Cemetery World (17 page)

I forgot about the gun.

Cynthia was running down the narrow hollow that carried the creek and I ran after her. Behind me a couple of guns went off, but the balls must have flown far wide of us, for I didn’t hear them hum nor did I see them strike. In a few more seconds, I told myself, we’d be out of range. Homemade guns carrying balls of lead powered by homemade powder could not have had much carrying power.

The narrow valley was tortuous traveling. The hills came down steeply on either side, in a sharp V formation, and there was no level ground. The surface was cluttered by massive boulders that through the ages had come rolling down the hillsides. In some places gigantic trees grew in the narrowness of the notch between the hills. There was no sort of trail to follow; nothing in its right mind would travel down this valley short of sheer necessity. It was a matter of finding the best path that one could, dodging around the rocks and trees, leaping the brook when it swung across one’s path.

I caught up with Cynthia when she was slowed down by an enormous pile of boulders, and after that we went together. I saw that she didn’t have Big Brute’s gun.

“I dropped it,” she said. “It was heavy. It kept getting in my way.”

“It’s just as well,” I said. And it was just as well. Each of the guns carried a single charge and we had no balls or powder to reload (even if we’d known how to reload) once that charge was fired. They were awkward things to handle and I had a hunch a man would have to do a lot of shooting with them before he could come anywhere near hitting what he was aiming at.

We came to a place where another little V-shaped valley came into the one we had been following.

“Let’s go up that one,” Cynthia said. “They know we came down this one.”

I nodded. If they followed, they might suspect we had chosen the easier course, continuing down the hollow from the cave.

“Fletch,” she said, “we haven’t got a thing. We ran off without our packs.”

I hesitated. “I could go back,” I said. “You go on up the hollow. I’ll catch up with you.”

“We can’t separate again,” she said. “We have to stick together. None of this would have happened if we’d stayed with Elmer.”

“Wolf has got them treed,” I said. “Either treed or running.”

“No,” she said. “Some of them up the trees have guns. And there are too many of them for Wolf to handle. They’ll scatter. He can’t chase them all.”

“You saw them,” I said. “That’s why you hit the big one with the pan.”

“I saw them,” she said, “slithering down the hillside. But I might have hit him anyhow. We couldn’t trust them, Fletch. And you aren’t going back. I’d have to go with you and I am scared to go.”

I gave in. I couldn’t honestly decide whether it was giving in or not wanting to go back, myself.

“Later on,” I said. “Later on, when this is all over, we can come back and get the stuff.” Knowing that we probably never would. Or that it might not be there if we did go back.

We started up the hollow. It was as bad as the one we had come down; worse because now we were climbing.

I let Cynthia go ahead and I did some worrying. We must have been in a real panic, both of us, when we left the cave. It would have been simple, using no more than a minute’s time, to have grabbed up the packs. But we hadn’t done it and now we were without food and blankets, without anything at all. Except fire, I thought. I had the lighter in my pocket. I felt a little better, although not much, when I realized we still had fire.

The way was grueling and there were times when we had to stop to rest. Listening for some sound back at the cave, I heard nothing and began to wonder, rather dazedly, if what I remembered had really happened there. I knew, of course, it had.

We were nearing the top of the ridge and the valley petered out. We clambered to the crest. The ridge was heavily wooded and when we reached the top, we were in a fairyland of beauty. The trees were massive blocks of red and yellow and in some of them were climbing vines that provided slashes of deep gold and brilliant crimson. The day was clear and warm. Looking at the color, I remembered that first day—only a few days ago, but seeming more like weeks—when we had left the Cemetery and gone down the hill to the first autumn-painted forest I had ever seen.

We stood, watching back the way that we had come.

“Why should they be hunting us?” asked Cynthia. “Sure, we took their horses, but if that is all it is, they should be hunting the horses and not us.”

“Revenge, maybe,” I said. “A twisted idea of getting even with us. Probably only a part of them are after us. The others must be following the horses.”

“That may be it,” she said, “but I can’t bring myself to think so. There is something more than that.”

