The Servants of Twilight

The worst of the bleeding had stopped, but the flesh immediately around the wound was swollen, an angry shade of red. The skin color faded to purple farther away from the hole, then to a deadpale white.

"Lot of blood?" he asked.

"There was."

"Now? "

"Still bleeding a little."

"Spurting?"

"No. If an artery had been hit, you'd be dead by now."

"Lucky," he said.

"Very."

An exit wound scarred his back. The flesh looked just as bad on that side, and she thought she saw splinters of bone in the torn and bloody meat of him.

"Bullet's not in you," she said.

"That's a plus."

The first-aid kit was in his backpack. She got it out, opened a small bottle of boric acid solution and poured it into the wound.

It foamed furiously for a moment, but it didn't sting as iodine or Merthiolate would have; with a slightly dreamy, detached air, Charlie watched it bubble.

She hastily packed some snow into a tin cup and set it to melt on the hot coals of the burnt-out fire.

He overcame his dreaminess, shook his head as if to clear it, and said

"Hurry."

"Doing the best I can," she said.

When the boric acid had finished working, she quickly dusted both the entry and exit wounds with a yellowish antibiotic powder, then with a mild, white anesthetizing powder. Now there was almost no bleeding at all. Taking off her gloves so she could

work faster and better, she used cotton pads, gauze pads, and a two-inch-wide roll of gauze to fashion an unsatisfactory and somewhat amateurish bandage, but she fixed it in place with so much white adhesive tape that she knew it would stay put.

"Listen!" he said.

She was very still.

They listened, but there was only the wind in the trees.

"Not them," she said.

"Not yet."

"Chewbacca will warn us if anyone's coming."

The dog was lying beside Joey, at ease.

The icy air had already leeched the stored-up warmth in the stone.

Beneath the rocky overhang, the sheltered niche was growing cold again.

Charlie was shivering violently.

She hurriedly dressed him, pulled up the zipper on his jacket, tugged his hood in place and tied it under his chin, then fetched the cupful of melted snow from the embers. The first-aid kit contained Tylenol, which was not nearly a strong enough painsuppressant for his needs, but it was all they had. She gave him two tablets, hesitated, then a third. At first he had a bit of trouble swallowing, and that worried her, but he said it was just that his mouth and throat were so dry, and by the time he took the third tablet he seemed better.

He wouldn't be able to carry his backpack; they would have to abandon it.

She shook a few items out of her own bag in order to get the first-aid kit into it, secured all the flaps. She slipped her arms through the loops, buckled the last strap across her chest.

She was frantic to get moving. She didn't need a wrist watch to know they were running out of time.

63

Kyle Barlowe was a big man but not graceless. He could move stealthily and sure-footedly when he put his mind to it. Tep minutes after Harrison killed Denny Rogers and threw his body down from the crest of the ridge, Barlowe moved cautiously from the tangle of dead brush where he had been hiding, and slipped across the face of the slope to a spot where shadows lay like frozen pools of night. From the shadows he dashed catlike to a huge fallen tree, from there to a jagged snout of rock poking up from the hillside. He neither climbed nor descended the slope, moved only laterally, away from the area over which Harrison held dominion, leaving the others pinned down but, with luck, not for long.

After another ten minutes, when he was certain that he was well out of Harrison's sight, Barlowe became less circumspect, rushed boldly up the slope to the crest, crawled over it. He moved through a gap between two rock formations and stood up on the flat, wind-abraded top of the ridge.

He had a Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum in a shoulder holster.

He unzipped his jacket long enough to get the revolver.

The snow was coming down so hard that he couldn't see more than twenty feet, sometimes not even that far. The limited visibility didn't worry him. In fact, he figured it was a gift from God. He already knew the spot from which Harrison had been firing on them; he wouldn't have any difficulty finding it. But in the meantime the snow would screen him from Harrison-if the detective was still on the ridge, which was doubtful.

He moved southward, directly into the raging wind. It stung and numbed his face, made him squint. His eyes watered and his nose dripped. But it couldn't stagger him or knock him down; it would have more easily felled one of the massive trees along the ridge line.

In fifty yards he found Morgan Pierce's body. The staring but unseeing eyes did not look human, for they were sheathed by milky cataracts that were actually thin films of crazed ice. The eyebrows and lashes and mustache were frosted. The wind was industriously packing snow in the angles formed by the dead man's arms, legs, and bent neck.