Gps, p.31
Gps, page 31
“Calculating,” the GPS chirped in response. Then, after several seconds, “Arriving, at destination, in, point, two miles.” Jeff hit the gas, and after a coughing reaction from the Celica, the car began moving along steadily, faster and faster, until the speedometer wiggled between 35 and 40. The second he’d hit the gas, Jeff had tuned out the Taurus in the opposing lane, which he was now quickly approaching. If he didn’t see it, it wasn’t there.
“Arriving at destination, in, five, hundred, feet.”
As the world began to go dull, blank and weightless around him, Jeff looked to his left in time to catch a glimpse of the terrified Taurus driver passing by, who screeched to a stop as he watched the red Celica disintegrate.
Jeff smiled at and waved at him.
- 52 -
The car came through the other side at about 30 miles per hour, and this time Jeff had remembered to steer a little to the right as it did. His last two entries had been too far left, and the last thing he needed was to crash. His new life would be over before it started if he did.
The blinding light of the afternoon collided with Jeff’s eyes, and as he pressed on the brake pedal as lightly as possible, the tires began kicking up massive swirls of dust, blocking his entire view. The Celica bumped across all sorts of undulations as Jeff gripped the steering wheel. Though he envisioned a terrible accident, the car came to a harmless stop, leaving Jeff waiting for a full minute for the dust to settle. When it did, he was sitting on an almost completely barren plain.
In the distance, through waves of heat billowing off the hardpan, he could see the reflection of vehicles in the sun. They had to be a mile away or more. Where the hell would he leave his car this time? No stadium lots to be found out here. Was there any chance he would be able to drive to wherever they were going? Not likely. Jeff at once understood the fear of losing one’s car out here.
He slowly drove toward the glare in the distance, steering around large rocks and cacti and realizing there was at least some chance the people ahead were enemies who would kill him. As he approached, the area around the parked trucks was littered with scrap metal and old car parts. This was where machines came to die, Jeff thought, and wondered if his car would die out here, too, along with him, being left to slowly decompose into scraps in the desert.
A camp full of men, many of whom he recognized from training, went about their business. No one jumped up to welcome him back when the Celica came to a stop behind a line of trucks. Jeff stepped out into the scorching sun.
The men were surrounding the remains of an SUV which had been mostly burned up and stripped down by the looks of it. Standing off to the right of the group was Paulo, who had his back turned to the wreck and was talking loudly into his two-way. He acted as though he didn’t even notice as Jeff walked up to him. He kept his gaze in the distance and never stopped talking.
“Hell no, just let him go,” he said. “We’re not going to start changing the rules now, man, no way. We’ve always said if they go, they go. He went, and we’re lucky we didn’t get ambushed after he left. I’m not burning any bodies out here trying to find him now. He was worthless, and now he’s gone.
“What’s up Delaney?” Paulo suddenly turned, smiling, and grabbed Jeff’s hand. “You made it! Everything go OK?”
Jeff did his best revolucion hand sign and smiled. Paulo laughed.
“Yeah, everything is fine, but what about my car?” Jeff asked. “I mean, it’s in pretty rough shape as it is, and I don’t think it’s gonna make it out here for too long.”
“Well, it’s here now, bro, and so are you, and that’s all we can ask for,” Paulo said, flipping the two-way up into the air and catching it, seeming to try to distract Jeff from the fact he wasn’t answering his question. “It’ll be safe here for now. We got guys to watch all the vehicles, but when we get the call, you know, the call, you’ll probably have to just drive it up there with us. Can’t leave it out here. It’s like a slow four-hour drive up there from here, but most of it‘s on paved roads. We’ve got gas for it, too, and Simmons will be there for sure, probably join us along the way, and he’s got his car with him all the time every time. You guys can scout some hiding places as soon as we get up there.”
“When will that call be coming?” Jeff asked, knowing he’d get something less than a real answer.
