In a blur, the Director darts back. The beam grazes off his chest, superficial damage. But enough to slow him down. He flits away into the dark, retreating.
Sissy nods at us; everyone quickly piles into the carriage. I jump onto the driver’s seat, grab the reins. Sissy sits next to me, her body twisted around, scanning the dark, her finger on the trigger of the FLUN.
“You think you’ve won?” The Director’s voice, booming out from the darkness. “You think you’ve got the better of us? You? You stinkin’ hepers.”
I look at Sissy; she shakes her head: Can’t see him.
“You’ve just delayed the inevitable. Listen: can you hear it?”
Nothing but the wind.
And then I hear it. A faint rustling, like dry autumn leaves trampled on. But mixed in, sharp, nattering sounds, metal filings rubbed in glass shards. Sissy turns in the direction of the noise, towards the distant Institute. Her face drops, aghast with horror.
A hazy wall of deeper darkness rises up like a tsunami wave crashing towards us.
“The good citizens are coming,” the Director jeers. “All the guests, all the staffers, all the media. Hundreds of them. Somebody disengaged the lockdown. Once they realised that, there was no holding them back, the good citizens, no containing them. I could only hope to beat them, the hunters and I, by using the hunting accessories to get a head start. Alas . . .” His voice droops off.
More sounds from afar now, distant cries and squeals of desire.
“My goodness, can you imagine the frenzy when they realise all the hepers are still alive?”
I grab the reins, pound them on the horse. We lurch forward. Towards the only option left to us. The boat. If it even exists.
I’m sorry, Ashley June, I’m sorry . . .
“They’re coming!” he screams, his voice trailing us as we begin to fly across the plains. “They’re coming, they’re coming, they’re coming, they’re . . .”
We skim along the harsh terrain, the horse flying faster than ever before. But where its form was once graceful, it is now jerky, desperate, panicked. As the minutes pass, the strain becomes more obvious.
The pursuing wall of dust has faded slightly. But it is the deepening darkness, and not increasing distance, that gives the illusion of disappearance. The volume of snarls and screams has only grown. Sissy sits next to me now, looking at the map. With sunlight long gone, the map is fading on the page, colours receding into the blankness of white. Her fingers trail a rough path across the map, her head swivelling around for landmarks.
“We’ve got to go faster!” she yells into my ear.
Blood still seeps from the cut on my hand. I do my best to stem the flow, pressing a cloth against it, a tricky manoeuvre while trying to steer a horse.
I feel fingers on my hand, prying the cloth away.
She folds it over, presses it in hard. “You’ve got to stop bleeding,” she says.
“It’s OK, it doesn’t really hurt that much.”
She presses in deeper. “I’m not worried about the pain. I’m worried about how your blood is giving our position away.”
I reach out and pull off the cloth. “Don’t worry about stanching the blood. They can see us perfectly fine in this darkness.”
She looks back for a few second, and when she turns around, worry is etched on her face. I don’t need to ask. The sound of the charging masses behind us grows by the minute.
“The map’s gone white,” she says, disheartened.
“It’s OK,” I say, eyes focused ahead. “We don’t need it. Just need to keep going straight, and we’ll hit the river. Follow the river north, and soon enough we’ll come upon the boat. Simple as that.”
“Simple as that,” she repeats. She shakes her head. “That’s what you said about your plan against the hunters. It was a catastrophe back there. I thought you said there were only going to be three of them, not five.”
“All of you assured me you could handle the FLUNs. Instead you had Epap in utter panic and shooting off all his rounds in the first five seconds. And then there’s Jacob, who couldn’t get off even a single shot. How many more times could I have said: ‘Don’t forget to disengage the safety’?”
She turns her head away, biting her tongue, I realise.
After a few minutes, I say, “Thanks for not abandoning me. For staying to fight with me.”
“We don’t do that.”
“What?”
“We don’t desert our own. It’s not our way.”
“Epap was—”
“Empty talk. I know him well enough to know that. We don’t abandon our own.”
