Quicksilver(57)

“I don’t want to be one of the X-Men,” I said. “There’s way too much angst involved in being one of the X-Men. Being one of the X-Men only works if you’re as handsome as Hugh Jackman, and then not much. Anyway, even the X-Men aren’t big box office anymore.”

Maybe Sparky was impatient with all of us or maybe just with me, but he was snappish when he said, “No matter how you got here, you’re human, Quinn. And you’re human, Bridget. Your special talents come with an obligation, a serious one. Both of you have a duty to use them for the purpose you were given, a duty to your country, the world, humanity. Duty isn’t to be taken lightly. Get over yourselves and get your asses in gear.”

I like to think I would have gotten over myself and shifted my ass into gear before much longer, but just then dire events began to cascade with such velocity that I had no choice but to embrace my otherworldly heritage and the duty that came with it.

“What’s this?” Bridget asked in the tone of voice with which a curious but wary character in one of the Alien movies might express interest when about to examine the large purselike egg in which a face clutcher waited to seize her head.

We were on the federal highway, approaching its intersection with the interstate, which was at this point somewhat elevated above the lesser road. Heavy rain slashed the night, the skeins dividing it into diagonal slivers like a completed puzzle in which the narrow slices of the image did not quite align. Bridget let our speed fall. Leaning over the steering wheel to squint through the rain-blurred windshield, she said, “That cluster of lights on the interstate, to the west. There’s been an accident—or it’s a roadblock.”

From the back seat, leaning forward, Panthea said, “Roadblock. The ISA is looking for us. And a blockade to the west means there’s also one in the eastbound lanes we can’t see from here.”

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.