The Messenger (37 page)

She slows to a crawl. If they are looking at her through a sniper’s scope they can see her now. In the trees, off the road, there are broken-down houses. A black patch where a car has been burned.

She parks the Mercedes in the middle of a half turn, broadside, so she can get out of there if she has to. Waits.

This is finally it …

She gets out, holds her hands up above her head. “Hello …” she calls.

Silence. She has left the automatic on the seat, and is standing in front of the car where they can see her. Go ahead, she thinks, shoot …

She calls again. Nothing.

She raises the hem of her hoodie, spins around.

Leans against the fender and waits with her hands up. “I surrender,” she says to the barricaded gas station.

Absolute quiet except for the wind.

Waits.

Nothing. All right, then. Besides, she needs water.

She gets back in, turns the car toward the fortress and drives a couple of dozen yards closer. Taps the horn two or three times. Drives on, right up to the opening. Ahead, at the entrance to the gas station, an improvised barbed-wire gate has broken and is propped up to one side.

She still has half a tank. The smart thing would be to keep on going. She idles past the pumps and parks again, leaves the car door open, and walks toward the station, still with her hands up.

“Hello …” From here she can see behind the barricade—past the chicane, a rusted container has its doors open. An office or guardhouse. A white plastic picnic table beside it with a Löwenbräu umbrella speared through its middle. A lonely turquoise-green portable
toilet farther back on the other side of the road. Beyond it, more cars dragged up to block the side streets and force traffic down the gauntlet.

“Hello …” she calls again, louder.

Inside the station a light is on, but at the front door she sees the glass is broken. Some kind of cooking smell leaking out beneath the garage doors. Maybe from a barbecue. A dog begins barking when she pushes on the door, and she stops.

“Hold on just right there—”

There is a movement. At the corner of the garage, where the service bay door is partly raised. He has a rifle and he’s dressed in what he must assume is camouflage: a military-style jacket, baggy pants, and what looks like rags wrapped around his face and head. He looks like one of the mummies from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

She stops, raises her hands a few more inches, watches him.

“What kind of money you got?” the man says after a good ten seconds. Still lurking back there at his position at the side of the building. The rifle still aimed right at her.

“Money? Not much. Some. Maybe a hundred,” she answers. The strange thing is that she is not frightened at all, and she waits calmly through a lengthy pause, as if the man were thinking through a math problem.

“Turn yourself around,” he finally says.

She does, keeping her hands aloft. This would be best, she decides. A bullet in the back. It’s the logical thing that should happen. It’s over now, and she knows it, but she keeps on turning, and when she gets all the way around he’s still waiting behind the walls of a little pillbox he’s built from tires and sand-filled paint cans.

“What kind of food you got?”

“Not much. Crackers. A box of rations that they handed me when I got back on the highway. It’s all in the car.”

Once again he waits, making up his mind about something.

“I can kill you,” he says. The voice is not exactly high-pitched, but thin. A sharp voice. It reminds her of crows. “If you want gas, you’ll have to pay me with something.”

“I don’t need any gas. I was just looking for water,” she says.

“Are you infected?”

From somewhere behind her, it’s another voice. Someone using a bullhorn, one of those things police use to shout warnings to rioters. It is a woman’s voice, sharp and to the point.

“I want to surrender,” Daria replies, looking along the barricade, trying to figure out where the sound is coming from. She turns, takes a step away from the man.

“Are you infected?”
the voice demands again.

“Yes.”

There is a pause. Daria stands there, hands up. The sky is red with thick ropy purple clouds that look like they are boiling out of the distant mountains.

“My name is Daria Vermiglio. I am one of the wanted terrorists. I surrender,” she says. And a few seconds later, when there is still no reply: “There is a warrant out for me. I want to surrender.”

Maybe her voice is too quiet, maybe it doesn’t carry across the expanse. She walks another five or six paces closer down the faded white lines and still there is nothing. She is tired; the fatigue makes her hands relax of their own accord down to her side.

