Juniper jerks the truck into gear and spins the wheel hard and plows forward and watches the hound bound after him in the red wash of the taillights. Soon it is lost from sight. He blows out a sigh and thumbs on the walkie-talkie. “Ran into a little trouble, but I’m okay now. What’s your status? Over.” He waits for a response, too long. There is nothing but the hush of static. He repeats himself. Still nothing. “Josh?” he says. “Josh, give me something. I’m getting worried here.”
Then—in stops and starts, like when you’re spinning the dial, hunting for radio stations—comes a fitful screaming. Of someone who has given up all control. Of pure, consuming pain. There is a woolly silence, and then another voice sounds. Deep-throated. Burned. And familiar. “Didn’t I already kill you?” it says. “Didn’t I tell you to stop with your hopeless causes?”
“Who are you?” Juniper says, but he already knows. The thing. The man who used to follow him from church to church, haunting him. The man who stood at the base of his bed in the hotel room. Pale-faced. Black-clothed. Whose joints moved like creaking ropes, whose voice sounded like the bottom of a well. They say you can’t remember pain, but he does now: a heated knot twisting his guts, a marrow-deep fear.
“You mean we weren’t properly introduced before?” the voice says, so deep it is palpable. “You can call me Cloven.”
When the signal fuzzes out again, it never comes back.
He wipes a hand across his face. Checks the side mirrors. Whispers “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Raises his hand as if to strike the steering wheel, but then pauses. Because the side mirrors flash with light. There is a car behind him, closing in fast.
More than an hour ago, when Juniper loaded up the Ram and readied to depart, he got underneath the hood and beneath the dash, disconnecting radio, Bluetooth, roadside assistance, the GPS, the alarm, the warning and airbag systems, the wireless transmitter, the fuel efficiency and emissions detector, automatic locks, even the cleaning fluid and air conditioning and heating. Almost all of this was housed in the brain of the vehicle—the engine control unit, a computer attached to the side of the motor—and several were paid services he didn’t subscribe to, but he erred on the side of paranoia and unplugged everything, everywhere, that still allowed him to drive. Because most cars are now riddled with one hundred million lines of code, more than a smartphone, more than all of Facebook, more than a nuclear power plant. This makes cars better, safer—with their low-emission sensors and forward-collision warnings and automatic emergency braking—but it also makes them as vulnerable to cyber-threats as any computer.
Which is why Juniper isn’t as surprised as he ought to be when the Jetta that thuds his rear bumper, that roars its accelerator and pulls up alongside him, turns out to be driverless. If he chainsawed through the dash, he knows the guts of the vehicle would stream with red code. The virus is in laptops, in phones, in tablets, in cars, in people. It is like terrible birdsong heard by someone that is then whistled and then sung by another and then becomes a marching tune for the military or a rural song fiddled around a campfire or a lullaby hummed by a mother. The infection is spreading, mutating, and will continue to, unless he stops it.
The car swings into him—two light taps, then a scraping shove—meant to force him off the road. Juniper experiments with braking and gas-gunning acceleration. He can’t outpace the Jetta, but the Ram is nearly three times the size. So long as Juniper muscles the wheel, he can hold a steady course.
They approach a four-way stop. It is heaped and puzzled with cars that have crashed into each other. All around it the asphalt is made even blacker with ribboning skid marks. Juniper waits until the last second and then jerks the wheel left, bashing the Jetta with enough force that it momentarily hoists onto two tires. It recovers, but not soon enough to avoid the snarl of cars impeding the intersection. Its brakes shriek. Then comes the sickening crunch of metal crashing into metal.
Juniper dives down side streets and mazes his way through a residential area, guessing the way, missing his GPS and worrying about his sense of direction. He cuts across lawns and even a park, never stopping, rarely slowing, feathering the accelerator, hunting for a clear passage. He tries not to look at the bodies. They slump on park benches and sprawl across sidewalks and hang out of windows. There are people alive out there, too, he reminds himself. People who need him.
In the near distance, a spotlighted billboard advertises a retirement community. A middle-aged man rests his hand on the shoulder of his bent-backed, silver-haired father. “Roles change,” the billboard reads. Roles changed when Juniper claimed to have visited heaven and he became a sudden celebrity and everyone needed him: his parents for money, the congregations for his false assurances. And roles changed when the cancer overtook him and he drove north to Oregon, handing out cash, intent on dying well. And when instead he lived, roles changed again, as he became a kind of servant—to the city, to Sarin. Now he can once more feel roles changing, everything changing. And maybe this time, if he dies, he’ll stay that way.
He can’t remember how old he was—maybe twelve or maybe ten—when the tornado hit Tarn’s Brook, Oklahoma. A category-five funnel sucked up trailer parks and flattened farms. FEMA flew over the disaster area and ordered 150 body bags. But as it turned out, only three people died. Juniper remembers—after he came to town for a prayer service—seeing all those body bags lined up in the Safeway parking lot, like black pupae ready to be claimed. Everyone who saw them imagined their own body fitting into a bag, had they not gotten to the basement in time, had a stray brick flung through their window listed a few inches to the left, had a meeting they thought about canceling not taken them to the other side of town. They had met death, but death had spared them. For now. The body bags wouldn’t lie unclaimed forever. Theirs were waiting. His was waiting. Unzipped, gaping like a rotten mouth. Maybe tonight it will finally claim him.
His eyes jog constantly to his side mirrors, knowing it is only a matter of time before headlights brighten them again. By the time he finds a thoroughfare with signs leading to I-5, he is being pursued—by two, then three, then six vehicles as he barrels up the on-ramp and hopes like hell the freeway is passable.