Lexicon

after a while.
    Wil looked at him. Eliot was unbuckling. “What?”
    “Don’t move.” He took the shotgun from Wil’s hands, opened the door, and disappeared.
    Wil hunkered down. Time passed. There was a sharp bang and the louder, deeper boom of the shotgun. Wil started to rise, stopped.
    The door opened. The shotgun came in, butt first. Wil realized he was meant to take it. Eliot climbed inside and turned the key.
    He sat up. “Are you okay?”
    Eliot took the Valiant back to the road and steered around the helicopter, which no longer looked like an aircraft so much as a randomly distributed collection of scrap metal. There was no sign of the pilot. The car reached sixty-five and then ninety and then 110, a speed that made the windows howl like wolves and every pothole a bomb. The tires slipped and muttered, treacherous. Wil didn’t want to say anything, but the fourth time he thought he was going to die, he couldn’t keep silent.
    “What are you doing?”
    “Hurrying.” Eliot’s voice was odd.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “A lot depends on you now.” Eliot shook his head. “Fuck.”
    “What?”
    “In the future, when you need to shoot someone, do it.”
    “Okay. Okay.”
    Eliot shook his head. “This was a stupid idea. A stupid fucking idea.”
    Through Eliot’s side window, Wil noticed a thin plume of dust. “Hey. Another car out there.”
    “You think I like shooting people? I don’t. I do it because it needs to be done. Understand?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you realize what happens if we fail? If there’s no one left to stop them?”
    “No. You haven’t told me.”
    “Christ,” said Eliot. “This is ridiculous.”
    Wil looked out the window. “That car is going fast. Really fast.”
    “It’s trying to intercept us.”
    “Is it?”
    “That’s a surprise, is it? You didn’t think there might be more?”
    “Why are you so pissed at me?” He stared at Eliot’s shirt. There was a patch. A darker area. “Did you get shot?” He didn’t reply. “Eliot! Did you get shot?”
    “Yes.”
    “We have to . . . get you to . . .”
    “If you say something stupid, I’m going to pop you in your fucking mouth.”
    “Eliot,” he said. “Eliot.”
    “I told you to shoot that guy.”
    “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Outside Eliot’s window, the dust plume resolved into a police squad car. “What can I do?”
    “Next time you have to choose between Farmer Joe and the fate of the world, you can put a bullet into Farmer Joe. That’s what you can do.”
    “Okay.”
    “You can kill Woolf. Can you do that?”
    “Yes.”
    “Yeah,” Eliot said. “Sure you can.”
    The cop car rose in the side window. A sign ahead said BARRIER HIGHWAY and STOP and clearly they were going to hit that cop car, Wil saw. “Slow down,” he said, but Eliot didn’t. Instead he dropped the hand brake and spun the wheel and the Valiant began to slide sideways. It crossed the highway, passing in front of the cop car, chewed dirt for a while, and lurched onto the blacktop. Behind them, a siren began to wail.
    “Find out if that cop is a prole,” Eliot said.
    “A what?”
    “A proselyte. Compromised. Find out if he wants to arrest us or kill us.”
    “How do I do that?”
    “How do you think? With the gun!”
    He wound down the window. The cop car was right there, nudging and whining like an animal in heat. He decided to shoot a tire. But the moment he got the shotgun out the window, the cop car’s engine vented and distance opened between them. Wil retreated inside. “He doesn’t want to get shot.”
    “Not compromised,” said Eliot. “Good.” Ahead, Wil saw BROKEN HILL 8 and NO ENTRY and QUARANTINE ZONE and DANGER DEATH . Beyond that, on the horizon, twin sets of twinkling lights like early stars. “Keep him back.”
    “How badly are you hurt?”
    “Badly.” Eliot’s eyes flicked to the rear mirror. “
Fucking shit Wil you fuck!
”
    He jerked around. The squad car had slipped lanes and was making a run up the driver’s side. Wil tumbled into the rear of the car. By the time he got upright, the cop car was alongside them. There was a soft thump of contact. The rear of the Valiant began to slide as if it were on ice. The world spun. Wil lost his grip on the shotgun. The Valiant performed one complete revolution and Eliot gunned the engine and it leaped forward again.
    He retrieved the shotgun. The cop car was moving up for a repeat performance, a second round of spin-the-Valiant, and there