But when the third one approached the stop sign, he got up. The closing-in feeling was back. This whole area had to be hot, no matter how far Parrakis had gotten. The next car could be police, and that would be the ballgame.
It was a woman in the car, and she was alone. She would not look at him; hitchhikers were distasteful and thus to be ignored. He ripped the passenger door open end was in even as the car was accelerating again. He was picked up and thrown sideways, one hand holding desperately onto the doorjam, his good foot dragging.
The thumping hiss of brakes; the air car swerved wildly. “What-who-you can’t-Richards pointed the gun at her, knowing he must look grotesque close up, like a man who had been run through a meat grinder. The fierce image would work for him. He dragged his foot in and slammed the door, gun never swerving. She was dressed for town, and wore blue wraparound sunglasses. Good looking from what he could see.
“Wheel it,” Richards said.
She did the predictable; slammed both feet on the brake and screamed. Richards was thrown forward, his bad ankle scraping excruciatingly. The air car juddered to a stop on the shoulder, fifty feet beyond the intersection.
“You’re that . . . you’re . . . R-R-R-”
“Ben Richards. Take your hands off the wheel. Put them in your lap.
She did it, shuddering convulsively. She would not look at him. Afraid, Richards supposed, that she would be turned to stone.
“What’s your name, ma’am?”
404
“A-Amelia Williams. Don’t shoot me. Don’t kill me. I . . . I . . . you can have my money only for God sake don’t kill meeeeeeee- ”
“Shhhhh,” Richards said soothingly. “Shhhhh, shhhhhh.” When she had quieted a little he said: “I won’t try to change your mind about me, Mrs. Williams. Is it Mrs.?”
“Yes,” she said automatically.
“But I have no intention of harming you. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” she said, suddenly eager. “You want the car. They got your friend and now you need a car. You can take it-it’s insured-I won’t even tell. I swear I won’t. I’ll say someone stole it in the parking lot-”
“We’ll talk about it,” Richards said. “Begin to drive. Go up Route 1 and we’ll talk about it. Are there roadblocks?”
“N-yes. Hundreds of them. They’ll catch you.
“Don’t lie, Mrs. Williams. Okay?”
She began to drive, erratically at first, then more smoothly. The motion seemed to soothe her. Richards repeated his question about roadblocks.
“Around Lewiston,” she said with frightened unhappiness. “That’s where they got that other mag-fellow.
“How far is that?”
“Thirty miles or more.”
Parrakis had gotten farther than Richards would have dreamed.
“Will you rape me?” Amelia Williams asked so suddenly that Richards almost barked with laughter.
“No,” he said; then, matter-of-factly: “I’m married.”
“I saw her,” she said with a kind of smirking doubtfulness that made Richards want to smash her. Eat garbage, bitch. Kill a rat that was hiding in the breadbox, kill it with a whiskbroom and then see how you talk about my wife.
“Can I get off here?” she asked pleadingly, and he felt a trifle song for her again.
“No,” he said. “You’re my protection, Mrs. Williams. I have to get to Voigt Field, in a place called Derry. You’re going to see that I get there.”
“That’s a hundred and fifty miles!” she wailed.
“Someone else told me a hundred.”
“They were wrong. You’ll never get through to there.”
“I might,” Richards said, and then looked at her. “And so might you, if you play it right. ”
She began to tremble again but said nothing. Her attitude was that of a woman waiting to wake up.
405
Minus 044 and COUNTING
They traveled north through autumn burning like a torch.
The trees were not dead this far north, murdered by the big, poisonous smokes of Portland, Manchester, and Boston; they were all hues of yellow, red, brilliant starburst purple. They awoke in Richards an aching feeling of melancholy. It was a feeling he never would have suspected his emotions could have harbored only two weeks before. In another month the snow would fly and cover all of it.
Things ended in fall.
She seemed to sense his mood and said nothing. The driving filled the silence between them, lulled them. They passed over the water at Yarmouth, then there were only woods and trailers and miserable poverty shacks with outhouses tacked on the sides (yet one could always spot the Free-Vee cable attachment, bolted on below a sagging, paintless windowsill or beside a hinge-smashed door, winking and heliographing in the sun) until they entered Freeport.
There were three police cruisers parked just outside of town, the cops meeting in a kind of roadside conference. The woman stiffened like a wire, her face desperately pale, but Richards felt calm.
They passed the police without notice, and she slumped.
“If they had been monitoring traffic, they would have been on us like a shot,”
Richards said casually. “You might as well paint BEN RICHARDS IS IN THIS CAR on your forehead in Day-Glo.”
“Why can’t you let me go?” she burst out, and in the same breath: “Have you got a jay?”
Rich folks blow Dokes. The thought brought a bubble of ironic laughter and he shook his head.
“You’re laughing at me?” she asked, stung. “You’ve got some nerve, don’t you, you cowardly little murderer! Scaring me half out of my life, probably planning to kill me the way you killed those poor boys in Boston–
“There was a full gross of those poor boys,” Richards said. “Ready to kill me. That’s their job.”
“Killing for pay. Ready to do anything for money. Wanting to overturn the country.
Why don’t you find decent work? Because you’re too lazy! Your kind spit in the face of anything decent. ”
“Are you decent?” Richards asked.
“Yes!” She stormed. “Isn’t that why you picked on me? Because I was defenseless and . . . and decent? So you could use me, drag me down to your level and then laugh about it?”
“If you’re so decent how come you have six thousand New Dollars to buy this fancy car while my little girl dies of the flu?”
406
“What-” She looked startled. Her mouth started to open and she closed it with a snap.
“You’re an enemy of the Network,” she said. “It says so on the Free-Vee. I saw some of those disgusting things you did.”
“You know what’s disgusting?” Richards asked, lighting a cigarette from the pack on the dashboard. ‘ I’ll tell you. It’s disgusting to get blackballed because you don’t want to work in a General Atomics job that’s going to make you sterile. It’s disgusting to sit home and watch your wife earning the grocery money on her back. It’s disgusting to know the Network is killing millions of people each year with air pollutants when they could be manufacturing nose filters for six bucks a throw. ”
“You lie,” she said. Her knuckles had gone white on the wheel.
“When this is over,” Richards said, “you can go back to your nice split-level duplex and light up a Doke and get stoned and love the way your new silverware sparkles in the highboy. No one fighting rats with broomhandles in your neighborhood or shitting by the back stoop because the toilet doesn’t work. I met a little girl five years old with lung cancer. How’s that for disgusting? What do-”
“Stop!” she screamed at him. ” You talk dirty!”
“That’s right,” he said, watching as the countryside flowed by. Hopelessness filled him like cold water. There was no base of communication with these beautiful chosen ones. They existed up where the air was rare. He had a sudden raging urge to make this woman pull over: knock her sunglasses onto the gravel, drag her through the dirt, make her eat a stone, rape her, jump on her, knock her teeth into the air like startled digits, strip her nude and ask her if she was beginning to see the big picture, the one that runs twenty-four hours a day on channel one, where the national anthem never plays before the sign-off.
“That’s right,” he muttered. “Dirty-talking old me.”
Minus 043 and COUNTING
They got farther than they had any right to, Richards figured. They got all the way to a pretty town by the sea called Camden over a hundred miles from where he had hitched a ride with Amelia Williams.
“Listen,” he said as they were entering Augusta, the state capital. “There’s a good chance they’ll sniff us here. I have no interest in killing you. Dig it?”
“Yes,” she said. Then, with bright hate: “You need a hostage.”
“Right. So if a cop pulls out behind us, you pull over. Immediately. You open your door and lean out. Just lean. Your fanny is not to leave that seat. Understand?”