Her words sink into me deeply. It’s my turn to be quiet. I’m thinking of Ashley June, alone in her cell. And then I’m hearing the Director’s accusing voice: You, running away like a squirrel and leaving her all by her lonesome.
I flick the reins to tease out more speed. The horse pounds on, snorting, sweat glistening all over its body now.
A wail breaks clear across the sky. Too loud, too close, too fast.
And then I feel it. Drops of rain, splattering on my cheeks. I look up at the sky in horror. Dark clouds, blacker than the night sky, swollen and bulbous. The rain will soften the ground; to the horse, it will feel like glue.
Sissy feels the drops, too. She turns to me, her eyes gripping mine. They are asking: Did you feel those drops? Did you feel those drops? There is answer enough in my silence; she bites her lower lip.
Then she stands up, right on the bench, the horse still galloping away, the carriage jostling and rattling. Her clothes are pulled back by the wind, fluttering madly behind her. Rain starts falling down in earnest, the drops splatting on her bare arms, neck, face, and legs like miniature stars.
“There!” she shouts, and her long arm, muscled and creviced like a bronze statute, points directly in front of us. “I see it, Gene! I see it. The river! The freaking river!”
“What about the boat? Do you see the boat?”
“No,” she shouts, getting back down, “but it’s only a matter of time.”
Behind us, the thundering of the ground grows louder, the snarls, the hisses. So much closer. I steal a quick look. Can’t see anything, just darkness now. Only a matter of time. Sissy is right. Either way, it’s only a matter of time now.
The river is a marvel. Even over the rattling of the carriage and the clamour of the chasing mob, we hear it from afar, a gentle gurgle that is deep and sonorous. When we come upon it minutes later, its size initially catches us by surprise, the banks spread far apart with a masculine broadness, at least two hundred yards across. Yet even under a sky weighed down with heavy clouds, the river seems light and feminine, filled with a sprinkling of sparkles that I at first mistake for fireflies. Its waters flow down like slowly undulating plates of smooth armour.
The horse has slowed considerably. Its breathing grows laboured even as its stride shortens. A few times, it veers dangerously close to the riverbank before correcting itself
. I have pushed it too far. It slows to a trot, then to a stop. I snap the reins, but I know it’s useless. The horse needs to rest.
“Why are we stopping?” Epap shouts from the carriage. When no one answers, he jumps out. “What’s going on? We can’t afford to stop.”
“We can’t afford not to,” I say. “This horse is about to drop dead. Just for a minute, let it catch its breath.”
“We don’t have a minute. In a minute they’ll be upon us!” He’s pointing now into the darkness from which squeals of excitement shoot out.
I ignore him, because he’s right, and jump down. The horse’s leg muscles, when I place my hand on them, are convulsing. “Good horse, good horse, pushed you too hard, did I?”
Epap spins around, his arm gesturing at me in disbelief. “Would you believe this guy? Trying to be a horse whisperer at a time like this? Sissy, where are you going?”
Sissy is running for the river. She bends down at the bank, comes running back with a bowl, the water inside sloshing about. The horse dips his muzzle in, messily slurps in the water. In less than five seconds, it’s done. It whinnies for more.
Sissy strokes the horse’s head. “Wish I could give you more, but there’s no time. You keep going, though, find us that boat, and I promise you, you’ll have all the water you’d want. But find us that boat. Quickly. Quickly!” And those last words come out as a shout as she slaps the horse on its haunches. It blinks, whinnies, then bullets forward. We all leap back onto the carriage. The horse is off again.
The sounds from behind roar closer. Raindrops fall down, fat and heavy.
We plough on. First figuratively, then literally. The ground becomes sodden and soaked, soft sponges sucking in the wheels of the carriage, the hooves of the horse. Even the bracing wind works against us, fierce as a gale, pushing us back, flushing our scent backward to the enclosing horde, inciting them further. Rain cuts into our eyes.
Then the darkness, saturating the air, dissolving the horse into the night. Only the sound of its laboured breathing and the forward push of the carriage are evidence that it is even there.