then rose unsteadily again and pissed on himself, the look of the dead, the lost, in his eyes.
“Not that you have any choices, but we’ll make it a real game,” the first one said, lifting a rifle from a pile of guns in the back of the Voyager and tossing it to Hilligan. His metallic head, a perfect replica of a human’s head in chrome, smiled. “We’ll only use these.” He turned his palm toward Hilligan, the threat of death held in check. “Agreed?”
Biting back useless rage and frustration, Hilligan nodded curtly.
The others had laughed, and they loaded into the vehicle and were gone, leaving their laughter behind, the laughter of tourists on holiday, having sport, packing picnic lunches from the ruins of Davidson, taking clothes and guns and food, leaving behind Hilligan screaming and the silent screams of a dead town.
~ * ~
And now it was time for the game to really begin.
They were getting tired and bored. He knew because their toys had begun to be abandoned: the tennis rackets, the golf clubs broken in two. Soon their minds would turn to bigger larks. The town of Lawrence was only five miles to the East. They would head there next. Where Anne was…and continue their fun from town to town, from city to city, until there was nothing left.
Something spat past Hilligan’s ear, pinged into the door of the Toyota.
“Shit,” Hilligan said.
Crouched behind the fender of the Corolla, he waited for another shot. Raising his head tentatively, he searched the desert with his binoculars. No shot came, and then he saw them: a retreating band of silver glints in the distance, just disappearing behind an outcropping of rock. A careful look at their wake showed the half-buried wreckage of the Plymouth Voyager, half-merged with the side of the rock wall.
For the first time in days, Hilligan smiled.
“Shit, we’re gonna win,” he said.
~ * ~
He spent the next hour packing and camouflaging the Toyota in a stand of live oaks. The only burden was Sparky’s food, an oversize box of dog biscuits, the only thing the dog recognized now and would eat, but he gladly strapped it to the top of his knapsack, cursing not the weight but the bulk. One somber, lost look from the dog made him bite the curses.
“Come on, pal.”
He set off at a brisk walk, the dog hesitating, then following mechanically behind, the sight of the dog biscuit box firing some barely connecting relay in his ruined brain.
After two hours, he badly missed the stuttering air conditioning of the Corolla. Salt sweat had nearly blinded him, but he kept on. The sun was like a sieve, arrowing heat down at him. Paradoxically, Sparky didn’t seem to mind; as long as the bright blue box with the hungry looking German Shepherd on it was in his eyesight, he marched resolutely in tow.
They passed the ruined Voyager at noon. It had been plowed deliberately into the side of the bluff and trashed; whatever hadn’t been taken was broken. The van was haloed in broken flashlights, dart games, ripped clothing, crushed miniature televisions, portable cassette decks. Nearby, carefully placed to seemingly view the wreckage, was a severed human head, which on closer inspection turned out to be that of Stern, the sporting goods store owner. He had been placed to view the destruction of his own robbed goods.
Hilligan kept walking.
At one o’clock he had to stop. He ate a sparse lunch, sipping at the water canteen instead of gulping, until his thirst was slacked. Sparky ate a dog biscuit, fighting the blurred mechanism of his mouth to work on it.
As Hilligan watched the dog slap his tongue tentatively at the shallow bowl of water, he heard the unmistakable crack of a rifle shot.
The dog tensed momentarily, then resumed drinking as if nothing had happened, completely ignoring the round hole in its left eye.
The dog drank, liquid dripping down its ruined face into its water bowl, and drank its own fluids until its body suddenly collapsed.
The dog shivered and lay still.
Hilligan was already half way up the side of the outcropping. He hoisted himself between two peaked rocks as another shot rang out below him. “Just had to make sure,
He took aim at the spot and there, in his sights, was a blinding chromium head.
He pulled the trigger and the head flared in a shower of metal and flesh fragments as the soft pink fleshy head exploded.
The rifle shot echoed, then the tranquility of the desert returned.
Cautiously, Hilligan returned to his pack and removed his binoculars. He climbed the hillock and scouted.
A mere mile ahead was the remainder of the band. They had stopped in the bare shade of a stunted stand of cottonwoods, waiting for their compatriot.
He hoped they had seen what had happened to their scout; and then knew they did because the three of them abruptly walked out into the sunlight, blinding him with the metallic brilliance of their heads.
When his eyes had adjusted, he saw that between them they had two weapons, one of which looked like an automatic rifle. The third carried an inappropriately small red pack, the kind children carry schoolbooks in, stuffed to overflowing; as Hilligan watched the other two tried to load it further until the one bearing the pack suddenly lashed out, knocking the other to the ground.
Hilligan put the high power binoculars down and tried to sight through the rifle, but they were too far away.
He returned to the desert floor, mounted his own pack, and moved on.
~ * ~
When he got to the cottonwoods, the bandits were long gone. A scatter of Ritz Crackers and empty juice cartons attested to their stupidity. He hoped the juice had gone down burning hot.
He went on.
He spotted them forty-five minutes later, as they moved into the low hills. On the other side of those hills was the town of Lawrence. They were moving fast, spread out, twenty or thirty yards between them.
Hilligan sprinted to the nearest rock outcropping, balancing his rifle carefully on the lip of the overhang, and caught the nearest in his finder. It was the weaponless one with the pack, standing at the limits of range. Carefully, using the rock to steady him, he pulled off a single shot, watching the bright metallic head shatter, scattering the sandy ground with cookies, plastic jars of peanut butter, and soft flesh.
The other two glanced around, then broke into a run.
Night was coming, and they had made it to the hills.
~ * ~
The stars were up. The Milky Way rose like a glowing band. The night was Moonless, but Hilligan could see his way by the blue glow of the Milky Way alone.
He saw with his ears as much as with his eyes. He thought of a novel he had been given by Anne after taking the job of Marshall in Davidson. It was one of the Leatherstocking Tales by Cooper. With the book, Anne had also given him a book by Mark Twain with an essay marked out in it about how lousy a storyteller Cooper was. According to Twain, most of the suspense in a Cooper novel developed when someone made noise by stepping on something while sneaking around. Someone was always stepping on something and giving themselves away.
Up ahead of Hilligan, someone stepped on something.
“Sorry, Twain, Cooper was right,” Hilligan muttered.
There was a line of jutting rocks ahead, threaded by a stony path. Hilligan crept to the first outcropping, avoiding any stepped-on somethings of his own.
He waited, and then there was another sound, very close.
Suddenly one of them appeared, the silvery luminescence of his head turning a mere yard from Hilligan.
It was the one with the automatic weapon.
Hilligan was quicker, and as a spatter of lead lined the rock wall to his right he pulled a shot out of his rifle and hit the other square in the chest.
The night flared and Hilligan briefly covered his eyes at the hissing explosion as the thing dropped its rifle,
