by neetha Napew
"Knife?"
"Long thin blade. Tried to roll and kick it away, but he was quick. Quicker than I expected him to be. I missed." A long, painful pause. "He didn't."
"How bad is it?"
"He got the femoral artery. Guess I'll never know if he was lucky or really, really good. Lost a lot of blood. I'm holding it pinched, but I'm starting to cramp up."
The Port Royale was a yard or so from Nanci Simms's feet and Jeff picked it up, slinging it over his shoulder.
"Put that in the auto. Rifle's there. Get the automatics, as well. Then give me a hand. Think it'll need stitching. I can do that if you can hold it shut. Not too long a wound, but it's deep enough. Let go and it'll spurt twenty feet and I'll be dead in three minutes."
"There might be more of them coming out after us."
"Yeah. Quicker we get moving away from here, the better our chances."
"We, Nanci?"
There was a long stillness. Then she said, "Ah, I get it, Jefferson."
"Time I moved on."
"You won't make it on your own."
"I can try."
"Sure. Prince among men, Jeff, aren't you?"
He turned away from her, toward the sports car, feet sinking in the soft mud.
"Mind if I give you a small piece of information?"
"I'm listening."
"I seriously advise you to reconsider. I'll forgive a single mistake. I'll make you pay for it, of course. Pay the sort of prices you like, Jeff."
He closed his eyes, fighting against the insidious voice.
"Not this time. I've liked what you made me… But I'm real keen on living, Nanci. Can't wait around."
"Why not kill me?"
"No need. Desert'll get you, or the hunters. You said yourself you can't move."
She laughed quietly. "Big mistake, Jefferson. Big mistake."
That was the last thing he heard her say as he climbed into the Mercedes. He gunned the motor and slewed sideways, spraying Nanci with dirt, leaving her, with her finger and thumb pressed against the severed artery, alone in the desert.
Jeff headed south, toward Las Vegas.
Chapter Fourteen
The brakes came on, locking up the rear wheels of the pickup truck and sending it sliding toward the side of the road.
Sly rolled over like a sack of potatoes, his face a mask of comical dismay, squeaking in alarm as he bumped into Heather Hilton.
Jim's reflexes were honed enough for him to brace himself against the juddering skid, but he still nearly fell against his daughter.
The first thought was that they'd blown a tire. The second was that a coyote had darted across the highway in front of them.
"Stay with the vehicle and keep your hands away from any weapons!"
The harsh voice, its order amplified through a bullhorn, gave him the right answer at the third attempt.
"Shit," he said.
There was a long earthmover, painted sunburst yellow, with two bulldozers, one at either end, sealing off most of the road. The gap at the end, just wide enough to admit a single vehicle, was blocked off by a red-and-white pole balanced on top of a couple of rusting oil drams.
Looking over the roof of the cab, Jim was able to see five armed men. No, there was a sixth one, manning an LMG, mounted on a makeshift platform of bricks and planks.
They all wore dark pants, mostly with quilted camouflage jackets. All of them had a badge on the lapels.
Jim couldn't quite make it out, but from the distance it looked like a yellow dagger through a silver disk of some sort.
"They friends, Jim?" Sly's gentle, round face was worried, and he was reaching out to hold Heather's hand.
"Maybe."
For no reason at all, Jim Hilton half remembered a line from some old poem he'd done at high school: "Nothing they know of friendship, who only friendship know."
Something like that.
The voice barked again. "Don't like saying it twice. Engine off and hands where we can see them."
"He never said that once."
Jim heard Steve Romero's muttered comment. He reached down and touched the cushioned grips of the Ruger, reluctantly leaving it be. The men at the roadblock all carried rifles and looked as though they knew how to use them. They were trapped in the pickup, where any effort to fight would inevitably lead to plain bloody butchery.
He ran his fingers through his thinning blond hair, now well down to his shoulders.
The movement attracted the attention of the man with the bullhorn. "Tall guy on the back of the truck. Stop moving around. Let's see everyone's hands up there, trying to catch a slice of sky."
