Robert Wilson - The Chronoliths

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.