Relentless

turnedonto the pavement from a narrow dirt road, heading north. As the vehicle approached, I saw that it was an Explorer.
    Clearly, the driver was interested in me. As he came uphill, he rode closer and closer to the center line until he had edged a few inches into my lane.
    Suspecting that Waxx’s protocols for his current operation required agents to acknowledge one another when they crossed paths, I remained close to the center line, reduced speed, and rolled down the window in the driver’s door.
    In the lower corner of the windshield, on the driver’s side of the Explorer, was a square decal of a size suspiciously like that on the windshield of my sedan, but I could not at first discern what it might be. As we closed on each other, however, I recognized the red triskelion, three fisted arms forming a wheel.
    His window was open, too, and as we coasted past each other, the driver gave me a thumbs-up sign with his left hand.
    He had a blocky head suitable for breaking boards in a martial-arts exhibition, the bulging jaws of someone who might pull nails out of lumber with his teeth, the nose of a pugilist who had let down his guard too often, and the eyes of a pit viper. The guy riding shotgun was not nearly so good-looking.
    After the briefest hesitation, I returned the driver’s thumbs-up sign with my left hand, and as we glided past each other, I sighed with relief, eased down on the accelerator, and rolled up my window.
    In my side mirror, I thought I saw the Explorer come to a halt in the middle of the road.
    After readjusting my rearview mirror to capture the back window, I confirmed that Blockhead had brought his vehicle to a full stop. He hung a left turn and fell in behind me.
    Something about me had made them suspicious. Perhaps I was notsupposed to respond to his thumbs-up with a thumbs-up of my own, but was instead supposed to make the okay sign or wiggle my pinkie, or thrust my middle finger at him.
    I could try my best not to be paralyzed by the viciousness of these evil people-of-the-red-arms, and I could strive to accommodate myself to their singular lunacy, but it just wasn’t right that they also expected me to play their game by some book of boy’s-club rules that included code signs, countersigns, and secret handshakes.
    Because I had been accelerating and they had been stopped to ponder why I had not replied to their thumbs-up with a bird whistle appropriate to the moment, I was a hundred yards ahead of them. Now they began to close fast.
    If I tried to run, they would
know
that I was not a faithful attendee at the altar of their asylum, and I would never get through the roadblock alive.
    I had the pistol, and I could make a valiant stand, but it was two against one, and I wouldn’t get a chance to let Penny Annie Oakley out of the trunk to help me defend our little piece of the American dream.
    In spite of my reputed flaming optimism, I concluded that we were screwed. Lassie’s growling in the backseat seemed to confirm my judgment, and I heard myself chanting over and over a four-letter synonym for
poop
.
    He closed to within fifty yards as I ransacked my brain for strategy. To forty yards … to thirty … to twenty. Ten.
    Then an inexplicable but not unwelcome event occurred.
    In my rearview mirror, I saw the southbound Explorer abruptly swing hard left, into the northbound lane, as though to avoid a collision with something that had bounded into the driver’s path, such as a leaping deer, though there was no deer nor anything else from which he needed to swerve.
    At risk of crashing into the trees that crowded close to the pavement, the driver braked hard and pulled the wheel to the right. Considering that he had been accelerating when he made his first sudden change of course and that he was on a downhill run, this maneuver proved too extreme, and the Explorer tipped precariously to port as it came back across the pavement toward the southbound lane.
    Careening off the road just where an embankment rose, the driver turned hard left again, ran along the slope at an angle that was not sustainable, wrestled the SUV back onto the pavement, but then shot across the southbound lane into the northbound once more, this time listing wildly to starboard.
    He seemed to have gone from sobriety to extreme inebriation in an instant, or perhaps they were transporting a beehive for some nefarious purpose and the wee critters suddenly erupted in a rage, mercilessly stinging Blockhead and his