GPS (19 page)

For all the wild shit he’d seen in the desert since people, himself included, had begun crashing into it from another time and place, he’d never seen a debut like Delaney’s. Like he had done when Simmons came over the first time — that had been better than a year ago now, and much farther to the north — Paulo had snatched him by the arm, too, and made sure he had gotten out of there immediately. That was critical in his success with Simmons and, he hoped, with Delaney.

If Paulo wanted them to come back, he had to let them get out of there after that first encounter. He had to let them get back home and let it fester for a while. The revolucion was a bizarre lure, attracting men from everywhere, even some who had better things to do.

A handheld GPS unit helped Fonseca find them when they arrived, though he didn’t quite understand how it was they actually arrived. Next week would be the ultimate test, and he knew from experience that transients came crashing through in all sorts of ways, some of them fatally. In his experience, many of them who did make safe arrival lost their minds within a week. Paulo hid out in the desert for more than a month after he first crossed over before ever making contact with his first fellow human.

The state-of-the-art Warren GPS he’d faithfully carried in his backpack for the last 16 months was the most modern piece of equipment the revolucion had ever known, and he even had its original charger. Not long after he’d found it, the GPS had simply started indicating the new transients’ arrivals with blinking red blips on his screen, and an accompanying female voice:
“There is, a new, arrival, at this, destination.”
For safety’s sake, he always kept the speaker on mute.

They were always confused and scared when he found the new ones sitting out there, often still in their cars, gripping the steering wheel as though bracing for some further impact. Ones that were farther away and took longer to find were sometimes the good ones, because if they had the guts and the instinct to leave their cars, they might have the instincts to survive. Then again, some that left their cars were ones who shouldn’t.

Paulo had watched just as many of them tear off screaming into the deep canyons or across the desert to meet any number of fates as he had convinced to stand and fight his fight. In truth, it was amazing any of them stayed even for a minute, let alone came back a second time or came on permanently. For some reason, though, some of them did come back, usually enough to keep a unit of at least 20 to 30 men in his division and three others just like it running missions against the FB at all times. And that was a minute percentage of the total military resistance against the Freemen occupation.

May 7 would give the revolucion a chance to reel in a few handfuls of newcomers at the same time and in the same place. At least Paulo hoped. It wasn’t like he’d picked that date. The GPS had begun chirping out warnings on the handheld months ago, and Paulo had grown to understand that similar signals were being sent to potential newcomers through their own GPS units on the other side.

In addition to giving the revolucion a constant trickle of new fighters, the accidental soldiers unwittingly served a dual purpose to the cause, especially those who ran off screaming and never came back. Since the start of the war, the few thousand who had gone off to meet their deaths left not only their cars behind — though it certainly wasn’t uncommon to find them lying upside down and smashed at the base of a canyon or gutted and torched by the FB in the desert — but also their GPS units.

To that end, as rugged and poor as the revolucion and its soldiers mostly were, this special division and a few others like it across the country carried out most of its deeds with satellite-guided accuracy and with an array of different cars and trucks when needed.

This process also meant there was a steady flow of modern vehicles being sent across the desert to the revolucion’s main camps for future transport missions and deliveries. The popularity of SUVs and pick-up trucks in the other world meant desert-worthy automobiles could regularly be found and sent on to other parts of the country, while the other handful stayed right there with the transients, and they had long since formed a secret fleet hidden in canyon passes well to the south. Paulo marked their locations into the history of his GPS, along with other vital revolucion and Freemen Brigade geography.

In the case of transient David Hawkins, Paulo had learned something vital about the whole process of transient travel. Hawkins was stuck here now and forever, or at least that’s what Paulo believed. It was a belief that had become the prevailing logic of everyone who had made the leap and stayed, in fact. But there was no exact proof it was true. It was more a case of something which hadn’t been proven
untrue
yet.

