Panic!

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.