Heather lifted her hands, dragging one of Sly's arms up with her. "Come on," she whispered.
"Fat kid only got one hand? If not, he better get it up there."
Steve leaned out of the window. "Leave the boy alone!" To his son he said, "Sly, do like they say. See how high you can stretch up. And don't put your hands down until I tell you."
Two men, carrying M-16D4s, eyes bright like hunting polecats, fanned out to cover the vehicle, moving light-footed.
"One at a time. Tall guy on the back. Step over slow and easy. Then the girl and the fat kid. After that you two in the cab. Driver first, last the skinny black in the passenger seat."
Jim felt a flicker of hope. Somehow they hadn't seen Carrie Princip. She must be lying flat between Kyle and Steve, out of sight.
But all she had was a six-shot .22 Smith & Wesson—against six heavily-armed men.
As he climbed down over the tailgate, Jim managed to stumble. Under the cover of tangled limbs he managed to switch his powerful handgun from its holster to the back of his trousers, hidden by his jacket.
"Don't fool around, Jack, or you get to be dead before you get to be dead. Move it, people."
Steve and Kyle stood close together, masking off the interior of the cab from the men with the automatic rifles. Sly was next to his father, but Steve was making sure the boy didn't turn and see Carrie, knowing that Sly wouldn't be able to control himself, wouldn't recognize the danger.
Heather stood next to Sly, her father close by on her left.
The five military types were ranged in a half circle and were now slightly more relaxed. Behind the barrier the machine gunner had lit a cigarette and had climbed down off the platform.
"Now, we better think about some names, people. I got me a list…" The tallest of the group, who was still holding the bullhorn in his left hand, was rummaging through the pockets of a smart combat jacket decorated with what Jim Hilton could now see was a silver sun, transfixed with a stylized golden arrow.
"What list?" asked Steve Romero. "Didn't think anyone was organized enough to have a list."
"Then you thought wrong, didn't you? Because I got me a real good list. You tell me who y'all are, and I'll see if we have you down as being a wanted or a not wanted."
Jim didn't much like the sound of "wanteds" and "not wanteds." It was looking as if things were going downhill fast.
Maybe because the paramilitaries didn't realize they could be a threat, they hadn't been searched for weapons, at least, not yet.
Kyle's Mannlicher rifle was in the back of the truck, but Jim didn't know what the navigator had done with his Mondadori .32.
Steve's bowie knife, strapped to his waist, was in sight. But the sawn-down shotgun was also in the bed of the pickup, alongside the .357 Magnum rifle.
Against the group of men, it would have provided the most effective weapon. Maximum punch at a minimum range.
But Steve had also been wearing a small blued-steel .32 automatic. A very old Beholla pocket pistol, holding seven rounds. Jim wondered just what he'd done with the gun.
The leader of the gang finally pulled out a sheaf of crumpled computer paper and peered uncertainly at it. "Right, got it now." He pointed at Jim. "Start with you."
"Name's Laszlo Kovacs."
The finger, heavily tobacco-stained, ran down the list. One of the other men suddenl
y nudged the leader in the ribs.
"What?"
"That guy's carrying a big knife. Maybe the fuckers got guns."
"You carrying a gun, Kovacs? If you are, you got one chance to take it, slowly and very, very, very carefully, and lay it in the dirt down by your feet. Same applies to the rest of you."
Nobody moved.
"Don't like that sort of response. You don't have guns, then let's hear you all sing out good and loud! Come on, people!"
Jim was aware of everyone's eyes slanting toward him, and even more aware that Carrie Princip was hiding just behind him, presumably waiting for the right moment to make a move.
It looked to Jim as if this might be about the last right moment they were going to get.
"I don't have a gun, mister," he said slowly and clearly. "If I did, then it'd be an instant condition triple-red, right now!"
The phrase was familiar to all United States space exploration crews since way back when it had meant what Zelig had once referred to, in a rare joke, as an ordure-ventilatory situation.
