Chapter Twenty

In which our heroine spends a night in a gas station.

The hand-painted sign on the building read:

ARTISANAL HOMEMADE GENUINE TEXAS GASOLINE

JESUS LOVES YOU & HATES COMMUNISTS

The building consisted of a store to the left and a two-bay garage to the right. Four dormered windows indicated a second story spanning the entire width, suggesting that the proprietors lived above their workplace. A pumpjack a short distance from the garage was pump-jacking away like a gigantic big-beaked water-bobber. A pipe leading back from the pumpjack to a dumpster-sized, smoke-belching mini-refinery behind it shuddered with each spurt of crude. A black hose ran from the mini-refinery to a fuel pump at the edge of the pitted blacktop apron that served as the front yard of the gas station. It was the petroleum-based equivalent of farm-to-table.

Lorinda was surprised when Stimpy didn’t stop at the fuel pump. Instead, he aimed at the left-hand garage door, which opened as the car slowed down. The car continued into the garage and the door clacked down behind it. The chilly white lights overhead disclosed another CCSA-built Russian car, this one a dull gray Lada, parked in the right-hand bay. A man and a woman stood in the corner of the garage next to an open door, just beyond the left front fender of the Zhiguli. Both were remarkably tall and thin, both had long, stringy brown hair, and both wore identical denim overalls over fraying blue work shirts. They smiled weakly as Stimpy and Ren opened their doors and stepped out of the car. Lorinda slid out behind Ren, who said: “Bill and Hillary, meet Margaret.”

“Hi, Margaret,” they said in unenthusiastic unison.

“Oh, come on, you two,” said Ren. “It can’t be that bad.”

The man, Bill, said, “You have no idea.” Like Hillary, he could have been anywhere from his early thirties to his mid-fifties. Between their exhausted-looking clothing, their lined and fretful faces, and their general air of fatigue, it was hard to tell. Bill stepped through the door, followed by Hillary, Stimpy, Ren, and, finally, Lorinda. Instead of continuing into the store, Bill started a clanking trudge up a metal spiral staircase.

“They used to be called Mickey and Minnie,” Ren said to Lorinda under his breath.

“I hated that,” Hillary said. “We’re not cartoon characters.” Lorinda had no idea what she meant.

Upstairs they entered a combination living room, dining room, and kitchen. A couple of dilapidated chairs faced a cabinet beneath a screen on the wall. A scarred wooden dining table was set for five, with a big salad bowl in the middle. “Grilled chicken,” Bill said. “Plus my special Caesar salad.”

Hillary, directing her words to Stimpy, her voice trembling, said, “Listen, man. We’ve been here sixteen months. It’s enough. Like, too much. If we don’t get out of here soon I think we’re going to kill each other. Or go insane. Or be poisoned by the fumes.”

Just then the lights dimmed and flickered. In response to Stimpy’s querulous look, Hillary said, “Looks like it’s time to do a little crypto mining.”

“ConfediCoin,” said Bill, “They use more electricity than the rest of Texas combined. It’s berserk. This —” He indicated the quivering lights. “— it’s been known to cause epileptic fits. Among those so inclined.”

When the lights stabilized fifteen seconds later, Stimpy stepped forward and hugged Hillary. “No promises, but I think we’ll have a couple to replace you guys in the next few weeks. You’ve gone way above and beyond.”

“I hope so,” she said, patting his back and looking toward Ren and Lorinda. “The bathroom’s right through there if you need it. Y’all must be starving.”

“I need to call my parents.” Lorinda said. “They must think I was shot or abducted or something. I just disappeared. And, oh, shit! My bar. PumpJack’s. They’re going to fire me.”

The four others exchanged a glance. Ren spoke. “We’ll get a message to them when we can. You’ve got to realize that everyone you know is being monitored now.”

“I can’t just tell them that I’m alive and okay?”

“You can’t tell them anything,” Stimpy said, trying not to sound too harsh. “Once we have a secure way to communicate with them, we will.”

Hillary gently touched Lorinda’s shoulder. “We’ve done this many times, Margaret. When it’s safe you’ll talk to them. Or we will. Now have some of Bill’s salad. White wine or red?”

“Who is this ‘we’ who’s doing all this for me?” Lorinda asked. “Who are you? I mean, I really appreciate it, but … who are you?”

No one answered.

Ren, the diplomat, smoothly changed channels. “So, Bill. What’s happening with the road cameras tomorrow? A ‘lightning strike’ like last time?”

“I have something better,” Bill smiled. “Before you leave I’ll roll in a chunk of video from the same time today. It’s an old trick but it works great.”

“Bill’s a genius hacker,” Ren told Lorinda.

“Wasting my talents in the middle of nowhere,” Bill muttered.

“So, Mr. Hacker,” Stimpy said, “if anyone’s paying attention they’ll think our car pulled into the gas station and never left?”

Bill waved his hand, brushing aside that dumb idea. “No, no, no. They never saw the car arrive here. When you were about ten miles away there was some unfortunate static, or maybe electrical glitches, that took the picture down for, oh, maybe a half-hour. When it came back: Where did that Zhiguli go?”

Stimpy grinned.

“Hey,” Ren said to Bill after they’d finished the surprisingly fine meal, “play Margaret something on your record player.” Lorinda looked puzzled. “Now your line,” said Ren to Lorinda, “is ‘What’s a record player?’”

