Panic!

One

Vollyer came awake just before dawn — and he was blind.

A soft, strangled cry bubbled in his throat; he sat up, pawing at his eyes. Darkness, darkness, with light shimmering faintly at the edges, with light flickering a long way off like candles at the end of a long, dark tunnel; but there were no images, no colors, there was only the light and pain, pain hammering behind the swollen lids, pain pulsating at the core of each eyeball. He shook his head and kept on shaking it, scratching wildly at the mucus-crusted sockets with the tips of his fingers.

Di Parma had been sitting on a rock nearby, watching the eastern horizon turn a dusty gray with the approach of dawn, eating the last of the tinned meat with chilled fingers. He came running over to Vollyer and knelt beside him. “Harry, what’s the matter? Jesus, Harry, what is it?”

“Get away from me!” Vollyer snapped at him. Control, control, get control of yourself, don’t panic, only the losers panic. Hands away from your eyes, only makes it worse rubbing at them, that’s it, blink now, blink, blink, light growing brighter, yes, taking away the darkness, force those lids up all the way, blink, blink, the sky, you can see the sky now and Di Parma, fuzzy but it’s Di Parma, concentrate, blink, his features, eyes, nose, mouth, blink, concentrate, blink, fuzziness fading, focus coming back, you’re all right, you’re not really blind, only temporary, bad strain that’s all, you can see now, you can see as well as before...

Vollyer dragged cool air into his lungs and sat up again, looking around him. The solid objects had faint, dancing perimeter shadows until he stared at one in particular and then the shadow went away. His head ached massively, malignantly, and there were searing needles probing at the retinas of his eyes. He got shakily to his feet and held his hands out in front of him and stared at their backs; the hands were trembling, but there were only two of them and they had no dancing shadows.

Di Parma said, “Was it your eyes, Harry? Mine have been giving me hell, too. It’s the glare of that sun...”

Vollyer said nothing. He walked slowly to the rock on which Di Parma had been sitting and took the binoculars from it and then went to where he could look out over the desert to the north. He lifted the glasses, squinting through the lens. The moon was gone now, the stars fading, and the landscape lay cold and starkly quiet under the retreating gray-black of the sky. He could see a long way, he could see cactus, rocks, bushy shrubs, distinct and identifiable forms. He released a long, soft breath, turning, calm again.

“Come on,” he said to Di Parma. “It’s time to be moving. We’re close to them, I can feel it. Even with you shooting at that snake last night, we’re close to them. It won’t be long now...”

Two

Brackeen said, “I can’t take any more of this sitting around. I’m going out and check with the deputy I posted at the junction.”

“If he had anything to report, he would have radioed in,” Gottlieb said. He sat across from his partner, Dick Sanchez, at one of the desks in the substation, drinking his tenth or eleventh cup of coffee and chain-smoking cork-tipped cigarettes. Both men owned tired eyes and disheveled suits, and they were playing two-handed pinochle with no enthusiasm at all.

Brackeen stood at the front counter, looking out through the window. The first pale, cold light of dawn touched the empty street beyond, an inchoate dissolution of the shadows resting in doorways and alleyways and at the corners of the false-fronted buildings. “I know that,” he said without turning. “But I’m ready to climb the goddamn walls.”

“Lydell will have those men I asked for here any minute now,” Gottlieb told him. “Why don’t you wait for him and we’ll all go out together?”

“I’d feel better moving around, that’s all.”

“Go ahead, then.”

“Radio when you’re coming?”

“As soon as we leave.”

“What time are the choppers going up?”

“They should be in the air any minute now.”

“Then we’ll have a report in another hour or less.”

“About that.”

Brackeen passed a hand across his face. There were deep circles etched into the puffy flesh beneath his eyes, and the lack of sleep had made the lids heavy and put a cottony taste in his mouth that was enhanced by the amount of coffee he had drunk and cigarettes he had smoked since last night. His nerves were raw-edged from inactivity, fatigue, caffein, nicotine. But his mind was clear and alert, kept that way by the prospect of movement and accomplishment, and by the presence of Gottlieb and Sanchez; the three of them had passed the hours since the arrival of the state investigators shortly after midnight in talking Brackeen’s theory through, examining every possibility, planning the moves to be made on this day.

As Brackeen picked up his Stetson and crossed to the front door, Gottlieb said mildly, “Stay loose, huh?”

“As loose as the two of you,” Brackeen said, and went out.

He drove to the junction and talked to the deputy again, and there was nothing to report. The sky was much lighter now, splashed with gold and deep red on the eastern horizon, and it would not be long before the rounded rim of the sun edged up there like a huge golden shield. A narrow wash paralleled the county road for a short distance here, beginning just beyond the rutted surface of the abandoned rail company road; a red-topped, black-and-white striped Gila woodpecker swooped low over it, shrieking maniacally all the while. There was no other sound; the county road was deserted at this hour of the morning.

Brackeen stood by his cruiser, looking up into the lightening heavens. The hell with this, he thought. He slid under the cruiser’s wheel and entered the abandoned road, driving slowly, his head moving in careful quadrants from the road surface to the terrain stretching away to the east. He did not expect to see anything, but this was better than just sitting, waiting for Lydell to show up, waiting for the choppers to report.

A half-mile, by the odometer, beyond the place where he had found the rental Buick the day before, Brackeen U-turned and started back again. He passed the sandstone formation which had concealed the Buick, passed the dry wash where the wrecked yellow Triumph had lain, and followed the gentle curve in the road from due north to northeasterly. Less than a mile from the junction, he slowed, remembering the all but obliterated shortcut from the rail company road to the county highway several miles to the east of the junction; trucks carrying road-grading equipment and the men who operated it had made the cut across the flatland here in order to save some eight miles in the haul out of Kehoe City. Brackeen had been over the rutted surface several times. It skirted a long, deep arroyo, over which the railroad, in the early days of the century, had built a trestle for a proposed spur to Cuenca Seco; the trestle had long since collapsed into the arroyo, and there was little else remaining of the abortive line of tracks branching off the later-abandoned line to Kehoe City. The railroad had not had much luck in this area of the desert over the years.

