“I’m not sure I want to do that.” He had a hand on the shift lever, ready to throw it into drive on a second’s notice. “We haven’t done anything wrong. You’ve as much as said so yourself.”
“That might be.” The officer sounded genuinely apologetic. If only, Frank thought frantically, his eyes had been normal and his taste for flammable liquids not so pronounced. “I have to insist. Like you say, this probably has nothing to do with you, but it’s not my place to decide blame or responsibility. We just patrol this section of highway. Don’t make things difficult for me. It’s been a tough week.”
Turning, he nodded in the direction of the patrol cruiser. When he saw what the thing was looking at, Frank rose halfway off the seat.
“Wendy!”
His daughter stared back at him from the front seat of the cruiser. Her eyes were wide, but she didn’t seem especially frightened.
“If you’ll come along peacefully, please,” the sergeant said, repeating his demand.
“What’s my daughter doing in your car? You have no right to—!” But the sergeant ignored him as he climbed into the back of the cruiser. Flashing its red lights but no siren, it rolled twenty yards forward before stopping. Only then did the driver run the siren a couple of times. It sounded distinctly like a human scream.
Frank clutched the wheel for support. Alicia had come up beside him, worry in her voice and in her expression.
“What’s going on, Frank? Why is Wendy in that police car?”
“I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t know why Wendy’s in that car, but they want us to follow them and with Wendy there we don’t have a lot of choices.” The siren raced again, a terrifying sound. “Get Mouse. Tell her what’s going on and ask her what we—”
“I already tried. She’s asleep in the back. I can’t wake her up. I’ve never seen anyone sleep so soundly.”
“Yeah, singing’s hard work,” he said sarcastically. A rising wail came from the police cruiser, like a pig being butchered alive. “Keep trying.”
Pale, Alicia nodded and rushed to the back of the motor home, ignoring Steven’s queries. With a wrench almost hard enough to break the shift lever, Frank pulled out into the slow lane. Automatically, he checked the rearview. There were two cars coming up fast, but as he pulled out they both changed to the fast lane.
He caught a brief glimpse of the passengers in the second car. A young man and woman. The woman was pounding on the inside of the rolled-up window. Her expression was wild, her hair disheveled. The driver of the car sat motionless behind the wheel, both hands affixed to the plastic circle. They went by so quickly Frank couldn’t be certain, but it looked to him like the driver had no face.
The two cars vanished over the horizon. The police cruiser accelerated, and Frank, feeling utterly helpless, fed gas to the motor and followed.
“What’s happening?”
Frank saw Mouse, still sleepy-eyed, standing behind Alicia’s seat. Somehow she kept her long hair from tangling while she slept.
He explained and when he was through she nodded knowingly. “Another thread has broken. The end has entwined with your line of existence.”
“They’ve got Wendy with them. They ordered me to follow.”
“You’re doing the right thing. If your daughter was here I might be able to help.” She stared at the patrol cruiser keeping ten car lengths in front of them. “Now we can do nothing until we have her again.”
“They’re not going to hurt her, are they?” asked Alicia. She was fighting back tears, fighting to keep control, Frank saw.
“From what your husband has told me they have no reason to. That is not a guarantee, but it offers reason to hope.”
“This is what you meant about this Evil allying itself with Chaos, right?” Frank wanted to accelerate, to pull around and use the motor home’s greater weight to run the ominous cruiser and its occupants off the road. Wanted to see the car roll over and over among the weeds and Joshua trees until it exploded in a ball of flame. Instead he followed meekly. “They were waiting for us.”
“You told me they were not expecting you.”
He sat a little straighter. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. That’s what the sergeant said.”
“Then we are still an anomaly to them. We must break away before they learn who I am.”
“Who are they?” Alicia asked. “What is this place?”
“An outpost of Evil. That much is certain. What kind of Evil we do not yet know.”
They fell silent, following. Other vehicles passed them regularly now. Frank tried not to look in their direction, hoped Alicia did not. Steven remained in the back, absorbed in his comic books, for which Frank was grateful.
Each car featured the same blank-faced driver, gray robots immune to everything but their driving. Chauffeurs on a concrete Styx. Like the cars and trucks, the passengers they were convoying came in all sizes, colors, and shapes.
Frank watched as an open-topped Jeep went bouncing past, towing two middle-aged men behind it. Both were naked and obviously had been dragged a considerable distance. Their bodies were raw and bloody and yet they acted lively enough. Probably more alive than they wanted to be. A big blue Lincoln cruised by smoothly. An attractive woman of middle age hung out the rear back window. She was screaming and waving both arms frantically. He had a quick glimpse of her companions in the back seat. They were ugly and alien enough to stop a sensitive man’s heart.
The Jeep and the Lincoln were exceptions. The majority of vehicles that roared past had all their windows rolled up. Their human occupants were visible only as jerking, gesticulating silhouettes, tormented shadows riding in the back of Chevrolets and Mercedes and VWs. Frank wondered if there was a formal relationship between the class of vehicle and its passengers, as well as the kind of tortures they were undergoing.
Only the motor home drove in the slow lane. We’re normal, he thought. Maybe that’s why these cops find us abnormal. A check of the speedometer showed they were doing fifty. Their captors were driving cautiously.
The landscape commenced a radical metamorphosis. This time it wasn’t a matter of a few stunted, distorted plants. The sky had turned a pale greenish hue, sickly and unhealthy-looking. Pools and ponds of molten sulfur and other unidentifiable acrid fluids pockmarked the terrain on both sides of the highway. He turned the air-conditioning up all the way. They might freeze, but at least they could breathe. The air outside stank of rotten eggs and burning flesh. The distant mountains were now obscured by steam and mist rising from pools of boiling mud.
Once Frank thought he glimpsed a line of at least fifty men, women, and children yoked to an enormous four-wheeled wooden cart. The cart had barred sides through which twisting, contorting bodies tried to squeeze. Blood and excrement formed a noisome trail behind the great wheels.
Squatting atop the front of the cart, wielding long metal whips, were a pair of nightmare faces with bulging eyes and long fangs. They had no legs and bounced up and down on a pair of muscular arms. All in a nightmarish glimpse as the motor home cruised past, its air-conditioning humming efficiently. After that he ignored the terrain on both sides of the highway and concentrated on the road ahead.
Whatever else might happen, he did not want to break down in this country. Alicia rested a hand on his leg. Even going fifty with the air conditioner running on high he could still hear occasional pitiful screams from the passing cars. The shrieks of the damned filled the air beyond the barbed-wire fences that delineated the limits of the highway.
Only the cacti had done well here. They had ballooned to enormous sizes, with spines like swords. Prickly pear and jumping cactus, cholla and devil’s tail covered the ground. Everyone he’d seen beyond the fence had been naked and barefoot.
It took him a moment to recognize a different humming sound. A glance in the rearview showed Mouse cuddling a frightened Steven. Apparently he’d forsaken his comics for a look outside and had been traumatized by what he’d seen. Now she was doing her best to reassure and comfort him.
“It’s all right,” she was telling the boy over and over. “Everything will be all right.”
