Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (22 page)

“Let’s keep it moving.”

The instruction was spoken in a flat, neutral tone but amplified out of all human proportion, as if it were a divine injunction booming out of the heavens. My entire body twitched in a moment of terror before I realized that the command had come from a megaphone in the police car. The truck started forward with a violent jerk and sped away down the road. I could see that even if I was able to find a car, I was not going to have much time to load in my possessions.

A minute later I came around a bend and saw that ahead of me on the left, another road ran at a right angle into the road I was on. Just beyond the intersection, a roadblock had been created out of state police cars and large yellow plastic barrels. A gap had been left just large enough for a car to pass, and in front of it stood a state trooper. The red pickup truck was just coming up to the intersection, and I saw the trooper wave it away down the side road. There it immediately pulled over and stopped, joining a dozen other cars and trucks parked at random off both sides of the road. Their occupants loitered in little groups by their cars and stared up at the flames in the distance or tried to get information from the policeman, who, however, seemed to be maintaining a posture of aloof reticence toward the public. The patrol car, which had been following the pickup truck, executed a U-turn in the intersection and headed back up the road toward me. I stepped well off to the side to let it pass and continued toward the roadblock.

As I approached the small congregation of human beings, all completely ignorant of my presence, I had a sudden sense of my own strangeness and isolation. I walked warily up the center of the road, watching everyone around me carefully, afraid that someone would without warning walk into me — or worse yet, start up a car and run right over me. Every moment that I spend in proximity to other human beings is shot through with unrelieved anxiety. I have to be constantly vigilant for any sign of a sudden movement or an illogical change of direction that will turn into some ludicrous collision, or some final grotesque mangling of my unnoticeable form. And if the other human beings have large animals or machinery under their capricious control, things are even worse. I was beginning to see what life would be like.

I paused just before the intersection and looked longingly at the vehicles parked outside the road block. Pointless to think of taking one. I had to assume that all of their owners were standing right there. It became clearer to me that I was trying not just to find a car but to steal one. Somewhere on the other side of the roadblock there would be fields full of vehicles, some of them perhaps with ignition keys left in them. Whether that would be of use to me would depend on whether there was some way to get one around or through the roadblock.

I walked across the intersection and, giving the trooper a wide berth, went up to the barricade to examine the situation. Just beyond the roadblock six or seven more state troopers stood about talking to each other and drinking coffee out of white Styrofoam cups. Beyond them, another hundred yards down the road, I could see the beginning of the drive into MicroMagnetics, and beyond the drive, half-screened by the rows of trees that lined it, was the large field I had seen earlier in the day, over which vast numbers of men and machines seemed to be swarming. What possible purpose could they be serving? It was dusk, almost dark, and I could not really make out what they were doing, but their activity seemed oddly unrelated to the adjacent site — or former site — of MicroMagnetics itself, which was concealed behind the shrouded fence. I could see brilliant orange and white flames rising into view above the fence and spreading through the treetops, and I could smell the delicious smoke. It was quite beautiful: neatly contained in its perimeter and surrounded by all that purposeful movement of men and vehicles, it seemed more like some enormous foundry than an uncontrolled outbreak of destruction.

The local people outside the roadblock seemed to share my enthusiasm and interest. However, the state troopers, in whose midst I now stood, made a point of looking as little as possible at the fire. It was evidently beneath their professional dignity to betray any fascination with the drama of events; they spoke very little and in matter-of-fact tones. Occasionally one of them would have an incomprehensible dialogue through a police car radio. I took a position just to one side of the point at which vehicles would have to stop and waited to see what I could learn about security procedures. But there was very little to learn, since there seemed to be no traffic aside from police cars. After a quarter of an hour, it dawned on me that further up the road, past MicroMagnetics and the field full of military vehicles and personnel, there must be another roadblock through which all the official vehicles entered and left the area. But surely someone must pass through this way or they would have closed off the road entirely.

I was almost ready to give up and begin walking again when, in defiance of the state trooper waving it off, an extraordinarily decrepit grey station wagon pulled into the roadblock. At the wheel sat a boy of seventeen or eighteen with a not entirely successful mustache. Through narrowed eyes he watched the policeman and waited with nervous defiance for him to speak first.

“I’m sorry, this road is closed.”

“I’m going through,” the boy said provocatively.

“This road is closed. You’ll have to back it up.”

“I live on this road. I go up this road every day.”

The trooper responded with absolute evenness. “Take your operator’s license and your registration out of your wallet and hand them to me, please.”

The boy repeated himself in an aggrieved tone, “I go over this road every day.” He was pulling out his license and registration. He handed them to the state trooper. A man in civilian dress, whom I somehow had not noticed before, stepped up beside the trooper, who passed the cards on to him without looking at them. The man examined the cards and then leafed through a stack of papers fastened to a clipboard. He walked around to the rear of the car and looked at the license plate. He walked back and with a brief nod handed the cards to the trooper, who handed them to the boy.

“Thank you,” said the trooper, with his own unsmiling nod.

“I’ve lived here my whole life. I use this road every day.”

The trooper made a little motion with his hand indicating that he could proceed and then stepped back. The station wagon continued on through.

Which was fine for the station wagon but not very encouraging for me. What would their reaction be when the driver’s license and registration floated out of the window and hovered in midair for their inspection. Still, I wanted to wait and see what happened when a vehicle was leaving the area rather than entering it.

It was another ten minutes before an old pickup truck came rattling up from the direction of MicroMagnetics. I watched closely. No one seemed much interested. It slowed down as it passed between the barrels, and another boy, much like the first, shouted out, “Reilly! Kevin Reilly!” The trooper, who was still on the side of the road from which he could talk to drivers of incoming cars, glanced casually at the passenger window of the cab as he made his waving motion. The pickup, without ever coming to a full stop, continued on through the intersection and sped off down the road.

