Worlds

45. Sunshine State

We made it to Florida, barely. A red FAILSAFE ENGAGED light blinked on and we descended rapidly toward a soft-looking pasture. Jeff steered us past a red barn and silo.

“We’re a little north of Gainesville,” he said. “If we can find a vehicle, we can get to the Cape in a day or two.”

We landed hard. Before I could draw a new breath, Jeff had slid the canopy back, grabbed a weapon from behind the seat, and vaulted out “Get out quick,” he said.

It took me a while to untangle myself from the safety net, and then I just sort of dropped over the edge, lacking commando spirit. It was hard to feel too threatened with the dawn reflecting prettily off the dewy grass, birds cooing, clean country smells.

Jeff was peering over the floater’s stern, looking at a farmhouse about fifty meters away. “Wonder if—”

There was a loud gunshot and, at the same time, the fading whine of a bullet that must have bounced off the floater. I cringed down.

“Not smart!” Jeff shouted. Another shot; no ricochet Jeff aimed toward a tree (curious bell-shaped foliage) and a laser blast stabbed out. The middle of the tree burst into flame.

“That happens to your barn in five seconds,” he shouted,

“and then the silo, and then the house. Come out with your hands over your heads.”

“What the hell do you want?” The shout cracked on “hell.”

“Don’t you worry about what I want,” Jeff said. He fired again and a haystack burst into flame. “Worry about what I’ve got!”

A white-haired man came out of the farmhouse door, followed by two younger men and a young woman. They stood on the porch with their hands in the air.

“Come on up to the floater,” Jeff shouted. “We won’t hurt you.” He made a patting motion to me. “Stay down,” he whispered.

They walked up the incline toward us, having a little trouble on the slippery grass. Jeff didn’t move. When they were in front of us, he said, “Put your hands down. Move together, shoulder-to-shoulder. Now shuffle to the left… there.” They formed a human shield between him and the farmhouse.

He stood up and handed the laser rifle over to me. “Stay down, O’Hara. If there’s a shot, burn everything.” I wasn’t even sure which button to push. Jeff stepped around the end of the floater.

“I have to assume you left someone back there,” he said, drawing the hand laser from its holster. “He better not peep. You want to go back and tell him that?” He kept the laser pointed at the ground.

The farmer stared at Jeff steadily, maliciously. “Ain’t no one down there. We all there is.”

“Sure.” Jeff leaned back against the floater. “This is government business. If you cooperate with us, we’ll forget those two shots. Understandable, the way things are.”

“The way things are” the farmer said, still staring, “is that we got no guv’ments, or maybe two. Which one might you be from?”

“The legitimate one.” He showed his badge. “I’m a field agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

He laughed. “That don’t mean shit. It was you and those goddamn spacers got us into this.”

“Not true. Richard Conklin’s a traitor, but most of the FBI is loyal. We’re trying to straighten things out We need help.”

The man kept looking at him, silently but not as maliciously. “Look at it this way,” Jeff said. “If we’d meant to do you harm, you never would’ve got out the first shot. You’d be roast meat by now, if that’s what we wanted. Isn’t that true?’

That’s right, Pop,” the young woman said.

“You shut up,” the fanner said mildly. “What kind of help is it you want?”

“Food, water, and transportation. We can pay.”

“What we hear on the cube, your dollar ain’t worth bum fodder. Food’s worth plenty.”

“We can pay in gold.”

“Gold.” The farmer took a step forward.

“Get back.” Jeff raised the weapon halfway.

“Sorry. Just wanted to look at your machine. Never seen a Mercedes before.”

“It’s a special police model. Got us all the way from Denver on fuel cells.”

“Now, that might be worth somethin’. Once the power net gets up again.”

Jeff hesitated. “I could kid you about that, but I won’t. It’s not mine to barter, even though well have to leave it here. It’s government property and it has a tracer signal embedded in the fuselage. If you tried to drive it you wouldn’t get ten kilometers.”

The farmer stroked his chin. “You just said the right thing, I think.” He half-turned, and shouted down to the farmhouse. “Maw! It’s all right. They jus’ cops.” He shrugged at Jeff. “Left the ole lady and the baby down there. Didn’t know what the hell you was up to.”

“How far you got to go?” one of the young men said.

“The Cape. New New York Corporation.”

“Why you want to go there?” the farmer asked.

“Bring them something they aren’t expecting,” Jeff said, smiling.

The fanner nodded. “Can’t do you no good there. Floater’s down in a soybean field five plat away.” He glared at one of the boys. “Goddamn Jerry comin’ back from a night on the town. Got a pigfart tractor—”

“Methane,” Jerry translated.

“—get you into Gainesville. You might could pick up somethin’ there.”

So for one gold coin we got a knapsack full of dried meat, bread, fruit, and cheese, and several jugs of well water, and a ride into Gainesville. The “baby,” who was ten or eleven, traced us a copy of their map of Florida. Jeff had him draw in the areas that were state parks and recreation areas; if possible, we wanted to find an overland vehicle, so as to avoid roads and towns.

They traded me a change of clothes—I’d been abducted in a bright red kaftan—and Jeff changed into his FBI uniform. We took from the floater a first-aid kit, compass, burglary kit, and enough armament to start our own revolution.

The tractor ride was at top speed, about equal to a fast walk. Both of the sons came along with us, armed and alert. Martial law evidently wasn’t working too well in Gainesville.

“Americans aren’t really bad people,” Jeff said, nearly shouting to be heard over the hammering engine. “But we’ve been trigger-happy for three hundred years. There are four hundred million firearms registered in the various states, and probably just as many unregistered. Two per person, and you can bet every one of them is greased up and loaded today. The people and the firearms.”