Bill didn’t have to be asked twice. He jumped up from the table, took a big step over to the cabinet under the TV, turned the knob of an amp on the shelf below, flipped the lid of an old, once-expensive turntable on top, and prepared to drop the needle on the black disk that had started spinning. “It’s his hobby, fixing these things up,” said Hillary, affectionately. A song blared from the big speakers on either side of the cabinet. Lorinda had never heard it, or, really, anything like it: a scratchy voice wailing “I see you got your / Brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat…” accompanied by a cacophony of honky-tonky music, whistles, and who knows what else. Lorinda went over and stood next to Bill, staring at the spinning record and listening, rapt.

When it ended, Hillary gestured to Bill — her fingers symbolically cutting her throat — to turn it off. “I think we’d better get her to bed,” she said.

“How does it work?” asked Lorinda, still staring at the record player.

“Well,” said Bill, enthusiastically, “it’s quite ingenious, really. They had to compress a wide frequency range into a tiny —”

“Uh, oh,” Hillary interrupted.

“Okay, okay, keep it simple, Bill,” said Bill. “Those little lines on the disk? That’s actually a spiral that goes from the outer edge inward, and it has these little bumps in it —"

Hillary stopped him dead with a “not now” look, put her arm around Lorinda, said, “You’ll get the lecture some other time,” and guided her out of the kitchen toward a little bedroom a few steps down the hall.

A small window looked out onto a back yard of scrub and dirt. On another wall, in a modest chrome frame, hung a poster displaying the New York City subway system. Upon the neatly made bed sat a small stack of perfectly folded clothes — two pairs of jeans, four plaid shirts, some underwear, and a travel toothbrush. By this time Lorinda wasn’t surprised. She just said, “For me? Thank you.”

“You need clean clothes,” said Hillary. “And you need to change your look.”

Lorinda inhaled deeply. On the one hand, it felt … inappropriate to ask personal questions, with all these insiders using made-up aliases to keep outsiders in the dark. On the other, the rescue and escape mission on which they were all bound up could hardly have been more personal, at least to her. So she took a leap. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Do you know Stimpy well?”

Hillary considered this. Maybe she’d been asked it before. Finally she said, “We’ve been working together for a long time.”

Lorinda considered her words carefully. “He just seems … I don’t know. He’s … mean to me. He treats me like I’m an idiot. I mean, he’s doing all of these amazing things, and I’m grateful but …”

“I shouldn’t tell you this,” Hillary whispered. “But it’s not you. He wasn’t always like this. But he is now. Ever since his wife died a couple of years ago. Ectopic pregnancy. She couldn’t get a reset in the CCSA and she couldn’t get out of the country. They prevented her from getting medical attention and it killed her. So this is all he does now. I mean, he was doing it before his wife … but he was doing a lot of other things too. He was one of the original organizers, after The Split. But now he’s doing this one thing: helping pregnant women get out of the country to get care.”

Whatever the cause — sheer relief to finally have a question taken seriously and answered; sympathy for the tragic background of her rescuer; exhaustion after the day’s upheaval — Lorinda felt an unexpected wave of emotion and grasped Hillary in a hug. “Your organization — what is it?” she asked into Hillary’s lank hair. It smelled like soap and gasoline.

“Well, put it this way,” Hillary said when they disengaged. “We’re part of a movement. Some people call us ‘the Resistance,’ but that’s not really right. The French Resistance wanted to drive the Nazis out of France —”

“Who?”

Hillary paused. She gave a little laugh, rubbed her eyes, and shook her head in what was either mock or real despair. “You never learned about that? The French Resistance in World War II?”

Lorinda shrugged. “Not really. What we learned in high school was that the U.S. beat the Germans and the Japanese.”

“Did they mention the Soviet Union?”

“Who?”

With a sigh, Hillary said, “Never mind. Anyway, we’re not here to destroy the CCSA. We just want to help people who want to get out. For whatever reason.” She smiled. “Sometimes we refer to ourselves as the Rebel Alliance, but that’s a joke.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s from this movie … never mind. What you have to do is get some sleep.” Hillary pointed to the door. “Bathroom’s right across the hall. We’ll get you up around seven and give you some breakfast. Then you can get the hell out of this godforsaken place.”

NEXT: Chapter Twenty-One. In which our heroine learns about the enclaves of the CCSA.

PREVIOUSLY in THE SPLIT!

Chapter One. In which we meet our heroine and her dainty little gun.

Chapter Two. In which Lorinda demonstrates her bartending virtuosity.

Chapter Three. In which our heroine receives a promotion and prepares to celebrate.

Chapter Four. In which our heroine proves herself an immoral citizen of the CCSA.

Chapter Five. In which our heroine goes to church.

Chapter Six. In which Lorinda contemplates her future, ignores Pastor Doug, and gets something unexpected from Emmie.

Chapter Seven. In which Lorinda learns something that threatens her big dream.

Chapter Eight. In which our heroine freaks out.

Chapter Nine. In which our heroine says the forbidden word as an unwelcome visitor arrives.

Chapter Ten. In which two unpleasant men perturb our heroine.

Chapter Eleven. In which our heroine seems to have found a solution to her problem.

Chapter Twelve. In which that black truck follows our heroine all the way to Austin.

Chapter Thirteen. In which Lorinda lashes out.

Chapter Fourteen. In which our heroine gets a taste of life in the big city.

Chapter Fifteen. In which our heroine meets a fellow bartender and has a drink.

Chapter Sixteen. In which Lorinda once again takes a swing with her little pink gun.

Chapter Seventeen. In which our heroine prepares to escape.

Chapter Eighteen. In which our heroine gets in a truck with a couple of slightly scary strangers.

Chapter Nineteen. In which our heroine learns that she’s got a long way to go.

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