Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (2 page)

It was halfway around the lake, an enormous crowd of campers, twenty that she could count and who could guess how many more? Their tents were down on the very lakeshore, and a huge wood fire was blazing on a rock. Half a dozen people stood around the fire, including a large, beefy man with a .38 Special pistol on a belt around his waist. He turned to confront her as she walked into the campfire circle.

"What are you planning to shoot?" she asked, pointing to the pistol.

"Rabbits," the man said.

"There aren't any rabbits this high," Pam said. "And the squirrels, ground squirrels and marmots are all protected."

"So I'll shoot chipmunks," the man said.

"That's pretty big game for a man." Pam looked at the blaze. "Quite a fire you've got there."

"Say, who the hell are you?"

"Forest Service. Wilderness Patrol," Pam said.

"So why don't you piss off, lady? We don't need you around here."

"You've got an illegal fire going here."

"What do you mean, illegal fire?"

The headache was pounding behind her eyes. "I mean there's a fire closure in this area," she said irritably. "These woods are tinder-dry, they can go off like dynamite with one little spark. Fires were closed out a month ago; there's a clear notice at every trailhead and dozens more tacked up all over the place, including that tree over there: no fires except camp stoves."

The man laughed and looked at his companions. "So the girlie is going to make us put out our fire. How about that, guys?"

Suddenly Pam was tired of all this. She stepped up very close to the big man with the pistol, looking up into his face. For a moment she was wracked with coughing, but fumbled her citation book out of her pocket. "Mister, I don't care what you do with your fire," she said when her voice came back. "What's your name?"

"Jack B. Nimble. What's yours?"

"Okay." She glanced at a pack near the fire with a stenciled name and address on it. "That says Robert B. Comstock, 314 Sand Way, Canon City, Colorado. That's good enough for me; let Mr. Comstock carry the load." She was writing in hercita-tion book. "You have an illegal fire, Mr. Comstock or whoever you are. That's point number one. You have at least twenty people in this one camp, where the legal limit is eight to one campsite. That's point number two. You've got a camp directly on the shore of the lake, when the Wilderness Law at the trailhead specifies one hundred feet back at a minimum. That's point number three. Now you can take your three citations and pay the judge a nice fat fine for each one, or you can break up this cozy mess and set up legal camps. Take your choice. I don't care what you do—but I'll be checking."

She ripped off a copy of the triple citation and shoved it into the man's paw. Then she turned and started back up the trail toward her campsite, coughing and coughing as she went. Behind her there was a flurry of activity; she heard the big man rumble, "For Christ sake, get that fire out and strike those tents. Goddam meddling bastards ..." Pam went on, scratching her wrist and ankle almost raw as she went. They'd probably trim up their camp, at least halfway, she reflected. They usually did. But aside from that, she was appalled at herself. Seldom if ever was she so imperative and abrupt about a violation. The whole idea had always been voluntary compliance, not the force of law. If it hadn't been for this damned headache, she would have handled it far more smoothly. . . .

Back at camp she cooked up dinner, then found she had no appetite for it. She just didn't
feel
good. She really just wanted to get into bed and sleep forever, but the force of habit was strong. First she brought out the small notebook from her pack, pulled out the notes from her breast pocket, propped up her flashlight and made her day's log entry in her small, cramped handwriting. The three dead ground squirrels, the strange dirty boy at Nada Lake, the trail-mending work, the unpleasant crowd she had just encountered around the lake. Finally, inexplicably exhausted and still coughing every few moments, she took a couple of ampicillin caps, her cure-all for everything, crawled into her sleeping bag still dogged by her headache, and dreamed nightmares.

To her amazement, she didn't wake up until after eight the next morning—more than three hours late, for her. Her head still throbbed and her cough seemed deeper as she crawled out of the tent, stiff and sore. Breakfast was out of the question, the very thought turned her stomach, and she had to get going, there was a lot to do today when she got up to the top. Something nagged at her subliminally as she struck her tent and stuffed her pack—her armpits and groin were aching fiercely.
Flu? In August? Good God. That's all I need right now.
She took two more ampicillin, struggled into her pack and started around the lake to the beginning of the climb.

