He and Jana had been here in the rock fort since dusk. He had wanted to continue, to keep running well into the night, but both of them were exhausted. You could run only so far in a single day, and then you had to have rest; you could run only so far...
There had been no conversation between them. Jana had sprawled out, face down in the sandy bottom of the fort, and sleep had claimed her immediately. Lennox had found a crevice which allowed a wide view of their backtrail, and he had sat there until just a few minutes ago, when darkness came. Would the two men keep looking in the bright white shine of the moon? He didn’t think so; they would need rest, too, and they would not want to take the chance of missing a sign in the deep pools of shadow the moonlight did not reach. Too, they would figure him and the girl to be exhausted, to seek out a hiding place for the night. No, they were safe now, until morning. And then—
And then.
He did not know what to do. If they kept running as they had today, blindly, they would be no better off than they were now; but he did not know where they were, or how far away the town of Cuenca Seco was — and the killers would be expecting them to move in that direction anyway. Could they double back to the road? Maybe — but there was no guarantee they would not stumble right into the arms of the men who pursued them; and he was not sure any longer in which direction the road lay. They could stay where they were, hidden here in the fort, hope that they were passed by, and then run in the opposite direction; but if their backtrail led to here, and the killers were able to follow it, they would be waiting in self-dug graves — they had no weapons, they could not make a stand. There was only one thing for them to do, then.
Keep running.
Lennox raised his head and glanced over at the girl. She was awake now, sitting up, working at a cactus thorn which had broken off in her ankle. Her face, under its layering of dust, was a grimace of pain. He looked at her — really looked at her for the first time — and he saw that she was very pretty. He remembered her poise, the fluid grace of her movements when he had first stumbled upon her, and he wondered vaguely if she was a model of some kind in New York; the car had had New York plates. But no, her hips were too prominent, her breasts too large; no, she was something else but she was big-city beyond any doubt; she had known the bright lights and the supper clubs and the Broadway opening nights, she had known elegance and luxury. You could see it, even now, even under the coating of alkali dust and dried sweat — like sensing a hotel was grand and proud and ultra-respectable despite a façade of city-produced soot and cinders.
And yet, she had stamina too — she had guts. She had not gone completely to pieces when the car went out of control, or when he had pulled her out of the wreckage and into the rocks, or when he had told her there in the wash what all of this was about; in spite of her shock, her horror at the knowledge of the situation she had suddenly been thrust into, she had not been a hindrance, a danger to his chance for survival as well as to her own.
But he felt responsible for her. If it had not been for him, she would be safe now, in Cuenca Seco or wherever it was that she had been staying in this area. God, he wished now that he had obeyed the transitory impulse which he had felt when he first came upon her. He had thought, then, of simply taking her car, stealing it, leaving her there to walk back to Cuenca Seco; it would have been a quicker, more positive method of escape, he had thought, than trying to find some way out of the town when she dropped him off there. If he had done that, she would be free of this; he would still be alone. But he had not wanted to hurt her in repayment for her kindness, had not wanted her safety on his conscience. And now — ironically, bitterly — her safety weighed far heavier on his mind than it would have if he had followed that original impulse.
The wind seemed to blow colder, murmuring, and across from him Jana hugged herself. A great stillness had settled over the desert now, and her head was cocked slightly to one side, as if she were listening for the next sound. Lennox thought she looked very small and very vulnerable.
In a voice that was cracked and brittle, like glass breaking a long way off, he said, “How are you feeling?”
She stared at him with dull, silent hatred.
“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry you had to get involved in this.”
“That’s a great deal of consolation.” The dry tremble of her own voice softened the bitterness of the words.
“Do you think I wanted any of this?” he said. “Do you think I wanted to be a witness to a murder?”
She looked away, at the bright face of the moon. A lone, tattered cloud drifted eerily across the lower half of it, giving it for a brief moment a whiskered, ancient appearance. After a long pause she said in what was almost a whisper, “I’m afraid.”
“I know,” Lennox said. “I know.”
“And thirsty. I’ve never been this thirsty in my life.”
“Don’t think about it. It only makes it worse if you think about it.”
“What are we going to do?” softly, plaintively. “How long can we keep running away from them?”
“As long as we have to.”
“I don’t know how much further I can go.”
“You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“Will I? Will the thirst and the fear be gone then?”
“I’m sorry,” Lennox said again.
“You’re sorry, oh God, you’re sorry.”
She sat rigidly, her face in profile and soft in the moonlight. Lennox felt strangely drawn to her in that moment, to this woman about whom he knew nothing but to whom he was bonded by a bitter quirk of fate. Since his discovery of the kind of cold and calculating bitch Phyllis was, he had mistrusted women; except for a plump divorcée he had picked up in a bar outside of Reno, and a waitress in a hash joint he had worked in Utah — two biologically initiated liaisons which had left him depressed and unfulfilled on both occasions — he had had little to do with them since the night he had begun running in earnest. But it was not a physical thing, this attraction he felt for the girl named Jana Hennessey. It was, instead, an innate recognition deep within himself that their common bond was far more basic than the immediacy of their plight, that they shared a kind of kinship; he saw something of himself in her, something dark and lonely and empty, and he could not explain what it was.
Impulsively he said, “Tell me about yourself, Jana.”
Her head moved slowly until she was facing him again. “Why?”
“I’d like to know.”
“What difference does it make, now?”
“You come from New York, don’t you?” he said.
She did not answer.
“Jana?”
“Yes, I come from New York,” she said wearily.
“What do you do there?”
“I write books.”
“What kind of books?”
“Children’s books.”
“Is that why you’re out here?”
“I... yes. Yes.”
“What were you doing all alone today? Research?”
“I was making some sketches.”
“You do your own illustrating?”