Brackeen did not want to return to the junction just yet; it only meant more passive waiting. He swung the cruiser off the road, onto the creosote-choked flatland. It wouldn’t do any harm to check the area out here, he thought; there was always the chance that he might spot something, and even if he didn’t it would consume some time until the air reconnaissance could be made and Lydell could get off his fat ass and into Cuenca Seco with the team of men.

Slowly, dust blossoming in lazy plumes behind him, Brackeen drove toward the flaming brass light in the eastern sky.

Three

Lennox and Jana left the tank at the first fading of darkness, rested and with regathered strength, and began moving toward a long sloping rise to the north. The air was no longer cold, though still cool, and they went as swiftly as their stiffened, aching bodies would allow; they had drunk deeply of the pulp of another barrel cactus outside the tank, and the moisture would stay with them for a while, until the sun climbed into the sky and set fire to the desert again.

They had passed the long night wrapped in each other’s arms, insulated against the biting wind, against the terror which lay without. The need for words had not come to either of them, and they had slept, and when they had awakened there was still no need to put voice to what they had shared. Jana had met Lennox’s gaze when he looked at her, and smiled faintly and nodded, thanking him with her eyes, telling him that she was all right now, that she knew and accepted the truth about herself.

As they ran, Lennox found himself wondering how deeply his feelings for Jana were rooted — if he could possibly be in love with her. There was none of the wild, joyous exhilaration he had felt with Phyllis in the beginning, none of the electricity, the chemical magnetism that draws and fuses two individuals; there was only the peace she generated within him, the bond that was theirs, the tenderness that overwhelmed him each time he looked at her and touched her. Was that love? Or the beginnings of love? He didn’t know, but he wanted to know. He wanted to know her better, he wanted her to know him, he wanted them to get out of this place, this trap, so that the understanding and the perception each seemed to have of the other’s inner self could be nurtured and developed.

He gripped Jana’s hand tightly, looking over his shoulder at her, trying to smile with his cracked mouth. She returned the pressure of his fingers, touching him with her eyes, and he knew that she felt some of the same things about him — and the knowledge filled him with hope and with pleasure and with urgency.

They approached the crest of the rise, threading their way between scattered boulders and thick clumps of mesquite; the sky was bright with the building haze of heat now, and Gambel’s quail and an occasional jackrabbit scurried away before them, startled by their presence in a world that belonged to creatures instead of men. Finally, minutes later, they topped the rise, and Lennox stopped abruptly, staring at what lay beyond. “Oh God,” he said softly.

Flat, semi-barren land stretched away from them, void of all but transitory cover; there was a line of rocky outcroppings to the west, but they were some distance away and he and Jana would have to cross a great expanse of open ground to get to them. Naked, they would be naked...

Jana said sharply, “Jack, look!”

“What is it?”

“Down there! Is that a road?”

Lennox followed her pointing arm with his eyes. Near the foot of the long slope falling away into the flatland was a pair of faintly discernible wheel ruts, obliterated in spots, grown over with brush in others, but ruts nonetheless, coming from around the rocks to the west, hooking eastward to parallel a wide arroyo cut deeply, like a jagged scar, into the dry, desolate plain. They would lead somewhere, they would lead to Cuenca Seco or to another road, they would lead out.

Lennox felt a surge of wild hope. He saw the same relief mirrored on Jana’s face, the sudden brightness of her eyes, and she said, “Oh, Jack, a road, a road!” and then they were running down the slope, unaware now of the rocky, treacherous soil and the gleaming cactus needles and the multiple, clutching arms of the mesquite and ocotillo, forgetting the danger of exposure on the open flat, seeing nothing but the wheel ruts, the path to safety...

Four

The pain in the lids and sockets of Vollyer’s eyes had become excruciating, and the shadows were back at the edges of solid objects, distorting them slightly, putting them vaguely out of focus. The edge of the sun had crawled above the eastern horizon now, and the glare of daylight wavered over the landscape, contracting the pupils, intensifying the agony.

They were coming on a long rise, and he stopped to catch his breath, to rub gingerly at the swollen pits with his pocket handkerchief. Di Parma said, “You sure your eyes are okay, Harry? Jesus, they don’t look too good—”

“There’s nothing wrong with my eyes!”

“Harry, listen, we’ve got to call it off pretty soon. We can’t stay out here much longer, Harry, not without food and water. We may have gone too far as it is, it’ll take us a full day or more to get back to the car—”

“Shut up, will you shut up?”

Di Parma caught his arm. “Listen, I’m telling you, I don’t want to die on this desert!”

Vollyer pushed him away savagely and swung the binoculars up. At first he could not see anything but blurred images through the lens, and he thought: I can see, I can see, my eyes are all right and I can see, clear up now, you bastards, clear up so I can see! He blinked frantically, and the blur lessened and there was substance, there were shapes; he tried to swallow into a constricted throat, fighting the double vision that would not completely dissipate, moving the glasses in a wide are, west to east, along the top of the rise—

They were there, Lennox and the girl, standing there at the crest and looking down to the other side, just standing there, five hundred yards away.