That was more promising. Definitely worth a try. And suppose they did stop me. They would be a bit mystified if they looked into the stopped car and saw no driver, but I should be able to escape easily enough. I would not be much worse off than I was now.

I turned and set out along the road toward all the activity in the background, to look for some sort of parking lot. There were open fields on both sides of the road now, and on my right I had an unobstructed view of the fence that shielded the MicroMagnetics site. As I walked I watched the fire beginning to subside behind it. When I reached the beginning of the tree-lined drive leading into MicroMagnetics, I stopped. The drive itself was now cut off by the fence and completely deserted, since the Colonel’s men had constructed their new access road further on, but strewn about the field on my left, immediately opposite the old drive, were roughly two dozen cars, completely unattended. None of them appeared to be military or police vehicles. They looked somehow familiar.

When I recognized the grey van, I felt a wave of something resembling vertigo. Carillon’s van. Less than thirty-six hours ago I had arrived in it, looking pretty much like anyone else. Now I looked like no one at all. Thirty-six hours. It seemed like the proverbial eternity. Or no time at all: just an abrupt, meaningless discontinuity in the chart. It was Carillon’s fault, come to think of it. Asshole. Damn him. Although I suppose you could just as well say it was Wachs’s fault. Or no one’s fault, if you like. As a matter of fact, I would just as soon not give either of them credit for anything as extraordinary as my present condition. Not much satisfaction to be had from anger at them, anyway: they had both done worse out of it all than I.

My mind flooded again with the ghastly image of the two of them on the lawn, bursting into flame.

The important thing was to keep moving. I stepped off the road and walked into the field to look at the cars. They were scattered about the edge of the field chaotically. It looked as if, at some point during yesterday’s grotesque events, all the cars in the parking lot had been hurriedly towed out of the lot and dumped here. The owners would already have been evacuated from the scene, and the way things were going now, it might be some time before anyone got around to arranging for them to return and claim their cars. There was quite a varied selection to choose from: sports cars, station wagons, sedans, even an old convertible.

It was Carillon’s van that I wanted though. I knew that at once. For one thing, it was more than big enough to hold my entire hoard. It even had a large, convenient sliding door on one side and double swinging doors at the rear to make my task easier. But I was also pleased with the fact that it was Carillon’s — or, if not, it would quickly be connected to Carillon. Whether they stopped the van now at the gate or found it later miles away when I was done with it, they would assume that one of Carillon’s friends had made off with it. Jenkins, when he found out, would of course think of me at once, and it would confirm his assumption that I was a student for a fair world. I found myself hoping that the Students for a Fair World would turn out to be an immensely successful mass movement, with a vast roster of members, and that it would take years to track them all down. If it was enough trouble, they might never get around to checking up on Nicholas Halloway.

There was one other thing about the van. I had a clear picture in my mind of Carillon standing in the parking lot yesterday morning and casually tossing the keys in through the open back doors.

The van had been left facing the road at an angle. I circled around it to the sliding door, which was on the side away from the road. I took a long careful look around in every direction. It was almost dark now, and as far as I could tell there was no one anywhere near. I took hold of the door handle and gently pulled at it. It did not yield. I gradually increased the force. Suddenly it gave way and slid open with a violent grinding noise, while in the same instant the interior roof light automatically ignited, brilliantly illuminating the van like a signal lantern in the dark field. For one terrified moment I was paralyzed. Then I lunged at the light and switched it off, stumbling onto my hands and knees on the floor of the van, with my heart racing.

I climbed back out of the van and stood on the ground outside for what seemed like a quarter of an hour, waiting to see whether anyone would come. In the distance there was every imaginable sort of noise and activity, but there was not a sound, not a movement, anywhere in the field around me. I climbed back into the open van and searched the grimy metal floor on my hands and knees until I found the keys. I climbed up into the driver’s seat and got one of them into the ignition. It turned, and little red indicator lights lit up across the dashboard. I turned the key off again, leaving it in the ignition, while I continued my inspection of the van. I carefully opened both front doors and the back doors to make sure they were all unlocked. It meant putting up with the excruciating noise of pushing them shut again, but I had to know.

No maps in the glove compartment. I would have liked a map of New Jersey. I took a thick plastic windshield scraper around to the rear of the van and jabbed it into the light over the license plate until I felt the bulb smash.

The sound of the chain saws stopped.

I climbed back into the driver’s seat and rolled down the window at my side. I sat there for several moments, collecting my wits and my nerve. Don’t think about it. Turn the key and start the engine. You have to keep moving. Check the hand brake. Into low gear, let out the clutch. I rolled slowly out onto the road with the headlights still off. I wanted them to have as little warning as possible of my arrival.

When the cluster of cars and policemen came into view, I switched my headlights on and accelerated, driving through them at an aggressive pace and halting abruptly as far forward in the roadblock opening as I plausibly could.

“Reilly,” I shouted out the window. This, I hoped, would be the only account I would have to give of myself. But a policeman — not the one who had been there before — walked slowly forward toward my window. He held a large flashlight in one hand. Behind him I could see the same civilian with the clipboard start back around the car to look at the license plate.

In another moment the policeman would surely be gazing in amazement at the empty driver’s seat. Should I just wait, hoping against the odds for some other, better outcome? Let out the clutch and run for it? Forget the van and scramble out the other side door? Decide now.

“Thank you!” I shouted amiably through the window, as if the hoped-for permission had actually been granted. I let out the clutch and pulled away at a confident but not excessive speed. I had a glimpse of the policeman’s face registering both surprise and indecision. Thirty yards down the road I leaned out the window and took another look: he still stood uncertainly in the same position, his flashlight lighting up a little circle on the road beside him, as he gazed after me.