ground, gleaming metal leaping at them, a thing gone berserk, gaining in spite of the uneven terrain.
Dust choked his lungs, bringing on a spasm of coughing, as he dragged the faltering, panting Jana to the edge of the arroyo. It was some one hundred and fifty yards wide and forty feet deep at this point, with steep, layered shale walls that were treacherous but scalable, extending away on both sides, in both directions. Boulders and ironwood and mesquite littered its sandy bed, and a few yards beyond, below where the rail line crawled up to the edge of the wash, twisted chunks and lengths of rusted, disintegrating steel, sun-bleached bits of rotted wood that had once been ties formed heaps and piles and pyramids the width of the jagged incision—all that remained of a long-collapsed, long-forgotten trestle.
Lennox had the fleeting, disjointed image of a massive, grotesque display of Pop Art sculpture, created by the forces of nature long before man learned the dubious aesthetics to be found in the arrangement of junk and scrap metal. And then, without thinking any further, his ears filled with the rumbling, rattling howl of the cruiser, he turned Jana’s face to his chest and took her over the edge.
Twelve
Thirty yards from where he had seen the girl and Lennox start down into the arroyo, Vollyer was forced to abandon the patrol car. The ground was too rough here, dotted with too many rocks and thickly grown vegetation, and the glare of the rising sun through the windshield was hellish on his eyes.
He scrambled out of the car, not hearing the demanding voice half garbled in static on the radio, not thinking about anything but the job he had to do. He had the Remington clenched in his right hand, and he pulled at his coat pocket with his left for the .38; he was taking no chances now, there was time, but very little of it, this particular game had gone as far as it could go.
He ran in a drunken wobble to the arroyo and ducked his head against his shoulder to clear away some of the astringent sweat, and then looked down into the fissure. He couldn’t see them. Hiding, they were hiding; if they were still on the move he would have been able to pick them out easily from up here; there were plenty of places of concealment at the immediate bottom of the wash, but once you got fifty yards on either side you couldn’t run very far without exposing yourself. And they hadn’t had time to make it all the way across, to scale the bank on the opposite side. No, they were down there, all right, just down there, hiding, and it was only a matter of seconds now.
Vollyer transferred the Remington to his left hand, holding both guns up and away from his body, and dropped into a sitting position with his legs splayed out and pointing at an angle into the arroyo. He went down the bank that way, like a plump and begrimed child going down a long slide, using his right hand and the heels of his shoes to restrain momentum. A few feet from the bottom, an edge of rock bit painfully into the back of his left thigh, opening a deep gash. causing him to limp slightly when he struggled finally into an upright position on the dusty floor. The Remington back in his right hand, he moved forward, slowly, exhorting his eyes in mute viciousness to mend so that he could see clearly, exhorting in vain.
Something moved, a quick stirring, ahead and to his left. Vollyer reeled around a steel-draped boulder, and the long rattled tail of a sidewinder swayed into the dimness at its base. Cautious of his footing, he backed away and crossed to where a stunted smoke tree offered possible cover. Nothing. A conglomerate of twisted steel. Nothing. He stopped, ducking his face into his shoulder again, and then squinted with myopic intensity on all sides of him. Nothing.
A high, flat-topped rock, with bonelike fragments of bleached wood strewn at its base, beckoned nearby. That was what he needed, a high vantage point in this proximity; if he could scale that rock, he might be able to locate their place of concealment. He went toward it, painfully, watchfully, listening to the ragged sound of his own breathing. It was otherwise very quiet. But they were close, he could sense their nearness; a tic jumped spasmodically along his right temple, and another pulled the left side of his mouth down crookedly.
They were very, very close ...
Thirteen
The running was over.
Crouched with Jana in a right angle formed by a canted boulder and a mound of crumbling debris, Lennox knew that with sharp, crystal clarity. He could not run any more; he simply could not run any more. Whenever a crisis had arisen in his life, he had run away from it, he had taken the easy way out—as a child, as a teen-ager, as an adult, never standing firm, never meeting the crisis head-on, just letting the panic take possession of him, welcoming it, never fighting it. And each time he had run away—unnecessarily, foolishly—he had lost a little more of himself, abrogated a little more of his manhood. He knew now that this was what Jana had seen in him, what she had been trying to tell him last night; at long last he, too, was facing his weakness, just as she had faced hers, coming to terms with himself, understanding himself, realizing that if it had not been for Jana and for the ordeal which was now reaching its culmination, he would have been irreclaimably destroyed by the poisons of his fear.
But now, if he had to die, he could die as a man, and he was very calm. He had felt the exorcism of the panic, the need and the capacity for flight, when he and Jana reached the bottom of the arroyo moments earlier. They could have tried to make it across to the far bank, they could have kept running and they could have died running, but with the understanding, he had instead brought Jana here, to the first concealment he had found. It was here they would make their final stand, if it was to be their final stand; he would fight, somehow, in some way, he would make a fight of it.
He looked at Jana and their eyes met, and he knew she was with him, all the way, unquestioning, undemanding, seeing the resolution in him and taking strength from it. Together, her eyes seemed to be saying. In life or in death, together.
He did not want her to die. He wanted her to live even more than he wanted to live himself—the first truly unselfish commitment of Jack Lennox to anything or anybody other than Jack Lennox—and anger rose in him, and hatred, cold and calculating, for the man-thing that thought of them not as human beings but merely as insensate objects, threats to his own warped existence. Lennox listened. Movement, soft, stealthy, coming from somewhere on the other side of the boulder, shoes sibilant on the sand, a deep wheezing of constricted breath. Jana heard it too, tensing slightly beside him, touching his arm. Lennox did not look at her; his full concentration was on the movement and the sounds beyond. Coming closer? Yes, closer, but not too close, not yet, there was still a minute or two.
A weapon, he had to have a weapon.
And he remembered the knifelike piece of granite.
His hand came up to touch his belt, where he had put the stone earlier—and it was gone. Damn, damn! It must have pulled free when the bullet skinned his side and he had fallen on the slope. He released a silent breath, passing his fingers over his split and puckered lips, looking around him, looking for another weapon, any weapon. His eyes touched small stones, a piece of decaying wood, an unwieldy section of rail—discarded them, moved on, restless, urgent, wanting something substantial, something heavy, something to throw, perhaps, or something sharp
and he saw the rusted splinter of steel.
It lay in the sand eight feet away from him, on open ground. Some two feet long, warped but otherwise unbent, it was a dull, cankered brown in the sunlight, its forward edge tapered into a point that appeared sharp, that appeared capable of penetrating flesh. Beside it was a long section of rail, the parent which had spawned it through metal fatigue or through impact in the collapse of decades past.
Lennox stared at the splinter, and he thought: Spear, it looks like some primitive spear, and there was a bitter irony in the association. Wasn’t what was happening here, this battle for survival, a primitive thing too—as old as man, as old as life itself?
He had to have that spear. He had to take the chance of going out there to get it. That two feet of slim oxidizing steel represented the last remaining thread of hope, the battle lance, and without it they were naked— there could be no battle.
He put his lips to Jana’s ear and breathed, “I’m going out after that piece of steel, stay here and keep down,” and then, because this was perhaps the final goodbye and there was the need, just this once, to put it into words,
