Deathwatch (10 page)

The stone against him felt strange. It was as though, in all the time he had been running he had not been in contact with the earth, the fleeting touches of his fingers and the small areas of the soles of his feet not really touching the stone.

This stone was solid and warm and felt soft, as though he were lying on a warm, stiff-fibered carpet. It was a sleepy, delicious feeling and there
was no reason to end it; just hang here on this warm carpet and sleep.

The fingers of his right hand had slipped steadily, nerve by nerve, but he had not noticed it.

Only the snapping movement of his little finger, as it slid off the edge, brought his attention to his hands and made him feel the growing strain coming down his arms in tight strings of pain.

He worked his body upward, and at last rolled over into the darkness of the narrow corridor.

His muscles trembled, jerked, shivered as he crawled on his hands and knees into what was not a corridor but a tunnel, the outer wall solidly curving over at the top and becoming a part of the butte itself.

Sometime, a million years ago when the desert was a sea, waves had formed this tunnel, wearing the sides and floor smooth, rounding the sharp edges of the stone.

Ben crawled on toward where light showed a slight bend in the tunnel. The floor here began to slope downward and was very smooth, the stone almost gleaming in the subdued light coming from the far end.

He got around the bend slowly.

And there lay the lake. A great lake of dark, sparkling, clear water, held there by the stone.

A
CURIOUS THING
has been noticed about people who are dying of thirst. The dehydration of their bodies is so extreme and the loss of salt so serious that the consistency of their blood changes radically. Sweating eventually ceases and the mucous membranes, usually moist and full of fluid, dry up and peel off. There is no saliva in their mouths or throats, and even the corners of their eyes, always flowing with moisture in normal times, become so dry that any speck of dust in their eyes causes excruciating pain.

And yet, if these people are rescued before they die, even people in the last moment of life and completely dehydrated, they almost always cry. From some mysterious storage, real tears flow from eyes that, a moment before, were bone dry and painful. No one knows where these tears come from.

Ben sat on the floor of the tunnel, his back against the curved wall of it.

It was not a lake.

It was a puddle of water about fifteen feet in
diameter and not more than two feet deep in the deepest part. All around this puddle bird droppings had caked the floor, and the water itself was not, as it had seemed, sparkling and clear. It was murky and had a stale, almost dusty taste.

It was delicious.

Lying on his stomach, Ben had drunk as much as he could. Then he had rested and drunk again.

It was as though he had actually felt this water flowing straight through the walls of his intestines and being taken up by his blood, and distributed through his body.

He had drunk once more and then, asleep almost before he rolled away from the puddle, he had lain there beside the water.

Ben felt now the way he had as a child when he was awakened by some nightmare and his mother had been there to comfort him. He had never known that comfort in his uncle’s house after the death of his parents. But he felt it again now as he sat beside this little puddle, the smell of guano strong around him.

His tongue had shrunk to its normal size, his throat, though raw, felt good. His eyes were wet again and he felt strength in his body.

He was hungry.

Since the first night on the low range of mountains he had not felt particularly hungry and, in the last hours, had felt no hunger at all. But now his stomach was gnawing at him.

The intensity of the light had changed as he slept. Now the strongest light came from the end
of the tunnel at which he had entered and the far, unexplored end was only a dim glow.

Even his feet didn’t seem to be so painful as he got up and walked around the puddle and on down the corridor.

As he neared the end he noticed where the ancient waves had worn the outer wall very thin, in places eating all the way through it so that it looked like a great slab of brownish cheese pocked with little holes.

The tunnel ended raggedly, the outer wall breaking up as the tunnel widened so that, beyond it, he could see a wide, open ledge of stone slanting upward at about 15 degrees and ending at what was apparently the top of the butte.

Ben started to walk out on the open ledge, but then for the first time in hours thought again of his enemy. Madec knew that he was somewhere on the butte. He would be waiting for just such a mistake as this.

