Paul Theroux - O-Zone

He moved his thumbs on the weapon that aimed across the perimeter.

"It's working," he said. "My seven megawatts are boosting that beam. Hear it?"

There was a small continuous sound, like a bee in a jar.

"This is crazy. I don't see anything," Valda said.

"Believe me, I've made a space through there."

"Lead the way, Fish."

Fisher locked his faceplate and set off, holding his head down. The others followed in single file, keeping themselves at the same angle, as if ducking a low ceiling.

They were halfway across the gravelly perimeter when a spotter gunship appeared overhead and began maneuvering back and forth. As the gunship bounced, a ground patrol emerged in a dust cloud from the O-Zone side of the perimeter. It was a half-track, with a rack of missiles on its roof, and it was painted in both Federal and Red Zone stripes. It swerved and rattled at great speed toward the point in the perimeter where Fisher and the others had entered.

It had been Fisher's intention to make them believe that a break had occurred in the beam — after all, seven people were running across the perimeter. The driver of the halftrack must have been fooled, because he raised his head above the hatch and steered forward, giving chase. Still speeding, he headed toward the ragged bent-over fugitives.

"Hurry up!" Fisher shrieked. He was sobbing with fear, and trapped in his helmet his voice deafened him for a while. He did not know that no one could hear him. "Clear the beam! It's going off! They're coming after us!"

His honking voice, crying Hot pursuit, rang inside his head.

But as he had promised, the beam wavered and went off. There was no question of that, and although they could not see it die or see the meltdown of its self-destruction, that puff of smoke, there was another piece of proof. At the moment the Red Zone beam dropped and reasserted itself against the perimeter, the half-track was passing through it, and the vehicle exploded with its commandos. Its four missiles were ineffectually launched into the air in a succession of gusts.

"No one's ever done that before," Fisher was saying.

He liked speaking with his helmet on and his faceplate propped up. He believed it gave a special and rather eerie quality to his voice.

"They've penetrated hyperspace, they're living in orbit, and there's a station on the moon. But no one's ever exfiltrated O-Zone!"

They were pig-piled under a bluff in a shallow cave of loose earth. Their instinct was to hide. On the way out they had crossed an old road and had seen some houses that may have been inhabited. Each of the houses had a sign on it saying For Sale. That was how you knew there had been a vast excursion of nuclear waste; half a state declared a Prohibited Area; America's first O-Zone; a monumental catastrophe: the bungalows just outside it had For Sale signs nailed to their walls. Fisher said wasn't that incredible!

The others were silent.

"They tried to nuke us. We destroyed those fuck-wits!"

Their breathing made the pile rise and fall. They had never even thought of breaking out before! This was as strange to them as O-Zone was to him. He had opened the door and let them out. And though he understood their fear, and had once shared it, he felt powerful here.

"Yeah. I like it on the ground."

Something happened to the sky the next day — it swelled, its dome grew and became cluttered with folding clouds, and even the horizon advanced to a greater distance and became as ambiguous as dust. But it was not the sky, it was the water beneath it, a slipping gray-green thing like another bald perimeter littered with branches and broken crates and odd bottles and logs, and the far bank trimmed so low that it seemed like more water. "This here's the Mighty Miss," Gumbie said.

Hearing it said like that, Fisher wanted to cry, he was so pleased.

"I know," he said, but he hadn't taken it to be water. He had never imagined a river could look like this — he had only seen it from the tapes, when they had highballed overhead. But it was so different on the ground. It had a smell, it had a sound.

They lashed two logs together and made a long narrow raft that carried them up on a back-current and then downstream to the far shore. The river was so muddy it seemed to have no depth at all — they worried about going aground, though they bobbed like all the other pieces of spring flotsam.

"This suit has a buoyancy feature," Fisher said, and nearer the Illinois side he jumped in, shouting, "Wet exit!"

He was submerged in the river to his chin, and his helmet was all that showed. It was as though he were walking on the bottom. The raft made the shore, but the boy still paddled in his slow upright way. He was enjoying being a speck in this waterworld. His helmet bobbed across the water like a bucket in a flood.

"Fish," someone said.

They had seen Winslow some way off — the buildings, then the route signs, and at last the for Sale signs. Winslow's watchtowers seemed particularly ominous, and the land was flat enough for the checkpoints to be visible as gates on the highway. So they left the road and detoured around the town. High fences drove them farther away. They crossed farmland, some of it neglected and some of it still in use. The strips of trees that had been left as windbreaks had widened into shaggier patches of woods.

"There's plenty of water here," Mr. Blue said.

In O-Zone they had traveled only during the day; now, on the outside they traveled only at night. They marched quietly in the darkness. This terrain was different — wetter and unfamiliar. Unlike O-Zone it had a human smell — air soured by smoke, a whiff of decay, a sharpness in the light breeze that caught on their faces.

Keeping away from the lights of the town, they strayed into a cluster of darkened buildings, and they crouched near them until long after sunup, when it became clear that the place had been abandoned.

They sheltered in the farmhouse that day. They were disgusted by its dry rot and flimsy construction — the sagging roof, the shaky floor. The windows were dirty and useless, the barns still stank of sweating animals — of death and dirt. Rusty refrigerator, rusty kitchen machines, a sink full of spiders and mouse droppings, and strewn on the floor of another room old books that smelled like corpses.

"Is the United States all like this?"

Echols said no; Rooks said yes.

Fisher said, "I don't know!"

They moved into the overgrown garden, among fat flowering bushes and fir trees that had grown into steeples. Here they slept, beneath the sounds of insects and birds, while Fisher rummaged. His success had given him strength.

He found the car first — sunk in the driveway, buried to its fenders. Then he saw the dish and the cable, and he felt at last that he was in the same country as his mother and Hardy and that dimbo Hooper. He still had his helmet. He was glad that, even when it had seemed heavy, and he might have managed better without it, he had not chucked it. An alien would have shit-canned it! But the helmet had become a home to him, and he had stuck himself into it, and inhabited it, and had felt less lonely. He had not used the phone functions since his abduction — what was the point? It had a range of less than a hundred clicks. But using this dish to create a satellite link would extend its range, and he could transmit by relay.

He wished the aliens had been awake to see him tinkering with the dish and taking a reading of the sun. He took a malicious pleasure in mystifying them — there was power in mystery! He wanted to tease them, too. "What do you think I'm doing now?" he wanted to say. He could see them making monkey mouths. He wanted to quiz them and prove they were ignorant. "I live here," he could tell them. "This is my home!"