Blackbone (42 page)

Dormancy. He kept thinking of dormancy.
Why should Loring be right about that?
He watched her tie up the ends of the sack, which he now recognized as a pillow case, then dump the load into the pile outside Hut 4.

Then he saw Churchill watching the pile. Loring shook a warning finger at the dog, shooing him away. Churchill trotted off but, when Loring moved away, he turned and eyed the pile again.

Oilman had just stuck two fingers in his mouth to whistle the dog down when he heard the first distant roar of a vehicle. He listened. Loring was about to enter Hut 6. She stopped too.

Gilman rose and went to the bottom of the slope. The men were still lined up along the fence, but their heads turned as they too became aware that something was approaching.

The roar grew louder. Something rounded the distant bend and came into view. Gilman swallowed. A snow-plow.

He glanced back. Loring stood outside Hut 6, watching the snowplow come down toward the camp.

The relief detachment would be right behind it, probably in trucks. Gilman felt all hope sink in his chest. There were only a few minutes left and he had done nothing. He hadn’t a clue where to find the djinn. And all Loring had managed to accomplish was to pile up some food in the snow. Churchill was scratching at the pillow case full of food, trying to open it. Gilman gave the dog one short, sharp whistle.

Churchill scurried back to Loring. Gilman returned to the stoop he had left, shoving his hands in his pockets and encountering the salt tablets he had stuffed in there last night.

Loring walked around a puddle in the snow and joined Gilman on the stoop. They sat quietly and watched the trucks come down the valley road and grind over the hump above headquarters, then brake as they came down to the gate.

Gilman couldn’t watch anymore. Churchill sat down in the snow in front of Loring and raised a paw to be held. Gilman wondered if Bruckner was still among the living, up there at the fence maybe, watching them take care of his pet. Starving him to death, but otherwise taking care of him.

Gilman absently scratched Churchill’s ears.

“I’m sorry.” Loring’s voice was soft next to him.

“For what?”

“Getting you involved.”

“You did what you had to do. We both did.”

She bit her lip. “What’s left?”

Gilman shrugged. From his pocket, he pulled out the remaining salt tablets. He juggled them and looked up at the trucks. “Maybe I can keep
them
away with these.”

One by one the trucks drew up to the fence. The rear gates dropped and armed soldiers poured out, and they didn’t care who they were prodding into formation—Germans or MPs.

General Hawthorn climbed out of one of the trucks and clumped over to the gate, a large man with heavy jowls and thick glasses and a stern expression. Borden and Cosco were waiting for him. Gilman watched them salute then listen to the general, who did a lot of talking very quickly, very hotly. Borden tried to guide him away from the gate, talking to him, reasoning with him.

“Shit. He’s stalling the bastard.”

“That’s what you told him to do,” Loring said.

“But can’t he see that it’s useless? That we’re not doing anything?”

“He’s following orders. What did you expect?”

“Does it matter?” said Gilman. “Any second that one-star pain in the ass is going to turn and see me sitting on the steps of Hut 9 chatting with a woman. Then he’ll order the gate blown open and storm down the slope with his entire army, then—” Gilman got up and took a deep breath. “No sense letting Borden take all the heat,” he said. Loring rose with him. She reached for his arm and pulled him around, then she was kissing him deeply, her eyes closed, her breath warm against his cheek. He held her and wondered if the general had turned around yet.

Churchill barked.

Loring pulled away. Gilman drew back and looked at her hair, disheveled but still pretty in the sunlight. He wanted more time to spend looking at her, time to think of her as a woman and not just someone with whom he had survived an ordeal. Despite the passion of last night —which he had known at the time was little more than desperate lust—he really hadn’t begun to know Loring Holloway until this morning. He could see in her eyes that she felt the same way.

Churchill barked again—twice.

Gilman glanced over and saw the dog standing before the puddle in the snow, looking at him and panting happily. His tail wagged. He bobbed his head several times at the water.

