I drift onto the rumble strips somewhere near Tucson, and even though it's only for a second or two I can tell from the lurching swerve of my course correction that I'm getting dangerously tired. I don't want to give up the wheel just yet, not when I still know so little about the man I'm traveling with, but I also can't argue with the basic biological realities of exhaustion. When he says, "Pull over behind that gas station and we'll swap for a while," I go ahead and do it. There aren't really any alternatives, not when staying put is as good as giving up. And I'm not ready to give up yet.

I'm not so sure about my traveling partner. He's certainly got a good vehicle, I'll give him that; this was one of the last in the Aten 1020 series, probably the finest solar-electric cars ever produced. We don't need to scavenge at all through the burnt-out remains of the highway gas station I pull in behind--we just hop out, run around the car to swap places, and then he's in the driver's seat and I'm a passenger again and we're off before the drones arrive. I can't pretend it doesn't unnerve me to give up control so soon after the last time, but I have to get used to it sometime. If we can't cooperate, we're already done for.

"Take a break," he says, getting the car back up to eighty with an almost effortless conviction back the way we came. "You can sleep for a while now, I'll let you know when I need you to drive again." I'm not looking forward to seeing the same dusty scenery again, but the truth is it doesn't matter where we go so long as we stay in motion and don't keep to a predictable route; the Southwest is nice because it's always sunny and the solar batteries can stay topped up pretty much all day, but the important thing is to move. There's always an eye in the sky sooner or later, and if you stay still it's never very long before the drones come along.

It almost happened to me outside of Santa Fe. My last traveling partner caught a blast of brain static from an old billboard, one of the ones we thought we'd sabotaged back when the war seemed winnable and we were filled with the old guerilla zeal I can't even bother to muster up anymore. He stopped the car and threw the keyless ignition fob down a pothole that was at least eight feet deep, and I knew by the time I got it and fought him off the drones would be on us. And after five years of constant warfare, I knew that the human mind couldn't possibly resist a concerted drone onslaught.

Even running was a close thing. They say the maximum effective range of a drone's subliminal call is seven hundred feet, but that's an estimate and not a fact, and good acoustics can make it close to a mile. The acoustics weren't great in Santa Fe, I got into a tangle of city streets that bounced and echoed the sound around, but even so it felt like wading through molasses to run. My brain kept trying to convince me to go back and listen closer, really pay attention to the signal they were broadcasting through their high quality speakers and think about what it was the Superior Will had to offer, and I was staggering by the time I ran into this car near the highway on-ramp. If he hadn't stopped....

I try to push it out of my head and rest, but those of us remaining have gotten very wary of sleep. The first skirmishes happened while we were sleeping, with the Overmind and the Sleep of Surrender and a half-dozen other high-tech brain hackers activating anything with a speaker and using it to broadcast their will-dominating subliminal messages to anyone within range. Probably a quarter of the world's population succumbed overnight, way more in the United States. The rest of us woke up to find the planet at war without even the slightest explanation why.

My heavy-lidded eyes glide over the devastation as we drive, firebombed buildings and degraded stretches of road and whole towns entirely devoid of population. We'll probably never even know why most of the damage was done--most of the commands were issued from concealed bunkers half a world away, and the people who carried them out didn't ask questions and didn't seek reasons. They just obeyed while the world tore itself apart, and now there's almost nobody left to care about what happened or why.

Soon there won't be anybody. They're starting to rebuild in places now; with the war all but won by the Superior Will and most of the free minds like me or my travel partner too scattered and desperate to think of anything but bare survival, the dronified humans are turning the cities one by one into a blanket of thought-deadening signals that extend for literally hundreds of miles. Slowly but surely, they'll turn America into one vast subjugated state, three hundred million thralls controlled by a single voice, and then... hell, I don't know. By the time it happens I won't care anymore. All I can say for sure is that I want to put off the day I find out as long as possible.

It seems like the man next to me does, too. We haven't exchanged names yet; with relationships as transient as ours and identity sometimes erased in a matter of seconds, asking for a name can feel a little too intimate. There's only two people in the car, two people in this whole little world we've made for ourselves; when either one of us speaks, there's already no question who we're talking to. Might as well not bother worrying about it, right?

I feel my eyelids slip shut as the car moves onto a long, smooth stretch of road almost entirely undamaged by shelling, and even though the familiar sting of fear grips me for a moment at the inexorable surrender to an exhaustion too powerful to fight, I have to admit it's a relief to drift off into sleep. Even if I catch myself as always wondering if this isn't some kind of subtle brainwashing taking hold of me and sapping away my free will, sleep is the only place I'm free from terror and paranoia and the relentless, grinding exhaustion of a life on the run. Maybe that's why so many of my old comrades were defeated in the end. Maybe they just wanted a rest.