Vollyer jerked the glasses down, and the Remington scope-handgun was in his right hand. He began to run up the slope. Di Parma hesitated and then ran after him, reaching his side. “Harry, what is it, did you see them?” but even as he said the words, Di Parma was looking up at the crest of the rise and the two figures standing there, looking at them for a brief instant before they jumped forward to disappear on the other side. He had been carrying his jacket, and he fumbled the .38 out of the pocket, flung the garment down; his lips pulled away from his teeth, and the fingers of his huge hand were spasmodic on the sweating metal of the belly-gun.

They ran diagonally across the slope, toward the spot where Lennox and the girl had been standing. Vollyer gagged on each breath, running on legs that were like jagged edges of bone, and sweat poured acid agony into his eyes. He fell once and Di Parma slowed automatically and pulled him to his feet, and then they were at the crest and looking beyond and Lennox and the girl were almost to the bottom of the slope on that side, running to the west. Vollyer pawed away sweat, pawed away some of the shimmering blur, but he was still too far away for an accurate shot, he had to get closer, a little closer, and he plunged downward with Di Parma at his heels, slipping, sliding wildly on the incline, moving in a diagonal again to cut off the targets at the bottom.

Vollyer became aware, through the stinging obscurity of his vision, that there was some kind of road or cart track down there — that was what they were running for and they were looking at that, only that, they did not know that he and Di Parma were up here behind them and that was all the edge he needed, the game was definitely over now, no mistake now. The gap was closing, closing, two hundred yards, less, near enough, one bullet for Lennox and one for the girl, and he skidded to his knees on the slope halfway down, bracing himself, washing away sweat with the palm of his free hand, bringing the Remington up into the crook of his arm and sighting with the scope. Two of Lennox and two of the woman, oh you goddamn bastard eyes, blink, blink, concentrate, clear up, there now, there, finger closing on the trigger, steady, steady—

The first shot.

Pause.

And amid rolling vibrations of sound that filled the yellow-gold morning like distant thunder, the second shot...

Five

With the window rolled down, and the cruiser’s speed held to a crawl, Brackeen heard clearly the deep, hollow reports and knew immediately what they were.

Reflexively, his foot bore down on the accelerator and the patrol car responded with instant power, rear tires spewing dust and pebbles. He clung grimly to the wheel, body tensed, eyes probing the flaming distance, trying to see beyond the line of rocks just ahead. The shots had come from somewhere on their far side, somewhere close, and he knew with the intuitive sixth sense of a born cop that it was not a kid potting at jackrabbits or quail, or one of the local settlers target-practicing at an early hour; he knew that this was it, that this was the showdown, that the waiting had come to an abrupt end and there would be no need for the helicopters any longer, no need for Lydell and his search party, knew that he would find all of them — Lennox and Jana Hennessey, dead or alive now, and the professional sluggers — waiting for him just a few seconds away...

Brackeen remembered the bullet he had found in the dashboard of the wrecked yellow Triumph, too badly mutilated for accurate identification but obviously of a high caliber; remembered, too, the dead body of Perrins/Lassiter and the six bullet holes within a five-inch radius on the upper torso, testimony to a deadly marksmanship. One man, possibly both, with a high-velocity weapon of some kind and more than likely the smaller handguns they had used on the hit, revolvers or automatics... automatics... automatics...

And Brackeen’s mind was suddenly filled with a vivid reproduction of the rain-slick fire escape and the frightened white face of Feldman and the heavy automatic leveled upward, the huge black bore of the gun, the explosion and the destructive impact of the bullet which had seemed so real and yet had only been illusion; Coretti’s face, alive and dead, smiling and bloodily pulped, alternating like shuffled Before and After photographs across the surface of his mind. Sweat flowed thickly, hotly over his face and under his arms and into his crotch, and there was fear in the center of his belly now, fear twisting at his vitals, the same kind of fear he had felt staring at Feldman’s gun that night, staring at death and the terrible black void beyond.

I can’t face a gun, he thought. I can’t let it happen again!

And then he thought: But I have to, there’s nobody else, if I back off and radio for Gottlieb and Sanchez, for help, it might be too late by the time they got here and Lennox and the Hennessey girl could still be alive right now, no, I’ve got to see it through, I can’t crap out on them now...

The back of Brackeen’s neck grew cold and bristling, then, and his thoughts became very clear and sharp. Understanding flowed through him, taking the edge off the building panic in his belly, quieting the stutter of his heart. He had to see it through. That was the way it had to be all right, that was the only way it could be. Because the commitment and the resurrection of Andy Brackeen had to be full and complete or else there was no real commitment and no true resurrection at all. You couldn’t start living again halfway, with half-knowledge, and subconsciously he had known this from the very beginning. He had known there was a good chance it would come to this, to a confrontation, a showdown, and he had wanted it to be that way. Jesus Christ, he wanted to face the gun or guns out there, he had to face them — that was why he had come out alone this morning, that was why he had been so nervous with the waiting last night and today; he wanted it because without it he would still be half a man, and he had to know what Andy Brackeen really was, he had to know.

He caught up the hand mike on the cruiser’s radio and called the substation. Demeter was there. Brackeen gave his position, and what he had heard, and asked for immediate assistance; then he signed out before any questions could be asked; there was no time for questions.

The line of rocks loomed directly ahead. Brackeen replaced the mike and drew the .357 Magnum from the holster at his belt, holding it on the seat beside him, palm sweating on the textured butt. His mind was blank now, relying on instinct and training to dictate his actions, and the fear that was in him was tempered with a kind of anticipation...

Six

The first bullet cut hot and burning through Lennox’s right side, and the unexpectedness of it, the sudden biting pain, caused him to stagger, to lose his balance. He went down, rolling, his head striking a glancing blow on a rock, thinking fuzzily, My God, my God, what, and then there was billowing sound to take away the early-morning stillness and he knew what it was, he realized he had been shot, he realized that their luck had finally run out.

