Reamde

Then Marlon hollered as the rear end of the Subaru became visible just ahead of them. Men were standing around it, looking up in alarm. Csongor twisted the wheel to avoid them. Then remembered that these were the guys they wanted to run over. Tried to correct the error. Felt the vehicle tilt beneath them as it went up on two wheels.

In his peripheral vision, something was coming at him. He looked out Marlon’s window to see that it was the road, hinging straight up into the glass. Marlon was spinning away from it, bringing his hands up to protect his face.

That they had rolled over was obvious enough. What didn’t become obvious for several moments was that they had rolled over all the way and ended up sitting upright on all four wheels, sideways on the road, rocking gently from side to side on the suspension.

Csongor looked out his open window and saw jihadists (it was time to start calling them that) reaching into their garments, just as Marlon had pantomimed a few minutes ago.

He swung the wheel. “Get down!” he said.

Glass was breaking all around him. His door had been sprung off its hinges during the rollover. He pushed it open to provide some space for him to lean sideways. Looking straight down at the road, using its edge as a guide, he got the SUV pointed in what he hoped was the correct direction and punched the accelerator.

A few moments later he sat up straight, just in time to see that he was making for a head-on collision with a fat man riding down the middle of the road on an all-terrain vehicle, a rifle in his lap. Some mutual swerving occurred, and they just avoided hitting each other.

He looked over to see that Marlon was, at least, moving. He had banged his head on something during the rollover and was bleeding from a laceration, stanching it with a wad of Gazetteer.

The road went into a gentle leftward curve. Rustic houses went by them, mostly on the right.

Some of them began to look familiar, and he understood that he was driving in circles. The road had terminated in a big loop. There was nowhere he could go from here.

Except, possibly, up a driveway? He had to do something because the jihadists would be coming soon—might be running laps on the same loop already—and they had him bottled up here, at the head of the valley. He paused at the entrance to one driveway, saw a white man coming down it holding an assault rifle. An assault rifle! He gunned it forward to the next driveway, but this one was blocked, just off the road, by a gate. No place to hide from vengeful jihadists.

The driveway after that seemed to wind off into the woods for some distance. Csongor, reacting without thinking, turned down it, praying that the move wasn’t being observed by any of the people who were pursuing them. Because this not was a decision he could take back; he couldn’t assume that there was a handy infinite loop at the end of this road.

It went around a single bend and terminated in a massive timber gate. Csongor crunched it to a stop, then took advantage of a little wide spot that had been cleared, just in front of this barrier, to make it possible for wayward vehicles to turn around. Even so, getting the SUV reversed in such a tight spot required many back-and-forths. During a few of these, he found himself gazing curiously out his window at a panoply of documents that had been laminated in weatherproof plastic and stapled to the wood. None of them seemed to be direct threats to kill him. They were more in the way of legal filings and political/religious manifestos.

A word passed in front of his eyes that took a moment to sink in. When it did, he stomped the brake. Reversed the vehicle’s direction. Then crept back the way he’d come, as slowly as he could make the vehicle move. Scanning the documents on the gate, unwilling to believe he’d actually seen it.

“What is up, bro?” Marlon demanded. Then he called out “Aiyaa!” as Csongor stomped the brake again, jerking the vehicle, and him, and his aching head.

“I think I get it now,” Csongor said.

“Get what?”

“What’s happening.”

He was staring at a document—a sort of open letter—signed at the bottom. The signature was so neat that you could actually read it. It said, JACOB FORTHRAST.

UNCLE JOHN DROVE the all-terrain vehicle back toward Jake’s cabin with Zula sitting on the luggage rack behind him. Jake rode her bicycle. Olivia and Jake chivalrously suggested that those two ride on ahead as fast as possible, the bicyclists catching up as soon as they could. John, though, was averse to any plan that involved splitting up; and the intensity of his reaction as much as proved that he was recollecting something that had not worked out very well in Vietnam. The journey back was therefore carried out in a tortoise-and-hare mode, the ATV running forward for a few hundred yards and then idling along while Jake and Olivia caught up with them.