Hours from the bridge, MacLeod can still smell the sharp metallic scent of Arturo’s weapon. It’s a singular detail enhanced by the monotony. They’re simply traveling, one foot in front of the other over reddish earth in a green world. Miles of it. At some point, they passed within sight of a helicopter’s carcass—vines hanging from rotor blades, part of the hull turned mossy, being reclaimed by the jungle. Nobody paused to gloat or proselytize or mourn. Another dead piece of the world in their wake.
Soon, they’re crossing an open, brownish valley between walls of verde. Palm trees sway on the hillsides. To MacLeod, the place suddenly seems as wide-open as the Atacama Desert in that IMAX film. It’s impossible, isn’t it? Seven billion souls on the planet—untold millions relatively nearby to the south—and nobody else is here. No cars, no planes, no glass towers of office denizens ready to proclaim they love their work, their company, their fine country.
Here, there is only quiet, dry solitude licked by breeze. It feels bizarrely normal—the shrubs and rocks untroubled by malice, clothing decisions, spent cartridges. A party of misfits gets easy passage to the music of remoteness. Even their pace is killing him—no hurry, no concern, taking their sweet time. Five people walking the earth, that’s all.
MacLeod swallows against the warm air. He could use more water—his saliva long gone thanks to the once-floppy chew toy. When he wriggles his mandible, pain explains the severity of chafing on his lips. This moment, like every other for the past sixty hours, is an instance he can’t have imagined happening in his life, to him.
Yes, one day, you will wake up a hostage to others’ whims and menace, and strangers will take you on a hellacious journey.
There’s no lifeline, no one to call. One thing he has come to understand, after a cynical schooling in economics and political willpower: Nobody’s coming to save him. He sighs into the breeze.
No way out.
Fear gives way to fantasy. A great storm crashing down to carry it all off—these thugs, the lying politicians, the Columbus teenage driver who wiped out a family because she was too busy Snapchatting her boyfriend, the hard hats and excavators and dump trucks and flag men from that traffic-snarling project on Giles St. (the one that seemed to exist only to prevent him from getting home after a thirteen-hour day to reach Emma’s pure grace and bizarrely-knowing Korean eyes). All of it could go, should go. A twisting, churning correction on the life he had—a wiping of the slate.
Cora’s sharp eyes are looking back at him in amusement. She and Arturo are in the lead, his hand cupping her posterior.
A pleasant, friendly couple—not a damned care in the world.
She faces forward and there’s quiet laughter, a lover’s joke. The storm disappears from thought. Palm fronds are rattling uphill. Puffs of cottony cloud laze in slow transit. Great emerald stalks of bamboo approach, beckoning with shady whispers.
MacLeod takes in all the calm incorrectness of this world. Deep within him, his sigh seems to rattle skeleton bones in a chilly cave.
Can’t some horrible tempest come along and free me?