The Comstock party, broken up and moved back from the lake, was just stirring as she went past; three or four of them glared at her. At the far end of the lake she stopped at the feeder creek for water, suddenly unbearably thirsty. From the place where it crossed the creek the trail led back, rising and falling, through a deeply wooded canyon floor, then abruptly started up, and up, and up. Her usual time to the top in the cool of early morning was about an hour, but starting up now after nine, she knew she wouldn't make it that fast. The mist was already off the lake and a hot sun was baking down—
Great on those rocks up higher.
To top it off, the headache and the coughing slowed her down. Every time her pulse topped a hundred her head started pounding until she tripped or lurched or walked into a tree. Each coughing spell made her stop for a minute to get her wind, so she couldn't set a pace. She pushed doggedly on, finally giving up on pace and stopping to rest for five minutes out of every fifteen as other hikers came up behind her and passed her.

From time to time she could see the white water of the creek plunging down cliff and canyon from Lake Vivian, the first of the Enchantment Lakes high above. About a third of the way up, the trail switched out to the creek near a beautiful series of crystal pools, usually her first two-minute rest stop. This time she dumped her pack like an elephant off her back and sank down on a log, not even looking at the creek.

Abruptly, she realized she was shaking. She couldn't hold her hands or legs still, and her teeth were chattering so fiercely she could hear them. She was suddenly icy cold, frigid, nearly shaking herself off the log, shaking too hard to grip her arms across her chest.
Chills. That means fever, high fever, that's what the first-aid book says. Heat stroke? Impossible, her neck and forehead were still wet with sweat.
She sat shaking for fifteen minutes until gradually, gradually, the chills subsided and she felt a little better. She shouldered the pack and started slowly up again.

Two hours later, still nowhere near the top, she had another chill, worse and longer than the first. This time a spasm of coughing wouldn't seem to stop until she was totally breathless, and left red streaks on her handkerchief. There seemed to be a trace of a bad odor on her breath that she couldn't get away from. Perils of the wilderness didn't scare Pam Tate, she knew what they were and what to do about them, but perils of the body were something else. Suddenly she was frightened, wishing very much that Frank were here, wishing she were up on top of this rockpile and not still a third of the way down. For the first time she thought of dumping her pack and going on without it—but that was irrational. She had to have the pack, up on top. She started on.

It was almost 2:00
p.m.
when she finally reached the open granite slabs that led up into the pocket where Lake Vivian lay, a cool, deep, green lake, clear as fine emerald, surrounded by scrub pine and larch and great rocky outcroppings, Mt. Temple rising like a vast granite crenellated castle behind it. She didn't pause there. She barely even glanced at the sublime beauty of the place, then crossed the outlet creek and up the rock trail that climbed five hundred more feet into a saddle and down into Lancelot, the lake where she usually camped. Several camps were already set up on the long, rocky point that extended out into Lancelot, but nobody was at the far end of the point, and nobody had taken "her own" campsite near the tiny fairy pond surrounded by stunted pink heather and twisted gray weath-erbeaten larch. The place she sought had a wind-shelter of rocks, good drainage from the coarse sand of the tent site, a rock "table" for her camp stove.

She dumped her pack and sank down on the sandy ground. For a long time she did nothing at all, chilling and chilling, head and body aching fiercely. Her armpits and groin felt sore as boils—there seemed to be huge lumps there now, soft and mushy and agonizingly painful to touch. She stripped off her blouse, saw great black-and-blue welts where the pack straps had pressed, and more on her legs where the boots had rubbed.

