Land Beyond the Map

The road crawled up a slight hill, and before the car reached the top Crane could see the fiery glow beyond. He stopped the car below the crest, got out and walked on and up until he could lie down and look over and across the undulating plain and the rivers and trees to the scene on the horizon. Polly dropped at his side.

“That’s it,” Crane said with satisfaction. “That’s the sight — factory, city, hell, what-have-you — I saw as a child.”

“It’s a long way off.”

“Just as well. Look.” He pointed to the road, a thin strip of whiteness running directly to the distant buildings. “Tanks. Half a dozen of ’em. All trundling this way. Fast. After our blood.”

VIII

Those distant specks of bright vermilion stained the white road like spots of blood. Polly caught her lower lip between her teeth. “You think—?”

“They’re coming out to find out what happened to their buddies, why the two we knocked out don’t respond to signals.” He looked more closely at the city. “I think we’d better get out of it while we still have the time.” He felt unnaturally calm.

That roaring, fiery, gleaming monstrosity over there had last been seen by him when, as a child, he had been enjoying a country holiday with his father and mother and sister Adele. Now his father and mother were dead and Adele was — well, Adele was now just as she had been then in everything except physical age. Distance hazed detail. He caught tantalizing glimpses of that monstrous branched tree and that silver bowl from which flames licked ruddily. His memory had not played him false, then. The lowering Gehenna had existed — did exist still. Through the surging currents of memory and anger and fear the impudent thought occurred to him that he should have a camera. But, then, people would scoff at what they would dub camera trickery. He slid back and stood up.

“Come on, Polly. We can’t do any more. You’ve just got to face it about Allan.”

She didn’t answer. But her face distressed Crane.

Back in the car and driving fast in retreat along the way they had come, Crane wrestled with the heavy sense of defeat permeating his acknowledged relief in traveling in the right direction. Hell! What more could two rational people do? If they had gone towards the city, or whatever it was, the tanks would certainly have dealt with them as they must have done with Allan Gould and Colla. The best bet was to return to the normal world and prepare for another expedition into the Map Country. They’d been pitchforked into it without warning, quite unexpectedly, without arms, food or a reliable method of long-term transportation. He glanced at the gasoline gauge.

Just enough to take them back to the torn edge of the map.

He continued to drive. The feel of the controls beneath hands and feet gave him a sense of purpose and a material task on which to fix his impatience. The miles fled back as the road unrolled. Twice the surrounding country went through stomach-churning upheavals with the solid land rolling like the mid-Atlantic; but through it all Crane kept the Austin going stolidly, compensating for each treacherous lurch of the queasy road surface. Polly sat huddled up at his side, not speaking.

They were, Crane realized with savage self-mockery, a forlorn little band.

Going back they saw, not only more perambulating bushes, but a whole forest on the march. The unceasing frieze of sky-pricking mountains changed, too, and from gaunt, coned summits fire and fury vomited forth, scorching the earth, spreading lava in a wicked trickle of flame all across the ground until the oven-heat licked at them from the roadside and they could hear the ominous hissing and bubbling and smell the rank sulpher odors from the depths of the earth.

Shining white under the sunshine, dappled with cloud shadows from the belching volcanoes, the road tamed the lava and the furnace-filth recoiled from the highway.

Great birds swooped from the sky and once a raking talon scored all along the paintwork of the car’s hood. Crane gunned the car, bashed it solidly into the bird’s body, felt a sadistic satisfaction as the feathered reptilian flyer spun away, screeching.

Monsters with greenish-gray hides, slimy and rank, blundered from the river and stood glaring stupidly at the road and the fleeting car; but they did not venture further.

“They’ve been tamed by the tanks,” Crane said. “This road is a single lonely streak of sanity running through the chaos of this world.”

Up hills and down long slopes the car sped with smooth precision, the tires hissing and the air blustering through the smashed windshield. The rear-view mirror showed an odd glimpse of a clanking machine far off. The Austin had the legs of them. They passed the wrecked tank tumbled at the side of the road where they had left it. Ahead a black object appeared on the road and Crane tensed up. Then he relaxed, consciously slackened the grip of his fingers on the wheel.

“Colla’s truck. And the first tank. Nearly there.”

There was no warning.