The Wanderer

Suddenly three birds whirred up at once from the grass, and the nearest group of unicorns held tremblingly still, sniffing the air and peering about fearfully, then took off with great bounds. Simultaneously there sprang from behind a rock a gray-barred tan felinoid otherwise resembling Don’s conductor. He raced after the unicorns, his long legs flashing, hurled himself on the last, brought it crashing down from mid-bound, grasped it by chest and chin, and dipped his jaws toward its throat.

A topaz bird winged past the nearest tree-clump and from it there sprang a green-furred felinoid, female by her smaller size and slightly different contours. She leaped with the soaring grace and almost incredible elevation of a ballet dancer executing a grand jetй. Her long arm flashed and barely brushed the bird, but three long talons deeply pricked its breast. Grasping it by the comb with her other hand, she carried it to her lips and bit expertly into its ruffling neck.

There was a redness on her dull olive lips and on the one long white fang showing as she looked across the yellow feathers straight at Don with her large and flowerlike, jade-irised eyes. It may have been coincidence, but he felt that she saw him. And as she sucked the blood, with the blood-red sky behind her, she smiled.

Then a swooning tiredness came, and things grew dim and neutral-hued, and Don realized he was floating once more in his tiny cabin. He tried to look down at the bed, but was again unable to. The next instant he was lying on it. He felt its soothing touch from toe to head as all vision faded and his sense of rocketing, swooping movement gyrated down to darkness and to rest.

Chapter Thirty-four

Doc tootled the horn four times and stopped the Corvette just short of the rock slope where they’d camped last night. Hixon was back driving his truck now. In the Corvette, Ann was riding between Doc and her mother, while Margo and Hunter sat behind them.

All these five had been chattering in high spirits, despite or more likely because of their faces being blackly smeared and their clothes damp and dirty from the weird warm black rain, which had just now stopped and which they’d decided might well be from volcanic ash blowing up from Mexico and points south.

“Or sea-muck uncovered by low tides and whirlwinded up,” Doc had second-guessed. “It tastes a touch salty.”

The sky was wild masses of dark low clouds trapping bright silver light.

“All out,” Doc ordered gaily. “Ross, run ahead and check for water in the dip. I want to take her across before I get goosy.”

Hunter obeyed. Margo went with him.

The truck pulled up behind the Corvette, and behind the truck the school bus, its yellow streaked more blackly than ever.

Doc shouted to Hixon in the truck: “Tell your passengers to get out before we take the vehicles across, just like this morning. McHeath! — pass the word back to Doddsy, and tell him to shoo his folks out of the bus fast. We don’t want to waste any more time here than we have to. Then post yourself by the bus and watch the road behind us.”

Ann snuggled up against Doc. She said excitedly: “Let me stay in the car with you. I’m not scared of us slipping off.”

“That’d be great, sweetheart, but your Ma would say I was tempting Kali,” Doc said, ducking his head and rubbing his smeary cheek against hers. Rama Joan smiled fondly at him as she pulled her daughter out giggling.

“No water in the dip,” Hunter called back. At that moment his legs went out from under him and he sat down. “But it’s damn slippery,” he qualified as he scrambled to his feet, Margo grinning at him unfeelingly. “This film of wet ash is treacherous.”

Rama Joan’s smile faded. From beside the Corvette she whispered urgently to Doc, “Can’t we fill the dip with stones and earth, or at least clean it off?”

He leaned toward her and answered in a low, fast voice: “Look, darling, those murdering drunken kids are bound to get some cars on this road soon and come whooping for the beach. A lot of them have been doing it all their lives. Second nature to them. We really haven’t a minute to lose.”

He sat back, honked the horn once and roared the motor. “Here I come!” he warned.

He drove fast and the Corvette jounced through the dip with no sideslip at all. He parked it well ahead, then came jog-trotting back to where Rama Joan, Margo and Hunter were standing above the dip. Ann was back by the bus, chattering to McHeath and admiring his rifle.

“That was a rousing anticlimax,” Doc said. “I guess I’m getting chicken in my old age.” Hunter and Margo laughed. Rama Joan smiled uncertainly.

Ida called thinly from beside the truck: “Mr. Brecht! Ray Hanks doesn’t want to be lifted out again.”

Doc looked around at the others, shrugged, said: “It’ll save time,” and yelled: “O.K., let him chance it! Bring it over, Hixon!”