I was maintaining the national average. Ten-shot laser pistol stuck uncomfortably in my belt, riot gun on my lap. It was similar to Perkins’s shotgun but worked on compressed air rather than gunpowder. It kept shooting as long as you held the trigger down, eight seconds per cassette. I was certain I could never use it.

The farmland gave way to lowrise suburbia, then high-rises and malls. Whole blocks were burned out. There were squads of soldiers at some intersections; they saw Jeff’s uniform and waved us on.

The city proper was a mess. Nearly half the stores were gutted, shoals of glass on the sidewalks and streets. Other stores were being guarded by conspicuously armed men and women.

The boys had a city directory. They took us first to Honest Ed’s RV Rental, which was a smoking ruin, and then to Outdoors Unlimited. It was unharmed, and a fat man with a hunting rifle lounged in the doorway.

“You rent cross-country vehicles?” Jeff shouted.

“Got three,” he answered. We unloaded our gear and the boys backed up to the intersection, and roared away with obvious relief.

“We need something that’ll get us to the Cape and back,” Jeff said. “About five hundred kilometers’ range.”

“That’s no problem. Problem is, will you bring it back.”

“I have no reason not to. This is FBI business—”

“I can read.” The three letters were prominent on Jeff’s right breast pocket.

“If I don’t make it back, you can bill the government I’ll write you out a statement, good for the replacement price of the vehicle.”

“Now that’s just it. The money situation is really confusing. I’ve been doing business by barter, all day.”

“I have some gold. Four thousand.”

He shook his head. “My cheapest one’s worth twenty times that. Tell you what. Your statement, the gold, and one of your lasers.”

“That’s against the law.”

“Not much law around, you may have noticed.”

“Let’s see the vehicles.”

None of them was a floater. Jeff selected one with six large wheels; he verified the charge in the fuel cells and checked the manufacturer’s handbook. There was plenty of power for the trip.

He wrote out the statement and signed it, then gave the man two gold coins and his laser pistol. The man asked for the holster, too. Then he handed over the keys.

We started for the door. I heard a soft click and turned around. The fat man was standing there with a fading smile on his face, the pistol pointed in our direction. Jeff was already halfway to him in a smooth balestra. He gracefully kicked him on the chin. He fell like a fat soft tree.

Jeff buckled on the holster and retrieved his laser. “It’s not common knowledge, but the thumbrest on an agent’s personal weapon is a sensor keyed to his thumbprint. Good insurance.” While he was talking, he checked the fat man for a pulse. “Still alive.” He found a tube of liquid solder and squeezed a few drops down inside the barrel of the hunting rifle. Then he searched the man’s pockets for the gold and the statement. “We’re felons, now. Let’s go.”

The RVs motor was a quiet hum. The seats were soft and deep. “Ah, sportsmen,” Jeff said. He pushed a button and the windows rolled up. He said the glass had to be shatterproof but he didn’t know whether it would deflect a bullet. He told me to keep the riot gun very visible.

We sped through the streets of Gainesville with only one incident. We both saw the silhouette of a man with a rifle, standing on the roof of a building across the street. Jeff slewed the RV to the left and we passed under him driving along the sidewalk, horn blaring to warn pedestrians. If he shot at us, I didn’t hear it.

Jeff zigzagged through the city, following his compass. We were stopped several times by military and police road-blocks but didn’t have any trouble.

We got oil a “truck road” south of Gainesville, a straight smooth ribbon of concrete, and Jeff got the RV up to 150 kilometers per hour.

“If we dared to stay on these roads, we could be at the Cape in a couple of hours. But there’s bound to be trouble … ambushes, hijackers. Soon as we get out in the country well head straight southeast, toward the Ocala National Forest” We were going through an area of small factories and shabby lowrise apartment buildings.

The road curved and Jeff slowed down abruptly. “That’s trouble, for sure.” About a half-kilometer ahead, a truck was lying on its side. At least four people were milling around it, and at least one of them was armed. Jeff turned onto a gravel path marked “Service Road,” that led behind a concrete-block factory, evidently abandoned. There was no fence in back, just a tangle of brush, taller than the RV.

“Hang on,” Jeff said. He slowed down and did something with the levers mounted by the steering wheel. The motor’s pitch dropped to a loud growl and we crawled into the brush.

It wasn’t encouraging. There was nothing to see but green, in every direction. We’d go a few meters and fetch up against something immovable, back up and try a few meters in another direction. After a half-hour of this, we were suddenly in the clear: Jeff knocked over a wooden fence and we were speeding over a manicured pasture.

“Horse farm.” He pointed to a group of the animals staring at us from a safe distance. “Well be all right if we can keep away from buildings. One farmhouse per day is plenty.”

Every kilometer or so, we’d slow down to break through another fence and take a new compass reading. We had to detour around a large lake (the RV would function as a boat, but Jeff said it would be very slow and too tempting a target), but then shot straight south across farmland to the Ocala National Forest.

The forest was full of trees, no surprise. Jeff weaved around while I tried to make sense of the bobbing compass, telling him to bear right or left, averaging rather south of east and east of south. But it seemed safe; we encountered a few jackrabbits and armadillos, but none of them was armed.

We came upon a sand road that bore directly southeast, so decided to chance it. We were able to maintain a speed of thirty to forty kilometers per hour, slithering through the woods. Green shade and silence on both sides. I guess we got complacent.

Suddenly a metal cable jumped up from the sand in front of us. Jeff tried to stop but we slid and slammed into it. Out, he said, and kicked open his door and dived. But I was tangled up in the seat restraint again, and this time it almost killed me. Just as the buckle clicked free, a bullet smashed through the windshield and peppered my face with glass fragments. I felt a hot splash of involuntary urine and broke a fingernail getting the door open, fell to the ground and crawled behind a tree, blasting the riot gun in various directions.