Carrie reacted immediately to the prompt.
The small-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver seemed to make more noise than a grenade launcher, the sound reverberating in the cab of the truck. Sly Romero screamed and started to fall to the ground, hands going over his ears.
Heather dived for cover, away from her father, scrabbling to get under the pickup.
Steve and Kyle had both been ready, nerves straining, and they both reacted with blinding speed. One of the things that astronauts had was wonderful reflexes. In a flash, each of them drew a handgun from hiding.
Jim grabbed so fast for the Ruger in his belt that he nearly dropped it.
"Machine gun's mine!" he yelled, knowing that there lay the greatest danger. The massive full-metal-jacket .44 would have gone clean through an automobile.
It all took less than three seconds after the crack of Carrie's Smith & Wesson 2050.
In that splinter of time, she had squeezed the trigger twice more, lying prone on the seat, arms extended, right wrist gripped in the left hand for steadiness.
The armed men were taken totally by surprise at the burst of fire from the hidden, unsuspected assailant. The range was below twenty feet, and they were close together.
Carrie's first shot was best aimed, hitting the nearest target through the bridge of the nose and kicking him onto his back. He died before he crashed onto the ground, legs flailing, fingers opening and closing convulsively. Blood was pouring from the shattered rear of his skull.
Her second shot struck the next man through the right shoulder, making him drop his M-16D4 on the highway.
Her third shot knocked the bullhorn from the leader's hands, exploding it into jagged fragments.
The half-dozen enemies were slow to react to the burst of shooting.
Kyle and Steve both emptied their weapons, and most of their thirteen rounds found flesh and bone.
Only one of the paramilitary men managed to fire in retaliation. But he was already dying, going down into the darkness, as he sprayed a dozen full-automatic rounds into the side of the truck, opening bright silver holes in the rusted metal.
The farthest away was the figure by the machine gun, but he reacted slowly to the crimson ballet of death that was flowering before him. The cigarette fell from his open mouth, and he made a fumbling gesture toward his weapon.
Jim took a long, deep breath, holding it in and steadying the heavy blued-steel revolver at arm's length, his index finger settling firmly on the wide trigger.
The spurred hammer clicked back, and there was a frozen moment before the Ruger fired. A moment when Jim Hilton knew with an absolute clarity that a miss was impossible.
It hit the machine gunner through the base of the skull as he started to turn away. It drilled upward, already tumbling, then exited through his half-open mouth, spinning his body down to the ground.
Then nobody moved, the men on the ground still in the pools of blood around them, and the survivors in a frozen tableau as if they were afraid to believe that they still lived.
At last Jim lowered his weapon dazedly and looked around.
Sly was lying in the back of the pickup, hands between his thighs, sobbing quietly to himself. Steve and Heather were sitting by him.
Jim was amazed at the way his young daughter coped with the horrors of life after Earthblood.
She'd scrambled out as soon as the shooting stopped, perky as though it had been hide-and-seek at her eleventh birthday party back home.
Steve and Carrie checked out the dead. Since his gun was empty, it had been up to the woman to administer the coup de grace to two of the wounded. She kneeled without a moment's hesitation beside them and pressed the muzzle of the warm .22 to the backs of their heads, near the left ear. The shots made the bodies jerk before they sank into final stillness.
"You did real good, Carrie," said Jim, reloading his own revolver. "Brilliant. If there was a government to recommend you to, then I'd…well, I'd recommend you for the finest medal."
"Thanks. The rest of you did good, too."
"Pretty well. But you, Steve," he said, raising his voice, "and Kyle. Try not to leave yourself with an empty gun. Count your shots and save one. Never know what you might need it for."
"Yeah," said Steve. "Sorry." Kyle simply nodded his agreement.
"I can't believe that I had to put them out of it," Carrie said, shaking her head. "Both men had about four bullets in them—and they were still living."
"Life's not like the vids, Carrie," said Jim.
