Doc groaned, and I turned to help Wyatt support him. “We’re almost out of it,” Wyatt urged.
Doc smiled, weakly. “I’m going to make that fellow make me two cups of tea later.”
“I’ll drink one of them myself,” Wyatt laughed.
Ten minutes later, Cowboy called a halt. We had left the Palmera Mountains behind. Before us stretched a shimmering table of sand, low brush, and straight, heat-hazed highway.
“One swallow of water,” Pettis ordered. As we drank he continued, “We have to make a decision. Either we pick up the pace and make it to the base before nightfall, or we spend the night here.”
“Where?” Wyatt asked.
“That mountain man’s cave. First, we’d have to find it, then fortify it…and even then I don’t know how good we’d be fighting them off once the Moon rises.”
The thought of the grisly place, piles of human bones marking the stranger’s treachery, turned my stomach. The others must have felt the same. The vote was quick and unanimous.
“We have to continue,” Doc remarked. “Anything else would be madness.”
“You heard what I said about picking up the pace,” Pettis said sternly.
“I heard you.”
Pettis studied our faces. “All right. Doc, take another swallow of water. I’m going to set the pace, and we stick to it. Agreed?”
Everyone nodded.
Pettis turned and walked.
His pace was grueling. After five minutes, we were all gasping. But then, gradually, we settled into a rhythm and our breathing evened out. Wyatt, deviously, began to whistle the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai. When no one joined him, he quipped, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you folks. You’d think you’d just been through some sort of catastrophe.”
Doc smiled thinly; he had grown pale once more and was beginning to lag behind.
As I called out for Pettis’s attention, Doc fell and didn’t get up.
“Oh…Lord,” he gasped.
I knelt beside him. He had turned paste-white. I tried to open his collar but he pushed me away. “Look,” he said. He held out his right arm and turned it over, showing me a long, deep red scratch.
“Jesus, Doc,” I said.
“When did it happen?” Pettis said evenly, suddenly standing beside me.
Doc’s eyes were unfocused, but then cleared. “The first rush they made. I thought it…hadn’t broken the skin.” He groaned, indicating the pencil-point-thin line of blood along the length of the wound. “I suppose I was wrong.”
“We can carry him—” Wyatt began.
“You know damn well what’s going to happen to him,” Cowboy cut in. “All of us do.” He turned to Doc. “What do you want me to do?”
“I…don’t want to become one of them,” he rasped.
“Are you sure?”
“Do you think it might be…” He paused, groaning with pain before continuing. “Do you think it might be interesting to undergo the change? I’m doing it now, Cowboy, and it’s not pleasant.” He turned to Proctor. “It’s your show now, my friend. Make sure they do it right.”
“I’ll make sure,” Wyatt said.
“Please make it quick, Cowboy,” Doc groaned.
“The rest of you keep walking,” Cowboy commanded.
“Cowboy—” I said.
“Please go,” Doc said.
We had gone ten yards when I heard Doc say, almost cheerfully, “I wish you would have made me that cup of tea—” and there was a burst of gunfire and then silence.
A few moments later Cowboy had caught up with us. “Let’s go,” he said, walking past us, returning to the pace he had set.
His voice was hard, but he couldn’t hide from us the tears that had tracked his cheeks, like water in a dry desert.
CHAPTER 22
A Field of Light
Night was falling when we saw the lights.
For the last hour it had seemed that we must have gone in the wrong direction, or that our estimate of distance had been in error, or that the desert had swallowed everything including Kramer Air Force Base. We had walked forever. The desert had begun to cool down, but the waves of heat were merely replaced by waves of anxiety, an oppressive feeling that our ascension of the next rise must produce a view of Kramer or we would all go mad. Even Cowboy had begun to show doubt and fatigue. By my own estimate, he hadn’t slept more than a few hours since I had met him. His pace had slackened. When we topped a bluff and discovered that only scrub, rocks, and sand lay before us like the Devil’s table I feared he might collapse.
“Goddamn, it should be there by now.”
After a pause, Wyatt said, carefully, “Maybe it is.”
He pointed, and we all stared across the sandy tableland to the horizon. I saw nothing—and then, the desert darkened imperceptively, and the lights became visible, and Kramer Air Force Base suddenly spread itself across the valley floor below us in the distance like a wash of jewels.
“Jesus, there it is,” I said.
“They’ve got the generators working!” Cowboy said.
He was gazing like a child seeing his first Christmas tree.
“Goddamn, ole Jimmy really did it!” Wyatt shouted.
The three of us, hypnotized by hope, began to run toward the still-distant lights. But suddenly, Pettis came to his senses, calming us to a brisk walk.
“It’s going to get dark fast,” he said, “and we’ve still got another couple of miles to go. I suggest you keep your weapons ready.”
We were moving through a series of low hills, which eventually rolled down to the long flat plate of desert that held Kramer Air Force Base and the miles of shuttle runway backing it.
We walked, occasionally passing a pyramid of bones. It got dark. The stars popped into view overhead. You could feel that the night-Earth no longer belonged to man.
And as we topped the rise that would lead us down to the base, the night gave up the wolves to us.
The Moon began to rise.
They were just in front of us. When the Moon crested the horizon they let up a singular wail of love and blood lust that froze us in place, even as we could see an unattainable grail, our destination, below us.
At that frozen spot in time and space, three sights commingled: first, the magnetic, almost blinding spotlights inside the base, which bathed the most beautiful sight I had ever beheld—the shuttle Lexington, seemingly intact and pointing ruthlessly at the sky atop a monstrous booster. Second, my eye was drawn to the Lexington’s target—the Moon itself, its evil gray light now heartily breaking the horizon beyond the base. And third, a sight that momentarily stopped my heart—there, covering the last hills we had yet to pass like a massive growth on the land and mountains, were thousands of wolves, ranked along a thick line of attack, uncountable numbers of bone piles among them, their mad howling, like that of Zulu warriors, serenading their rising homeland and the enemies they sought to annihilate.
At their back, unnoticed, we stood transfixed, until Pettis finally woke us from our stupor.
“Get behind the rocks,” he whispered fiercely, pulling us off the road into hiding.
“What in hell are we going to do?” Wyatt said.
“We’ll have to circle wide of them, or find a hole in their line farther down, away from the road.”
“And then what?”
“Then we do what we have to.”
“Sounds good to me,” Wyatt said dubiously.
We backtracked a quarter mile, then climbed, unchallenged, into the hills. For once the Moon became an ally; its sharp shadow light, combined with the lights from Kramer, provided us with enough sight to avoid pitfalls.