you can. (ii) When traveling by water, keep other craft at a distance—if they draw near, disable them, either by weapons fire or by the use of incendiary devices. (iii) Risk tolerance approaches zero when traveling via watercraft.
(d) (i) Evacuating by car, truck, or diesel transport is your most likely method. (ii) Take the time to secure fuel. (iii) Do not secure all of your supplies or fuel in one vehicle. (iv) Use at least enough vehicles that if one is compromised, its crew, supplies, and passengers can be adequately transferred to the other vehicles. (v) Off-road-capable trucks are advised. (vi) Where possible, avoid the use of highways and other roads. (vii) Avoid traveling through urban centers at absolutely all cost.
[3] (i) When the terrain requires you to travel by road, organized shipping lane, or established flight path, attempt to keep an Outsider’s vehicle in sight at all times. (ii) You may need to disable this other vehicle in order to Forage parts, should one of yours require repair. (iii) When possible, avoid “roadside” repairs and simply confiscate other vehicles. (iv) Expect resistance.
[4] (i) Your vehicles should not drive so closely together upon the open roads that they would be disabled simultaneously by anti-vehicle fire, roadside bombs, or other devices. (ii) If one vehicle is compromised, the other(s) should travel far enough ahead to double back and safely neutralize the roadside threat before attempting a rescue.
CHAPTER TEN
they took their paint off, Mary and Four. Used some blood from the corpse in the office to distress their shirts. They ran tangentially toward the Humvee, so they wouldn’t surprise the Guard. Mary had her gun tucked under her waistband, up against her ass.
The Guard didn’t shoot the girls when they ran—panicking, yelling, bloodied, and wide-eyed—toward them. For help. For sanctuary. Five of the Jacks were watching from the roof, from the corner nearest the Humvee—Aleph Party. There was definitely another firefight deeper into campus, they reported. Around the bell tower.
Two of the other Jacks were at the far corner, looking the other way down Meyer. We’d given one, the leader, my walkie-talkie. He would coordinate between his Party, Beta, and the last Party, Chi, who were at the other end of the roof, watching over Oak Street. He reported to Levi, whom I put in charge of the operation. To call it off, to redirect as needed. I was the free agent. I wanted it that way, for this. The Jacks would see Mary, their bloodied Mary, take the risk. Get things moving.
They needed to see one of us seal the deal—me or Levi. See us save her and take what we needed. She was their Mary, had been so from that first white moment, bringing light to the darkness in the office, where they had been abandoned.
One of the Guards, the one with the nerve-agent cannon, sent two canisters at the Auditorium Building, their basso grunts like hooting owls as their ejecta smokestreamed toward the building. As I’d thought, the agent clouds were cohesive. They vented up into the opened windows, before the wind dispersed them, on the second and third floors, through which Salvage was firing. The break in the firefight bought the Guard a minute to address the girls.
Aleph Party, on Levi’s command, fired the grenade launcher over the Humvee toward the building, between the Guard and Salvage, to divert their attention.
We had to hurry. There might have been another demolitions squad worming through the underground. The Jacks had made enough for several vehicles, but they didn’t know how much would be used. If there was another squad, they’d blow a new hole in the road, taking people down into the darkness to live dead forever with flowers that wouldn’t die. Zunis and Greeks and kids from Slade, trading all the final answers with the oracle. Giving them back, maybe, at Delphi. Asynchronously. Offering answers from the future, when things Collapsed, to the classical ancients waiting patiently to be as intelligent as we were, at twelve years old, in our seventh-grade classroom, reading Mythology and Native Americans.
The answers hadn’t made sense to the ancients because they’d been for us, in the future. They just built meaning from the abstracta. It was a trick psychics used.
Mary was ready. She got the jump. She shot one Guard through the back of the neck when he turned around to flinch at Aleph Party’s exploding cocktail. When he turned around to help other people at all times.
If I could, I would have just