Chapter 56: Get Off The Road
The door came off its latch with a sound like a bone going, and the noise of the world came in.
It was so much worse outside. That was the first thing. Behind glass it had been a spectacle, and out here it was a hundred and ten decibels of wind and metal and the flat crack of things hitting asphalt at terminal speed, and under all of it the low sick hum of the aperture up the road, which nobody had gone anywhere near since the birds came out of it. The sound of it went through the soles of his shoes and up into his teeth.
Theo had Sesan’s wrist in his left hand. He had not let go of it and he was not going to.
He spoke to her with a tender voice.
"Please. Sit down, I’m begging you."
She did not sit down. She stood on the running board with her hair coming apart in the wind, and the glass behind her had frozen white where her palm had been, a spread of frost with five clear fingers in the middle of it, and she looked at him with her cold eyes and did not move an inch.
"Sesan. If you go out there you die faster than you are supposed to."
Something in her face gave. He would think about that later too, right now, he needed to employ any means to make her go back inside.
Uthed’s hand came past him and almost took her shoulder. Sesan flinched, but Theo reacted faster, chopping the old man’s approaching hand away from the young lady with his palm.
Theo glared at him.
"What are you doing?"
Uthed drew the hand back and held it against his side, confused at what he had done wrong, and stuttered.
"I was only trying to... help."
"Please. Don’t touch my wives, I’m saying this for your sake."
He gently guided Sesan back to her seat, one hand flat between her shoulder blades until she was down and the door was shut on her, and she watched him through the frosted glass the whole way.
And when it worked Theo turned around and looked at the road properly for the first time.
***
After observing the terrain for longer than a minute, it was like certain information about the land was intuitively opening up to him. The camber of the tarmac. The three metres of nothing off the north shoulder. The way the trees past the ditch stood close enough that a man would have to turn his shoulders to walk between them.
Perhaps this was what the Genesis Eyes meant by continuous interaction, but Theo could now see things a bit differently even with the land, and there was no one else on that highway that could see it like he could.
He saw several lines.
They came down out of the wheel of birds like threads off a spindle, and each one ended on a person or a vehicle, and they moved and corrected. When a hero rolled left, his thread was already left of him. When the woman with the ruined calf dragged herself toward the shoulder, hers went with her like something patient on a leash.
Six of those threads were on the van.
Watching those threads, Theo instinctively understood what it was.
’The Flockhunters’ skills. They have everyone target locked.’
And every hero on that road, every single one of them, was standing in the open with their feet planted and their faces turned up, doing the one thing the system had warned Theo was bad news.
And now, Theo understood why.
He inhaled deeply and exhaled gently.
’I can’t force them anywhere.’
He was silent, thinking and looking at the sky, at the slow patient wheel of it and the threads coming down off it.
’I don’t have to force them anywhere. I only have to stop giving them the sky.’
Then he bolted. He went the other way, down the line of stopped vehicles, past the second car with its window down and a driver shouting into a handset, and he came up on the third and hauled the passenger door open and put out his hand.
Frank looked at the hand. Then at Theo. Then at the hand.
"Radio."
"Sir, you’re supposed to be in the—"
"Frank. Radio."
Frank gulped and gave him the radio.
Theo keyed it and did not introduce himself and did not ask permission, and something came out of his mouth that had never come out of it before, which was an order.
"Lance. Get everything off the road. Into the trees. All of it, all four vehicles and the van, right now, down the cut on the north shoulder."
Somebody else was already talking over the top of him. A voice that was hard and furious.
"Negative. Negative, that’s a life-support transport, you cannot take a van down a—"
"They can’t fly in there."
Theo said it flatly, and not loudly, and the channel went quiet the way a room goes quiet.
"Their wings need open air. In dense canopy they lose their dive power and their formation. This is not guesswork. You’ll have to trust me, out here we are a menu. Under those trees we will be a nuisance."
He drew a breath.
"Please. My wife is in that van."
Two seconds of dead air passed. Theo stood in the wind with the handset against his mouth and counted them.
Then Aide Lance’s voice, perfectly calm, with something underneath it that had not been there at any point that afternoon.
"All units, the north shoulder, follow the van. Move."
And here is the part that the heroes, and their agencies did not see coming.
They moved. The vehicles, and the mysterious hero, abandoned the Heroes of the agency to deal with the mess they created anyways.
The lead vehicle swung right off the tarmac and went down the embankment nose first with its suspension screaming, and the sound it made hitting the bottom was the sound of a car being sold for parts.
The second followed it. The north shoulder dropped a full three metres into a drainage ditch before the treeline began, far too steep for a transport van carrying a woman who could not be tilted past twelve degrees, and every driver in that convoy saw it and every driver kept going anyway.
Lance came off his feet, landed on the shoulder ahead of the van, and put both hands down, and a ramp of ice came up out of the ground and laid itself across the ditch in one long pale sheet, wide enough for the wheelbase, angled at what Theo’s eyes told him was eleven degrees.