Ben went back into the tunnel and got one of the sotol sandals. Then he knelt beside a small hole in the outer wall and slowly slid the sandal out across the opening.

No bullet ripped into it, no sound rolled up from the desert.

He tried a larger hole.

With the dark tunnel behind them these holes might look to Madec like only dark splotches on the stone surface.

He lowered the sandal and slowly moved until he could see out through the hole.

Madec was down there, sitting on the hood of the Jeep studying the butte with the binoculars, the .358 across his lap.

Ben sat down beside his puddle of water. For a long time he stared at the perfectly calm surface of it.

It was the only weapon he had; water which gave him time. If he could get some food it would add to his time, his life.

He picked up the slingshot and carried it back toward the wide end of the tunnel until he found a spot safe from Madec. There he cleared off the small pebbles and debris and sat down. He noticed as he did that his muscles were beginning to feel very stiff and painful and that, as he stooped, his back and his wounded arm ached.

It was the best slingshot he had ever seen. The handle fitted exactly into his hand, the yoke was a wide, strong U of tubular metal from the base of which the brace went down the inside of his wrist to the curved metal piece which lay against his arm, almost halfway to his elbow. There was little strain on his fingers or the palm of his hand even at full pull of the powerful rubber tubes. There was no shaking, no wavering.

Picking up a small pebble, he fitted it into the leather pouch, drew and let go. The pebble whistled out into the sunlight, hitting the wall of the butte and whining away into the air.

Gathering a little stock of pebbles, he began to shoot, aiming first at a spot close by on the wall
but, as he learned to hit it with almost every try, picking targets farther and farther away, until he found the extreme range of accuracy of the slingshot.

Then, as the light slowly faded, he just sat and shot the thing, stone after stone, more and more pleased with it as his accuracy improved. He got so he could pick up a stone, pouch it, draw, shoot and hit his target with what seemed to him remarkable speed and accuracy.

At close range the slingshot was lethal. The rubber tubes were so powerful that, at full draw, Ben was sure the pebbles started out with as much velocity as the pellet of a good air gun.

Confident of his ability, he at last decided to waste one of the heavy lead buckshot, wondering what difference the smoother shape of the buckshot would make.

It made a lot.

He wasted five more of the lead bullets, finding out how much flatter their trajectory was and how much more velocity the round shape gave them.

Ready, he moved back into the tunnel, taking a position beyond the puddle so that he was almost in darkness. Arranging himself so that he would not have to move anything but his fingers drawing the pouch back, he loaded it with a buckshot and then sat, waiting.

The first bird was a sparrow hawk.

It wheeled straight into the tunnel and straight out again, banking in a sharp, whistling turn about five feet from Ben.

Discouraged, Ben sat watching the empty disk of sky he could see down the tunnel. Not a bird appeared, not even in the far distance.

Had they stopped using this water hole? Were all these droppings old? Was there water somewhere easier for them to reach?

Ben did not see them flying or see them light. They were just suddenly there, a covey of Gambel’s quail walking without any hesitation into the tunnel and on toward the water.

They were talking to each other in a low, soft, fluty chatter, the little curved plumes on the heads of the males bobbing up and down as though they were nodding in agreement.

He let them come until they reached the water. Then, picking out a male standing alone, dipping his beak down and then raising it high as he let the water run down his throat, Ben drew slowly, aimed and released.

The bird dropped where he stood, a little dust of feathers settling on him and a little cloud of dust rising as he kicked feebly and then lay still.

It did not alarm the other quail at all. Some glanced at their fallen companion but did not stop drinking.

Ben eased another buckshot into the pouch, drew and shot. He did not hit this one as cleanly, apparently striking bone. The buckshot knocked the bird backward a foot or so but killed it.

He did not miss a single shot. When the birds had drunk enough they turned and walked, still
chatting, out of the tunnel, leaving five dead on the floor.