Panic, the old familiar shrieking panic, clutched at him and he reached out blindly and caught onto a heavily thorned prickly pear, slicing open the heel of his hand, slowing himself. And then Jana screamed, he could hear her screaming, he could hear more echoes of sound, and he managed to check his forward momentum, to twist his body so that he could see upward along the slope.

She was down, she was on her hands and knees and crawling toward him. Lennox felt the added emotions of hatred and rage and futility as he scrambled to his feet, looking up at Jana and beyond her, fighting down the urge to immediate flight, and the two of them were up there, scrambling down the slope, you dirty sons of bitches, why don’t you finish it, why don’t you sit up there and get it over with! He heard Jana cry his name, cry it again, and he ran to her and pulled her to her feet and there was no blood on her, there was only blood on him, blood soaking the remnants of his shirt, blood flowing down from his cut palm to drip thickly crimson from his fingertips. The second shot had missed her, it had been the shock of seeing him fall or the bad footing which had sent her to her knees; her eyes were huge puddles of terror, pleading mutely, and he flung his arm around her shoulders and dragged her with him down the slope.

There was no place to go, the rutted trail was useless, they were trapped; the avenue of escape had opened only briefly, to tempt them, and then it had closed and there was nowhere for them to go. It had all been for nothing, all the running and the hiding, and last night, too, the insight and moments of peace and ecstasy and salvation, the growing thing that might be love between them — all for nothing, all too late. Fate had played a monstrous joke on them, tantalizing them with a chance, a future, and then presenting them with nothing but a certain death...

Seven

“You missed them!” Di Parma screamed. “Damn you, damn you, you missed them both!”

He ran past Vollyer, arms flung wide, spitting obscenities in a release of the pent-up frustration he had known the past two days. They’re not going to get away this time, they’re not going to get away, oh you prick, Harry, damn your bad eyes and your boss-man superior attitude, you missed them, they should be dead now but they’ll be dead pretty soon...

Vollyer was up and stumbling after him, frantically trying to chamber one of the .221 cartridges into the Remington, but Di Parma paid no attention to him. He was watching Lennox and the girl, watching them reach the wheel ruts below and start across them, a hundred yards away, just a hundred yards. He lengthened his strides, summoning all the strength left in his body, gaining on them, opening up his lead on the struggling Vollyer, and he was twenty yards from the trail when he became aware of the rumbling whine of an automobile engine coming out of the west, increasing in magnitude as the machine drew closer.

Di Parma turned his body without slackening his pace, looking toward the line of rocks in that direction, and then the car was there, he saw the car, he saw its unmistakable black-and-white markings, the red-glassed dome light, heard the deafening roar of its engine as it hurtled forward. He tasted momentary panic and his thoughts were sharply confused. Cops, oh Jesus, cops, how did they find us, I knew this was all wrong, I knew it! — and the cruiser veered off the road, coming straight at him, the gleaming chrome of its grill like bared teeth in the expanding brightness. He reversed himself, scrambling backward, eyes searching wildly for cover, not finding any, and the cruiser came to a shuddering stop nose up to a boulder fifty feet from where he was.

He dropped to his knees in the rocky soil, holding the .38 steadied in both hands, and opened fire.

Eight

Brackeen was through the driver’s door, moving with amazing speed for his bulk, before the cruiser stopped rocking.

In the distance, he caught a glimpse of the two figures — a man and a woman, the drifter and Jana Hennessey — that he had seen running the moment he’d emerged from the rocks. He felt a grim, fleeting elation that he had been in time, that they were still alive.

He crouched along the front fender, the Magnum heavy in the wetness of his hand, and a bullet dug its way metallically into the far side of the car, another spiderwebbed the near corner of the windshield. He forgot the runners then, thinking: It’s happening, it’s happening, but that was all he thought. A curious sense of detachment spread over him, as if he were suddenly witnessing all of this from some distant place, as if he were not really part of it at ail.

Another bullet furrowed across the cruiser’s hood, making a sound like fingernails being drawn across a blackboard. Brackeen knelt by the near headlight, looking around it, and the one he had taken out after with the cruiser was kneeling there fifty or sixty yards away. He was doing all the shooting. The other one, further up the slope, was running at an angle toward a thick-bodied cactus; something long and misshapen glittered in his hand.

The kneeling one fired again, and the headlamp in front of Brackeen exploded, spraying glass that narrowly missed his eyes, forcing him back. When he got his head up again, the slugger was on his feet, trying to run up the slope, clawing at the jagged earth with his free hand. Brackeen moved out a little, not thinking, setting himself at the edge of the bumper, and the Magnum recoiled loudly. Dust kicked up at the slugger’s heels. He raised the muzzle and squeezed off again.

The shooter jerked, leaned forward, fell, and then slid backward on his belly with his arms spread-eagled.

One, that’s one.

Brackeen looked up at the cactus for the other, swinging the Magnum over, and he saw the sunlight glinting again and there was, all at once, white agony in his chest and he toppled backward with thunder detonating in his ears and he was looking up at the bright, hot sky, jarred into thinking now, trying to understand. Roll over, get up, but his limbs would not obey the command of his brain; he wanted to touch his chest, he knew that there would be a hole there, that thick, warm blood would be there, that he had been shot and that he was badly wounded and yet, with all of it, he was strangely calm, the feeling of detachment still lingered. The pain spread malignantly through his body, numbing his mind now in a dark gray haze; but the sky was still hot, so blue and hot the morning sky, what did he shoot me with? Not a rifle, what he was carrying was too small for a rifle — a handgun, then? Sure, with a scope sight, I should have known, but you can’t figure all the angles, you’ve got to do the best you can and sometimes that’s not good enough, but the important thing is doing your duty, the important thing is not crapping out — listen, I did it, didn’t I? I did it, Coretti, I faced their guns and I didn’t panic and I didn’t freeze up, oh Marge, there’s so much I have to make up to you, to both of us, and the one who had shot him ran up and extended the scope-sighted handgun and blew away the side of Brackeen’s head.

