Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

CHAPTER 33

A road trip.

In a few weeks, such a thing would no longer be possible, so Wilson resolved to take his time as he drove east. He wanted to savor every last moment: the subtle changes in the land, the search for decent road food, even the chance to gripe about the weather and the price of fuel with waitresses and other strangers. It would have been fun to drive cross-country with Irina, he thought, show her the diverse beauty of the country, just meander west and take it all in.

Not possible, of course. After June 22, the pleasures of this kind of driving – of any kind of driving, really – would come to an end. The intricate web of highways and roads and streets that knitted the country together would, in an instant, be useless. Virtually every vehicle on the road would come to a stop. Their engines would sputter and die. And they would never start again.

Vintage cars and a few diesels, like the ones back at the B-Lazy-B would still be capable of travel, but their range would be limited by the dead cars littering the roads.

Even if the occasional old car could get around, most of the fuel would be trapped underground in tanks, inaccessible without the electricity needed to work the pumps.

Bicycles would become quite valuable.

Although he’d modified the suspension, and created a sort of gimballed cocoon for the weapon, he winced as the Escalade shuddered over the rough road from the ranch to Juniper. He felt better when he hit Route 225.

Now that the road was smoother, he tapped the dashboard controls to select the Russian language CD. When it came on, he spoke out loud at the prompts, mimicking the recorded voice.

Thank you: Spashiba

You’re welcome: Pajalsta

Sorry: Izvinche (to strangers); Izvinit (to friends)

As well as making this effort to learn Irina’s language, he’d purchased more than a hundred books in the Russian – everything from dictionaries to poetry to classics, contemporary fiction, and children’s books. He’d bought an array of DVDs, as well, along with several icons, a samovar, and sets of matryoshka dolls for their children. He didn’t want Irina to feel cut off from her culture.

After an hour or so, he switched off the language CD. Time for some music. He used to sing aloud in Florence all the time because music was one of the things he missed the most. It was amazing how many tunes he knew just as fragments. And locked up in solitary, that could drive you crazy if you let it, the way the rest of a tune stayed out of reach, closed off in some neuronal backwater. In the beginning, it maddened him that there was no way to fill in the blanks. It wasn’t as if he could go online and download the song or go out and buy the CD to satisfy his curiosity.

So he went crazy buying CDs after he got back from Africa. He filled in all those blanks and more. The B-Lazy-B had a catalog of more than three thousand CDs – and a state-of-the-art sound system. It was an eclectic selection – he couldn’t be sure how his tastes might change as time went on.

The Escalade had a pretty good sound system, too. By the time he reached the Utah border, he was rapping along with Eminem.

“Oops, there goes gravity.”