"Never was."
He stooped and picked up the fluttering pages of the computerized list from where it lay, sodden in the spreading pool of blood by the clawed hand of the leader.
It was mainly page after page of names, broken up into what looked to be arbitrary sections, some with only three or four people identified on it. Most sheets carried the superscription "Not Wanted."
The last couple of perforated sheets were marked "Wanted." A further notation stated "Refer to HoSHQ. Attention F."
"Look," said Carrie, pointing with the four-inch barrel of her Smith & Wesson.
The gun was touching the word "Aquila."
Beneath it was an alphabetical list of all the crew's names, beginning with Cortling, Marcey, ending with Turner, Peter.
"Least somebody wants us," breathed Kyle.
Jim Hilton clicked the full cylinder into place on the Ruger. "Let's move out," he said.
Chapter Fifteen
Nanci Simms had forgotten more about survival techniques than most people ever learned.
The best way to die was to do something stupid, like leaving your vehicle in the desert and wandering off into the wilderness. But she also knew that you could do everything correctly and still get dead.
She lay back and listened to the sound of the Mercedes's powerful engine fading away across the endless stillness.
"Bastard," she said with a gentle venom.
As the day advanced, every now and again she eased her grip on the deep arterial wound in her thigh for a second, looking down with a dispassionate interest as a bright crimson trickle immediately appeared between her fingers and thumb. It flowed smoothly down her leg, into the hot, thirsty sand.
"What they used to call a catch-22," she whispered.
If she lay where she was, then she would be dead of dehydration within a few hours. The brains in her skull would finally begin to bubble like gray-pink oatmeal once the body's temperature regulator gave up the unequal struggle.
Night wasn't that far off, and the woman guessed she could live that long. Probably through into the middle of the following day.
If she tried to move, she'd be unable to keep a grip on the knife wound, and the blood would gush out like a scalding geyser. She would be unconscious in less than three minutes.
It was a catch-22, all right, but she wasn't ready to give up.
Shade and fluids, those were the two vital ingredients in staying al
ive in a desert environment.
The former wasn't impossible. There was a pile of tumbled boulders of Navaho sandstone only a few yards behind her. Nanci knew that if she was exceedingly careful she could crawl to its scant shelter without hemorrhaging.
Fluids, her weakened mind whispered to her. She needed fluids, to guard against the dehydrating heat and at least compensate a little for what blood she'd already lost.
From where she was lying, she could see the glint of metal at the belt of one of the corpses. She squinted against the harsh sunlight, making out the shape of a round metal canteen half beneath the stiffening body.
Nanci drew in several long slow breaths, listening to the silence. The only sound was the buzzing of large brown-speckled flies that had been attracted by the exciting odor of fresh blood.
Her light blue eyes opened and closed. "Well, old girl, there is no time like the present. Or there'll be no time at all." She laughed, a harsh sudden noise in the stillness. "Well, they say gallows humor is always a help."
The heat was beginning to get to her, and the temptation to lie still was almost overwhelming. But she could feel the tightness across her forehead and a slight fuzziness fringing across her mind.
"Now," she said.
THE ROADS WERE surprisingly clear.
Jeff was able to set the cruise control at seventy-five miles per hour. He relaxed, feet off the pedals, hands gripping the pale leather of the steering wheel. The air conditioning was full on, blasting a stream of icy air toward his face. Around him he was conscious of the baking desert air flowing past him in the sports car.
Occasionally he spotted some obstruction in the shimmering ribbon of heat-distorted blacktop. Then he touched the brake, dropping out the cruise control, immediately giving him back total command over the powerful Mercedes.
This time it was a coyote, grizzled, its fur sparkling with streaks of silver gray, its questing muzzle turned toward the approaching car. Jeff was about to tap the horn when a sense of caution overcame him. Instead, he gunned the motor, aiming directly at the animal.
At the last moment it scurried away onto the sandy shoulder of the highway, jaws open, almost as though it was laughing at him.