Pattern for Panic (26 page)

Suddenly there was a loud crack and splinters flew from the inside of the thick wooden door. Three more shots slammed through the wood as I ran to the side of the room where I'd be protected behind the stone wall. Then I saw the bolt jump, ringing as another shot banged outside. They were shooting hell out of the bolt, ripping it off. A dozen shots in rapid succession finished the bolt, left ragged holes in the wood around it.

They'd be charging in before many more seconds passed. I raised the automatic, slid along the wall till I stood close to the spot where the door would swing open. I'd get three of the bastards. There was a crash and the door slid halfway open, halted only by the desk. A brown face appeared in the doorway a foot from my upraised gun and I pulled the trigger. The face jerked back as if somebody behind the man had yanked on a rope around his neck. His face disappeared, a hole in it under one eye.

There was quiet outside, then noise swelled. The words were Spanish, but I recognized Villamantes' voice screaming. More silence, then. Villamantes screamed some more. I tried to place him by the sound. If I could get one good peek at him, he'd be a dead man. I edged closer to the half-open door, then knelt so my face would appear close to the floor, started to peek around—and jerked my head back as what sounded like nineteen guns blasted. I thought a bullet swished through my hair. I got the hell away from the door, held my gun on it.

Something funny was going on out there. It was completely silent. I didn't get it and I didn't like it. I moved backward and my foot banged into the dead
indio'
s leg. I grabbed his feet, pulled the guy over to the wall, then got my arms around his waist and lifted him from the floor.

I grunted as I edged along the wall toward the door, the dead man projected in front of me, his head dangling. I took one more step and his head passed beyond the wall's edge. I felt his body jerk in my hands as the guns roared outside. When I jumped backward, several chunks of his head were gone. I dropped him, waited.

I heard them coming, slowly, and I jammed my teeth together, aimed at the open space through which I could see the far wall of the big room. I heard them right outside the door and my finger tightened on the trigger. Then I saw movement, pulled the gun toward it as blonde hair appeared in the space in front of me. A frightened face, filled with pain, and the red lips pulled back from her teeth. I recognized Buff's twisted face as the gun roared and bucked in my hand.

Chapter Twenty

It was reflex, pure instinctive, unthinking reaction that jerked at my hand a fraction of a second before the gun roared. Buff slumped in the doorway and for an awful moment I thought I'd killed her. But the gun had been jerked away in time. She had been released by whoever had pushed her forward, and she slumped against the desk momentarily, then was dragged back out of sight.

I stared blankly at the partly open door as Villamantes said smoothly, “It is your choice, Mr. Scott. My men are perhaps a bit afraid of your weapon. Throw the gun out, then step outside, and the girl will live. We do not need her as much now as we did before."

I knew that none of us would live very long anyway. But I had only one slug left in the gun. I hesitated. Then I heard Buff scream.

“All right!” I yelled. “Stop it, Villamantes."

“The gun."

I threw it out the doorway.

“Come out, Mr. Scott."

I slid the desk back, kicked the door all the way open. I heard Villamantes rattle something in Spanish. Then he said in English, “Quickly, Mr. Scott."

I stepped out into the big room. I saw them all, Villamantes and a man holding Buff, other men with guns pointed at me, two men lying nearby in pools of blood, some dead snakes on the floor. Nobody was shooting. Not yet. I didn't know why they weren't.

Villamantes told me with a question. “Whom did you phone, Mr. Scott?"

I said, “What the hell are you talking about? I've had a lot of time to phone people, haven't I? You silly son—"

His face flushed and he nodded at the man holding Buff; the guy twisted her arm behind her. Her mouth opened. I calmed down. “O.K.,” I said. “I'll keep a civil tongue. But I didn't phone anybody."

“I don't think I believe you."

I shrugged. Villamantes barked orders and men started scurrying around. In a minute one man brought the Doc in from somewhere. When he saw Buff he jumped toward her, but the man yanked him back.

Villamantes said to me, “I think to be safe we will leave for a while. All of us but you, Mr. Scott."

I didn't like that. I wanted to go with them.

