But Marlon’s rejoinders had been coming more and more slowly, and after this one he went silent for a while.
“We should start looking for a place to hide,” Csongor offered, just trying to be agreeable. “Maybe there will be something up here.” For the valley was now broadening, as if the river were about to divide into tributaries. The distance between the road and the riverbank grew rapidly, and soon their view of the stream was blocked by dense coniferous forest, brightened here and there by the fresh shoots and buds of deciduous trees. The general trend was uphill, but the terrain was flatter than what they had passed through minutes before; they seemed to have found their way into some high, broad valley among the mountains. Until seeing this, Csongor had supposed that they had ventured beyond the limit of civilization and entered into wilderness, but now he understood that they had merely been driving through a natural bottleneck. Cleared land, livestock, mailboxes, and houses began to complicate their view.
“We should keep going,” Csongor said. “Maybe there is a town or something.”
“There is no town on the map,” Marlon said, fixated upon the Atlas and Gazetteer. “Just a mountain, name of Abandon. Then Canada.”
“Then maybe we should just pull into one of these places and ask for help,” Csongor said. He slowed down and took the next right, turning into a driveway that ran into the woods for a few meters—just enough to accommodate a stopped vehicle—before terminating in a gate.
“TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT,” Marlon said, reading words spray-painted in foot-high letters on a sheet of plywood that covered most of the gate. “What is a trespasser? Some kind of animal?”
“It’s us,” Csongor said, throwing the SUV into reverse and gunning it backward onto the road.
They proceeded without further discussion for a kilometer or so, then slowed down as they approached a whorl of dust filling the whole road cut, from tree line to tree line. Csongor took his foot off the accelerator and let the SUV idle forward. The windshield was a dusty mess, so he motored his window down and leaned out to get a clear view.
This made it possible for him to see that a big vehicle—a pickup truck, red—was stopped in the oncoming lane, pointed toward them. No silhouette was visible behind its steering wheel. This struck Csongor as deeply wrong.
A figure emerged from the dust, walking up along the driver’s side of the truck. Behind him was a second man, moving in the same way. The first of them reached the driver’s door and pulled at the handle but found it to be locked. He then reached in through the window, which was apparently open, and got it unlocked. This was accompanied by some strange pawing gestures that caused little cascades of sparkly bits to tumble out of the window frame and scatter on the ground.
“Broken glass,” Marlon said.
The man hauled the door open and then backed away, as if aghast at what he was seeing there. He paused for a moment, pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt, and said something into it. Then he reholstered the radio and nodded to his companion. The two of them bent forward as one and reached into the truck’s cab, then hauled back.
What they dragged out of the cab was clearly recognizable as a limp human form even though its head had been blown apart into a soggy mushroomlike thing trailing gray stuff that had to be brains. The feet came out last; clad in a pair of high-topped work boots, they bounced off the truck’s running board and then hit the ground heels first.
“Shit, Csongor. Csongor! CSONGOR!” Marlon was calling.
Csongor was so transfixed by the sight of the body that he had stopped paying attention to the two living men who were dragging it by the arms. He now noticed, dully, that those men were staring directly up into his face from no more than about ten meters away.
Then he felt something come down hard on his knee and sensed the steering wheel moving free of his hands. The SUV surged forward, veered left, then right, then left again. The corpse-dragging men were filling the windshield; then they disappeared beneath the edge of its hood and the vehicle thumped and bucked as it smashed them back into the pavement and rolled over them.
Csongor looked down to see Marlon’s left hand on his knee, shoving his foot down into the gas, and his right hand on the steering wheel. Marlon had flung himself sideways across the SUV’s cab and was practically in Csongor’s lap.
“I got this,” Csongor said. “I got it! Fine!” Marlon relented and wriggled back into the passenger seat.
“Maybe we should go back and get their guns,” Marlon suggested.
“That’s how it would work in a video game,” Csongor said, which was his way of agreeing. He allowed the gas pedal to come up off the floor for a moment.
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.