30
RATTLESNAKES
Rachael had been following the bottom of the wide arroyo for what seemed miles but was probably only a few hundred yards. The illusion of greater distance resulted partly from the hot pain in her twisted ankle, which was subsiding but only slowly.
She felt trapped in a maze through which she might forever search futilely for a nonexistent exit. Narrower arroyos branched off the primary channel, all on the right-hand side. She considered pursuing another gulch, but each intersected the main run at an angle, so she couldn't see how far they extended. She was afraid of deviating into one, only to encounter a dead end within a short distance.
To her left, three stories above, Eric hurried along the brink of the arroyo, following her limping progress as if he were the mutant master of the maze in a Dungeons and Dragons game. If and when he started down the arroyo wall, she would have to turn and immediately climb the opposite wall, for she now knew she could not hold her own in a chase. Her only chance of survival was to get above him and find some rocks to hurl down on him as he ascended in her wake. She hoped he would not come after her for a few more minutes, because she needed time for the pain in her ankle to subside further before testing it in a climb.
Distant thunder sounded from Barstow in the west: one long peal, another, then a third that was louder than the first two. The sky over this part of the desert was gray and soot-black, as if heaven had caught fire, burned, and was now composed only of ashes and cold black coals. The burnt-out sky had settled lower as well, until it almost seemed to be a lid that was going to come down all the way and clamp tightly over the top of the arroyo. A warm wind whistled mournfully and moaned up there on the surface of the Mojave, and some gusts found their way down into the channel, flinging bits of sand in Rachael's face. The storm already under way in the west had not reached here yet, but it would arrive soon; a pre-storm scent was heavy in the air, and the atmosphere had the electrically charged feeling that preceded a hard rain.
She rounded a bend and was startled by a pile of dry tumbleweeds that had rolled into the gulch from the desert above. Stirred by a downdraft, they moved rapidly toward her with a scratchy sound, almost a hiss, as if they were living creatures. She tried to sidestep those bristly brown balls, stumbled, and fell full-length into the powdery silt that covered the floor of the channel. Falling, she feared for the ankle she had already hurt, but fortunately she did not twist it again.
Even as she fell, she heard more noise behind her. She thought for a moment that the sound was made by the tumbleweeds still rubbing against one another in their packlike progress along the arroyo, but a harder clatter alerted her to the true source of the noise. When she looked back and up, she saw that Eric had started down the wall of the gulch. He'd been waiting for her to fall or to encounter an obstacle; now that she was down, he was swiftly taking advantage of her bad luck. He had descended a third of the incline and was still on his feet, for the slope was not quite as steep here as it had been where Rachael had rolled over the edge. As he came, he dislodged a minor avalanche of dirt and stones, but the wall of the arroyo did not give way entirely. In a minute he would reach the bottom and then, in ten steps, would be on top of her.
Rachael pushed up from the ground, ran toward the other wall of the gulch, intending to climb it, but realized she had dropped her car keys. She might never find her way back to the car; in fact, she'd probably either be brought down by Eric or get lost in the wasteland, but if by some miracle she did reach the Mercedes, she had to have the keys.
Eric was almost halfway down the slope, descending through dust that rose from the slide he had started.
Frantically looking for the keys, she returned to the place where she'd fallen, and at first she couldn't see them. Then she glimpsed the shiny notched edges poking out of the powdery brown silt, almost entirely buried. Evidently she'd fallen atop the keys, pressing them into the soft soil. She snatched them up.
Eric was more than halfway to the arroyo floor.
He was making a strange sound: a thin, shrill cry — half stage whisper, half shriek.
Thunder pounded the sky, somewhat closer now.
Still pouring sweat, gasping for breath, her mouth seared by the hot air, her lungs aching, she ran to the far wall again, shoving the car keys into a pocket of her jeans. This embankment had the same degree of slope as the one Eric was descending, but Rachael discovered that ascending on her feet was not as easy as coming down that way; the angle worked against her as much as it would have worked for her if she'd been going the other direction. After three or four yards, she had to drop forward against the bank, desperately using hands and knees and feet to hold on and thrust herself steadily up the incline.
Eric's eerie whisper-shriek rose behind her, closer.
She dared not look back.
Fifteen feet farther to the top.
Her progress was maddeningly hampered every foot of the way by the softness of the earth face she was climbing. In spots, it tended to crumble under her as she tried to find or make handholds and footholds. She required all the tenacity of a spider to retain what ground she gained, and she was terrified of suddenly slipping back all the way to the bottom.
The top of the arroyo was less than twelve feet away, so she must be about two stories above the floor of it.
“
Don't look down, don't, don't, for God's sake, don't…
Vertical erosion channels cut the wall from top to bottom, some only a few inches wide and a few inches deep, others a foot wide and two feet deep. She had to stay away from those; for, where they scored the slope too close to one another, the earth was especially rotten and most prone to collapse under her.
Fortunately, in some places there were bands of striated stone — pink, gray, brown, with veins of what appeared to be white quartz. These were the outer edges of rock strata that the eroding arroyo had only recently begun to uncover, and they provided firmer footholds.
“
She grabbed a foot-deep rock ledge that thrust out of the soft earth above her, intending to pull and kick her way onto it, hoping that it would not break off, but before she could test it, something grabbed at the heel of her right shoe. She couldn't help it: she had to look down this time, and there he was, dear God, the Eric-thing, on the arroyo wall beneath her, holding himself in place with one hand, reaching up with the other, trying to get a grip on her shoe, coming up only an inch short of his goal.
With dismaying agility, more like an animal than a human being, he flung himself upward. His hands and knees and feet refastened to the earthen wall with frightening ease. He reached eagerly for her again. He was now close enough to clutch at her calf instead of at the bottom of her shoe.
But she was not exactly moving like a sloth. She was damn fast, too, responding even as he moved toward her. Reflexes goosed by a flood of adrenaline, she let go of the wall with her knees and feet, holding on only to the rock ledge an arm's length above her head, dangling, recklessly letting the untested stone support her entire weight. As he reached for her, she pulled her legs up, then kicked down with both feet, putting all the power of her thighs into it, striking his grasping hand, smashing his long bony, mutant fingers.
He loosed an inhuman wail.
She kicked again.
Instead of slipping back down the wall, as Rachael had hoped he would, Eric held on to it, surged upward another foot, shrieking in triumph, and took a swipe at her.
At the same moment she kicked out again, smashing one foot into his arm, stomping the other squarely into his face.
She heard her jeans tear, then felt a flash of pain and knew that he had hooked claws through the denim even as her kick had landed.
He bellowed in pain, finally lost his hold on the wall, and hung for an instant by the claws in her jeans. Then
