Piers Anthony - Rings of Ice

“God Almighty!” Gus swore. “You shot Thatch?”

“I was trying to stop the men chasing him.”

“She hit the tank,” Gordon said. “That’s why it went off.”

Karen looked at Zena’s hands. “This one’s bleeding,” she said.

“Forget that!” Gus shouted. “Get out and find Thatch!”

There was a second boom. Bright, roiling smoke rose over the buildings. “All those tanks are going to go!” Gordon said. “If he’s near there, it’s hopeless.”

“You bitch!” Gus yelled at Zena. “It’s your fault!”

Zena could not defend herself. It was her fault.

Dust Devil jumped from Floy’s shoulder and bounded into the night. There was the sound of someone approaching.

“They’ve found us!” Karen cried, shrinking back. Normally she was unflappable; but her limit had been passed. Or she was running low on blood sugar again.

“No, that’s him,” Floy said. “Dust Devil doesn’t run to anyone he doesn’t know. Not like that.”

It was him. “I had to be sure no one followed us,” Thatch said. “I circled around.”

“Let’s go!” Gus cried. They piled into the bus, and Gordon drove it rapidly along their escape route.

No one spoke to Zena again. What could they say: that it was all right that she had messed up the whole project, set fire to the very gasoline they had come for, and almost shot Thatch?

“We have enough to get us back where we were,” Gordon said. “After that, we’re stationary.”

“We’ll be better off in the forest,” Gus said glumly.

The trip that had taken three days down took only hours back, for they knew the route and had no further need for caution. Their laborious road-building paid off in need, in speed. But it also blazed a trail for the city men to follow, later.

They passed their prior stop and went on. The meter for the gasoline read empty, and the last of their reserve gallons was in the tank.

Now they had to slow, for they had no pieced-together road here, and wanted none. Gordon turned off the motor whenever they stopped for construction, and coasted wherever he could. Sometimes they used the pulleys, so that the bus could traverse seemingly impassable terrain with minimum disturbance. If they were lucky, it would fool the pursuit.

“Trees!” Floy cried happily.

The forest began—tightly meshed pine trees. Gordon pulled into the forest as far as possible, found a sheltered, level place, and stopped. “We made it!” he said. “And we still have a few drops left for an emergency.”

Just in time, for it was dusk. They had spent all night and all day without noticing it, getting away from the city and into the high wilderness. Zena’s hands were ingrained with dirt, and she had several painful blisters.

“Okay,” Gus said. “We’ll sleep here tonight and take stock in the morning. Floy stands guard until midnight, then Glory.”

“I’ll do it,” Zena said. “Gordon needs some rest.”

“Sure he does—but you can’t do it!” Gus snapped. “You have a bad hand and foot and you’ve been working your ass off and you lose your head in a crisis. You’ve got to take care of yourself.”

So that she could be a breeder, she thought bitterly. Gus didn’t care about her welfare; he was thinking of posterity. He was taking care of her the same way he would a ten-gallon drum of gasoline: needed for future use.

Karen fixed supper and they all ate, sparingly. Then Floy went out with her cat, Gordon rolled into his bunk, and Gus took Karen to the back room.

Zena lay on her dinette-bed, wide awake. Why had she done it? How could she have blundered so? In retrospect it was obvious that she should have stopped firing the machine gun the moment the two men following Thatch went down. Instead she had hysterically blasted the tank and precipitated the conflagration.

She had lost her head. And she had murdered several men.

“Zena?” Thatch said from the floor.

“Oh, Thatch—I’m sorry!” she said miserably.

He sat up. “I just wanted to say—I thought we were finished when those men ambushed us. They had knives, and they were going to use them to make us tell where the bus was. The idea of torture—it terrifies me. When you took over the machine gun—”

“I ruined everything!” she finished.

Gordon dropped down from his bed. “You saved our lives!” he said. “Nothing less would have made those bastards stop.”

Pleased by this unexpected support, Zena did not know how to express herself. “You forgot to change!” she said. Always before it had been Gloria who slept.

“That whole project was ill-conceived,” Gordon continued. “You were the only one who argued against it. We should have known there would be no more free gasoline. You did the right thing, breaking up the mousetrap.” Then he looked at his wig, hanging on a hook by the bed. “I didn’t forget. I took it off. I’m going out to take a walk with Floy.” He went out.

Zena felt tears in her eyes. “He’s generous,” she said.

“Floy prefers him as a man,” Thatch said.

“That isn’t what I meant,” she said, embarrassed. Was this Floy-Gordon thing becoming serious? A fourteen-year-old child…

“He’s right,” Thatch said. “Gus was mad because his plan didn’t work out. He doesn’t like being wrong. We never had a chance.”

“Oh, let it drop!”

“I thought I was going to die. You saved us. The sound of that gun was the sweetest thing I ever heard. And it was brilliant of you to hole the tank, so that they’d be too distracted to organize a pursuit.”

“That was an accident!”

“Oh.” There was an awkward pause. “Well, I just wanted to thank you.”

Just like that, she thought. Thatch decided she had saved his life, so he gave her a formal, almost dispassionate thank-you. Because it was the proper thing to do.

“Nobody ever helped me like that before,” he said. “Except Gus.”

Except Gus. Zena felt a wave of nausea. There seemed to be no immediate cause. Certainly she did not object to weaning Thatch away from Gus. So what was bothering her now?

She thought it through, and realized that it was not the result of what had happened, but the anticipation of what was about to happen.

She got down beside Thatch on his mattress. “I can’t do anything else right,” she said. “And I’m not going to be much good at this. But I guess it’s time.”

“Zena, don’t—”

“No, it has to be. I’ve proved I can’t do anything else, as I said. I’ll be stiff as a board and I may throw up, but Gus is right. It has to be.”

“Zena, this is preposterous!” he said alarmed.

“That’s my line, not yours.”

“Without love, without joy—”

“Take it or leave it,” she said, though she was trembling so violently she was sure he noticed. “Do you want me to go to Gordon instead?”

He pondered. “Maybe you’d better.”

“What?”

“Or Gus. He always knows what to do.”

“I ought to slap you!”

“Yes.”

Her fear was replaced by a stunted kind of fury. “I don’t understand you at all!”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Going into something without knowing, without planning—that’s asking for trouble.”

“So I discovered, yesterday.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Don’t make me feel even worse.”

“I’m trying not to. You’re too nice a girl to—it wouldn’t be right. I don’t know what to do.”

“You said that. Maybe you need to start with Karen.”

“Yes. She’s experienced. She offered—”

“She did!”

“She has to take a lot of food, so she said she wanted to make it up to us any way she could. She thought it would make things easier for you and Floy if she just handled everything in that line. Until things were more settled.”