Nine

When they heard the oncoming car, Jana and Lennox checked their headlong flight, looking back. Shattered hope re-formed and re-cemented as they recognized the vehicle, saw it skid off the wheel ruts in a spume of dust and veer straight at the nearest of the two killers, saw the driver’s door fly open and the big uniformed officer tumble out, saw the near one on the slope fall to his knees, heard the hollow, cracking sound of gunshots and the savage whine of bullets striking metal; they were, all at once, awed and breathless spectators, divorced from the unfolding drama, clinging to one another, held spellbound by the abrupt and inexplicable turn of events.

Jana felt the bunched muscles of Lennox’s arm and shoulder, and his blood stained her fingers where they were caught in the front of his shirt. I love him, she thought, as she had thought lying in his arms last night, as she had thought waking in his arms this morning. It isn’t possible, it isn’t reasonable, but I love him. Part of it is a reaction to what happened between us, part of it is gratitude for giving me the courage to face myself and for helping me to understand the truth — and yet, it’s more than that, it’s deeper than that, it means much more than the wild, giddy infatuation I had with Don. I need him, he needs me, we can help each other, we can learn from each other, we can lean on each other. We can’t die now, we simply can’t die now...

She held him more tightly, careful of the wound in his side that her gently probing fingers told her was only superficial, watching the figures moving beyond through the shimmer of gathering heat, the thoughts spinning and sustaining her, blotting out the fear. She watched the one man get to his feet and begin to run up the incline, saw the second one scurrying higher above him. Then the officer stepped out to the front of the cruiser and a brief wisp of smoke spiraled out and up from his extended right hand and the near one jerked and fell amid the booming echo of the gunshot. Jana’s heart seemed to hurl itself at the walls of her chest, we’re going to be all right! and then she saw the officer reel and fall, heard a louder reverberation, and exultation instantaneously dissolved into returning horror.

“No,” she said, “oh no, no, no!”

The remaining pursuer broke away from the cactus behind which he had taken refuge, from behind which he had fired, and began to stumble down the grade. Lennox said, “Jesus!” and spun Jana around and they were running again, running with panic again. She forced her legs to keep working, her slender body screaming against the renewed demands of it, and her mind chanted in a frenzied cadence, Hope, no hope, hope, no hope, because all of this was a hideous fluctuation, as if God could not make up His mind, as if He were ridden with indecision as to the outcome, and that made it so much more terrible, so much more of a nightmare...

Ten

Vollyer turned away from the dead cop, fitting another cartridge into the Remington, and looked along the wheel ruts at the fleeing forms of Lennox and the girl. He was facing directly into the half-revealed plate of the sun and its light was like burning embers thrust against the surface of his eyes; he still had only partial focus, the wavering shadows had broadened, and the two of them down there were indistinct images viewed through warped glass. He would just be wasting time and ammunition trying to pick them off from here, looking into that goddamn sun; he had missed them both at a closer range from the slope, hadn’t he? Hitting the cop as he had, had been more luck than marksmanship, the way his eyes were now, and they were bad — there was no use in kidding himself any longer, they were very bad.

He started to the cruiser, and as he did so, he saw the slope through the swimming blur and Di Parma was there, on his feet, pitching down toward him. A gaping hole in his left shoulder, just under the collarbone, splashed blood in bright red streams over the front of his shirt and trousers as he moved, and his left arm flopped uselessly, almost comically, at his side. When Vollyer had run past him moments earlier, to make sure about the cop, Di Parma had seemed not to be moving and he had thought he was dead; now, seeing him still alive, Vollyer felt nothing at all. Di Parma was still a stranger, a nonentity, a lump of clay — alive or dead, it no longer made any real difference.

He came up and there was wildness in his eyes, a mixture of pain and fright. He was whimpering, red froth at the corners of his mouth. “I’m hurt, Harry, I’m hurt bad, oh God, oh God, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“Not yet,” Vollyer said, “not until we get to Lennox and the girl.”

From inside the cruiser, the short-wave radio crackled abruptly, angrily to life; a voice demanded acknowledgment. Di Parma looked at the car, looked back to Vollyer. “There’s other cops around here, they’ll be swarming all over this place in a few minutes!”

“We’re going after the witnesses,” Vollyer said. “Get in the car.”

Di Parma’s face contorted into a grimace of agony and rage. “You’re crazy, I’m not listening to you any more, oh, you bastard, I’m hurt and I need a doctor, I need Jean, there’ll be cops, I’m getting out of here!” and he pushed past Vollyer and staggered to the cruiser’s open door.

Vollyer lifted the Remington and dispassionately shot him in the back.

The bullet shattered Di Parma’s spine just above the kidneys. He screamed once, very briefly, a shrill, surprised feminine sound, and then pitched forward onto his face and lay dead there in the blood-spattered dust.

Pivoting, emotionless, Vollyer scrubbed at his eyes with his free hand and peered along the wheel ruts again. He could still see the girl and Lennox down there. Silence now, thick and brittle, save for the continued crackling of the short wave; but there was no sign, no sound, of approaching cars from either direction. He had time, he still had time. It would take only a couple of minutes to catch the two of them, and then he would drive out, get back to the Buick if he could or find a place to ditch the cruiser and pick up another car; but he had to get the two of them first, it was no good without getting them. You play all the way or you don’t play, and he had always played all the way; that was why he was a winner and Lennox and the girl and Di Parma, too, were all losers.