There is a slight burble of static as the bullhorn is toggled back on:
“How do you know you’re infected?”

“I have a fever and … rashes all over my body …”

“I’m sorry. We don’t have room for you, ma’am.”

Even though it’s getting dark, the heat is still radiating off the road; she can feel it wafting over her.

“Can I get some water?”

“Do you see the shed right over to your right?”

“Yes …”

“There’s a hose there. Do you have a container?”

“Yes.”

“Do not drink from the hose, and make sure you turn the faucet all the way off and put the nozzle back in the bleach when you’re done.”

“Thank you.”

“When you leave, use the turnoff to the right and drive out on
the road heading west. You can’t come through on this road. Go west. Do you understand?”

“Yes …”

“We give you the water, you gotta let me have something,” the man says. He has risen up from his blind.

“All right,” she says. Quietly. Submissively. That’s what men like. Men like to bargain, they like to think they are making a clever deal. “We can do that, if you want,” she says.

“You don’t have to drive away so fast. You can stay for little bit.”

“Good. I’ll get the food for you.” She goes back to the Mercedes, opens the passenger door, and gets the ration box. With one hand she gathers the automatic and holds it flat beneath the cardboard box as she turns, closes the door with her hip, and begins carrying it across the concrete toward the man at the blind.

“You want the food, here it is,” she says. He edges out to see her more clearly. The rifle comes down. She is closer now … perhaps within thirty feet of him. This is what they mean when they say women are devils, tricksters who use their wiles to lure men to their destruction. This is why women cannot truly enter Paradise.

“Do you live here, in the garage? Is that your wife out there?” She sees her shadow lengthen across the pavement. The sun is low now … he probably can’t see her face, but she still tries to smile, slows down her walking. She doesn’t need to go so fast.

“Stop and put it down.”

He’s certainly no bigger than her. He is living inside the garage, she decides. She waits before complying with his demand, puts her weight on one hip. The gun is tight in her hand now, still masked beneath the box.

“Here,” she says. “I’ll put this down and go get the money …” She takes a step forward, slowly bending to set the cardboard box down on the pavement before him—

And then comes up, only a few feet away now, firing—and her second or third bullet hits him, she can’t see where, but it knocks him backwards behind the tires, and she veers away, into the garage. She can see the end of the rifle, his leg struggling, hear his groans.

The dog inside barks frantically. Behind her is an explosion and a rattling of shotgun pellets and breaking glass. She ducks into the station. Out by the container she sees the woman. She is older. Slow when she runs, the shotgun heavy in her hands, she vanishes around the corner of the container.

On the front counter is a plastic case of rebottled water. Caps have been scavenged and sealed with cling wrap and rubber bands.

She takes a bottle and goes out the front door. Down the road, the woman is driving away in a Jeep, heading toward the second wall. As she passes through it, the bullhorn squawks, and the brake lights come on as she skids through the second chicane.

Daria drinks. A full bottle, right away. Then she gets another to take along, goes to the car, and gingerly lowers herself onto the seat.

Now she can see someone moving on the second wall, and she puts the Mercedes in gear and drives, veering off the shoulder, completely off the pavement into the brush, through what once was someone’s yard. In the distance, a siren starts up. Another explosion. Gunshots.

She slews down the deserted streets of what must have once been a water hole, then a country store, then a town, now finally evolved into a tourist trap with razor wire. There is a hard snapping sound, then another, as their bullets smack into the Mercedes. She zigzags and stirs up the dust behind her, jerks the steering wheel and cuts up someone’s driveway, through the backyard, crashing through a rusted swing set, flattening a chain-link fence, then fishtails out onto a wide dirt street.

Then straight ahead and it is only a few seconds until Niv-L’s fine car is beyond their range. Gone, with the red sun low.

Out in the scrub, dust devils spring up and then die away. In the far distance there is a row of electric power lines, leaning at crazy angles as if elbowed by the winds.