Men were scurrying around, some carrying boxes outside. They were getting ready to take off, all right. A man walked up to Villamantes with a thick sheaf of papers. He took them and put them in the inside pocket of his coat.

Doctor Buffington was standing with his guard a few feet from me. He said dully, “That is my work—my work. That is what he forced me to do for him. I should have made them kill me."

The guard shoved him forward. Villamantes shouted instructions to the men again and I recognized
"pronto,"
quickly. Then he turned toward me and took the gun from under his coat.

He didn't say anything dramatic, just pointed the gun at me. He didn't want to talk to me; he wanted to shoot me. The gun was pointed at my belly almost before I could tense my muscles, but even as I started to jump, Buff screamed as she jerked free of the man's hands holding her and dived toward Villamantes.

I started toward him as he whirled and slashed the barrel of the gun across the top of her blonde head. She crumpled, fell to the floor. And then, at one of the few times I hadn't been thinking about General Lopez, all kinds of hell broke loose. There was a steady rattle of gunfire outside, a hell of a booming roar followed by what sounded like machine guns or automatic rifles.

Villamantes knew what that uproar meant as soon as the first rattle of guns reached us. He stood absolutely still for a moment, his mouth open and eyes wide; then suddenly he turned and ran toward the door leading below. I ran after him, flopped to the floor as he whirled in the doorway and fired twice, the bullets singing over my head. Then he was gone.

I got up and ran to the door, jumped through it onto the steps and slammed the door behind me so I wouldn't be outlined in the light. But there was no shot at me, nothing.

I went down the stairs, stumbled and fell, then rolled frantically in case he fired at the first sound, brushing against something cold and wriggling on the earthen floor. I crashed into the mummified bodies of the holy men, felt them crumble, felt the powdered dust of death in my nostrils. But there was no other sound.

I stayed motionless on one knee, listening, trying to hear him breathing, but there was nothing. Lightning flashed outside and flickered momentarily, faintly, here on the dried brown faces, but I didn't see Villamantes.

Lightning—the thought picked at my brain. I shouldn't have been able to see it here, underneath the building. But then it flashed outside again, and a hundred feet ahead of me, down the mummy-lined corridor, rain splashed on the earthen floor. It was an exit. I ran down the corridor and felt wet air against my face, saw the lightning squarely ahead of and above me. Then I followed the dirt steps which Villamantes must have used. I climbed up out of the corridor, saw a wooden panel lying on the ground at my right and the mound of earth that must have been above the panel before he pushed it away. The wall was behind me now, and beyond it noise still bubbled and I heard the crack of gunfire. I turned and ran into blackness, rain falling heavily, beating against my face.

A minute dragged by, and then another. I stopped, not knowing which way to go. And, too, I realized that I'd run after him unthinkingly, without a weapon, and with the muscles of one arm badly torn and crippled. But I couldn't go back; he'd soon be gone for good—if he wasn't already gone. A great sheet of lightning hurtled from sky to earth, almost upon me, followed immediately by a sharp crackling roar, almost deafening. And in the sudden blinding flash, even as it seemed that the earth shook beneath my feet, I saw him.

He was on my left, no more than twenty yards away, struggling erect. He had stumbled, slipped and fallen in the mud. I ran toward the spot and as I neared him he must have heard my feet pounding through the mud, because flame spat at me in the darkness and a bullet snapped past me through the air. I lunged at the flash as he fired again, unable yet to see me but firing at the sounds I made; and then I crashed against him, swinging my open right hand like a cleaver toward his face.

My hand thudded against his upraised arm and then we fell in the mud, sliding, his body beneath me at first, then slipping away from me. I clutched at him, felt his clothing in my hand and jerked him to me, slashing with my right hand for his nose, his throat. His palm smacked against my wrist and his fingers clamped around it with a grip of desperation. The gun thudded against my shoulder and I threw up my other arm, grabbed his biceps in my fingers as we rolled in the mud, then slid my hand down to his forearm, trying to keep the barrel of his gun away from me.