He loaded the Remington once more and slid in under the wheel of the cruiser. The engine started on the first ignition turn. He backed the car away from the boulder and drove over Di Parma’s legs, down to the wheel ruts, hunching forward, eyes slitted, and went after the running, shimmering, distorted figures on the flatland ahead.

Eleven

Looking back over his shoulder as they ran, Lennox watched the fat one kill two men in the space of a minute — the wounded police officer and, incomprehensibly, his partner, who had survived the bullet which had felled him on the slope. Vomit boiled up into Lennox’s throat. What kind of man is that, he thought sickly, what kind of black union could have created a man like that?

He saw the fat one get into the cruiser, and he thought then: He won’t come after us now, he’ll know that poor cop isn’t alone, that there have got to be others close by. He’ll run, he doesn’t have any choice now. He’ll have to forget about us, he’ll have to run, he’ll have to let us alone.

But he didn’t believe it. The brutal, senseless way the fat one committed murder, the relentless way he had pursued Jana and him until now made a false hope of Lennox’s thoughts — and when he glanced back again and saw the patrol car bearing down on them along the rutted trail, he knew beyond any doubt that the situation was as critical now as it had been before the arrival of the single officer.

God oh God, where were the rest of the cops? It couldn’t be just the one, there had to be others, they had to have figured out what had happened somehow, or else the one wouldn’t be here. But if they didn’t hurry they would be too late — where were they, where were they?

Lennox swung his head around again, holding onto Jana, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in his side where the bullet had creased him. No place to hide, no sanctuary, not enough time to cross the trail and try to re-climb the slope on the other side, nothing in front of them but a flat plane of cactus and sparse ground cover and the remains of a long-abandoned set of rail tracks — sections missing and grown with mesquite, sections collapsed or windblown into drunken angles — that came looping around the incline from the south, dissolved in favor of the trail, and then resumed in a straight run to the edge of the deep arroyo winding away on their left.

There was only one way for them to go, and Lennox altered their course in an abrupt quarter-turn toward the brink of the arroyo; if they could get down into that wash, out of the open, maybe they could hold out until more police arrived, if more police arrived. Slim chance, frail chance, but they had nothing else, nothing at all, and behind them the cruiser swerved sharply off the ruts, pursuing, the sound of its engine like the rumbling swell of an approaching earthquake in the quiet morning, the sun-baked soil beneath their feet seeming to ripple to complete the illusion. Lennox cast another wild look over his shoulder, saw the machine bouncing and swaying over the rough ground, gleaming metal leaping at them, a thing gone berserk, gaining in spite of the uneven terrain.

Dust choked his lungs, bringing on a spasm of coughing, as he dragged the faltering, panting Jana to the edge of the arroyo. It was some one hundred and fifty yards wide and forty feet deep at this point, with steep, layered shale walls that were treacherous but scalable, extending away on both sides, in both directions. Boulders and ironwood and mesquite littered its sandy bed, and a few yards beyond, below where the rail line crawled up to the edge of the wash, twisted chunks and lengths of rusted, disintegrating steel, sun-bleached bits of rotted wood that had once been ties formed heaps and piles and pyramids the width of the jagged incision — all that remained of a long-collapsed, long-forgotten trestle.

Lennox had the fleeting, disjointed image of a massive, grotesque display of Pop Art sculpture, created by the forces of nature long before man learned the dubious aesthetics to be found in the arrangement of junk and scrap metal. And then, without thinking any further, his ears filled with the rumbling, rattling howl of the cruiser, he turned Jana’s face to his chest and took her over the edge.

Twelve

Thirty yards from where he had seen the girl and Lennox start down into the arroyo, Vollyer was forced to abandon the patrol car. The ground was too rough here, dotted with too many rocks and thickly grown vegetation, and the glare of the rising sun through the windshield was hellish on his eyes.

He scrambled out of the car, not hearing the demanding voice half garbled in static on the radio, not thinking about anything but the job he had to do. He had the Remington clenched in his right hand, and he pulled at his coat pocket with his left for the .38; he was taking no chances now, there was time, but very little of it, this particular game had gone as far as it could go.

He ran in a drunken wobble to the arroyo and ducked his head against his shoulder to clear away some of the astringent sweat, and then looked down into the fissure. He couldn’t see them. Hiding, they were hiding; if they were still on the move he would have been able to pick them out easily from up here; there were plenty of places of concealment at the immediate bottom of the wash, but once you got fifty yards on either side you couldn’t run very far without exposing yourself. And they hadn’t had time to make it all the way across, to scale the bank on the opposite side. No, they were down there, all right, just down there, hiding, and it was only a matter of seconds now.

Vollyer transferred the Remington to his left hand, holding both guns up and away from his body, and dropped into a sitting position with his legs splayed out and pointing at an angle into the arroyo. He went down the bank that way, like a plump and begrimed child going down a long slide, using his right hand and the heels of his shoes to restrain momentum. A few feet from the bottom, an edge of rock bit painfully into the back of his left thigh, opening a deep gash. causing him to limp slightly when he struggled finally into an upright position on the dusty floor. The Remington back in his right hand, he moved forward, slowly, exhorting his eyes in mute viciousness to mend so that he could see clearly, exhorting in vain.

Something moved, a quick stirring, ahead and to his left. Vollyer reeled around a steel-draped boulder, and the long rattled tail of a sidewinder swayed into the dimness at its base. Cautious of his footing, he backed away and crossed to where a stunted smoke tree offered possible cover. Nothing. A conglomerate of twisted steel. Nothing. He stopped, ducking his face into his shoulder again, and then squinted with myopic intensity on all sides of him. Nothing.

