Bridget pulled to the side of the road and stopped and switched off the headlights.
“We can’t go back to Peptoe,” Sparky said. “They know we were there. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be setting up roadblocks to catch us leaving. But they can’t be sure we’ve left, so they’re still in Peptoe, behind us and ahead of us.”
Bridget said, “So we’ll go overland a few miles beyond the roadblock before we get on the interstate.”
“Even if we use low beams, they’ll see us in all the darkness,” I worried. “They’re not more than half a mile from here. They might already have noticed you pulling off the road.”
“We don’t need headlights. We have psychic magnetism.”
The idea chilled me. “No moon, no stars, driving blind? Even the lightning has moved off to the east.”
“Magnetism always takes us to what we’re seeking, what we need. Right now we need safety. Magnetism won’t lead us off a cliff.”
“It led you to a tiger. It led you to a bomb factory.”
“Alphonse was as sweet as a kitten,” Bridget said.
Sparky said, “The bomb factory wasn’t a problem.”
“There was an altercation,” I reminded him.
“Yes, but we weren’t the ones who ended up . . . ended.”
“There aren’t cliffs in this territory anyway,” Panthea said, apparently siding with Bridget and her grandfather. “Deep arroyos. Some of them have been briefly turned to rivers in this weather. Rough terrain. Some low brush. But no cliffs.”
I felt the need to explain, sternly but patiently, that while we might be at no risk of driving off a cliff in this territory, we could as easily die by driving into a deep arroyo that had become a raging river. I said, “Being trapped in a sinking Ford Explorer, being swept along in violent currents, desperately sucking the last air trapped near the ceiling of a sunken vehicle, inhaling great quantities of dirty water full of drowned tarantulas makes dying in a sudden hard fall off a cliff seem, by comparison, a good death.”
“All right, then,” Bridget said, “so we’re all agreed,” and before I could protest her interpretation of my remarks, she drove off the shoulder of the highway, down a low embankment, to the floor of the desert.
Panthea said, “With lights off, if you parallel the interstate but stay at least half a mile from it, they won’t see us, not in this downpour and the dark of the moon.”
The weak light from the instrument panel provided no guidance, but instead ensured that our eyes did not become fully dark-adapted, thereby making the land ahead even more obscure than it otherwise might have been. Bridget hunched over the wheel, piloting us along at just five miles per hour, which seemed like a daredevil speed in those circumstances. The soil most likely had a high concentration of powdery fossil shells, which is the constituent of chalk, and the palest radiance issued from it. However, in spite of the rock and rattle of progress over rough ground, the visual impression was of motoring across a cloud or across a subterranean lake surfaced with a frothy mist, in a vast cavern where the walls and ceiling were as dark as the bowels of a whale.
Half a mile to our left, on the elevated interstate, the lights of the ISA vehicles at the roadblock and those of motorists lined up for inspection glimmered, dull and rutilant, through the screening rain, like the balefires of a cult that burned alive the sacrifices that its gods demanded. The distant glow did nothing to illuminate our course. The tense silence in the Explorer belied the apparent faith with which everyone but me had endorsed reliance on psychic magnetism to get us to safety.
In that regard, I felt nothing, was drawn neither to the left nor right, nor forward. Bridget murmured to herself—“Maybe, maybe, okay, to the right, a little, not too much”—and I remembered what she had said about confidence improving the efficiency and accuracy of psychic magnetism. Evidently, she was focused, as I was certainly not. She’d never before muttered to herself while behind the wheel and seeking something, but I attributed this to the stress of these unique circumstances.
Abruptly she cried out and pulled the wheel hard to the left, and Winston barked loud enough to cause me to startle forward in my restraining safety harness. A vehicle without running lights crossed in front of us, moving at a reckless speed. It was so close, no more than six feet away, that I could see some details of it: half again as large as our SUV, jacked up on tires with tread as deep as those on a farm tractor, an all-terrain transport with what might have been a rack of spotlights on the roof, above the windshield. I had the distinct impression that it was a military vehicle and knew it must be part of the ISA search party, lying in wait here in case we tried to avoid the roadblock by going overland.