out the hair that was still long and to remove strands that had naturally broken or fallen out. Behind his ears the areas that had been shaved by the medics were still growing back in, but the hair was still short enough that scars and ports could be seen in his scalp. He’d have wanted to cover that up even if it had not been part of his identity to wear a turban.

In the bottom of his duffel was a bolt of black fabric neatly folded. After he had put his hair up into a knot and covered that and the little comb with his bandanna, he unfolded the black fabric and tied one end of it to the rim of the steering wheel with a slipknot. This enabled him to stretch it back across the cab into the sleeping area. That in turn made it possible to get it pleated lengthwise in the correct way, making sure that its raw edges were neatly folded inward. Which was half the battle. That done, he untied it from the steering wheel and clamped the end between his teeth temporarily while he began to wind it around his head. A few minutes’ wrapping and tucking later, he had a reasonably presentable turban that covered the scars and so on left over from the surgery. It passed high across his forehead, allowing a neat triangle of the bandanna under-turban to show—a touch he hoped would be noticed and appreciated by the locals. For he had no idea where he was, other than the western United States. Cowboy country for sure.

He was able to do the first part of this operation by feel, sitting cross-legged on the mattress, but some of the details at the end required a mirror. So he moved up to the passenger seat, flipped the sun visor down, and discovered a small vanity mirror on the back of that. It was flanked by a couple of lights, which he turned on, since it was now close to full dark outside. In another minute or two he was able to finish the wrap and get everything neatly and securely tucked away.

It was only after Laks turned the light back off that he got a good look outside the windshield and saw two people standing in front of him, staring up at him from perhaps ten meters away. He had, during the last minute or so, begun to notice a distinctly foul odor. Since his sense of smell was next to useless, he’d assumed it was but a faint whiff of some incredibly disagreeable stench blowing over the truck stop from a nearby hog lot or chemical factory. Perhaps a tanker full of toxic waste had jackknifed. But he now understood that nothing of the sort was true and that the stink in his nostrils was perceptible only to him. It wasn’t real. It was a signal from the early-warning system that had been wired into his skull in Cyberabad. It was trying to let him know that there was something dangerous about his situation. It had started perhaps one minute ago and gotten rapidly worse until the moment he had switched off the light and seen those two people watching him. A man and a woman, both in their late forties or early fifties, white, fat, informally dressed as you’d expect in a truck stop parking lot in the intermountain West. Absolutely normal and unremarkable, in other words, for this time and place.

It was, of course, he—Laks—who was the weirdo. He could guess that this couple had been on their way to or from the truck stop when they’d happened to pass directly in front of him. Their gaze had been drawn by the light. They’d stopped to watch him putting the finishing touches on his turban. A procedure neither of them had ever seen in their lives.

Laks reached for the door handle. He had a notion to climb out of the vehicle, greet these people, introduce himself, and politely explain what they’d just seen. But before he could act on it they moved away suddenly, quick-stepping toward the truck stop. The man gripped the upper arm of the woman, who was a little less nimble than he was. A hip replacement was in her future. His lips were moving. She turned her head and threw a look back in Laks’s direction as they hustled away. It was not a good look. But the foul smell was abating. The system—whatever it was, however it worked—was letting him know that the threat was subsiding.

Still, he didn’t want to alarm these poor people any more than he apparently had already, so he waited until they had gone inside the main building before opening the truck’s door and climbing down to the pavement.

And then he stopped for a few moments and gazed almost vertically upward at a bright prodigy blotting out much of the sky.

Visible nearby, out the truck’s side windows, had been a pair of stout pillars: steel tubes, anchored to concrete plinths by nuts the size of his head, erupting vertically until they passed above his field of view. Now that he was outside, though, he could follow them up and see what they supported: a sign that, laid flat, would have covered half of a football field. It was thrust high into the air so that it could be recognized by travelers from miles away. It was a cartoon rendering of a smiling and winking man with a white cowboy hat pushed jauntily back on his head. He wore a checked shirt. One hand was extended invitingly toward the truck stop. The other hand was thumb-hooked into a wide orange belt with a buckle shaped like Texas. Below that, the sign consisted of huge glowing letters: t.r. mick’s.

Some kind of chain operation, evidently.

When Laks had had his fill of that and enjoyed the starry sweep of the big western sky, he lowered his gaze and began walking in toward the central building. A moving walkway was available. Normally he’d have walked, just to stretch his legs, but his inner ear was acting up suddenly, as if trying to pull him back to the truck. So he stepped aboard and grabbed the handrail. In the distance behind him, barely perceptible under the whoosh of tires on the interstate, he could hear the comforting whir of drones shadowing him in the dark.