A high, flat-topped rock, with bonelike fragments of bleached wood strewn at its base, beckoned nearby. That was what he needed, a high vantage point in this proximity; if he could scale that rock, he might be able to locate their place of concealment. He went toward it, painfully, watchfully, listening to the ragged sound of his own breathing. It was otherwise very quiet. But they were close, he could sense their nearness; a tic jumped spasmodically along his right temple, and another pulled the left side of his mouth down crookedly.

They were very, very close...

Thirteen

The running was over.

Crouched with Jana in a right angle formed by a canted boulder and a mound of crumbling debris, Lennox knew that with sharp, crystal clarity. He could not run any more; he simply could not run any more. Whenever a crisis had arisen in his life, he had run away from it, he had taken the easy way out — as a child, as a teen-ager, as an adult, never standing firm, never meeting the crisis head-on, just letting the panic take possession of him, welcoming it, never fighting it. And each time he had run away — unnecessarily, foolishly — he had lost a little more of himself, abrogated a little more of his manhood. He knew now that this was what Jana had seen in him, what she had been trying to tell him last night; at long last he, too, was facing his weakness, just as she had faced hers, coming to terms with himself, understanding himself, realizing that if it had not been for Jana and for the ordeal which was now reaching its culmination, he would have been irreclaimably destroyed by the poisons of his fear.

But now, if he had to die, he could die as a man, and he was very calm. He had felt the exorcism of the panic, the need and the capacity for flight, when he and Jana reached the bottom of the arroyo moments earlier. They could have tried to make it across to the far bank, they could have kept running and they could have died running, but with the understanding, he had instead brought Jana here, to the first concealment he had found. It was here they would make their final stand, if it was to be their final stand; he would fight, somehow, in some way, he would make a fight of it.

He looked at Jana and their eyes met, and he knew she was with him, all the way, unquestioning, undemanding, seeing the resolution in him and taking strength from it. Together, her eyes seemed to be saying. In life or in death, together.

He did not want her to die. He wanted her to live even more than he wanted to live himself — the first truly unselfish commitment of Jack Lennox to anything or anybody other than Jack Lennox — and anger rose in him, and hatred, cold and calculating, for the man-thing that thought of them not as human beings but merely as insensate objects, threats to his own warped existence. Lennox listened. Movement, soft, stealthy, coming from somewhere on the other side of the boulder, shoes sibilant on the sand, a deep wheezing of constricted breath. Jana heard it too, tensing slightly beside him, touching his arm. Lennox did not look at her; his full concentration was on the movement and the sounds beyond. Coming closer? Yes, closer, but not too close, not yet, there was still a minute or two.

A weapon, he had to have a weapon.

And he remembered the knifelike piece of granite.

His hand came up to touch his belt, where he had put the stone earlier — and it was gone. Damn, damn! It must have pulled free when the bullet skinned his side and he had fallen on the slope. He released a silent breath, passing his fingers over his split and puckered lips, looking around him, looking for another weapon, any weapon. His eyes touched small stones, a piece of decaying wood, an unwieldy section of rail — discarded them, moved on, restless, urgent, wanting something substantial, something heavy, something to throw, perhaps, or something sharp

and he saw the rusted splinter of steel.

It lay in the sand eight feet away from him, on open ground. Some two feet long, warped but otherwise unbent, it was a dull, cankered brown in the sunlight, its forward edge tapered into a point that appeared sharp, that appeared capable of penetrating flesh. Beside it was a long section of rail, the parent which had spawned it through metal fatigue or through impact in the collapse of decades past.

Lennox stared at the splinter, and he thought: Spear, it looks like some primitive spear, and there was a bitter irony in the association. Wasn’t what was happening here, this battle for survival, a primitive thing too — as old as man, as old as life itself?

He had to have that spear. He had to take the chance of going out there to get it. That two feet of slim oxidizing steel represented the last remaining thread of hope, the battle lance, and without it they were naked — there could be no battle.

He put his lips to Jana’s ear and breathed, “I’m going out after that piece of steel, stay here and keep down,” and then, because this was perhaps the final goodbye and there was the need, just this once, to put it into words, “I love you, Jana.”

He waited for her reply, the same three words, and when they were his he squeezed her hand and then moved out toward the splinter, the spear, lying in the sand beyond. He advanced in a humped, four-point stance, fingers splayed just ahead of his shoes, both sliding silently through the sand, his head turned to the left so that he could see the widening area around the boulder. He made a foot, another foot, coming out of the shade now, coming out of hiding, and from just beyond his vision there was a scuffling sound, leather scraping rock, pebbles tumbling, and he stopped moving and leaned forward, holding his breath, craning his neck, and twenty feet away, atop a high flat rock, the fat one, the killer, was pulling himself onto his feet, turned in profile, Death standing outlined against the bright, bright blue of the desert sky.

There was no quickening of Lennox’s heart, no tightening of his groin, none of the symptoms of fear and panic and irresolution. Time had run out, there was no more time to brace himself with the lance, there was only time for one quick attack before the fat one turned and saw him, a single offensive and nothing more.

He thought: This is the moment, this is the judgment — and lunged toward the waiting spear.

Fourteen

Breath whistled asthmatically between Vollyer’s lips as he straightened on top of the rock. He hunched forward, squinting, turning his body as he tried to fuse the dancing shadows below with the objects from which they sprang, cursing his eyes, screaming silently at his eyes. Sweat streamed down from his forehead, over his cheeks, and he lifted his left arm and in that moment he saw the movement, definite movement, independent of the shadows.

