Cold Fire

Using a safety harness was a habit with him, so he was thrown sideways and forward, and his sunglasses flew off, but he didn't crack his face against the window post or shatter his breastbone against the steering wheel. Webs of cracks, like the work of a spider on Benzedrine, spread across the windshield. He squeezed his eyes shut, and gummy bits of tempered glass imploded over him. The car rolled again, then started to roll a third time but only made it halfway, coming to rest on its roof Hanging upside down in the harness, he was unhurt but badly shaken.

He choked on the clouds of white dust that poured in through the shattered windshield.

They'll be coming for me He fumbled frantically for the harness release, found it, and dropped the last few inches onto the ceiling of the overturned car. He was curled on top of the shotgun. He had been damn lucky the weapon hadn't discharged as it slammed around inside the tumbling Camaro.

Coming for me Disoriented, he needed a moment to find the door handle, which was over his head. He reached up, released it. At first the door would not open Then it swung outward with a metallic popping and squeaking.

He crawled off the ceiling, out onto the floor of the desert, feeling as though he had become trapped in a surreal Daliesque world of weird perspective He reached back in for the shotgun.

Though the ash-fine dust was beginning to settle, he was still coughing it out of his lungs. Clenching his teeth, he tried to swallow each cough. he needed to be quiet if he were to survive.

Neither as quick nor as inconspicuous as the small desert lizards the scooted across his path, Jim stayed low and dashed to a nearby arroyo When he arrived at the edge of that natural drainage channel, he discovered it was only about four feet deep. He slid over the lip, and his feet made a soft slapping sound as they hit the hard-packed bottom.

Crouching in that shallow declivity, he raised his head slowly to grow level and looked across the desert floor toward the overturned Camaro around which the haze of alkaline dust had not yet entirely dissipated.

the highway, the Road king finished reversing along the pavement and halted parallel to the wrecked car.

The door opened, and a man climbed out. Another man, having exited from the far side, hurried around the front of the motor home to join his companion. Neither of them was the kindly-retiree-on-a-budget that a might have imagined behind the wheel of that aging caravan. They appeared to be in their early thirties and as hard as heat-tempered dense rock. One of them wore his dark hair pulled back and knotted into redoubled ponytail-the passe style that kids now called a "dork knob" The other had short spiky hair on top, but his head was shaved on the sides-as if he thought he was in one of those old Mad Max movies. they wore sleeveless T-shirts, jeans, and cowboy boots, and both carried hand guns. They headed cautiously toward the Camaro, splitting up to approach it from opposite ends.

Jim drew down below the top of the arroyo, turned right-which was approximately west-and rushed in a crouch along the shallow channel He glanced back to see if he was leaving a trail, but the silt, baked under months of fierce sun since the last rain, did not take footprints.

After about fifty feet, the arroyo abruptly angled to the south, left.

Sixty feet thereafter it disappeared into a culvert that led under the highway.

Hope swept through him but did not still the tremors of fear that had shaken him continuously since he had found the dying man in the station wagon. He felt as if he was going to puke. But he had not eaten breakfast and had nothing to toss up. No matter what the nutritionists said, sometimes it paid to skip a meal.

Full of deep shade, the concrete culvert was comparatively cool.

He was tempted to stop and hide there-and hope they would give up, go away.

He couldn't do that, of course. He wasn't a coward. But even if his conscience had allowed him to buy into a little cowardice this time, the mysterious force driving him would not permit him to cut and run. To some extent, he was a marionette on strings invisible, at the mercy of a puppeteer unseen, in a puppet-theater play with a plot he could not understand and a theme that eluded him.

A few tumbleweed had found their way into the culvert, and their brittle spines raked him as he shoved through the barrier they had formed. He came out on the other side of the highway, into another arm of the arroyo, and scrambled up the wall of that parched channel.

Lying belly-first on the desert floor, he slithered to the edge of the elevated roadbed and eased up to look across the pavement, east toward the motor home. Beyond the Road king, he could see the Camaro like a dead roach on its back. The two men were standing near it, together now.

Evidently, they had just checked the car and knew he was not in it.