Quicksilver(61)
Bridget brought the Explorer to a full stop. She took deep calming breaths and wiped the incredibly attractive sweat from her face. “Panthea, what do you see?”
From the back seat, Ms. Ching said, “I saw my entire life flash before me.”
“I should have said what do you foresee?”
“Nothing at the moment. I suspect that if and when I do foresee something coming, it will be nothing good at all.”
I could have told Bridget as much, even though I had no talent whatsoever as a seer.
Sparky said, “What happened back there was a piece of cake. We’re not in a fix. I’ve been in a lot worse situations than this, should’ve lost a limb or an eye on a hundred occasions, but I’ve still got all my pieces. As long as we’re not soaked in blood and trying to stuff our intestines back into our bodies through a gut wound, we’ll be okay.”
“That’s very inspirational,” I said.
“Because it’s the truth,” Sparky said. “The unvarnished truth is always inspirational. Bridget, sweetheart, you better turn your mind to thoughts of getting a new vehicle, and let psychic magnetism take us to it.”
“I’m already on it, Grandpa,” she assured him as she let the Explorer coast forward once more into blinding darkness and rain, still not daring to switch on the headlights.
Panthea said, “I wonder if they have other drones, the small ones, capable of doing reconnaissance in weather this bad.”
“Not yet, not for a few years anyway,” Sparky said with what I hoped was conviction based on deep knowledge of the technology. “But if the rain stops, which it soon will, that’s another thing we’ll have to worry about.”
Bridget motored forward, the speedometer needle quivering from a point just below the five to just above it. Even this return to a more moderate pace seemed suicidal, considering how abruptly we could find ourselves at the edge of a deep arroyo with steep walls, with or without a raging river.
My mind was formed in part by sensible, cool-headed nuns who couldn’t work themselves into hysteria even if Godzilla suddenly erupted through the pavement of the street in front of the orphanage and ate a busload of commuters. Unfortunately, my mind was also in part formed by the apocalyptic, death-obsessed culture of the past several decades. Tens of millions were supposed to have died in an ice age back in the 1980s, just as predicted in 1969, and still more were said to be doomed by a bath of acid rain shortly thereafter, as well as in radiation that would fry the world when the ozone layer disappeared. Hadn’t hundreds of millions more perished at the turn of the millennium—Y2K—when every damn computer went haywire and all the nuclear missiles in the world were launched, to say nothing of the lethal effects of canola oil in theater popcorn? Living in the End Times was exhausting. When you were assured that billions of people were on the brink of imminent death at every minute of the day, it was hard to get the necessary eight hours of sleep, even harder to limit yourself to only one or two alcoholic drinks each day, when your stress level said, I gotta get smashed.
As a product of my culture, therefore, I trusted as best I could in Bridget’s psychic magnetism, but there were times during the next fifty minutes when I closed my eyes and covered them with my hands in expectation of catastrophe. Inevitably, I thought of the door in the day that Hakeem, Bailie, and Caesar had seen. I wondered what would happen if a door in the night opened and we didn’t see it and we drove through on an old cobblestone road that led away into the stars. Would our lungs implode in the vacuum of deep space?
For some reason, that made me think of the transport that had fallen into the arroyo and had either been swept away or had flooded and sunk. I said a little prayer for the men who went down with it, because maybe not all of them were evil. Maybe some of them truly thought it was righteous, even noble, to zip tie old men and lock them in car trunks, to brace innocent citizens at a lunch counter and attempt to spirit them away for the purpose of interrogating them and testing them to destruction in a laboratory, for the noble purpose of protecting the establishment from the possibility of a diminishment of its power.
All that and more occupied my feverish thoughts as we moved blindly through the night. I was as nervous as Samson might have been when, eyeless in Gaza, he felt for the pillars with which he would pull the roof down on the Philistines who had blinded and imprisoned him. That legend might have been inspiring if I hadn’t remembered that, when all of Samson’s tormentors were killed in the collapse, he died with them.
The rain began to relent, and thunder rolled no longer. In a drizzle, under a thinning cloud cover that revealed a veiled moon, we came out of the rough land onto a two-lane blacktop road that no doubt dated to the 1950s; it was in middling repair.
The interstate lay beyond view, and in spite of the county road under our wheels, we remained in a place so remote that not a light was visible in any direction.
Bridget started south, then hung a U-turn and cruised north.
I felt drawn that way as well.
“Do you see anything, Panthea?” Bridget asked.
“Yes, I was just struck with a quick vision, but I don’t know what it means. I saw an old man sitting in a throne-like chair with carved-wood heads of dogs, German shepherds, at the top of the two stiles that supported the back rail. He was eating what appeared to be a brownie and drinking a beer.”
Movies and novels have conditioned us to believe that when a clairvoyant is assaulted by a vision of something yet to happen, she or he always glimpses a moment of high drama—a bridge collapsing, an assassin with a rifle taking aim at a head of state. I wondered if sometimes Panthea foresaw John Kennedy Ching, of Ching Station, restocking the candy display the day after tomorrow or maybe a mail carrier delivering a new issue of Arizona! magazine next Tuesday. The idea of a seer glimpsing mundane moments of the future rather charmed me, although it would be regrettable if seeing the geezer with the brownie and beer distracted her from seeing, instead, that my head would be cut off by a guy with a chainsaw.