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.
At intervals of two hundred or three hundred feet the manzanita lacings would break and he would replace them: he crossed the desert from manzanita to manzanita.
The flats were never flat: it was uphill and downhill always. He would lose sight of the hills for a while and climb to a height from which they were visible and descend through another blind trough.
At normal walking pace a man could cover three miles in the space of an hour. Mackenzie had started walking when darkness came. The moon had risen. Midnight had come and gone. He kept walking. Perhaps he had crossed three or four miles.
There was urgency but it wasn’t the kind that would be assuaged by hurry: if he burned his machinery out too soon it would defeat the purpose. The pace had to be steady but slow enough to conserve the pittance of fuel remaining in the engine. His speed across the desert was that of an infant just learning to walk. But it was enough.
The configuration of the hills became familiar and this informed him he was near the camp. He didn’t know whether he would find anyone alive there. He had no expectations. It was something he had to do; he did it without curiosity.
He found his way to a point of ground a few yards higher than its surroundings. From here he examined the land ahead of him in order to locate the camp: it had to be nearby.
It took time and minute examination but finally he placed the site off to his right. He could see the outline of a ridge and knew it was the high ground over which he had crawled the night he’d crept out of the camp.
Therefore the camp lay beneath it just out of his range of vision: one hump intervened.
He went that way, lurching from foot to burning foot.
Perhaps half an hour later he came up out of a shallow dip and crossed a rising wave of earth and saw the familiar slope before him. Down there to the left they had strung their jackrabbit snares; a bit above and to the right he identified the paired clumps of brush that marked the ravine where they’d dug the still. The ravine snaked up toward the top—that was the route he’d taken when he’d left.
He still had several hundred yards to cross. It was too soon to make out human figures in the moonlight unless they moved. He glanced at the mountain foot: was Duggai watching him now?
He came up into the camp on his tottering raw feet. A twinge of alarm quivered in some distant part of him. He was certain he was going to find them both dead.
There were no snares along the jackrabbit run. He climbed. The pit of the solar still was still there where they’d dug it in the floor of the ravine but the plastic sheet was gone. He went across the ravine toward the foxholes they’d dug: he could see the dark rectangular outlines like shadows on the ground.
The trenches were empty.
He blinked very slowly and looked all around him. There on the ocotillo they’d hung jackrabbit strips to dry. The solitary barrel cactus they’d pulped. The manzanita they’d half destroyed to make splints for Earle’s leg.
Something drew his bleary attention. He moved to one side to get a better view past the greasewood clump.
He found them there.
27
They lay naked, the three of them curled up very close to one another; at first he thought they were dead. Then he saw Jay stir.
Jay?
Jay shot bolt upright with tight expectant eyes, ready to cringe. Then recognition changed the skeletal features behind the dark beard. “My God.…”