“We’ve been so hard on him about food,” Loring said. “I think he’s actually
asking
if he can have a drink.”

Gilman grinned.

There was a yell up the hill. The general was storming toward the gate, motioning a soldier with a tommy gun to come with him. Borden hurried after him and tried to stop him at the gate. The general thrust a finger in Borden’s face and Borden backed off, looking down into the camp, right at Gilman and Loring. The general nodded to the soldier, who braced himself and sent a burst of gunfire into the lock.

Churchill leaped back in surprise and crouched in the snow, whimpering.

“It’s okay, boy,” said Gilman. “Just some asshole from headquarters.”

Glancing at Gilman, Churchill hesitantly returned to his puddle, circled it, territorially staked it out, growling at the armed soldiers tromping through the snow and kicking up drifts. General Hawthorn was in the lead.

Conscious of the salt tablets crumbling in his palm, Gilman was about to pitch them into the snow when it occurred to him that something was not right. Something was very much out of place.

“Major Gilman, I want to see you right now!” Hawthorn called from halfway up the slope.

Ignoring him, Gilman stepped back from Loring, his eyes shooting to the nearest hut, to the eaves, to the snow on the rooftops, snow and ice on all the huts, snow and ice everywhere he looked. But nowhere, nowhere in the entire camp for as far as he could see was there anything like the puddle of water Churchill had found.

Everything else was still frozen solid and would remain that way until after noon, when the sun climbed higher and it got hot enough to melt the snow and ice and—

Churchill was down on his front paws, about to drink.

“Get out of there!” yelled Gilman. “Yah—yah!” He ran across the snow, waving his arms at the dog, hoping the troops coming down the slope wouldn’t think he’d gone nuts and open fire. “Yah—yah!”

Churchill scurried away from the puddle and circled back to Loring.

Gilman floundered in the snow with the crumbling salt in one hand, his other hand plunging into his pockets for more. He took all he had in both hands and flung it into the puddle, then he threw himself backward, tripped, and fell in the snow and crawled madly—

The water sizzled. In full view of the soldiers coming down the hill, and the general waving his drawn .45, the puddle of water erupted out of the snow, sending up a column of oily flame thirty feet high. The force of the blast knocked Loring off her feet. Churchill shot past her and dove under Hut 7.

Within the column, out of a central core of blackness, the djinn appeared, writhing in agony, flailing its arms and legs as its body was carried off the ground by the building inferno. It screamed rage in a hundred voices that echoed off the steep slope of Blackbone Mountain and froze General Hawthorn and his soldiers in their tracks, awed by what they saw and heard.

The flame slowly dissipated, turning the djinn’s twisting, burning body into an oily black smudge that greased the air and shortly turned to smoke that trailed up into the sky. It leveled off and became a fine gray ash that rained down on the snow.

The soldiers on the hill held their ground but went no further. The general was still backing up when the ash rain stopped.
 

Gilman helped Loring to her feet then coaxed Churchill out from under Hut 7. The dog emerged cautiously, frowning at the ash around his paws. As Gilman and Loring headed up the slope, he trotted along with them.

“Still want to send me away?” Loring said.

“What? Oh, I don’t know. I thought you might want to stick around and watch General Hawthorn tear a strip off me.”

“Just let him try.”

He glanced at her. She smiled. “Maybe we ought to get to know each other, Miss Holloway.”

“Not a bad idea, Major.”

“What if I invite you up to see my etchings?”
 

“Any time. And I’ve got a few things I’d like to show
you.”

Gilman chuckled and watched the general cautiously wade through the snow to meet them. He was holstering his .45.

Window Hill Survivor syndrome. They died and I didn’t. What if I had died with them? Then who would have been in charge here at Blackbone? Arid what would he have done?
      

Gilman smiled. General Hawthorn’s scowl was clouded with uncertainty as they exchanged salutes. Before words could be exchanged, Gilman grabbed the dog and held up his front paws.

“This is Mr. Churchill, General. He would like a cigar.”