Hawkins’ car had been discovered and destroyed by Freemen Brigade scouts who came upon it and a few other vehicles in a canyon meadow the very same night the kid had arrived. The confused, frightened Hawkins had insisted on going out on watch duty with the others instead of staying in the camp alone, and the FB troops nearby had pounced quickly.

The prevailing belief among Paulo and the transient army was that whenever one of their cars or GPS units was lost or stolen out here, or if the GPS ever malfunctioned or died, their ability to ever travel back home ceased. The connection between a man’s car and himself was symbiotic for transients. More particularly, each GPS was seemingly assigned by some unseen DNA or fingerprint to one man and one man only, or at least that’s what the men had experienced. Hawkins, though a rare case, was not the first to meet his fate.

The look of anguish on his face that night as he stared at the vacant ground where his car had been said it all. The fact that Hawkins sneaked out of camp a few nights later, trying unsuccessfully to steal numerous other cars at the camp and find his way back out, proved the theory true in Paulo’s eyes. Hawkins would never make it back home and he didn’t want to be where he was. But he, like so many before and after him, had found his way over that first time and it changed the course of his life forever.

Paulo and the other transient leaders could have simply seized all of the new vehicles away from their owners the minute they arrived as a matter of principle, of course, forever handcuffing the transients to their new world. But that was short-sighted.

Fonseca believed the men could be every bit as worthy to the fight as their cars, if not more. If they realized they were stuck here like Hawkins now was, they could never be fully trusted. He wanted committed men, not slaves. While some came and went, there were plenty more who came, stayed and became permanent residents in the war, people who simply shoved off from the old world and never chose to return. Paulo was one of them.

But there never seemed to be quite enough of those, and Fonseca had witnessed plenty of them lose their lives recently. Without the high fatality rate for transient soldiers and the inconsistency in their arrival, he would be running with leagues of men by now. There was a reason the number in each division rarely if ever exceeded 30 men despite the constant flow of newcomers. Simmons, although a rare example, was almost the perfect soldier. He traveled back and forth too much but he always returned because he’d become committed. He was a believer in doing what was right at any cost.

Many of the daily movements in Paulo’s world were about finding wayward transient cars and abandoned and damaged war vehicles before the Freemen and their horses and black Range Rovers found them the way they had found Hawkins’ car that night. As much machinery and GPS technology as Fonseca and his foot soldiers had successfully recovered to date, Paulo himself was the only revolucion soldier to have nabbed a handheld, battery-driven GPS unit fit for the battlefield, and it had fueled the revolucion fight perhaps more than any other man or any other machine ever since.

It had been carefully pried out of the dying fingers of one of the good ol’ boys, the men the Freemen now hailed as ‘The First Ten.’ They were the ones who had first brought their unfair fight to Paulo’s country. In the defining moment of his first tour with the transients, Fonseca and another man had stumbled upon five of what at that point was merely a hundred-man band of roving weekend terrorists. The men were drunk on tequila and sitting around a desert fire that night.

It was easy back then. The Freemen were so green to the desert, Paulo and his companion had slit two of the men’s throats before they had even stopped laughing. Two of the remaining three were still so busy fumbling in their pants and at their sides for a firearm that they quickly found themselves rolling around in the sand with bullets in their heads — one of them had rolled right into the campfire — before either of them had squeezed off even a single round.

It was a message, the first of many, that an entire nation would not simply sit back and allow itself to be run over by a bunch of stockbrokers and weekend warriors. Paulo had yanked the remarkable-looking GPS gadget out of the grasp of the last living man of the group, the only one that seemed not to be reaching for his gun, but instead trying to get the hell out of there by simply running away. He didn’t make it more than 10 paces from the glow of the dying coals, where one of his college buddies now roasted and choked out his last breaths.