She staggered to her feet, somehow got her tent out and raised, coughing repeatedly and bringing up great foul-smelling clumps of red-streaked stuff with each paroxysm. All thoughts of doing anything that day were pushed aside—she had to rest, get her breath somehow, get this aching and chilling to stop. While she worked, reality began to fade in and out, as though there really
were
enchantment up here. At one point, as she struggled mightily to get her sleeping bag lofted and into the tent, a half-hour job, she thought Frank was there and she was talking to him, but she never could focus on him. At another point she thought she was still down at the Snow Lakes, camped near the deep swimming pond, and went wandering off looking for it, then had to search and search to find her way back.

Finally the tent was ready. To keep a grip on things and fight away the phantom ideas flooding her mind now, she found her notebook and pencil and with hands still shaking started to scribble her short daily log. She knew what she was writing didn't make any sense, she'd already written about the Com-stocks before, and she'd worked on the Snow Lakes trail yesterday, not today, but she plunged on. At one point, without any conscious intent, she found herself writing a love letter to Frank, a
real
love letter, pouring out all the things she felt but had never really been able to say to him, but the scrawl got so bad even she couldn't read it and somehow there was blood on the bottom of the page, so she threw it aside and crawled into the tent, aching all over and coughing until she was breathless.

She slept and woke and slept, repeatedly awakened by the coughing. At one point she took some pills from a little bottle, ampicillin and aspirin, she thought—had to be, there wasn't anything else there. Presently it was dark and she slept again, fitfully. . . .

Hours later she woke, suffocating and hardly able to move. The tent stank like a sewer and her body was baking. Desperately she tore open her sleeping bag. She screamed out as she moved an arm—something warm and slimy was draining down from the mushy lump in her armpit. She began coughing again, and found some dark, wet, sticky stuff pouring from her mouth and running down her chin and breast, soaking into the down bag around her. Her scream was choked off by the gurgling sound of more coughing. With a supreme effort she twisted her head down to the tent entrance, choking, suffocating, smothering, frantic for air. She wrenched the tent open and got herself halfway out.
Oh, God, Frank,
she thought,
help me. . . .
She inched a little bit more out of the tent before she collapsed, unable to move.

She died two hideous hours later, at 2:15 in the morning, facedown in a little pile of coarse granite sand.

2

In Brookdale, Connecticut, on the night Pam Tate died, Jack Dillman was standing in the bathroom putting the finishing touches on his second shave of the day when his wife banged on the door. "You planning to stay in there all night?" she called. "We're already half an hour late."

Jack opened the door. "Just finished," he said, and raised his eyebrows. Carmen was wearing a silky dress of bright scarlet, cut deep between her breasts. "Wow," Jack said. "You going on the prowl tonight?"

"Always prepared," Carmen said. She turned her head when he bent to kiss her. "Careful, you'll muss my hair."

"Gonna give Hal a big thrill, I suppose."

"He's always responsive, the poor silly ass. And he's the host."

"He's silly enough, all right," Jack said sourly. "He wouldn't know what to do if you dropped it in his lap."

Carmen turned businesslike eyes to the mirror, retouching her makeup. "Then I might have to teach him," she said. "If you didn't hate him so much, it wouldn't be near as much fun."

Actually, Jack reflected as they drove the half-mile to the party, he didn't hate Hal Parker at all. The guy was stupid, and an awful bore, for all his money, but nothing you couldn't put up with one evening a week. And he doubted that Carmen was serious about Hal anyway—just about anybody else would do as well. Not that it mattered too much anyhow, he reflected. He had learned to make a sort of peace with that years ago.

All the same, Jack thought, it wouldn't hurt to give Hal Parker a little jolt this evening, just to remind him that the goodies didn't necessarily come free, so he began considering what kind of a jolt might do it. Trouble was, with a guy like Hal, it took quite some kind of jolt to get through at all.

3

At Grizzly Creek, Montana, on the night Pam Tate died, Harry Slencik came into the cabin late, his arms and legs caked with mud, and tossed his ten-gallon hat onto the elkhorn rack over the fireplace with a sigh. "Well, speaking of good news," he said to his wife, "I think the irrigation pump's quit."