Mick was still chasing the VW, shouting at Jelovsek. The thief took no notice, concentrating on manoeuvring the car back down the narrow, slippery track. Mick was losing the chase rapidly. The car had begun to pick up speed. Furious, but without the breath to speak his fury, Mick stood in the road, hands on his knees, heaving and sobbing.
‘Bastard!’ said Judd.
Mick looked down the track. Their car had already disappeared.
‘Fucker couldn’t even drive properly.’
‘We have . . . we have . . . to catch . . . up . . .‘ said Mick through gulps of breath.
‘How?’
‘On foot. . .‘
‘We haven’t even got a map . . . it’s in the car.’
‘Jesus . . . Christ . . . Almighty.’
They walked down the track together, away from the field.
After a few metres the tide of blood began to peter out. Just a few congealing rivulets dribbled on towards the main road. Mick and Judd followed the bloody tyre marks to the junction.
The Srbovac road was empty in both directions. The tyre marks showed a left turn. ‘He’s gone deeper into the hills,’ said Judd, staring along the lonely road towards the blue-green distance.
‘He’s out of his mind!’
‘Do we go back the way we came?’
‘It’ll take us all night on foot.’
‘We’ll hop a lift.’
Judd shook his head: his face was slack and his look lost.
‘Don’t you see, Mick, they all knew this was happening. The people in the farms — they got the hell out while those people went crazy up there. There’ll be no cars along this road, I’ll lay you anything — except maybe a couple of shit-dumb tourists like us — and no tourist would stop for the likes of us.’
He was right. They looked like butchers — splattered with blood. Their faces were shining with grease, their eyes maddened.
‘We’ll have to walk,’ said Judd, ‘the way he went.’
He pointed along the road. The hills were darker now; the sun had suddenly gone out on their slopes.
Mick shrugged. Either way he could see they had a night on the road ahead of them. But he wanted to walk somewhere — anywhere — as long as he put distance between him and the dead.
In Popolac a kind of peace reigned. Instead of a frenzy of panic there was a numbness, a sheep-like acceptance of the world as it was. Locked in their positions, strapped, roped and harnessed to each other in a living system that allowed for no single voice to be louder than any other, nor any back to labour less than its neighbour’s,
they let an insane consensus replace the tranquil voice of reason. They were convulsed into one mind, one thought, one ambition. They became, in the space of a few moments, the single-minded giant whose image they had so brilliantly re-created. The illusion of petty individuality was swept away in an irresistible tide of collective feeling — not a mob’s passion, but a telepathic surge that dissolved the voices of thousands into one irresistible command.
And the voice said: Go!
The voice said: take this horrible sight away, where I need never see it again.
Popolac turned away into the hills, its legs taking strides half a mile long. Each man, woman and child in that seething tower was sightless. They saw only through the eyes of the city. They were thoughtless, but to think the city’s thoughts. And they believed themselves deathless, in their lumbering, relentless strength. Vast and mad and deathless.
Two miles along the road Mick and Judd smelt petrol in the air, and a little further along they came upon the VW. It had overturned in the reed-clogged drainage ditch at the side of the road. It had not caught fire.
The driver’s door was open, and the body of Vaslav Jelovsek had tumbled out. His face was calm in unconsciousness. There seemed to be no sign of injury, except for a small cut or two on his sober face. They gently pulled the thief out of the wreckage and up out of the filth of the ditch on to the road. He moaned a little as they fussed about him, rolling Mick’s sweater up to pillow his head and removing the man’s jacket and tie.