“It’s Cemetery,” I said and I wasn’t entirely clear what I meant by saying it, although it did seem that Cemetery was somehow involved in everything that happened. But as soon as I said it, the whole pattern formed inside my mind.

“Don’t you see,” I said. “Cemetery has a finger in everything that happens. They can bring certain pressures. Back at the settlement someone got a case of whiskey for trying to blow up Bronco. And here are the ghouls …”

“But the ghouls,” she said, “are different. They’re stealing from Cemetery. Cemetery is setting traps for them. They’d make no deals with Cemetery.”

“Look,” I said, “it may be they’re only trying to curry some favor with Cemetery. They found the wolves were after us and who but Cemetery would set the wolves on us. And the wolves had failed. To the kinds of minds the ghouls have it must have seemed a rather simple thing, an opportunity. If, the wolves having failed, they could bring in our heads there might be something in it for them. It’s as simple as all that.”

“It could be,” she said. “Heaven knows, it gets down to simple basics.”

“In which case,” I said, “we’d best be getting on.” We went down the slope and struck another rock-littered ravine and followed it until it joined another valley, this one a little wider and easier for traveling.

We found a tree that was almost buried beneath a great grapevine and I clambered up it. Birds and little animals had been at the grapes, but I found a few bunches that carried most of their fruit. Picking them, I dropped them through the branches to the ground. The grapes proved somewhat sour, but we didn’t mind too much. We were hungry and they helped to fill us up, but I knew that we’d somehow have to manage something other than grapes. We had no fishhooks, but I did have a jacknife and we probably could cut willow branches and rig up a brush seine that would net some fish for us. We had no salt, I remembered, but hungry enough, we could manage without salt. “Fletch,” said Cynthia, “do you think we ever will find Elmer?”

“Maybe Elmer will find us,” I said. “He must be looking for us.”

“We left the note,” she said.

“The note is gone,” I reminded her. “The ghouls found the note, remember? They’d not have left it for him.”

The valley was a little wider than the one we followed from the cave, but it had never broadened out.

Rather, the hills seemed to get larger and move in on us. Now there were great rock cliffs that rose a hundred feet or more on either side. It became a less pleasant valley. Progressively, it grew more eerie and frightening. Not only was it stark, but silent. The creek that flowed through it was broad and deep, and there were no shallows or rapids. The water did not talk; it surged along with a look of terrible power.

The sun was low in the west and with some surprise I realized that we had traveled through the day. I was tired, but not tired enough, it seemed, to have walked all day long.

Ahead of us I saw a cleft cutting back into a cliff. The crest of the cliff was crowned with massive trees and occasional ragged cedars clung precariously to its face.

“Let’s take a look,” I said. “We’ll have to find a place to spend the night.”

“We’ll be cold,” she said. “We left the blankets.”

“We have fire,” I said.

She shuddered. “Can we have a fire? Is it safe to have a fire?”

“We have to have a fire,” I told her.

The cleft was dark. The walls of stone enclosed it and we could not see to the end of it because the dark deepened as the fissure ran back into the rock. The floor was pebbles, but off to one side, a little back from the entrance, a slab of rock was raised somewhat above the floor.

“I’ll get wood,” I said.

“Fletch!”

“We have to have a fire,” I said. “We have to chance it. We’ll freeze to death without it.”

“I’m scared,” she said.

I looked at her. In the darkness her face was a blur of whiteness.

“Finally I am scared,” she said. “I thought I wouldn’t be. I told myself I wouldn’t be. I said to me I’d tough it out. And it was all right as long as we were moving and out in the bright sunlight. But now night is coming, Fletch, and we haven’t any food and we don’t know where we are…”

I moved close to her and took her in my arms and she I came into them willingly enough. Her arms went around me and clutched me tightly. And for the first time since it all had happened, since that moment I had found her sitting in the car as I walked down the steps from the administration building, I thought of her as a woman and I wondered, with some surprise, why it should have been that way. First, of course, she had been nothing but a nuisance, popping up from nowhere with that ridiculous letter from Thorney clutched tightly in her hand, and since then we’d been run ragged by the events that had come tumbling over one another and there’d been no time in which to think of her as a woman. Rather, she had been a good companion, not doing any bawling, not throwing any fits. I thought somewhat unkindly of myself for the way that I had acted. It would not have hurt me to pay her a few small courtesies along the way, and thinking back, it seemed that I had paid her none.

