~Norm~
The truck rocked and creaked over the potholes of the old country road. Dust blew in through the open windows, but I kept them down. I kept my speed down too, to hear in case Tilly saw me and called out. There had been some small farms here, but many of the residents had moved away after the Rot began to devastate their land. The trees and bushes that had encroached on the road made the task of searching that much harder.
At first, I couldn't imagine what might have happened to Tilly to make her miss our meeting. Then the terrible thought had occurred to me that she might have arrived at our meeting place only after the police officer had shown up. She would have had to stay there and watch me drive off. I had almost turned and gone back north immediately to try to find her, but that idea had some problems.
For one, it was entirely possible that the checkpoint was still in place. Cameras recorded each vehicle's license plate as it went through, and their system would flag me if I showed up again in the same place so soon. I had been lucky that they hadn't recognized me when I went through before. Also, I thought it unlikely that Tilly would just wait on the roadside for me.
My biggest problem was, even if I was right about what she wouldn't do, I couldn't guess what she would do. That was why I was here, driving along a road that was washed out in some places, overgrown by brush in others, along the edge of a large, abandoned ranch. I thought that Tilly might try to walk back home if she had no other alternative, so I had begun to scout the back country roads to the west of highway 99 in the hope that I might stumble across her. I also kept my cell phone plugged in constantly to keep it charged, in case she managed to find a phone to call me.
It was now past noon and I had seen no sign of Tilly. I had not eaten since the previous night outside the warehouse and my stomach had adopted a nearly continuous grumble of complaint. More immediately, the truck was running low on gas. I made my way back to the main road and headed south into Newberg to fuel up. Since I had never gotten my FEMA food vouchers, there really wasn't anywhere that I could go to get a meal. I was feeling wired, amped up on fear and anxiety, but shaky and weak. I stood at the gas pump, watching the numbers climb, and agonized over what to do next. The pump clicked off when it reached the hundred dollars that I had prepaid. I slapped my palm into the side of the truck. "Fuck it," I said.
I climbed into the truck and headed back up highway 99. I passed the place with the barriers and was relieved to see that the checkpoint had cleared, the officers and guardsmen off to set up somewhere else. I had idly wondered many times if the checkpoints ever actually caught any genemods, or if their main purpose was to serve as a constant reminder to the populace of who was in control. The bootleggers certainly seemed to have ways of anticipating or avoiding them.
I turned around a few miles up the road and started back. About a mile past where the checkpoint had been, I slowed and put on my hazard lights. I studied the tree line as I drove, glancing forward every few seconds to ensure I didn't run off the road or into the back of a stopped car. Nothing.
With no better ideas to go on, I went back to patrolling the back roads. I wondered if Tilly had simply lost her way and gone west instead of southwest, or even north, but she had seemed so sure of herself, even giving me the distance to travel to meet her. I considered getting out and searching the area on foot, but I would have to cover a few square miles, at least, to have any realistic chance of finding her.
I stopped running the truck constantly and forced myself to wait and make the trip once an hour down the back roads, so that I wouldn't use up the truck's gas and my dwindling supply of cash. Nightfall arrived as I made one last, desperate trip down Roy Rogers Road, which ran due south to Newberg. Of course, I didn't find anything new that I hadn't seen my last five trips down it. When I came to the outskirts of Newberg, I merged onto 99 and continued south, choosing speed over the dubious safety of the coastal route.
I pulled into the driveway of the farm at around ten o'clock, and was greeted by a small crowd as everyone but Nonna ran out to meet me. Nissi caught me in a crushing hug as soon as I stepped out of the truck. "Where were you?" she said in a tone that was somehow both relieved and accusatory. "We thought you'd been arrested. Norm, what happened? What's wrong?"
"Where's Tilly?" Stansy said, peering past me into the empty cab of the truck.
"I lost her," I said in a choked voice. I was just barely holding my emotions in check. "Can we go inside?" I hurried past the shocked looks on their faces.
Stan heated up some of the leftovers from the evening's meal while I told them all what had happened. Nissi clutched at my hand the whole time, as if I might just vanish if she let go.
"It was getting dark," I finished, "and I didn't know what else to do, so I came back here."
Stan put a plate of rice with a side of applesauce on the table in front of me. I took a forkful and began to chew. I was ravenously hungry, but the food could have been sawdust for all that I noticed of it.
"What are we going to do?" Wendy asked.
"Could she make it all the way down here?" Stansy asked. "What is it, a hundred miles or so?"
"Something like that," I agreed. I shook my head dismally. On foot, that would take days, maybe weeks if she kept off of the roads. "Would she know how to get here?"
"She's got Truedirect, or she should," Nissi said. "I'd be really surprised if they left that off, with the mishmash of enhancements she's got."
I looked at her askance. "Truedirect?"
Nissi nodded. "It's a little engineered magnetoception organ that they started putting in mods on about the third version release of Stan Ups, and a lot of other mods. The biotech that developed it had generous licensing terms. I have one. So does Stansy and Nock. If Tilly has that, she can orient herself to the four compass points within a couple of degrees." That pretty much ruled out the notion that she had gotten lost.
Nissi stood up. "We need to look at a map."
I picked up my plate and we all followed her into the den. We watched as she brought up Openmaps on the terminal screen. "Okay," she said, "any terrain features we can use? You said you were south of Portland, but just north of this little town, Newberg. Anything else?"
"Well, there was a bridge," I said. "I crossed it right after I got through the checkpoint. I mean, the bridge was literally right on the other side of it."
Nissi zoomed in the map and searched along the highway. "Okay, here, probably. This says it's the Tualatin River. You know . . ." She frowned and zoomed in closer.
"What is it?" Stansy asked.
"Well, I was just thinking. This is no dinky little stream. You said that both bins were packed heavy with food, so they might not float. Maybe she got to this river and couldn't go further."
It had never occurred to me that the terrain might be impassable on foot. To me it had been just another bridge. I had crossed dozens of them on the way to Portland. "Okay, follow that thought," I said. "Where would she have gone?"
Nissi brushed her finger over the screen a few times, moving the view to follow the course of the river. "Unless it got shallow enough to cross on foot, which looks unlikely, she had to go a couple of miles to the west before she got to this other bridge. Then it's another mile and a half southeast to get to the place she told you to meet her. No wonder she was late."
