Duggai came around the pit and jammed the revolver against Jay’s neck.
Then he spoke. His voice was matter-of-fact. “All right Captain, show yourself.”
There was nothing to do but obey.
He walked forward in slow defeat and tossed the brass knives to the ground and waited for Duggai to do whatever he intended to do. Mackenzie’s mind had gone blank now: he thought of nothing-he only watched.
“Good try, Captain. Real good.”
Jay pulled his head around toward Mackenzie, showing his tears. The fists at Jay’s sides were clenched like a child’s.
“You think I want to shoot you?” Duggai said. “That ain’t the way this works. Get on over to the truck now.” The Magnum came away from Jay’s neck and waggled toward the camper.
He wasn’t sure his legs would bear him. He staggered toward the truck: all muscular control was gone and his consciousness served only as a vessel for the reception of impressions. There was no will.
Duggai said, “Now strip.”
Mackenzie sat on the tail bumper of the truck and pulled the moccasins off. He had trouble untying the bow knot in the stiffened thong of the breechclout. When it came off he saw distractedly that it had left a deep red welt around his waist.
Duggai still had the coathanger wire with which he’d trussed them before. “I guess you know the drill by now. Right wrist.”
Mackenzie went blank then and was not aware of anything until he came half awake in the stifling box of the closed camper. He was sitting where he had sat before and Jay was on the cot beside him and they were tied to the truck hands and feet as they had been before. They were not gagged this time. Nor were they clothed. The truck was a furnace and it pitched him hard against his wire lashings but he didn’t feel the pain. He felt nothing at all. After a brief semiconscious interval he passed out.
26
He had been in a dark place. The sudden daylight whip-lashed his eyes. He was aware of it when he was dragged from the truck and pitched to the ground on flank and shoulder and the back of his head: aware but as if it were in a nightmare-divorced from physical sensation. A boot in his kidney rolled him over on his face and he knew the texture of hard ground against his cheek. His eyes were opened to slits-he saw the blazing earth, out of focus. His wrists and ankles were freed. Footsteps tramped away: heavy boots treading hard. The mesh and whine of an engine. Cluttering, it drove away. Then there was silence.
He rolled over and the pebbled ground was agony against the charred flesh of his back. That was what woke him: the pain.
The sun was straight overhead. It filled the sky, blinding him. His head lolled to the side. He saw the desolate earth-sand, clay, rock, scrub, cactus. A flat plain stretching miles. Dry weathered mountains. Pale haze of sky.
How long had he lain unconscious in the noon sun?
The rage to survive pried its way into him. It propelled him across the desert on elbows and knees to the shade of a bush. His arrival spooked a tiny lizard: it scooted away.
Dig, Mackenzie.
No thought of past or future; no awareness of the cause of his presence here. He thought only of life. He searched the ground and found a stone and began to scrape unthinkingly at the soil.
Dusk; but the intolerable heat lingered. He lay on his belly, his cheek on his bicep-the arm had gone to sleep and tingled when he stirred.
He dragged a hand across his mouth and felt the prickly beard and mustache. His eyes had no moisture in them: he lifted himself and peered through painful wedges.
The empty land stretched away in all directions. He turned a full circle. It seemed he had seen this landscape before. Was it familiarity or only the fraud of deja vu?
The rusty brain began to function after a fashion. Duggai dumped me out here. Alone. Dumped Jay somewhere else. So that we can’t help each other. Punishment for our attempted escape. We’ll die quickly now-Duggai must be losing patience.
Shirley-Earle. What’s he done with them?
What difference does it make?
Lie back, Mackenzie. You may as well die fast.
He blinked rapidly, trying to moisten his eyes. Yawned. It worked a bit; he was able to keep them open. In the fading light he inspected the horizons.
In the west the twilight silhouetted a sawtooth skyline he knew he’d never seen before. In the south nothing-flats fading away into darkness. To the north some nondescript mountain clumps, nothing to distinguish them. To the east-he gazed that way a long time. Something nudged his memories. It was only a range of hills five or six miles away but it held his scowling attention.
It took the sluggish mind a long time to work it out. There-the summit dotted with boulders; there beside it the adjoining summit that sloped up to a flat crown and fell away steeply on the far side. The angle of view made the contours different, foreshortened them; but he looked again-finally he was certain. That was the place where Duggai had his camp. Swing around to the south and it would assume the shape of a human foot. The one beside it was the summit that had resembled a hogan-studded village.
It stood to reason. Duggai wanted to keep his victims in range.
So he brought me all the way back.
It meant Shirley’s camp was east-by-southeast from here. Four or five miles.
The burned skin of his back had been tightened by the sun until it felt as crisp as fried bacon: every movement was shockingly painful. His buttocks were too raw to sit on and the sole of his right foot had been exposed as well because of the position in which he’d fallen.
He stood on one foot in his cramped foxhole and closed his eyes tight: he had to fasten his will like steel hoops around his emotions-he had to drive fear and pain from him.
Then he climbed out of the hole and began to walk.
In an ungainly manner he lurched across the desert without thought. He was no longer rational. He simply hated. Any object excluded all others from the space it occupied: there wasn’t room for anything else: his hate filled every crevice. It kept him alive.
Dimly it occurred to him there was no campfire ahead. But he kept going.
His feet were puffy and splitting. He trod pebbles and spines. Moonrise and a tracery of clouds behind him gave a hint of time’s passage. He walked toward the moon.
After a while he realized he’d been talking out loud-he didn’t know how long he’d been doing it; he heard the steady lackluster monotone, rhythmic blasphemous oaths-a dark fugue of profanity, a dirge. He didn’t silence himself. The metered curses were like a drummer’s pace.
Intransigent rigidity kept him upright and moving. He had no objective and no defined purpose-journey for its own sake. He knew the objective would make itself known to him when its time came.
Thirst swelled his tongue. Now and then he stumbled. He moved slowly but he moved. The moon climbed; its light changed the hills-their shadows settled and shifted; now and then he looked up at the summits and marked his progress by the disappearance of another star behind the hills.
The prints he left behind were darker now: his feet were bleeding.
From a low well of instinctive information came the realization that the organism had to be sustained-that self-destruction was not an acceptable answer. He stopped.
He knelt at the altar of a barrel cactus with a stone in his hands: it was large and heavy, requiring both hands and the remaining strength in his arms to lift it overhead. He slammed it down, crushing the top of the cactus, pulverizing it. Gently with his fingers he plucked the big hooked spines out of the mess. Then he scooped up cupped handfuls of pulp and sucked the juice from them.
He broke fronds off a creosote bush until he had an armful of them. He carried them twenty feet to a scrubby manzanita and began to wrench small branches off the red-barked bush, twisting and tearing them. He was able to strip lengths of bark off the branches and he used these cords of bark to bind the creosote fronds to the soles of his feet. The small oval leaves of greasewood were brittle but they crushed quickly underfoot and the fronds filled with dusty clay as he walked, cushioning the ravaged feet: the fronds flapped like snowshoes and every so often he would pick-up a jagged pebble which he would have to remove.