“We’re babes in the woods,” she said. “You remember the old Earth fairy tale, of course.”

“Sure, I remember it,” I said. “The birds came with leaves …”

And let it go at that. For the tale, when you came to think of it, was not as pretty as it sounded. I couldn’t quite remember, but the birds, it seemed to me, had covered them with leaves because they were quite dead. Like so many other fairy tales, I thought, it was a horror story. She lifted her head. “I’m all right now,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

I put my fist underneath her chin and tilted up her face. I bent and kissed her on the lips.

“Now let us go and get the wood,” she said.

The sun was nearly gone, but it still was daylight. Lying along the foot of the cliff, we found scattered wood. A lot of it was cedar, dead branches that had fallen off the trees clinging to the bare face of the rock.

“It’s a good place to have a fire,” I told her. “No one can see it. They’d have to be directly opposite the opening to see it.”

“What about the smoke?” she asked. 

“This is dry wood,” I said. “There shouldn’t be much smoke.”

I was right. The wood burned with a bright, clean flame There was scarcely any smoke. The night chill had not settled in as yet, but we huddled close beside the blaze. It was a friend and comfort. It beat back the dark. It drew us together. It warmed us and made a magic circle for us.

The sun went down and out beyond the cleft dusk closed in rapidly. The world went dark and we were alone.

Something stirred out beyond the circle of the fire, at the outer edge of dark. Something clicked upon the rock.

I leaped erect and then I saw the blur of whiteness. His metal body shining in the firelight, Wolf trotted in to us.

From his steel jaws hung the limp form of a rabbit.

Wolf was hell on rabbits.

Chapter 17

O’Gillicuddy and his gang arrived when we were Finishing off the rabbit. Without salt, it was somewhat short of tasty, but it was food and the only thing we’d had all day had been grapes. Just the fact of eating made life seem a bit more stable and ourselves not entirely lost.

Wolf lay between us, close beside the fire, stretched out, with his massive head resting on his metal paws.

“If he’d only talk,” said Cynthia, “it would be very nice. Probably he could tell us what Was going on.”

“Wolves don’t talk,” I said, chewing the shinbone of the rabbit.

“But robots do,” she said. “Elmer talks. Even Bronco talks. And Wolf here really is a robot. He isn’t any wolf. He’s just made to look like one.”

Wolf shifted his eyes around, to look first at one and, then the other of us. He didn’t say a word, but he beat hid metal tail upon the rock and it made a terrible racket. “Wolves don’t beat their tails,” she said. 

“How do you know that?”

“I read it somewhere. Wolves don’t beat or wag their tails. Dogs do. Wolf is more like a dog than a wolf.”

“It bothers me,” I said. “Here he was, to start with, thirsting for our blood. Suddenly he turns around in his way of thinking and is a pal of ours. It doesn’t make much sense.”

“I’m beginning to believe,” said Cynthia, “that nothing on the Earth really makes much sense.”

We sat by the fire, enclosed in the magic circle. The firelight flickered and flickered yet again and there seemed to be a strange sense of motion all around.

“We have visitors,” Cynthia said quietly.

“It’s O’Gillicuddy,” I said. “O’Gillicuddy, are you there?”

“We are here,” said O’Gillicuddy. “There are many of us. We come to bear you company in this wilderness.”

“And to bear us word, perhaps?”

“Yes, indeed. Word we have to bear.”

“We would have you know,” said Cynthia, “word or not, we are glad to have you here.”

Wolf flicked an ear, as if there were a fly, but there wasn’t any fly. Even if there had been, it would not have bothered Wolf.

Ghosts, I thought. The place was full of ghosts, the principal one of which was named O’Gillicuddy. Ghosts were here, I thought, and we were accepting them as if they were people or had been people, and that was madness. Under normal circumstance, a ghost was acceptable, but here, under these conditions, they became not only acceptable, but normal.