“Soon,” was the one he got. “Soon. There are lots of little movements going on out there right now, Delaney. Some by us, some by them. Each side is trying to figure out what the other one is doing, and why. That’s how it goes. A lot of the time, your plan is all about their plan. Half of war is about waiting for them to do their thing so we can do ours. That’s the fun of it, my friend.
“Anyway, soon. Hell, we might go up there tonight for all we know. Not my call to make, but it’s gotta be soon. So here’s the thing. How ready are you to go up there and do it tonight, if you had to? Could you do it? Could you hit those tanks, or take a decent shot at one of those FB dogs running in your direction? Every minute counts, Delaney.”
“Really? So what time is it, anyway?” Jeff answered smartly. “I should get started.”
“No idea, bro,” Paulo said, turning away from Jeff and toward the wreck. “No clue. Afternoon o’clock.”
Jeff slathered himself in SPF 50 lotion from the trunk of his car — which he pensively left in the custody of a man named Sydney later that day — and then joined the effort to strip clean the vehicular relics in the area of all their working parts and load them onto the trucks. Paulo said a crew of revolucion boys was on its way to trade trucks — they would take these once they were loaded and leave their own vehicles behind. It was a common practice, apparently. He hoped no one would swipe his car when that deal went down.
The work was grueling, but no one complained and no one checked his watch. Though Jeff found that irritating — not knowing the time all the time — for the first time in his adult life he was in no position to start bitching, so he didn’t.
The mass clean-up effort ultimately forced the men to split into groups and go their separate ways across the stretches of the plain, searching out the hundreds of human relics sticking out of the sand on the perimeters of Victoria. Only a few men stayed behind to guard the camp and neither Jeff nor Paulo was among them.
Jeff spent the spent the day in the passenger seat of a beat-up Ford pickup truck with a pink naked-lady figurine dangling from the rearview mirror, and with Paulo behind the wheel. Although he spent much of the day trying not to worry about his car back at camp, Jeff actually enjoyed the work for the most part, acting like this was nothing more than a new job for him, until Paulo got a frantic call on his radio.
Some men had strayed from their vehicle at a burned-out Freemen campsite on the edge of the plain and had been ambushed by FB scouts on horseback. There had been four revolucion men out there, and two definitely weren’t coming back. The other two were both wounded but had successfully gotten back to their truck and fled the scene, but with an FB Range Rover now hot on their trail. Apparently, they were all headed this direction, and at high speed.
There were about 15 revolucion trucks out there in all, and all of them were fanned out in different directions from the camp. They too were likely moving quickly in this direction now. Paulo and Jeff, and two others in the back of the Ford, were directly in the path of all of them, the closest to camp.
The thing that was easy about fighting out on the plain, Paulo had said earlier, was that you could see other vehicles coming from miles away. The tough thing about it, he said, was that you couldn’t tell exactly who they were until they were right on top of you, and sometimes even then you couldn’t tell.
When the guys who’d been ambushed had escaped, they had actually gone a little too far west, according to Paulo’s GPS, and were steadily veering in this direction now. Lucky for them, as Jeff soon saw, Paulo was in the desert that day. He was armed and behind the wheel of a truck he said was no one’s in particular. It was one of thousands of cars out there he called “revolucion property.”
With his GPS glowing in his hand and an M16 balanced on the middle console, Paulo looked strangely happy to hear there was more action out there than just stripping down cars for scrap metal. As soon as the distress call chirped out, he wheeled the truck wildly in the other direction, driving right into his own dust trail but not seeming to care as he pondered who might be where on his handheld.
“I’m so glad you’re here, man, this is going to be great experience for you, Delaney!” Paulo shouted, as though they were going to lunch with the CEO of a big company. Jeff didn’t answer, but instead slid his Blackhawk out, switched off the safety and placed the gun on his lap. Paulo clawed at the little middle window on the back of the truck’s cab, sliding it open.
