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.
During these pauses, John would try to communicate with persons not present. The people who lived around Prohibition Crick had gone there specifically to get off the grid, and so excellent phone reception was not among their priorities. They were not the sort to look benignly on phone company technicians crawling around the neighborhood hiding cables under the ground and setting up mysterious antennas to bathe every cubic inch of their living space with encoded emanations. In spite of which, you could sometimes get one bar if you stood in a high, exposed place in just the right posture. But they were in some combination of too far from the down-valley cell towers and too deeply trapped in the folds of Abandon Mountain’s lower slopes for this to work.
John also had a walkie-talkie, which Jake and members of his family tended to take along with them as a safety measure when they ventured into the wilderness on hunting and huckleberry-picking expeditions. This was of a common brand, pocket-sized, and notoriously fickle when used in the convoluted landscape of the Selkirks; sometimes they could reach people from twenty miles away, sometimes they were no better than shouting at each other. John’s first few efforts to reach Elizabeth back at the cabin were unavailing.
After that, Zula took the device from him and hit on the idea of trying some of the other channels. The device was capable of using twenty-two of them. John had left it set on channel 11, which was the one that the Forthrast family was in the habit of using. Zula hit the Down button and indexed this all the way to 1, pausing on each channel for a few moments to listen for traffic. Then she worked her way back up to 11 and attempted to hail Elizabeth a few more times, with no results. Then up to 12. Nothing. Then she moved up to 13. A barrage of noise came out of the thing’s tiny speaker, and she had to turn the volume down. Several people were trying to transmit on the same channel all at once, and all of them were shouting.
“Why is channel 13 special?” she called back to Jake, who was jogging along about fifty feet behind the ATV.