Ash could hear the men coming up the mountain, still calling to each other. Their voices were sounding winded now and they were stopping frequently to catch their breath. Ash had no choice but to wait until Tommy caught his breath, too. It was impossible for him to carry the boy along terrain this steep; he needed his cooperation.
“Are you ready?” Ash asked.
Jack breathed deeply, exaggerating his condition.
“Not yet,” he panted. “I’m so tired.”
Ash looked uncertainly at the boy, then back down the mountain.
“Okay,” he said. “But hurry.”
“I can’t breathe,” Jack panted. He was not certain if he had seen a man at the bottom of the cliff or not, but clearly there were men coming up the mountain behind them. Jack knew that running away would do him no good; the big man would catch him in a second and Jack was afraid of tumbling down the rocky slope. His only chance was to stall for time and he did not have to feign very much; he was genuinely exhausted. He resisted the urge to look back down the cliff to see if the man was really there.
From a distance of six inches the iron pyrite in the rocks looked fuzzily pink. Becker eased his way upwards, his face close to the stone, his vision focused only as far away as his next handhold. Under normal circumstances, it was a climb he would never undertake without equipment. He needed a hammer and pitons to build himself a ladder in the rock, a safety rope to keep a slip from becoming a fatal fall to the bottom. But these were not normal circumstances. He climbed faster than he knew was safe, but the result of delay seemed worse than the danger of a fall.
There were no ledges to sit on, no rifts in the rock wide enough for him to secure himself, no place to rest, no grips firm enough for him to even lean out from the wall and look upwards. He could not plan his ascent any further than one set of holds at a time because he could see no further up with his face so close to stone. He could not hear anything over the sound of his own breathing. He dared not look down to see how far he had come; he could not look up to see how far he had to go. Fingers scrabbling above him to find a ridge of rock that would hold his weight, toes seeking for the tiny outcroppings his fingers had left, he inched his way upwards.
Becker tried to pause to ease his aching muscles, but it required more energy to hang there on three fingers and a toe than to keep moving upwards. Meanwhile, the part of his mind not concentrating on the climb was racing. If Lamont was the man from the motel, and Becker was convinced that he was, then the woman who was with him, the nurse, was involved too. His idea of searching for the uniform left in a laundry was not a bad one, after all. He remembered the motorist’s description of the woman who had been driving the car from which Lamont emerged. “Charming,” the man had called her. A woman who could make a man think she was charming after a few seconds of talk at a roadblock. The woman at the motel had worked like that, leaping into a conversation without preamble, as if she had known a man all her life. It had to be the same woman, and she conned us both. Bicker realized. Diverted us both, took our minds off of our business almost immediately. She did it to me by flirting, Becker thought, remembering his sexual reaction to brushing against her in the motel room. And she distracted Karen by using Jack, by both flattering her and suggesting she was an unfit mother all at once. She put us both off balance and kept us there. Mentally, he cursed himself. Karen had to be told; she had to be warned whom she was looking for-and how dangerous she was. But there was no way to do it now.
His left arm began to go into spasm, the bicep jerking wildly from the unremitting strain. Becker released the fingers of that hand, letting the arm hang at his side as he pressed closer to the rock, trying to merge with it so that he could cling with face and chest and hip.
“We have to go now,” Ash said. He had been peering down the mountain toward his invisible pursuers for the last several minutes, his face thrust forward as if he could see them that much sooner.
“I can’t,” Jack said, still panting.
“We have to,” Ash said.
“I’m too tired,” Jack insisted, shaking his head, then dropping it between his knees. “I just can’t. Honest.”
Ash looked back down the mountain, bewildered. The climbers had become silent, but he knew they were getting close.
“We have to,” Ash repeated.
“Can’t… ”
Ash grabbed Jack under the arm and pulled the boy to his feet. Jack sat again as if his legs could not hold him. With a trace of annoyance. Ash lifted the boy again and swung him around so that he rode piggyback, leaving Ash’s arms free. Ash took his first tentative steps along the crest of the mountain with the boy on his back.
Becker was falling, but his body hadn’t submitted to gravity yet. He had reached the top. He could see it even with his face against the rock, the horizon hovering tauntingly just one more reach above him. But it was a reach he could not make. As he lifted his left foot to hip level to give himself the purchase to push up for the final grasp, the thin ridge of rock crumbled under his weight and his left leg swung down uselessly. His bloody fingers were barely holding on as it was and his feet had no way to move higher to relieve the weight. He hung two feet from safety, clinging to sheer stone with two fingers on one hand, three on the other, and a toehold for his right foot that was more wish than security. There was no way to change position without falling, no way to ascend without plummeting down forty feet to the waiting granite below. His fingers began to dance with cramps, then his biceps. It was a matter of seconds, Becker realized, before the spasming of his own muscles jerked him right off the mountain.
It was then he saw the foot before his face. Lamont stood above him along the crest, staring down, his mouth open in wonder.
“Who are you?” Lamont asked.
“Help me,” Becker said.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to fall. Help me.”
Jack’s head appeared over the big man’s shoulder and he gaped wide-eyed.
“Help him,” Jack said.
“We have to go,” said Lamont.
“Please!” Becker cried. His right foot slipped off its tiny ridge, forced back by the twist of his body as he looked straight up at Lamont. Both arms and fingers were jerking wildly.
Jack slid off Ash’s back and reached down for Becker, but his arm was too short. Jack tugged at Ash’s pant leg, imploring him to help. Slowly, uncertain what to do. Ash knelt and reached down and grabbed Becker’s shirt collar. He pulled him upwards, then caught one of his flailing arms and lifted him onto the crest of the mountain.
Becker sprawled forward onto the ground, his arms splayed out to either side. Still spasming, they flopped like landed fish.
“You hurt yourself,” Ash said, looking at Becker’s bleeding fingers.
“My arms,” Becker moaned. “Rub my arms.”
“We have to help him,” Jack said. The boy began massaging one of Becker’s twitching biceps.
“Harder,” Becker said, gritting his teeth against the pain.
“We have to go,” Ash said, but he took the other arm, watched what Jack was doing, and imitated it.
“Harder, harder.”
Becker’s whole body began to jerk as the tension of the climb took its toll on his legs and his back as well as his hands and arms. The spasms rocked him, doubled him in pain, made him convulse so violently he threatened to roll back over the cliff.
Jack sat on his back, digging his hands into his bicep, then his leg. Ash followed the boy’s lead, trying to bring the spasms under control.
A voice rang out from below them, startling in its clarity and closeness. The pursuers were coming on. Ash stared down the mountain. He still could not see them, but the nearness of the voices frightened him.