He gathered them up and took them to the funnel end where there was more light. They were still warm as he plucked them, the feathers remarkably hard to pull out.

The little carcasses looked pitiful, as they lay in a row on the rock, the heads unplucked, the gay plumes limp now and colorless.

Ben tried not to look at them as he gouged them open with his thumbnail, their juices covering his hands. He debated about throwing the entrails away but at last did, thinking that other quail would be back for water in the morning.

Ben looked at the raw, bloody thing in his fingers, the bones showing ghastly white in what was left of the sunset.

Then, and with his eyes shut, gagging, he put it to his mouth and tore the flesh off with his teeth. Close to nausea, he did not chew at all, just swallowed the tough, slimy stuff, forcing his throat to accept it.

He ate them all, the process getting no easier. When they were all gone he looked at his hands, dark with blood, and felt the blood around his mouth and almost lost the meal.

I can’t go on doing that, Ben decided.

If the birds came back in the morning he would dress them out and then put them in the sun. No matter how hungry he felt he would make himself wait until the sun on the stone
had cooked them—at least a little.

His mind went on, dealing only with small things, not wanting to deal with the one enormous thing which, as he slowly admitted it into his thoughts, was like the darkness creeping up the side of the butte and into the tunnel.

T
HERE WERE VOICES
in the wind. Off and on all night Ben had listened to them: the whispering, the faint dry laughter, the chattering that sometimes sounded insane. As a little boy he had heard these wind voices and they had scared him, but his father had told him that the desert had to talk at night. That it was so silent during the day it just had to break out into all this talk at night.

Ben had never been afraid of the voices after that.

He had slept all night, guarded against Madec by birds that had come at sunset to roost at the mouth of the tunnel. Every time Ben moved in his sleep they fluttered and cried out, hustling away from him.

At dawn he had shot six birds, using only pebbles in the slingshot, saving the buckshot for a time when he might need the greater velocity and greater accuracy. He had plucked and cleaned them more efficiently than he had the others and now they were lying out on a smooth, clean rock, the sun already beginning to cook them.

Using water from the puddle, he had cleaned all the wounds he could reach and was pleased to see how fast they were healing. He had inspected his slingshot, examining the rubber tubes carefully to see that they were not beginning to break or wear at any place.

His beard was now six days old, for he made it a practice not to shave during long trips in the desert; a beard helped protect his face from the sun. When he looked at himself in the surface of the water his beard was very black and thick and gave him a strange, Satanic look; he looked dangerous.

Ben had a pleasant sense of well-being as he sat down in the tunnel out of reach of Madec’s gun and started practicing with the slingshot. His wounds only hurt when he moved carelessly, his arm only ached a little and, although he was hungry, he was content to wait until the carcasses became more appetizing.

He was getting so good with the slingshot that he could hit within an inch of where he aimed at thirty feet. At fifteen feet he was accurate even with a stone.

A nine-inch whiptail lizard came into view, and Ben threw a pebble at it to get it moving and then nailed it on the run at twenty feet.

He added it to his cooking birds and then stopped for a moment and looked through his peekhole at Madec.

The man had pitched camp at the foot of the
butte, getting the Jeep in close to the breccia. He had parked facing the butte and had put up the tent behind the Jeep. The water cans were in under the awning of the tent, lined up in a neat row in the shade.

Madec was doing something around behind the Jeep. Ben could see his shadow moving.

As he sat down again and fitted the slingshot back into his hand he knew that it was foolish to imagine that he was safe just because he had food and water and Madec could not shoot him.

Madec would change that.

He was locked to that man down on the desert. They were chained together.

Perhaps a different man would have left the desert by now, sure that Ben could not make it out. But Madec would not do that. He would stay until he saw that his plan had been worked out to the last detail.

Madec would not leave him here alive.

As Ben sat going over in his mind what had happened since the first roar of that .358, a thought formed and became clearer and clearer until he realized that it was the only thing he could do.