The gun cracked in his hand and the bullet raked my side. I squirmed, pulled him on top of me, then shoved him over me and against the ground, his fingers still tight around my right wrist, my left hand on his arm that held the gun. I inched my hand down further and he jerked his arm, nearly ripped it from my grasp.

For a long moment we lay almost motionless, straining with our arms, neither able to gain an advantage. He was on his back and I was sprawled halfway on top of him, my chin upon his chest. He was strong, and I could feel the strength draining from me. The beating, torture, all the rest of it had sapped my strength and it was ebbing from me. I couldn't jerk my wrist from the strong grip in which he held it. I squeezed my fingers tightly around the arm that held the gun, but slowly I felt him forcing it toward me, bringing the gun's muzzle around to bear on my chest. I strained every muscle, felt the veins standing out on my forehead from the effort, and for a moment I held his arm rigid. But then it moved again; I felt the weakness growing in my arm, the torn muscles agonized as he forced the gun toward me.

Both of us were grunting and snarling like animals, and that is what we were then. The nearness of death, its sharp edge, sliced away the layer that was human, and we were animals rolling in the slime of earth. One thought possessed my mind, that I must kill him, kill him. It was the only thought that existed, it was my world, my brain.

I felt his arm force mine back further, his muscles like stone under my fingers, and I knew in seconds the gun would be against my side. That he would get away, that he would take with him a horror almost past believing, that he would live even after all the cruel and evil things that he had done, meant nothing to me now. And even the fear of losing life, of dying here in the mud, was only a small part of what I felt. The thought that I must kill him swelled so large that there was room for nothing else inside me.

Lightning flashed above us and I saw his contorted, unhuman face close to my own, his head thrown back with the intensity of his effort, the lips peeled wide and his naked throat inches from me. From somewhere out of the darkness in my mind, I remembered a conversation with a friend, a soldier in Korea, struggling for his life like this in a foxhole with a Red Chinese; and on the edge of death, he had ripped the enemy's throat with his teeth, killed him, and lived.

The lightning flared again and I saw the white throat, the corded neck of Villamantes. From somewhere came an extra breath of strength and I inched higher on his body, straining my arms to hold the gun away, and then I felt his skin against my lips, and then—his flesh upon my teeth.

I heard his cry, but it was like an imagined sound, for it was mingled with the pulse of his life, and it seemed the rain was red blood gushing upon me from the sky, covering my body and mixing with the mud beneath us and around us until we were drowning in a great, thick lake of blood. My mind was empty except for that one thought of red rain steadily falling, and then finally even that thought grew dim and there was stillness all around me.

I crawled on my hands and knees away from him and sprawled on my face, then rolled over on my back and let the rain beat against my flesh, against my mouth. My brain was stunned with shock, and nausea gurgled in my stomach. I felt, insanely, as if I were inside the walls of an enormous beating heart, the blood hissing and rumbling through the arteries, pouring from the veins, the great pump booming in my ears and the raw red walls swelling and then closing in upon me.

And, finally, after a long time, my mind was blank, squeezed dry of any thought or memory or sensation, and there was only the sound, or absence of sound, a strange half-deafness with silence beating in it, that was yet a sound in my mind. And, a long time after that, I heard the rain again, felt it cool upon my skin, cool, not warm and thick, as it had been before.

I got to my knees, and stayed like that for minutes more. I rubbed mud against my mouth, ground it against my lips, then caught rain in my hands and slapped it against my face. And finally I got up, walked back to Villamantes.

I searched him, took everything from his pockets, then stood up. Lighting flashed and I saw him for the last time, on his back in the mud, rain beating on his face and on the torn, ripped redness of his throat. I left him there, walked back toward the Center. The sound of guns had stopped. It was finished, over.

Chapter Twenty-One

Now it was Wednesday afternoon, too early for the rain to start. The sky was beginning to darken, but sunlight still filtered through the gathering clouds.

We were at the Mexico City National Airport—Buff, Doctor Buffington and me. We had a few minutes before their plane took off, headed for L.A., Hollywood, the Sunset Strip, home. I'd follow them later, on another plane, but it was better that we didn't leave together; whatever we might have talked about, there'd have been something else in our minds.