“Hey, both you guys cram in here, we gotta scoot! Jump out and let these guys jump in, Delaney. Hurry! Those guys are in trouble!” Paulo slid to a stop. Jeff tumbled out of the truck, and the two large men piled in, knocking the machine gun to the floorboard as they climbed in.
“Careful, bro!” Paulo yelled. “You gonna kill us before they do!”
Jeff had what appeared to be about a foot of space left to try to squeeze himself back in, and then he would have to shut the door and still be able to breathe. This seemed crazier than the two guys just staying in the back of the truck, but Jeff wouldn’t have traded places with them, so he had to reclaim his seat, what little was left of it. A glance at the horizon showed the first traces of the chase heading their direction.
“C’mon, Delaney!” Paulo shouted, and Jeff clumsily leapt onto the laps of the two men in the middle of the truck and wrestled himself into position. Now it felt like less than a foot.
By the time Jeff had pulled hard enough on the door to make it snap shut, Paulo was already driving so fast across the plain even the dust couldn’t keep pace with him. In the passenger’s side rearview mirror, Jeff saw the grains of desert forming two massive cylinders in the air behind them. Now their truck could be seen from miles away too, Jeff thought, as the ghostly city disappeared into the horizon behind the dust.
Fearing the door he was cramped up against would suddenly swing open under the pressure and send him flying to his death, Jeff leaned constantly into the shoulder of the man to his left, who didn’t seem to notice.
“Get ready to blast, man,” Paulo said, as though Jeff having a loaded handgun on his lap wasn’t ready enough. “We’re gonna T-bone these motherfuckers!”
Paulo wasn’t kidding. When he saw the chase coming in his direction — the revolucion truck still leading the pack — he steered immediately in its direction, the truck fishtailing wildly as he did. Jeff now clutched his gun, and Paulo leaned over the steering wheel and smiled in his direction.
The two-way now perched on a clip on the dashboard suddenly spoke, a voice asking Paulo his position. Instead of answering, Paulo took the opportunity to voice a much greater concern to his men as the truck barreled in the direction of the oncoming chase.
“The big hit needs to happen soon,” Paulo orated loudly into the radio. “There are too many of these rats still out here, way too close to us. They must know more about us than we thought. We need to get a move on, Hermanos, and soon.”
Paulo dropped the two-way between his legs and onto the floorboard below. He punched the gas even harder and headed right at the approaching chase. The lead vehicle roared past them to Jeff’s immediate right, and the onrushing dust cloud obscured everything in every direction, temporarily masking even the sunlight. Paulo gave a hard right-hand pull on the steering wheel, which was met by a quick, yet massive jolt coming from the opposite direction, one so powerful it threw the four men sideways in the truck. The truck itself jerked off to the left as well and began to spin out, but Paulo had kept one hand on the wheel and was able to steer the truck out of its skid and to a violent halt.
Before Jeff could collect himself, Paulo was spinning the truck back around and heading toward the point of contact. Jeff’s heart was pounding in anticipation of his next gunfight. He’d been here three hours and already he was in a fight for his life. Again. The front end of the truck was smashed, but only Jeff seemed to notice.
“Keep your seatbelts on, Hermanos,” Paulo said to the three squirming men in a steady, almost conversational tone. The two men in the middle — one of whom was basically forced to sit in the other’s lap — had been lucky enough to be able to stretch the middle seatbelt around themselves and get it locked in place prior to the initial impact. “Get ready for another jolt.”
When a break in the dust showed Paulo a black Range Rover sitting on its side in the distance, he hit the gas again. The Toyota’s steering was off after sideswiping the Rover, so he had to keep steering it back on course as he roared ever closer to the overturned SUV.
“Jesus, man, are we gonna just plow right into them?” Jeff asked, putting his free left hand up on the dashboard like a nervous mom.
“Yes,” Paulo said. “Take your arm off the dash or you’ll break it.”