Despite its uncanny, almost magical abilities, the GPS exposed Fonseca’s greatest flaw as a leader, or more correctly had created it. He was so driven by the war, Paulo routinely cast aside any thoughts or questions that didn’t directly pertain to the cause. Because of that, he tended to treat the GPS like something that had fallen right out of the sky, sent plummeting down by Ares himself to help Paulo fight his daily battles. He used it at times more than he used his own brain, often gazing into it late at night, fascinated by its power and endless possibilities.

It was that fascination that seemed to keep Paulo from asking himself one very interesting, seemingly obvious question: Given where the GPS had come from, weren’t those little red blips on the screen, the ones that took him to potential new revolucion soldiers, actually guiding him to potential new Freemen Brigade soldiers? Paulo was stealing FB recruits right from under its nose, and he didn’t even realize he was doing it.

- 22 -

Paulo’s division was running with just 26 men. If Delaney became the 27th, he would likely play an immediate role in the sabotage scheme of which Fonseca was currently in charge. If things worked out, and no one else got killed between now and then, Delaney might become the man he’d always wished Josh Simmons would have become.

Paulo understood that if the transients had something to live for on the other side, it was impossible to convince them they had something to die for on this side. Simmons had too much to live for on the other side, and now spent his life running back and forth between two very different worlds.

While 14 of the 26 men had answered the call from different parts of their own country, the remaining 12 were from elsewhere — eight of them were Americanos who had mostly shown promise to Fonseca upon their arrival, including Simmons. One was Hawkins, however, who showed no promise. The other four were from different parts of Europe. Like most Americanos Fonseca had known in his life, especially when he attended college in California and before he himself answered the call of the revolucion, each man came here with his own set of circumstances and problems.

Simmons drove a beautiful new Lexus sedan which stuck out like a sore thumb in the desert and the mountain passes. Fonseca always told him the thing was so easy to spot with its glowing silver paint it would get them all killed. But Simmons was otherwise the smartest among them, educated on the West Coast of America like Paulo himself had been in a previous life.

Like many of the other transients over the last two years of the conflict, Simmons refused to erase his old world, never wanting to give up the life he was simultaneously leading back home. Yet, something about the rage of this place or the many wrongs of the war in it had lured him back a second time, and now hundreds of times more. Unlike any others who had ever made the leap into the revolucion, Simmons faithfully traveled back and forth so much that Fonseca couldn’t imagine when he slept, if at all.

Simmons had learned to do it in more daring, yet much smoother ways than the one that sent Delaney and his Celica crashing both in and out that first time. When he was here, Simmons was constantly on Fonseca’s case to keep track of his car. Simmons could never get stuck over here, and vowed to take his own life if he did. As long as he was alive, he was the fiercest warrior in Fonseca’s crew, and although it had become something of a chore in recent months to deal with his car and his constant comings and goings, soon Simmons would be gone for good, and Paulo already knew how much he would miss him.

It was the woman, of course, and the two children, and his fledgling career back home (when you were part of the revolucion you were never allowed to say what you did on the other side, no matter which side you happened to be on at the time) that would never allow Simmons to become anything more than a true transient. Beyond Simmons, when Fonseca rolled through his current roster of fighters in his mind, he thought with growing confidence about the handful of them that seemed here for the long haul, guys he knew had nothing to lose because they had nothing and no one waiting for them at home except maybe trouble.

He wondered if Delaney would ever be one of those, one that could become a permanent Simmons. So much had gotten done those two months back in the winter, when Simmons suddenly had been able to be around for all but a couple of days. With him, Fonseca’s army had struck some vital blows toward driving the Freemen back onto their heels for the very first time. Without that momentum, there was no telling where the revolucion would be now.

During those months, Simmons helped to lead the missions through the desert and in and out of new and more advantageous camp locations. With him, they had a better understanding of the terrain, as he had an amazing sense of direction and could memorize dozens of miles at a time, always finding his way back, even without a GPS. He ran like a jackrabbit, leading their frequent, often desperate retreats with deer-like, flowing strides.