* * *
We decided to take the back roads to Chickentown because of all the military checkpoints along the main highway. The alternate route is a Forest Service road, which is paved for about a mile and then suddenly becomes a pothole-ridden gravel road littered with huge rocks and other obstacles. Hacker was at the wheel, me in the passenger seat next to him. Everyone in the van was silent for the first fifteen minutes of the journey. When more than half of your crew is psychic, there really isn’t much to say.
“Hey, look to the right, guys,” Hacker said, breaking the silence. “The entrance to Palatki, those Indian ruins where we went into the portal. Wish we had time to stop and go through that thing again. Maybe I could get my psychic chops on too and join the rest of you.”
“What’s a portal?” asked Greta innocently from the back seat.
“It’s kind of a doorway,” said Leela. “A doorway into other dimensions. It takes you deep inside your being and gives you insights and information that aren’t available in the so-called real world. The four of us experienced it couple of years ago. It was fun!”
“Oh, wow!” said Greta, sounding like a high school girl who’d just discovered kissing. “Could we stop there for just a few minutes? I’d love to try it.”
“No time right now, Greta,” said Jill. “Maybe another time. You know, I heard that there are people squatting over there. About a hundred people living among the ruins. No running water, and they’re growing their own food. Also hunting rabbits. Eating anything that doesn’t eat them first. Saving up rainwater. Survival…just like the Sinagua Indians who lived here six hundred years ago. Sin. Agua. Without. Water. Get it?”
“Got it, Jill, thank you very much!” said Hacker a tad sarcastically. He hadn’t shown much emotion lately around losing his ex-girlfriend, but I detected some strong feelings in him regarding this issue. I scanned his mind and immediately tapped into sadness, guilt, and remorse, seasoned with plenty of anger. He didn’t seem to understand that Jill couldn’t tolerate his playboy ways, and he couldn’t square that with the reality of the hot threesome that Jill and Leela and I seemed to be enjoying immensely.
Hacker also was carrying around no small amount of anger toward me. It slipped out occasionally. Still, he loved me. I was his brother beyond blood.
“Hey, Marty, I been wondering,” said my friend. “When is that freakin’ chip in your skull gonna dissolve so we can be equals again?”
“I dunno, man,” I said. “The docs said it would be good for two hundred hours, just so we could pull off the operation in Davos. Now it’s way way past that. Many days past that. And the power just seems to be getting stronger. I’m beginning to wonder….”
“I’ve got a theory, folks.” It was Leela, leaning forward and putting a warm, tingling hand over my crown chakra. “Remember the Schumann Resonances, that singing we did in Davos at Black Swan Beta that put everybody to sleep? We tapped into that brainwave frequency, remember?”
“I remember,” I said. “I was ommmming like my life depended on it. And I guess it did.”
“We were singing at the frequency of the Earth’s magnetic field,” explained Leela to everyone in the van. “See, the Earth is a receiver of cosmic energy. It radiates this information outward as long-wave signals which we humans then receive via our spines and our craniums. Like an antenna, hmmm? So our antenna captures this information and sends it to the pineal gland, which transmits it to the pituitary gland, which is the master control center of the brain. Does that make sense? That’s all I remember. I saw it in Wikipedia.”
“And so….” I commented, dryly.
“And so the brainwaves we generated with our singing back at Black Swan Beta passed through Marty’s pineal gland, where his implant is located, and amplified its effects. So maybe he’ll retain his psychic abilities forever. Or occasionally he’ll need a booster, and we’ll sing to him again. If Marty joins us on baritone, we’ll do three-part harmony. Ommmmmmm.”
Everyone in the van joined in the om. Three times. Then we all breathed deeply together. And fell into silence again.
Half an hour later, Hacker was bouncing up and down in the driver’s seat, yelling excitedly. “Hey, you guys, check it out! The highway is just up ahead! We’re almost to Chickentown!”
The last few minutes of the ride had been horrific, the tortured shock absorbers of the van stretched past their breaking point. We could see the occasional vehicle moving along the divided road up ahead. We could also see what appeared to be a military checkpoint where the gravel road met the concrete highway.
And then we saw something else: a gate made of barbed wire stretched across our crummy road. There was no way to go around it. Everyone in our van moaned. Hacker cursed. Jill swore like a sailor. Leela shook her head in disbelief. Benny Bravo, who had been uncharacteristically silent during the trip, swore in Spanish.
