1 #12
Ari was moved by this. “You’ll be safer if I’m with you,” she said.
There were traces of chivalry among some of the militias.
She felt the van was marginally less likely to get shot up at a checkpoint if there were a woman in the front seat.
They moved through a day and a black night streaked with checkpoints, Felix driving, Ari in the passenger seat, and she wore a dress, makeup, a voluminous wig.
They were travelling to see her sister who was having a baby, she told the teenagers at the checkpoints, who shrugged—they didn’t care—and asked for money or clean water.
It took eleven hundred dollars in bribes to get to the Port of Houston, where they waited for six hours in a parking lot with the skeleton silhouettes of shipping cranes black against the sky.
They waited through the blazing afternoon and into a tropical evening, the air hot and still, scents of saltwater brine and diesel drifting in from the gulf.
A great white bird passed overhead, something like a heron but pale in the fading light.
“He isn’t coming,” she said finally, stating the obvious. Felix sighed. He knew. There was gunfire in the near distance, scaring a flock of seagulls that wheeled through the sky. They were quiet for a while, listening, but the sound didn’t come again.
“There’s a secondary location,” he said. “We’ve literally never used it.”
They got back in the van and drove away from the port, into a neighbourhood of decrepit little houses separated by high chain-link fences and razor wire.
Muscular dogs stared from dead-grass yards.
The sight made Ari tired. It was getting on toward eight in the evening and there was no one else on the street, no people or cars.
She knew something dangerous was going to happen soon.
She wished she were somewhere quiet and safe.
“This seems like a bad place,” Felix said. Ari was driving, and he was twisting his baseball cap in his lap.
“I agree,” she said. They kept the radio off and the windows cracked, listening, then the world turned white. She was blinded. Someone on the road ahead was shining a powerful light directly into her face.
“Turn left,” Felix said, a thin note of hysteria in his voice, “turn left now,” and she did it although she couldn’t see anything, driving blind, holding a hand up to shield her face against the glare.
They were on a street identical to the one they’d just left—small houses, chain-link fences, sad menacing dogs—and she was still dazzled, her vision blanked out by a green afterimage, but she saw lights ahead, some demarcation between neighbourhoods, and sped forward with the thought of sanctuary.
There were a couple of shots fired behind them, but no pursuit.
“That seemed a little half-hearted,” she said, talking about the gunshots, but Felix’s breath was shallow, his face beaded with sweat.
“The checkpoints around here are dangerous,” he said.
“This whole country’s dangerous.” But Ari realized as she spoke that she didn’t know which country she meant.
Texas had declared itself an independent republic years ago, but the territory between cities was mostly contested.
The lights turned out to be a strip mall and a gas station, facing one another, with a tent city in the gas station parking lot.
The tent city didn’t read as dangerous to her, or at least no more dangerous than anywhere else.
A group of people were singing and playing guitars around a campfire.
No reason to believe their lives were easier than hers, but there was joy there and she wished she could join them.
“Where are we going?” Ari asked.
“Just ahead. Make a right at the lights.”
Ari felt a flicker of unease as she made the right turn. She was moving toward death. Something lay in wait.
“We’re going behind that Denny’s,” Felix said.
She pulled up behind the Denny’s, where there was another tent city.
There was a certain beauty to it. Some of the structures had clearly been here for some time—it was half tent city, half shantytown—and strings of lights lit makeshift alleyways between them.
There were no visible weapons, and no one was obviously watching them, but Ari was deeply afraid.
“Felix,” she said.
He’d been just about to get out of the van, but he stopped and turned to her, startled by her tone.
“Felix, I think we should leave now.” It was very important that he not get out of the van.
“Okay,” he said, confused. “Why? You see something I don’t?”
“We’re going to die if we stay here,” she said.
“Yeah, okay, but I want to—”
Death was drifting toward them like mist, and she needed him to be aware of it too, because—the realization made her draw in her breath involuntarily—she cared about him.
He was staring through the windshield into the shantytown, concerned but also impatient with her, and she realized he was trying very hard not to hear what she was saying.
“Felix,” she said. She touched his shoulder, and he softened a little as he turned to her.
“It’s always dangerous, Ari.”
A knock at the window interrupted her. A child stood there, a girl of about eight with a look of wild hunger. Her hair was matted around her face.
“Message from Gopher,” the girl said flatly, when Ari opened the window.
“That’s my contact,” Felix muttered beside her. “Something’s wrong.”
“A message for me?” Ari asked the girl, but the girl was gone, she’d already dropped a folded piece of paper onto Ari’s lap and was running away into the shadows and firelight.
Felix reached for the note as Ari pulled out of the parking lot, and it was an interesting data point that he didn’t ask her what she was doing or ask her to go back.
He was staring at the piece of paper as she pulled out onto the expressway, following a route she’d mapped out earlier that day.
Houston was under the full control of the Republic of Texas and had a functional airport.
“How did that kid know who we were?” Ari asked finally.
“My contact had the plate numbers,” Felix said. “He must’ve posted a kid to watch arriving cars.”
“Are you going to tell me what the note says?”
He handed it to her, and she glanced at it as she drove. One word: RUN.
“Run,” Felix said. He sighed. “Run where?”