Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,99

crap out of her. Or—another way of putting it—to make sure she knew what she was playing at.

That stretch of the drive wasn’t long, and soon they were in the liminal zone outside of Sioux City where the vehicles of the Ameristanis began to peel off as if the city were emanating a repulsive force field only they could sense. They made a few moments’ detour through a Walmart parking lot, where Kevin threw a blue tarp over the machine gun so that they could pass through the city proper without offending local norms. The opposite bank of the river was visible here as the stream was circumventing a line of bluffs. Atop them, posted where it would be conspicuous to people who, like Sophia, were looking across the river, was the occasional religious site. The people over there had erected crosses, singly or in little clusters. Not huge ones like the flaming cross of the Leviticans, but more folk-art productions that looked like they’d been knocked together in a couple of hours from tree trunks or four-by-fours. Their simple lines were cluttered and complicated by stuff hanging off them. Sophia made sense of it as follows: These people were akin to the Leviticans they’d seen yesterday, but they didn’t have the money or organizational acumen to make natural-gas-fueled crosses out of structural steel. So they built them out of whatever they could scrape together in the way of lumber, wrapped them in rags, soaked them in fuel, and burned them at night.

Traffic across the bridge was limited to one vehicle at a time because it had been structurally weakened by tens of thousands of bullet impacts. Driven by the inscrutable algorithmically generated memes that dominated their edit streams, locals would from time to time gather on the opposite bank to empty mag after mag of 5.56-millimeter rounds into the underpinnings of the local infrastructure. As Pete put it, “Their fathers believed that the people in the cities actually gave a shit about them enough to want to come and take their guns and other property. So they put money they didn’t really have into stockpiling trillions of rounds and hunkered down waiting for the elites to come confiscate their stuff. There’s no use for any of it. So they come here sometimes and ‘vote with bullets.’”

In some sections of the bridge, where there was overhead steelwork, they could see the circular impact craters, so closely spaced that they merged into one another and gave the steel a hand-forged patina, as if blacksmiths had gone over every inch of it with ball-peen hammers. But most of the steel, and most of the damage, was under the bridge deck. Anyway the civic authorities on this side of the river had erected a guardhouse at the base of the ramp that led to the bridge and piled dirt behind it to stop any rounds coming across the river. A man in a bulletproof vest was posted there whose job was to space out the traffic so that only one vehicle was on the span at a time. Though he seemed to have a secondary function as well, which was to chat with the occupants of each vehicle and make sure they knew what they were getting into, and were not just tourists being horribly misled by Google Maps.

The car they’d parted ways with in Des Moines had tracked them down on the riverbank, not before putting itself through a mostly automatic car wash and recharging its battery somewhere, and so Julian and Phil and Anne-Solenne were able to transfer their overnight bags into the back of it and clamber into its freshly vacuumed and wiped-down interior. There was a note on the driver’s seat from Ahmed, the valet who had performed those parts of the detailing not yet deemed suitable for robots, in which he beseeched them to favor him with a tip if the quality of his work had exceeded expectations. Phil did so by staring at the note and muttering. The others climbed in and looked expectantly at Sophia, which was when she broke the news to them.

They did not have a clear fix on their destination at the time they crossed over the bridge, one at a time, waiting on the far side for the caravan to reassemble. The Tactical went over first, and Kevin made use of the wait to shrug on a flak jacket and a helmet.

They waited. Flanked by two armed Pete-minions, Sophia took a stroll