The Servants of Twilight (52 page)
How long had he been unconscious?
No way to tell.
As far as he could see, the trail leading up toward the crest of the ridge was deserted. Spivey’s people hadn’t yet come after him. He couldn’t have been out for long.
The pain in his arm and shoulder had sent questing tendrils across his back and chest, up his neck, into his skull. He tried to raise his arm and had some success, and he could move his hand a little without making the pain any worse.
He squirmed to the nearest tree and attempted to pull himself up, but he couldn’t do it. He waited a moment, tried again, failed again.
Christine. Joey. They were counting on him.
He would have to crawl for a while. Just till his strength returned. He tried it, on hands and knees, putting most of his weight on his right arm, but demanding some help from his left, and to his surprise he was able to shuffle along at a decent pace. Where the angle of the slope allowed him to accept gravity’s assistance, he slid down the trail, sometimes as far as four or five yards, before coming to a stop.
He wasn’t sure how far he had to go before reaching the rocky overhang under which he had left Christine and Joey. It might be around the next bend—or it might be hundreds of yards away. He had lost his ability to judge distance. But he hadn’t lost his sense of direction, so he crabbed down toward the valley floor.
A few minutes or a few seconds later, he realized he had lost his rifle. It had probably come off his shoulder when he’d fallen. He ought to go back for it. But maybe it had slipped off the trail, into some underbrush or into a jumble of rocks. It might not be easy to find. He still had his revolver. And Christine had the shotgun. Those weapons would have to be sufficient.
He crawled farther down the trail and came to a fallen tree that barred his way. He didn’t remember that it had been here earlier, though it might have been, and he wondered if he had taken a wrong turn somewhere. But on the first two trips, he hadn’t noticed any branches in the trail, so how could he have gone wrong? He leaned against the log—
—and he was in a dentist’s office, strapped into a chair. He had grown a hundred teeth in his left shoulder and arm, and as luck would have it all of them were in need of root canal work. The dentist opened the door and came in, and it was Grace Spivey. She had the biggest, nastiest drill he had ever seen, and she wasn’t even going to use it on the teeth in his shoulder; she was going to bore a hole straight through his heart—
—and his heart was pounding furiously when he woke and found himself slumped against the fallen log.
Christine.
Joey.
Mustn’t fail them.
He climbed over the log, sat on it, wondered if he dared to try walking, decided against it, and slipped down to his knees again. He crawled.
In a while his arm felt better.
It felt
dead
. That was better.
dead
. That was better.
The pain subsided.
He crawled.
If he stopped for a moment and curled up and closed his eyes, the pain would go away altogether. He knew it would.
But he crawled.
He was thirsty and hot in spite of the frigid air. He paused and scooped up some snow and put it in his mouth. It tasted coppery, foul. He swallowed anyway because his throat felt as if it were afire, and the wretched-tasting snow was at least cool.
Now all he needed before moving on again was a moment’s rest. The day wasn’t bright; nevertheless, the gray light striking down between the trees hurt his eyes. If he could just close them for a moment, shut out the gray glare for a few seconds . . .
62
Christine didn’t want
to leave Joey and Chewbacca alone under the overhang, but she had no choice because she knew Charlie was in trouble. It wasn’t just the extended gunfire that had worried her. It was partly the screaming, which had stopped some time ago, and partly the fact that he was taking so long. But mainly it was just a hunch. Call it woman’s intuition: she
knew
Charlie needed her.
to leave Joey and Chewbacca alone under the overhang, but she had no choice because she knew Charlie was in trouble. It wasn’t just the extended gunfire that had worried her. It was partly the screaming, which had stopped some time ago, and partly the fact that he was taking so long. But mainly it was just a hunch. Call it woman’s intuition: she
knew
Charlie needed her.
She told Joey she wouldn’t go far, just up the trail a hundred yards or so, to see if there was any sign of Charlie. She hugged the boy, asked him if he would be all right, thought he nodded in response, but couldn’t get any other reaction from him.
“Don’t go anywhere while I’m gone,” she said.
He didn’t answer.
“Don’t you leave here. Understand?”
The boy blinked. He still wasn’t focusing on her.
“I love you, honey.”
The boy blinked again.
“You watch over him,” she told Chewbacca.
The dog snorted.
She took the shotgun and went out onto the trail, past the dying fire. She glanced back. Joey wasn’t even looking at her. He was leaning against the rock wall, shoulders hunched, head bowed, hands in his lap, staring at the ground in front of him. Afraid to leave him, but also afraid that Charlie needed her, she turned away and headed up the deer path.
