Panic!

Jana and the man she knew as Pete Delaney were on higher ground, running parallel to the dry wash toward a low butte in the distance, when they heard the echoing crash somewhere behind them. It was a brittle and metallic sound, the kind a car would make upon impact with something hard and unyielding—the sound of ultimate destruction.

He stiffened and stumbled to a halt, looking past her, still holding roughly to her wrist. But there was nothing for him to see. He started forward with her again, but Jana held back, fighting breath into her lungs. Her temples pounded rhythmically, and the inside of her head felt as if it were layered in thick cotton. The effects of the shock which had gripped her following the Triumph’s wild flight off the road still lingered, and she could not seem to compose her thoughts; they were sluggish, like fat weevils in the cotton bunting.

She knew that it was no accident that they had gone off the road; she had heard the bullet humming just over her right shoulder, slamming into the dash, had heard reports behind them just before the rear tire exploded. Someone had shot at them, shot at them! But why? Pete Delaney? And those two men on the road running after them—more gunshots? She could not remember, she had been so dazed. Running, the rocks and the cacti, the fingers like steel bands on her wrist. The fear. She could feel it rise within her of its own volition, and, as well, seem to enter her body like an electrical current emanating from this man, Delaney. He radiated fear, it seeped from his pores like an invisible and noxious vapor. His face was a mask of it: gaffed mouth, protuberant eyes, throbbing veins.

She tried, now, to claw her wrist free of his painful grasp. He refused to let go. “You’re ... you’re hurting me!”

He did not seem to hear her. His eyes made a furtive ambit of the area; ground cover was thinner here, less concealing. He looked into the wash. It hooked sharply to the left several hundred yards ahead, vanishing into more thickly clustered rocks, and its bottom offered sanctuary in the form of boulders and paloverde and an occasional smoke tree.

Jana tried again to free herself, vainly, as he pulled her down the inclined but not steep bank of the wash. She fell when they reached the rocky floor, crying out softly, putting another tear in her Levis and a gash in the flesh just below her knee; tears formed in her eyes as he jerked her to her feet, and she began to sob in broken, gasping cries.

He ran with her to the closest of the smoke trees and drew her down behind the twisted, multi-trunked base; over their heads, the blue-gray twigs on its thorny branches—nearly leafless now—looked like billows of smoke against the fading blue of the sky. He released her wrist then, and there were angry red welts where his fingers had bitten into her skin. Jana rubbed at the spot gently with her other hand, turning her face away, drinking air hungrily. She was still sobbing, more softly now.

Lying flat on his stomach, the man she knew as Delaney peered through the humped bottom branch of the smoke tree, looking down the wash for a time and then upward, along its western bank to the rocks through which they had come moments ago. Nothing moved. He pulled himself into a sitting position, air whistling painfully through his nostrils, facing Jana. He seemed less wild-eyed now, more in control; the mask of panic had smoothed.

“We can rest a minute,” he said thickly. “Not long. Are you all right?”

“What’s happening?” she said. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“They shot us off the road, those two men.”

“Why? Who are they?”

“They’re killers.”

“What?”

“Killers, professional killers.”

“Dear God! What do they want with you? Who are you?”

“I’m not anybody, I’m just ... Pete Delaney.”

“Then what do they want with you?”

“I saw them murder a man,” he said. “This morning, at the oasis stop on the highway. That’s why I was on the desert. I ran away but they found me somehow. They’ll kill me if they catch me. They’ll kill both of us now.”

Jana shook her head numbly, disbelievingly. Professional killers? She had always thought they were something conjured up from the imaginations of fiction writers. Murder? Death? Just words, more fiction, a sympathetic shudder at a morning newspaper headline—things that never touched your life, that were somehow not even real. And she felt a sense of unreality sweep over her, as if she were a player in a melodrama, in one of those turgid mystery puzzle things her drama instructor at N.Y.U. had loved to produce. The concept of her life being in danger, of death and menace, was utterly alien. It had all happened so fast, too fast; she had been sucked into a vortex and she no longer had control of her own destiny. She was trapped, helpless, she was terrified.

He said, “We’ve got to keep running. We can’t stay here. As long as we keep moving, we’ve got a chance.”