But I've still got a partner. One traveling partner is all it takes, someone to keep the car moving while you sleep and help you scavenge the burned-out convenience stores for quick calories and give you a fighting chance so you don't wind up alone on foot with the drones closing in. I don't know why he stopped for me a couple days ago in Santa Fe--if I'm honest with myself, I'm not sure I would have done the same thing--but I'm incredibly grateful. It wraps around my drowsy mind like a warm, soft blanket as I slump over in the passenger seat and let sleep take me.

And I even have good dreams. Not the usual tangle of stress and panic and anxiety where I'm floundering through waist deep sugar sand until a drone swoops down on me and jabs me with an iridescent stinger filled with brain-numbing sedatives--no, in this dream we've found a safe space to stop for a while, a maze of underground tunnels hidden from the prying eyes of the satellites overhead, and we can finally stop the car and clamber into the back and brush aside the supplies to relieve some of our constant sexual tension. It's been literal months since my last climax, literal years since I've gotten laid, and in my fantasy it feels so good when his cock slides into my pussy that I gasp with electric, orgasmic ecstasy from that first thrust alone.

It just keeps going, too. The man of my dreams isn't some one-shot fucker who spurts and goes limp after only a few desperate thrusts; he's impossibly potent and virile, holding onto his climax despite years of blue balls, and I just know he's never going to stop plowing my soaking cunt. He's so dominant, so masterful, and the way he holds me down and rails my imagination is like a good hard pussy pounding that never has to end. All I want is to lie here, weak and simpering and passive, and get my mind fucked for--forever--

I don't know how, but I manage to lever my glassy eyes open despite the undertow of exhaustion that makes them want to stick shut. I realize when I wake that my pants are down around my ankles, with three fingers buried helplessly in my wet cunt and frantically, furiously masturbating despite my best efforts to stop. My traveling partner is sitting in the driver's seat with a blank, transfixed expression on his face, his hands on his cock instead of the wheel and only the automated cruise control keeping us from veering off the road and getting stuck in the sand. And the radio....

Oh, fuck. The radio's on. I don't know how that's possible, I could have sworn I checked it as soon as I got into the car, but my head was swimming with lingering subliminals at the time and maybe I couldn't focus properly. Or maybe I hooked it back up again. I remember being awfully certain I needed to look at it myself and not simply take the word of a stranger who could have had a plan to brainwash me while my guard was down--maybe that was some last little instruction from the drones I thought I'd evaded, persuading me to open myself up to another vector for their programming without even realizing it.

Or maybe it could be my traveling partner. He must have heard something when he stopped for me, maybe it was enough to make him think it was a good idea to reconnect the radio while I slept to see if he could find some... I don't know, some kind of a resistance radio station or something. Once that programming gets into your head, it can make you think a whole mess of bad ideas, I know that from some close calls during the war. I've seen people I was fighting with just minutes earlier suddenly decide to check an old cell phone to see if it still has enough battery life to play video games on.

It doesn't matter now. We've passed into an area where the old broadcasting towers are still in operation, and they've hacked into the onboard systems to pump subliminals into the cabin. He didn't even need to turn it on--as soon as the car registered an active signal and a functioning device, it knew exactly what to do to enslave us. I don't know if I've even got five minutes left before my resistance gives out, and that's nothing but a guess. And a bad one, based on how hard my pussy clenches around my fingers every time the warbling noise lets out another pulse of brain-melting sonic sludge. It already feels so difficult to move.

I'm almost grateful when the front left tire goes slamming into a pothole and the car lurches to an axle-breaking stop. It's not a good sign for the future, I don't know what I'll do without a vehicle to keep me moving and store my supplies, but it does snap me out of my trance long enough for me to yank the door open and stumble out into the cool evening air. I can't reach down to pull my pants up--hell, I can't even stop masturbating--but I hobble off the road as fast as my fabric-tangled legs will carry me. The post-crash adrenaline gives me the push I need to shake off the brainwashing, at least for a minute or two. I don't know whether it does the same for my traveling partner. I don't look back to see.

It doesn't seem like much of a victory when I finally collapse to a halt somewhere in a downtown parking garage, my brain buzzing with lust and my fingers still buried in my dripping snatch. But between the darkness and the cover of three levels of concrete, I'm at least safe from the drones long enough to masturbate the urges out of my system, and once my head clears I'm able to take stock of the dilapidated supply of vehicles and figure out whether there's anything I can salvage. The odds aren't good for me. I'd probably be better off just giving up and letting a drone find me so I at least don't die out here in the ruined remains of a city the desert is already reclaiming.

But that would be giving up. And despite everything, I'm not ready to give up yet.

THE END