The heat from the fire had done her some good. Her bones and muscles didn’t feel as stiff as they had a while ago; there wasn’t so much soreness when she walked.
The trees protected her from most of the wind, but she knew it was blowing furiously, for it made a wild and ghoulish sound as it raged through the highest branches. In those places where the forest parted to reveal patches of leaden sky, the snow came down so thick and fast that it almost seemed like rain.
She had gone no more than eighty yards, around two bends in the trail, when she saw Charlie. He was lying facedown in the middle of the path, head turned to one side.
No.
She stopped a few feet from him. She dreaded going closer because she knew what she would find.
He was motionless.
Dead.
Oh, Jesus, he was dead. They had killed him. She had loved him, and he had loved her, and now he had died for her, and she was sick with the thought of it. The somber, sullen colors of the day seeped into her, and she was filled with a cold grayness, a numbing despair.
But grief had to allow room for fear, as well, because now she and Joey were on their own, and without Charlie she didn’t think they would make it out of the mountains. At least not alive. His death was an omen of their own fate.
She studied the woods around her, decided that she was alone with the body. Evidently, Charlie had been hurt up on the ridgetop and had managed to come this far under his own steam. Spivey’s fanatics were apparently still on the other side of the ridge.
Or maybe he had killed them all.
Slipping the shotgun strap over her shoulder, she went to him, reluctant to examine him more closely, not certain she had the strength to look upon his cold dead face. She knelt beside him—and realized that he was breathing.
Her own breath caught in her throat, and her heart seemed to miss a beat or two.
He was alive.
Unconscious but alive.
Miracles did happen.
She wanted to laugh but repressed the urge, superstitiously afraid that the gods would be displeased by her joy and would take Charlie from her, after all. She touched him. He murmured but didn’t come around. She turned him onto his back, and he grumbled at her without opening his eyes. She saw the torn shoulder of his jacket and realized he had been shot. Around the wound, lumps of dark and frozen blood adhered to the shredded fabric. It was bad, but at least he wasn’t dead.
“Charlie?”
When he didn’t reply, she touched his face and spoke his name again, and finally his eyes opened. For a moment they were out of focus, but then he fixed on her and blinked, and she saw that he was aware, sluggish and perhaps fuzzyheaded but not delirious.
“Lost it,” he said.
“What?”
“The rifle.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said.
“Killed three of them,” he said thickly.
“Good.”
“Where are they?” he asked worriedly.
“I don’t know.”
“Must be near.”
“I don’t think so.”
He tried to sit up.
Apparently, a dark current of pain crackled through him, for he winced and held his breath, and for a moment she thought he was going to pass out again.
He was too pale, corpse-white.
He squeezed her hand until the pain subsided a bit.
He said, “Still others coming,” and this time he managed to sit up when he tried.
“Can you move?”
“Weak . . .”
“We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Was . . . crawling.”
“Can you walk?”
“Not by myself.”
“If you lean on me?”
“Maybe.”
She helped him to his feet, gave him support, and encouraged him to descend the path. They made slow, halting progress at first, then went a bit faster, and a couple of times they slipped and almost fell, but eventually they reached the overhang.
Joey didn’t react to their arrival. But as Christine helped Charlie ease to the ground, Chewbacca came over, wagging his tail, and licked Charlie’s face.
The rock walls had absorbed a lot of heat from the fire, which was now little more than embers, and warmth radiated from the stone on all sides.
“Nice,” Charlie said.
His voice was too dreamy to suit Christine.
“Light-headed?” she asked.
“A little.”
“Dizzy?”
“Was. Not now.”
“Blurred vision?”
“Nothing like that.”
She said, “I want to see that wound,” and she began taking off his jacket.
“No time,” he said, putting a hand on hers, stopping her from tending to him.
“I’ll be quick about it.”
“No
time
!” he insisted.
time
!” he insisted.
“Listen,” she said, “right now, with all the pain you’re in, you can’t move fast.”
“A damned turtle.”
“And you’re losing your strength.”
“Feel like . . . a little kid.”
“But we have a pretty extensive first-aid kit, so maybe we can patch you up and alleviate some of the pain. Then maybe you can get on your feet and get moving faster. If so, we’ll be damned glad we took the time.”
He thought about it, nodded. “Okay. But . . . keep your ears open. They might not be . . . far away.”
She removed his quilted jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, slipped it off his injured shoulder, then unsnapped and pulled back the top of his insulated underwear, which was sticky with blood and sweat. There was an ugly hole in him, high in the left side of his chest, just below the shoulder bones. The sight of it gave her the feeling that live snakes were writhing in her stomach. 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 dead-pale 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.
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