- 53 -
It went on that way for two weeks. Jeff and the transients successfully looped around the ancient city in a giant circle, a traveling smash-up derby that thankfully never involved Jeff’s Celica, and which introduced him to levels of fear and excitement he never dreamed possible. Paulo’s crew never once dared to plunge inward into the disease-ridden guts of Victoria, where the only life left was waiting to die, according to Paulo.
While they went, Simon Charles kept an eye on them from the Destinoso ranch through the eyes of his thousands of scouts, who followed a standing order to butt heads with the revolucion’s men whenever and wherever they could. Charles spent those same afternoons in a stupor in his bedroom, listening to the nonstop radio jabber from across the country, his men doing his work. He hoped his view was about to improve now that he had one of the enemy on the hook. He would reel in the little one in hopes of finding a much bigger one.
Charles, in fact, had a detailed scouting report on many of the revolucion’s leading men by the time the big attack on Destinoso was approaching, a scouting report deeper and more detailed than most Jeff Delaney had ever compiled. Through his nonstop surveillance, Charles had gotten plenty of rough details on all of the revolucion’s big players, and even on some of smaller ones like Paulo’s division and the other three transient outfits. But Charles still lacked a direct link to them and to their plans.
He’d sensed a change in the overall tactics — Paulo’s band and the other three spy divisions seemed to be stuck mostly in the eastern parts of the country while most of the revolucion’s regular forces slugged it out with the Freemen in the north central regions. His gut instinct told him it was very likely more of a strategic positioning plan than any sort of attack ploy, but his paranoia told him something different.
He knew his men were being spied on, too, and the movements of the revolucion, he thought, were focused on creating a stronger presence on the east coast as the FB drove south.
In reality, the looming revolucion attack had been nothing more than a random idea, a chance to use expendable bodies in an attempt to take a surprise shot at the FB’s head honcho. The Freemen troops had successfully driven their wedge down the middle of the country, but Charles’ drive to conquer the unknown had been softened greatly in the last six months by his almost constant intoxication.
He had reached a point at which the men around him were following his mystique much more than they were his actual knowledge or his blueprint for taking over. In fact, there was no plan anymore, only a knowledge that the fight he had picked was far beyond his control or his orders now.
He spent more and more days in total seclusion, dreading the moment when he got the call that somewhere out there his boys were taking it on the chin, were being overrun by an opposition much greater in size and strength than they could handle. He’d won the dare with his old college pals, and now most of his afternoons were consumed with wishing it had never been made. The constant radio voice cascading across the room made the reality of the thing inescapable, and as much as the distorted, rambling voices haunted him, he refused to ever be out of touch with them. Charles even had a speaker on the window sill in his shower. He had to know what was happening.
The only one of his friends still alive from the group that had initially invaded the desert together was now a rogue leader, still representing the Freemen Brigade with unrelenting rage but having cut off almost all contact with the home base at Destinoso. The last time he checked in, his crew had rambled all the way down to the southwest coast, something Charles had challenged him to do yet never dreamed to be possible. His men had proven him wrong, and with every drop of blood spilled, Charles knew there was a greater price to be paid in the end.
The other high-ranking members of the Freemen had been given long leashes in recent months as well. Though he knew he could never withdraw now, Charles wanted his men to start making their own calls out there. In his afternoon solitude, he accepted that he would always be the man who’d started the war, but now he lived in fear of its outcome, and wanted less and less of a direct hand in the violence.
But those were his days.
At night, the much darker side of Charles took over. His afternoons of paranoia led to nightly cocaine binges and increasingly outrageous behavior. The parties he spent the day dreading never really got kicking until Charles himself emerged from the main house and began dancing wildly in the seas of drunken people.
And as he swayed and darted among them, he found the worth in it all again. He was a modern-day conquistador, a landlocked pirate who could stagger unarmed through thousands of machine-gun wielding hooligans and never have to worry about even the slightest measure of dissent. He could snap his finger and have every one of them standing at attention and ready to kill for him.
