mamba.
“Let me be in time; please God, let me find him in time.” He heard it then. From beyond the crest of the next dune. The horror of the sound stopped him in mid-stride. It was a shrill giggling gibbering cry that sobbed into silence.
Johnny stood listening, panting wildly from his run.
It came again. The laughter of demons, excited, blood-crazy.
“They’ve got him.” Johnny flung himself at the soft slope of sand.
He reached the crest and looked down into the saucer-shaped arena formed by the crescent of the dune.
Benedict lay on his back. His white shirt was open to the waist.
The blue trousers of his suit were ripped and shredded, exposing his knees. One foot was a bloody lump of sock and congealed dirt.
The pair of hyenas had trampled a path in the sand around his body. They had been circling him for hours, while greed overcame their cowardice.
One hyena sat ten feet from him, squatting obscenely with its flat snakelike head lowered between humped shoulders. Brown and shaggy, spotted with darker brown, its round ears pricked forward, its black eyes sparkling with greed and excitement as it watched its mate.
The other hyena stood with its front paws on Benedict’s chest.
Its head was lowered, and its jaws were locked into Benedict’s face.
It was leaning back, bracing its paws on his chest, tugging viciously as it sought to tear off a mouthful of flesh. Benedict’s head was jerking and twitching as the hyena worried it. His legs were kicking weakly, and his hands fluttered on the sand like maimed white birds.
The flesh of his face tore. Johnny heard it distinctly in the utter silence of the desert evening. It tore with the soft sound of silk - and Johnny screamed.
Both hyenas bolted at the scream, scrambling over the far crest of the dune in horrible clownish panic, leaving Benedict lying with a bloody mask for a face.
Looking down at that face Johnny knew he could not kill him now, perhaps could never have killed him. He could not revenge himself on this broken thing with its ruined face and twisted mind.
He dropped on to his knees beside him, and loosened the flap of the knapsack with clumsy fingers.
Benedict’s one ear and cheek were hanging over his mouth in a thick flap of torn flesh. The teeth in the side of his jaw were exposed and the blood dribbled and spurted in fine needle jets.
Johnny tore the paper packaging off an absorbent dressing and with it pressed the flap back into place. Holding it there with the full pressure of his spread fingers. The blood soaked through the dressing, but it was slowing at the pressure.
“It’s all right, Benedict. I’m here now. You’ll be all right, he whispered hoarsely as he worked. With his free hand he stripped the packaging off another dressing, and substituted it neatly for the sodden one. He maintained the pressure on the clean dressing while he lifted Benedict’s head and cradled it in his lap.
“We’ll just dry this bleeding up, then we’ll give you a drink.” He reached into the first aid kit for a piece of cotton wool and tenderly began to clean the blood and sand from Benedict’s nostrils and lips.
Benedict’s strangled breathing eased a little but still whistled through the black lips. His tongue was swollen, filling his mouth like a fat purple sponge.
“That’s better,” Johnny muttered. Still without relaxing pressure on the compress dressing, he got the screw top off the water bottle.
Holding his thumb over the opening to regulate the flow, he let a drop of water fall into the dark dry pit of a mouth.
After another ten drops he propped the water bottle in the sand, and massage Benedict’s throat gently to stimulate the swallowing reflex.
The unconscious man gulped painfully.
“That’s my boy,” Johnny encouraged him, and began again feeding him a drop at a time, crooning softly as he did it.
“You’re going to be all right. That’s it, swallow it down.” It took him twenty minutes to administer half a pint of the warm sweet water, and by then the bleeding was negligible. Johnny reached into the kit again and selected two salt and two glucose tablets. He placed them in his own mouth and chewed them to a smooth thin paste then he bent over the mutilated face of the man he had sworn to kill and pressed his own lips against Benedict’s swollen dry lips. He injected the solution of salt and glucose into Benedict’s mouth, then straightened up and began again dripping the water.
When he had given Benedict another four tablets and half the contents of the water bottle, he stoppered it and returned it to the knapsack. He soaked the compress with bright yellow acriflavine solution, and bandaged it firmly into place. This was a more difficult task than he had anticipated and after a few abortive attempts he passed the bandage under the jaw an dover the eyes, swathing Benedict’s head completely except for the nose and mouth.
By this time the sun was on the horizon. Johnny stood up and stretched his back and shoulders as he watched the splendid gold and red death of another desert day.
He knew he was delaying his next decision. He reckoned it was five miles to where he had abandoned the Landrover in the gully. Five miles of hard going, a round trip of four hours - probably five in the dark. Could he leave Benedict here, get back to the vehicle, radio Cartridge Bay, and return to him?
Johnny swung round and looked up at the dunes. There was his answer. One of the hyenas was squatting on the top of a dune watching him intently. Hunger and the approach of night had made it unnaturally bold.
Johnny shouted an obscenity and made a threatening gesture towards it. The hyena jumped up and loped over the back of the ridge.
“Moon rise at eight tonight. I’ll rest until then - and we’ll go in the cool,” he decided and lay down on the sand beside Benedict. The lump in his back pocket prodded him, and he took the diamond out and held it in his hand.
In the darkness the hyenas began to cackle and shriek, and when the moon rose it silhouetted their evil shapes on the ridge above the saucer.
“Come on, Benedict. We’re going home. There are a couple of nice policemen who want to talk to you.“Johnny lifted him into a sitting position, draped Benedict’s arm over his shoulder and came up under him in a fireman’s lift.
Johnny stood like that a moment, sinking ankle deep into the soft sand, dismayed at the dead weight of his burden.
“We’ll rest every thousand paces,” he promised himself, and began plodding up the dune, counting softly to himself, but knowing that he would not be able to perform that lift again without a rock shelf or some support, against which to brace himself He had to make it out of the sandhills in one go.
“ - Nine hundred and ninety nine. One thousand.” He was counting in his mind only. Husbanding his strength, bowed under the weight, his shoulders and back locked in straining agony, the sand hampering each pace. “Another five hundred. We’ll go another five hundred.” Behind him padded the two hyenas. They had gobbled the bloody dressings that
Johnny had left in the saucer, and the taste of blood was driving them hysterical.
“Right. just another five hundred.” And Johnny began the third count, and then the fourth, and the fifth.
Johnny felt the drip, drip on the back of his legs.
Benedict’s head-down position had restarted the bleeding, and the hyenas warbled and wailed at the smell.
“Nearly there, Benedict. Stick it out. Nearly there.” The first cluster of moon-silver rocks floated towards them and Johnny reeled in amongst them and collapsed face forward. It was a long time before he had regained enough strength to shift Benedict’s weight off his shoulders.
He readjusted Benedict’s bandages, and fed him a mouthful of water which he swallowed readily. Then Johnny washed down a handful of salt and glucose tablets with two carefully rationed swallows from the water bottle. He rested for twenty minutes by his watch, then using one of the rocks as an anchor he got Benedict across his shoulder again and they went on.
