31

The night was calm. There were low clouds overhead, and a light drizzle. Some of the taller buildings seemed to vanish in the mist.

Fern slid into the front seat, started the car, and the Mercedes floated into the traffic. The armored vehicle moved at a stately pace.

“I have a good deal of faith in Dr. Valfort,” said Nona. “But I think you should be forewarned.”

I had not agreed to see him. She was pursuing the subject. I chuckled, hoping to feel as good-humored as I sounded. “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. He’s not one of those physicians who study the psyche because he’s completely mad.”

“He has very strong opinions.”

“That’s the warning?” I could not stand the friction between us, so leaned to her ear and kissed the soft, invisible down of her earlobe.

“Maybe we can take the trip together,” I said.

“Promise?”

Denial. Maybe Nona was right. “Put on some music for us, Fern,” I said, and he seemed quite happy to steer what must have sounded like a troubled conversation into steadier water under the temperate strains of Telemann.

We were another couple enjoying a San Francisco evening, sedated by music, and I forgot all but the moment, the gliding movement of the car, the jewels of the headlights. Sometimes there was drizzle on the windshield. Fog crept lower, closing over the tops of telephone poles and trees.

“‘The darkness which is not art,’” said Nona.

The lights of the traffic flowed over her, the shifting shadows of buildings, the rippling spill of headlights followed by the falling shaft of yet another shadow.

I recognized the quote, vaguely. I asked her to repeat what she had said.

“It’s one of your own phrases, Strater. From that article you wrote for Design Quarterly. You said that we are the ones who discover light, and music, all the ingenuity we use to make life an experience that we can endure. But beyond us always is the darkness that isn’t art, the Void.”

“That’s a nice, cheerful line of thought to take at a time like this.” But I was a little disturbed. I was forgetting my work, my thoughts. Even now I had trouble recognizing the quote as my own.

I patted the back of Fern’s seat. It was a more solid than usual piece of equipment, and I sensed that it, too, was armored, plated like the seat of a fighter pilot. “Let’s slip on down to the Marina,” I said.

“You got it,” said Fern, his jaw working a wad of gum.

We surmounted a hill, at an intersection I did not recognize, and fog was suddenly dense, ragged, swirling. It would break only to show a dash of distant lights, a glimpse of parked cars, and then it closed again.

Slow. Beyond our control. Deliberate. The evening a video of itself that we reviewed from a point far in the future. The fog lifted. A car swept into the lane ahead of us. It was a dark shape, its chrome bright. The car squealed sideways. It blocked the street.

Fern stepped on the accelerator, then slammed on the brakes as the car jockeyed to a new position, wedging us in. Fern worked the Mercedes into reverse, and backed up, driving fast.

I turned to look and could see nothing. Beyond the car windows was an absence, a blank. There was nothing out there, only fog.

And then there was a dark shape, a car rolling toward us down the hill, its headlights dead. Fern stood on the brake.

“Keep going,” I said.

That was the rule we had all learned. Keep moving. Don’t stop, ever.

No hurry. Plenty of time. Fern looked at me for an instant that began to unfold into several seconds. He said, “Hang on.”

He stared down the hill, his jaw working at the gum. He jerked the Mercedes into drive, and the big car accelerated. There was a feeling like joy at the sensation of speed. And there was another feeling: nausea and ice.

We crunched into the dark shape before us, our own car lurching to one side as the tires howled. Fern gunned the engine, and both cars churned down the hill with a smell of sulfur from the rubber. Then Fern yanked the transmission into reverse, and shook off the crumpled hulk before us.

Our car was slammed from behind, rocked from back to front, all of us thrown.

Fern fumbled at the glove compartment. It would not open. Fog shrouded us. A wind stirred the blank wall of drizzle, and the fog broke into tatters, into streamers and spinning wheels of vapor. We could see again.

But the street had changed. There was movement, people in the dark. Cars were rolling into place on the sidewalks. Car doors opened. Figures were hurrying toward us, black-garbed men with dark stockings or ski masks pulled over their faces.

Hurry, but with a certain lethargy. There were heavy thuds, chassis-shaking blows. I threw myself over Nona, taking her in my arms. Gunshots, I registered, my intellect gathering in the data while my body was rigid, nearly unable to move.

Shotguns. Fern pounded the dash, fumbled at the glove compartment. The door would not open.

Nona and I sat up, bracing ourselves. I wanted to say something to encourage Fern, but when I opened my mouth I could not make a sound.

Fern pumped the accelerator, and we slammed back and forth, our vision blurred, Fern wrestling the car into one position after another, trying to run down men who escaped only by leaping walls or their own crumpled cars. But the Mercedes listed. It was faltering, the stink of scorched rubber burning our nostrils.

We were slammed from behind again, and this time something had us. Fern floored the accelerator, and we dragged the wreck of a vehicle behind us, only to crumple into a car that blocked the hill.

A car struck us from the side. The Mercedes rocked far to the right, then fell back. Our bodies were flung, wrenched, half-tumbled, seatbelts cinching hard around our waists.

The music had continued until that last collision, a harpsichord’s spindly sound dashed into silence.

The glove compartment had fallen open with the last crash. Fern reached into it. He had a pistol in one hand, and was wrenching at the steering wheel with the other, powering the engine. The car skidded, shrieked, shimmying in place, going nowhere.

“Stay in the car,” he barked.

There were sounds from the car roof, dull thuds. They were on top of the car now, these dark figures. The butt of a shotgun or a rifle struck the window beside me, and the glass did not shatter.

Fern’s handgun was big, a .45 automatic he had praised for its “swamp-grade stopping power.” Fern levered the door open, and was outside.

The big pistol made a wham that rendered one half of my head numb, and deafened me. Fern braced himself against the car and fired again. Fern kept firing, hanging onto the gun with both hands.

And then he was gone.

Down. Fern was down, and the car door was open.

But surely that was a false impression of what had happened. Surely Fern was not hurt.

There was a subtle vibration. The engine block creaked. The car began to moan. The windshield shivered, and spidered, fragments like chalk, like bone fragments, bursting inward. The car was buckling, forced back upon itself. The doors were jammed within their frames, and the windows exploded.

One of the cars pressed the car door shut. We were in a fortress, and the fortress was beginning to cave in. The cars around us were pressing in, crushing the big, armored vehicle. The car trembled, durable enough to take the punishment only for awhile. The cars around us were big, too, and when the Mercedes would not crumple the cars methodically rammed its bulk.

The seatbelts would not unbuckle. The straps cinched us tighter, restraining us, squeezing the air from our bodies.

Nona was tight-lipped but calm as I contorted my way out of the grip of my seatbelt, without being able to work the catch. I helped her out of her harness.

Free.

We were out of the car.

Chemically tainted steam exhaled from under the curling hood. Gasoline rained from the tank onto the asphalt. The structure of the car was strong, but very gradually the car squeezed back upon itself, steel whining, crying out, metal popping loose and whistling past us.