She falls asleep and runs off the road, jerks awake, slewing the Mercedes the wrong way. The car slides and almost rolls over—bumping hard over the stones, not slowing down at all, crunching
right over a metal fence post and snagging a single strand of barbed wire that claws frantically beneath the floor of the car until she skids back onto the pavement, drawing a loud blat from an approaching semi.

She wrenches the car over into the darkness as the truck blows by her, then she gets back on the road and follows him. It is a tanker with an immaculate paint job and a chromium tank and numbers and warnings emblazoned all over its rump. Minimum weights, maximum weights. Several different hazmat warnings, and the legend:

She becomes mesmerized by the huge chromium tank as they drive along together. One bullet is all it takes, at least in the movies. She has learned, she thinks, how to sleep and drive at the same time. It is very clever, something she could impress the other students in Italy with.

There is a loud bleating of the semi’s air horn and she realizes that she has driven right up under the rear of truck, and she wrenches the wheel and accelerates around him, pushing the Mercedes down the blacktop. Waves to the trucker as she rushes past him.

She is awake again. She knows who she is. She knows why and how she got this way. She’s sorry about it all, but what good will that do? The music lands on something that is supposed to be a tango, all elongated yelps from an accordion and complaining violins.

Foolish. The trucker will be on his radio. There is only a little of her water left, and she looks at it, wobbling there on the seat next to the automatic. Stupid.

A few miles later she bumps back onto another highway, turns again toward what she thinks is west, opens the sunroof, slows to a crawl and looks up for the North Star. When she finds it, it’s almost in line with the road.

Directions … it doesn’t matter much anyway. The engine of the
Mercedes is sounding a little ragged. The endless dust and grit might have something to do with it. Or maybe it’s the little red light flashing on the fuel gauge.

And as she runs out of gas, the last thing she sees is a huge sign. It is a painting of a gray bulbous head with two black teardrop eyes, a tiny mouth, and an anorexic body, with one long three-fingered hand raised to the viewer and the slogan …

With the lights off and the windows up, Niv-L’s car could be a quiet and comfortable camp there in the chilly desert. But they are onto her now.

She swivels her legs out of the car, gets the rucksack out of the back, digs through it for things she might need. The gun. Water, and something she can use for a hat against tomorrow’s sun. She decides on a T-shirt that she can wrap over her head. The mask is useless now, and she pulls it off her face and lets it fall.

She puts the pack over her shoulder and begins to walk.

Across the pavement, just ahead, is a three-strand barbed-wire fence. Someone’s property. Meaningless, she thinks, the idea of owning a place like this. She pokes the rucksack through and then slowly and awkwardly bends her way between strands.

The ground is a mixture of sand with rocks strewn through it. All the plants, all the animals, everything is greedy for water. She’s got the remains of the bottle she killed for back at Coyote … it will have to take her to the end. There is a blurry moon rising. She aims for a low hill that rises out of the desert floor. There will be a view from up there, she assumes. Somewhere to die in peace.

She goes. One foot in front of the other. Not caring, not minding what happens. Her legs encounter thorns. The thorns pierce the flesh. What does that matter? She is at the end of her own mission now. Gone far beyond what she has been trained to do, or even what she agreed to do. All that is gone. All those decisions. All those mistakes, those obligations and allegiances. All of it. She can no
longer see herself as she was a month ago. That girl … she is so … irrelevant. She’s gone.

All that is real now is her next step through the briars.

She is too tired to look around very much. Watching her feet in the moon shadow as they strike the ground. She heads toward the hill—a low circular pyramid, something left behind by glaciers, mauled by the wind into a flattened cone that is barely a couple of hundred feet above everything else.

Walking along, she has glimpsed but now really begins to notice the shards of iron that are spread around the landscape. At first she takes them for rusty meteorites, until she gets across the flats to the base of the cone, where she discovers her first crater.