His body stiffened, the cords in his neck straining as he tried to focus on the source of the movement. It took shape for him, a man-shape, Lennox, Lennox, and the Remington came up in his right hand, jumping, roaring unsighted as the distorted figure ran across into the open. The bullet ricocheted off the boulder there, showering flakes of rock and dust, goddamn these eyes oh goddamn these eyes, and Lennox was bending down there in the sand, bending, two of him wavering, dancing. Vollyer dropped the Remington and the .38 slapped against his right palm and he fired and sand puffed up a foot wide, I missed him, you son-of-a-bitching eyes, I missed him, and then Lennox was coming up and moving forward, arm drawn back, something in his hand, and Vollyer squeezed the trigger again and again he missed, and Lennox’s arm pistoned frontally and the something in his fingers broke free, a blur, a thin brown blur, he threw something at me, get out of the

impact, Jesus! sudden pain, blackness behind his eyes, fire spreading out molten from his stomach, no, no, what did he throw, my belly, oh oh my belly, and the gun clatters down onto the rock at his feet, he staggers, his hands come up and encounter coarse steel, a length of steel, imbedded there and deep deep inside him, sticky wet, blood, steel, a spear, he threw a steel spear at me but that’s not right he’s a runner he’s not a fighter runners don’t fight, and Vollyer’s legs no longer support him, he falls to his knees, blind, fingers jerking desperately at the shaft penetrating the soft flesh just below his breastbone, trying vainly to pull it free

and he feels himself falling, blackness spinning all around him, dizzying within and without, his head strikes something, his arm strikes something, he is falling off the rock, and there is a solid jarring, an explosion of fresh pain that is still not as great as that in the core of his belly and the blackness becomes redness, flashing, pulsating, dissolves to blackness again and his hands flutter ineffectually at his stomach, the steel is gone now but the blood is there and the hole, the hole

dying, I’m dying, and he did it with a spear, a spear, what kind of thing is that, a goddamn spear, what kind of way is that to play the game...

Fifteen

Lennox had flung himself to the sand after releasing the steel splinter, looking up, preparing to roll toward a thick wooden tie if the hurtling shaft missed; but then he saw it strike flesh, saw the killer reel and stagger, the one gun drop, saw him topple off the rock into the sand at its base — and he allowed his body to go limp and his head to drop forward into the crook of his arms. He lay that way for a moment, finally lifted his head, and the fat one was still lying there in the sand, not moving. Lennox thought giddily: He shot at me point-blank, three or four times at point-blank range, and he missed every time and I had one primitive chance and I didn’t miss, maybe there is a God after all...

And then Jana was there, kneeling in the sand beside him, holding his head, pressing his face between her breasts, trying to cry but finding no moisture for her tears. “I saw it all, I saw it, oh Jack, oh God, Jack, are you...?”

“No,” he said, “no, I’m all right.”

A sobbing, almost hysterical laugh — a release of the spiraled tension inside her — spilled from Jana’s throat. “It’s over,” she said, “we’re all right, we’re all right.”

He felt tired, he felt incredibly tired. Hunger clawed just under his breastbone, and every inch of his body ached hellishly. He wanted to lie there and sleep, he wanted to lie with his head against Jana’s warm breast and sleep for days, for weeks. His mind seemed to have gone blank, incapable in that moment of sustaining thought, and it was good that way, for just a little while; all the thinking that had to be done had already been done before this final confrontation — all the examining and understanding — and there was no need for introspection now. They had survived, they had found one another and they had found a future, and there was simply nothing else to think about in this moment.

“Jack,” Jana said, “Jack, he’s moving up there, he’s still alive.” There was a kind of sickness in her voice — but nothing more.

She released his head, and Lennox stared at the crumpled form lying a few feet away, saw it twitching in the sand. He got painfully to his knees, finally onto the enervated spikes that were his legs, and walked there cautiously, stopping to pick up a heavy rock on the way. But there was no need for caution; blood pumped in diminishing geysers from the wound in the fat man’s round, soft stomach, and clawed fingers clutched uselessly at the earth. The eyes were open, but Lennox had the feeling that they were sightless, already sightless.

He felt no more hatred, he felt no emotion of any kind toward this dying lump of flesh. Rattling, liquid sounds began in the convulsing throat, the split lips opened, moved, as if trying to form words. He knows I’m standing here, Lennox thought, he knows I’m looking at him, and blood dribbled out at the corners of the small, broken mouth as it tried again to make intelligible sounds.

Lennox knelt, not knowing exactly why he knelt, and leaned close to the mottled, contorted face. Blood filled the mouth now, thick and red, overflowing, and Lennox felt nausea ascend in the pit of his stomach, intensifying the hunger pain there. He started to rise, to turn away, and then the rattling sounds became words, almost inaudible and yet very clear, forced through the bright blood along with a final, spasmodic exhalation — words that for Lennox had no meaning at all.

The words: “Fuck the winners.”

They climbed out of the arroyo at the same point at which they had entered it, and just as they emerged, there came from the west the high-pitched scream of sirens. They stood on the flatland, and seconds later three cars came very fast along the rutted trail — two black-and-white county cruisers and an unmarked black hardtop. One of the cruisers slowed and stopped near the two bodies at the foot of the slope, and the other two machines continued along the ruts.

A chattering, whirring sound reached their ears, coming from the sky to the east, and when they looked up they saw a dark shape — a helicopter — flying just to the near side of the golden rim of the sun, like an insect moving away from a naked light bulb. They looked back to the wheel ruts as the cruiser and the black hardtop drew abreast of them, came to shuddering halts one behind the other. Doors were flung open, and men burst out and began to run toward them across the rocky flatland.

The helicopter was very close now, the sun reflecting off the transparent glass bubble beneath its rotors, coming directly overhead. The hot turbulence generated by its spinning blades was somehow soothing on Jana’s face, billowing her dust-grimed hair, the tattered remains of her clothing. It really is over, she thought with a kind of wonder, it’s finally over. And then her eyes turned to Lennox and she thought: No, it’s just beginning.

He took her hand, held it tightly, and they started toward the approaching men.

Walking now.

Walking together.