“Let’s ram it,” I said, “just ram right through the frickin’ thing and shoot across the highway.”
“Yo, homies, let us crash the barricade like my bloods crash the wall down at the border!” said Benny, waving his fist in the air. “I can see a bunch of tents across the highway. Vamonos, hombres! We didn’t come all this way for nothin’!”
Hacker agreed with us, and gunned the van’s tired engine. “Let’s do it!”
“Wait! Wait!” said Leela. “I’ve got another idea. We can’t risk running into that checkpoint. There’s a small army of trigger-happy soldiers just around the corner. Plus the barbed wire would rip our van to shreds.”
“I can see it all happening, too,” said Jill, who was a pretty fair clairvoyant. “It will be very ugly. Let’s try something else.”
“Hey, Marty,” said Leela. “Remember what you did on that road from Davos to St. Moritz? That little psi trick where you lifted our car with mind power and saved our lives? How about you do that again and land us right in the heart of Chickentown?”
I turned around to face Leela, horrified by her idea. “Oh, sweetheart, I don’t think I could do—”
“Yes you can,” urged Jill. “Come on, we’ll help you. Right, Leela? We pitch in and lift this meat wagon up and over the barbed wire and across the road and into the Chickentown parking lot. Okay? There’s no time to think it over. Hacker and Greta, Benny, maybe you guys could close your eyes and visualize us already in Chickentown. Ready, Marty? On three: one, two, three, and—”
I concentrated, I focused, I gritted my teeth and madly massaged my third eye. I clenched my fists and screwed my eyes up tight. Nothing. Nothing at all. The van didn’t move. I looked up and saw a small contingent of soldiers approaching. The others in our van saw them too; I heard a collective sharp intake of breath. The soldiers, wearing camouflage uniforms, pointed their huge combat machine guns at the van as they moved ominously toward us.
“Now, Marty, now!” encouraged Leela.
“Git ’er done, dude, get ’er done!” ordered Hacker.
“Go, man, go!” encouraged Benny Bravo.
“Please, Marty?” said Greta in a small voice.
Suddenly the van floated into the air; higher and higher, twenty feet, thirty feet, fifty feet. The soldiers on the ground broke formation and looked frantically for the van. To them, it had disappeared. Seventy feet, eighty, one hundred feet, still rising.
“How do you stop this thing?” I shouted. “Where’s the brakes?!”
“I don’t know!” shouted Leela.
“I have no idea!” shouted Jill.
Hacker instinctively slammed on the vehicle’s real brakes, but that of course had no effect on our trajectory. My psi powers were in control. Actually, out of control.
When we looked down we could see the huge dimensions of the tent city, a beehive of activity, thousands of people. There was a stage where a band was playing. Nobody on the ground noticed our flying van. Higher and higher, farther and farther f
rom the highway we drifted, away from Chickentown.
“Marty!” screamed Jill. “Do something! We are headed for Jerome!”
27 City of the Future?
Violating the law of gravity by flying over the Verde Valley in an aging Chevy van was not my idea of a good time. Still, it was a necessary maneuver; we all knew that. We knew there were risks. What we didn’t know was how to control the beast. I focused my mind and found that I could control the vector, the direction of the van, as well as the altitude; but I had no control over the speed. The ride was getting bumpier by the second. The Mingus Mountains loomed just a few hundred feet away.
“Leela! Jill! See if you can slow this buggy down, okay? Concentrate!”
They did something, and it worked. The van slowed down and went into glide mode. I caused the van to swoop in low over Jerome, a tiny former mining town built into the side of a hill. Jerome was once a thriving center of sin and excess; now it is primarily a tourist magnet.
“Land this thing, Marty!” shouted Hacker, holding onto the steering wheel for dear life. “I can drive to Chickentown from here, dammit!”
“No way, Jose,” I snorted. “We’ve come this far, and I’m gonna drop this baby right into the parking lot. Chickentown, here we come!”
Over everyone’s protests, I guided the van expertly back to our destination, and in less than fifteen minutes we were hovering over the parking lot. The vehicle was almost noiseless, and no one on the ground seemed to notice. The parking lot was vast. I dropped the van right between a rusted Dodge pickup and a 1965 yellow Cadillac convertible. No one in the van said a word, but I heard a lot of sighing and heavy breathing. The engine was still running. Hacker turned it off, swearing to himself.