Cough; clearing of her throat, then words tightly strung as on wires: 'Fuck off, kid. I won't answer again.'
He saw a movement in the grass ten meters from the ditch. He did not see the sentries, but knew they would soon be in sight. She made no further response to his pleas and, galvanized by a masochistic urge to see her once more, he made his way to the tallest of nearby trees.
The sun's afterglow at his back, Quantrill strained to locate his lover and tormentor from his perch high in the tree. Then he saw her crawling toward the ditch. She was in a coverall, face down, dragging her legs. A dark stain had spread from above her waist to her thighs. Twice she paused, racked by coughs that she fought against. Once she spat, and in the bronze afterlight he could see that it was dark with blood. His mouth was open to shout when he realized that the sentries were approaching.
Abby must have heard them too. She lay full-length, hands pressed over her mouth. Quantrill suddenly saw himself as an obvious large bulk which he could not entirely hide behind the tree trunk. He could not climb down unobtrusively, dared not drop, was motionless with anticipation and fear.
The men, hardly beyond their teens, talked as they paced the perimeter, carrying stubby carbines in unmilitary fashion. '… don't give a shit what they say,' the taller one was griping; 'I bet these goddam coveralls aren't much protection in the open. I bet—'
'Hold it!' The other grasped his arm, swung his carbine up and stared into the grass away from Quantrill.
'Just a dog barking,' said the tall one.
'I know a cough when I — there,' he exulted. For all her best efforts to muffle it, Abby's spasm came again. The stocky youth swept his arm around to suggest a flanking maneuver. Quantrill heard safeties clicking off. Both men moved away from him, closing in on the prone Abby, and Quantrill could not make himself move.
She played dead. 'Told you I hit somebody out here 'while ago,' the tall one crowed as they stood over the motionless form. 'Turn him over, Al.'
The stocky Al toed at Abby's ribcage, then pressed hard and sprang back at her thin scream of pain. “It's a cunt,' he shouted.
'Work detail,' she moaned; 'I was on work detail!' Now she sobbed, trying to roll over, jerking with agony. 'Help me—'
'Sheeeit,' said Al.
'Why'n't you call when we come up, then,' asked the other.
'She's the one got outa the shops today,' Al concluded. 'They won't like knowin' you only managed to wing 'er.' They talked louder as Abby's sobs increased, her pleas only a noise to be overcome.
The tall one nodded, stepped up close and readied his own carbine. 'I can fix that; it don't make much noise.'
'Naw, you'd leave powder burns. More questions,' said Al. 'C'mon.'
They left Abby, walking backward, and Quantrill developed an instant's scenario in which he would reach her, somehow get her over the fence during the next half-hour, then to a doctor. He gasped when Al, playing out his own fanciful game, snapped the carbine up and fired a burst from ten meters.
Abby Drummond screamed only once; louder than the hissing muffled staccato of gunfire, not loud enough to be heard across the meadow. Her body rolled with the impacts, came to a final rest in the relaxation of death. 'That's how you do it,' Al snickered, patting his carbine. 'Let's get a move on, Wally. We'll report at the end of the shift like it wasn't nothin' to be excited about.'
Wally followed Al, looking back at their victim. 'You're just plain bad-ass,' he said admiringly as they swaggered off.
Chapter Thirty-Three
When Quantrill's shock and fear turned to rage, he was able to control his body enough to climb down from the tree. Now he knew that Abby had paid twice for trying to make the rendezvous, realized her desperate valor in repulsing him; saw the pitiless logic that had compelled her. He did not see his own frozen helpless apartheid as survival, but instead as plain cowardice. He refused to dwell on the moment of her death. That had happened a long time ago; what mattered now was the immediate future. He could drive the Chevy, but where? Local fallout was a long-term worry. His most pressing worry now was one he had nurtured from early childhood.
In the interplay between Quantrill's intellect and his will crowded a hierarchy of motives. His intellect would not have risked death for revenge, or for personal gain, or for the sheer hell of it. Very well then: his will offered the motive most effective on youths of the south and southwest: the stinging goad of the white feather. He had stood by and watched inert while horrors had been inflicted. Only direct action would set things right.
Quantrill had not yet developed the subtlety to seek the roots of corruption; he sought only to prune its branches. At some point between self-accusation and his return from the Chevy he had become a killer. He had no revolver, no experience, truly no white-hot anger. He had more lethal weapons: unshakable resolve and a talent for improvising.
He filled the big water jug from the Chevy's camper stove tank, filled the half-liter squeeze bottle from that, tested its range. He chose a small tree near the fence and, with his collapsible camp saw, cut it more than halfway through. The lights from the delta mooring dispelled the night just enough for him to recognize the two forms that passed once more before he was ready.
He heaved the contents of the jug through the fence, wiped his hands dry on grass, lay down in the shrubbery near enough to touch the fence links. Now his muscle tone was that of a young cat lying in wait. He would remain still until his quarry passed so that the first glimmer of his revenge would not be seen.
The two sentries were not talking, merely plodding their path, as they stepped onto damp matted grass. “Whatthefuck is this,' said Wally, stopping, his words masking the rasp of Quantrill's stove lighter.
Al did not answer in words, but in a howl as the stove fuel ignited, a line of flame racing through the fence and along the path underfoot. Qu an trill was already spraying more fuel from his squeeze bottle onto Al's head and shoulders, his target illuminated by the blazing grass.
Wally jumped to one side. He might have saved himself had he not stood petrified in astonishment as Al flailed and slapped at his blazing hair. He never saw the stream of fluid that played up his back, barely had time to feel its volatile wetness before he too was a lambent torch in the night.
Quantrill did not wait to see how thorough was his handiwork but raced to his campsaw and, aided by the light of a growing grass fire, made a dozen feverish passes through the sawcut in ten seconds. The tree cracked like a rifle. Quantrill tossed his saw over the fence, hurled his pack over after it, then scrambled up the leaning tree trunk and rode it as it fell across the barbed wire.
By now the meadow was ablaze, doubtless a beacon to many eyes. Quantrill did not realize yet that the flames were high enough to hide his next moves, and opted for the saw instead of his cleaver. The tall Wally was whimpering, trying with dull single-mindedness to get out of the remnant of his coverall. QuantriU's flying kick caught him in the groin, sent him sprawling. With one foot in the tall man's chest, Quan-trill needed only a single pass with the saw.
Al was another matter. “I can't see, can't see ohjeez,' he mewled as Quantrill found the carbine. The man was stumbling away from the heat waves, falling, running again, still on fire, and Quantrill made a lightning decision. Al — what was left of him — might be a better diversion alive than dead. Quantrill grabbed his pack, ran in a crouch to something that lay spread-eagled near the drainage ditch.
He dragged the thing into the ditch with him, took an interminable thirty seconds to gets its sticky coverall off, found that it fitted him better than it had someone else. Two minutes after the first flame had kindled Quantrill was sprinting in the ditch toward the maintenance shops wearing a coverall, pack slung over one arm, a carbine and a camp saw in the other hand.
A man raced by without seeing him, yelling. Quantrill saw elongated shadows bobbing near and dived headlong on dry gravel. As he scrambled to his feet, snatching at a carbine he had never fired, an older man saw him, tossed him a blanket. 'Go on, you sumbitch,' the man shouted, 'fight that fire with the rest of us!' Then the man was running, arms full of blankets, while more men ran by. No women; somehow that figured.
