Color Him Dead

by Charles Runyon

  The morning wind ruffled his hair and he watched the fire leap into a new franzy. He saw a huge gray rat, large as a terrier, clamber onto the parapet; he wondered idly how old this ancient patriarch was. The wind blew hot, like a breath of hell, and the horde began pouring over the wall in shrieking thousands. He picked up his stick and pulled Edith toward the underground room. He swung his stick to clear a path through the seething carpet; the rats crawled up his legs, leaped on his arms, and hung there with their claws. His feet slipped and rolled on furry bodies, and he knew if he fell he’d be skinned alive by those yellow teeth.

  Reaching the underground room, he crawled in behind Edith and closed up the hole with loose stones. Together they

  killed the rats which had come inside with them, gathered the unburned grass into a pallet, and cleansed each other’s nicks and scratches. Then without a word, by mutual consent, they made love. It was a slow, half-melancholy ritual, like the last look at a home after the movers have driven away, when you walk arm in arm through empty rooms and find old bobby pins, lint, buttons from a shirt long ago discarded, scratches on the woodwork and chips in the plaster, each one a reminder that this was once an abode of bitterness and passion and tenderness. Afterward, as they lay smoking, she touched the scar behind his eye.

  “How’d that happen?”

  “A fight in prison.”

  A shadow crossed her face. She drew her finger across the crescent-shaped scar on his chin. “You told me about this one. Football, in high school. And you remember these on your arms? I wanted a ripe watermelon so you went into the patch, then the dogs came and you got caught in the barbed wire and I couldn’t get you loose for laughing—” She stopped suddenly, a mist of tears in her eyes. “Most of it was … good. I’m glad to have it back.” She frowned. “What was the matter with us, Drew?”

  “I guess we were too hungry. We wanted to take a bite of everything in life, but we never took the time to chew it.”

  She sighed. “I would be content with very little now. An island like this, a little shack … I’d be happy with nothing.”

  “For a while, Edith.”

  “For the rest of our lives, Drew.”

  He felt an ache in the pit of his stomach. He felt she was telling the truth, and regretted that she’d never be able to prove it. His feeling of peace was gone; bitterly he watched the smoke spiral up from his cigarette; saw it disintegrate and curl upward toward the hole. His heartbeat quickened.

  “Take a deep breath, Edith. You smell something?”

  She sniffed. “You’re the man with the hypersensitive nose, remember? I get nothing but smoke.”

  “There’s air coming in from somewhere. Help me check the walls.”

  On the north wall, Drew found a crack in the close-fitted stones. Putting his fingers against it, he felt a tingle of cool air.

  “Could be a tunnel, Edith. Let’s dig.”

  It seemed hours before they had chipped away the surprisingly

  solid mortar and pried out a cubic-foot stone. Drew put his face to the hole and smelled dank musty air.

  “We’ll need a torch,” he said. “You keep digging.”

  Rats were still coming over the wall but they no longer troubled him; now they were involved in a shrieking, clawing internecine struggle for space. He saw one rat ripping the throat of another, while still a third tore at his flanks. Drew kicked his way unharmed to a dead tree which grew at the base of the tower and broke off a half-dozen wrist-thick branches. When he returned, Edith had enlarged the hole enough to admit his shoulders. Her nails were broken and bleeding, but there was a feverish excitement in her eyes.

  “Can we booby trap this room to delay them?”

  “I could,“ he said as he coaxed his torch into flame. “But time is more important to us than it is to Ian. They won’t come up until the fire dies. By then we’ve got to be gone.”

  He led the way, holding the flickering torch in front of him. The tunnel sloped steeply downward for a hundred feet, then ended in a blank wall. The draft blew upward from a yard-square hole in the floor. Drew set fire to a second branch and dropped it through the hole. It struck almost immediately.

  “Not over eight feet. You come after me.”

  He jumped, felt the heart-stopping sensation of falling through blackness, then struck with his knees bent. He called to Edith and she followed, falling forward on her hands.

  “What if there’s no way out?” she asked when he’d helped her to her feet.

  Drew felt the air brushing against his face, then riffling the hair at the back of his neck. It had a vaguely familiar rhythm: shhhh, ssss, shhhh, ssss …

  “There is,” he said. “Feel the air?”

  She was silent a moment. “What is it?”

  “That’s the rhythm of the fumaroles. The tunnel comes out under the sea.”

  Their voices echoed, and Drew realized they were in a large chamber. He fanned the two sticks into flame and made out the outlines of a cave a hundred feet long and twenty feet wide. Behind him, Edith let out a tiny scream. Drew whirled and stared into the face of a huge, grinning skull.

  “Shh. It’s past hurting anybody.” Raising his torch high, he saw that the floor of the chamber was littered with huge human skeletons. The one which had frightened Edith lay

  against the wall. Erect, it must have stood nearly eight feet tall. The relic beside it was comparatively small, not more than six and a half feet long. Its broad pelvic structure indicated that it was female. Beside her lay a specimen the size of a normal four-year-old child, whose short, curved legs and large skull indicated that it had been a suckling infant.

  “Now we know,” said Edith, “what happened to Chaka’s ancestors. They must have been sealed up and left to starve.”

  Drew grunted in agreement. “Let’s find a way out before it happens to us.”

  They went in opposite directions, each carrying a torch. Drew was halfway around when Edith called, “Here it is.”

  Drew found the opening large enough to admit him standing up. The tunnel spiraled downward so steeply that they had to hold to the walls to keep from pitching forward. It ended in a cavern frothy with turbulent water. An eerie green glow came from the north end, as though a floodlight shone from deep beneath the surface.

  Drew studied the scene a moment. “I’ll go first and see how it looks outside. Then I’ll pull on the rope and you can follow.”

  “You don’t have a rope, Drew.”

  “We’ll make one,” he said. “We can’t swim in our clothes anyway.”

  Drew took off his own outer clothing while Edith removed her blouse and skirt. He watched her from the corner of his eye, half-amused at the difference between now and the way she undressed for love. There was no complacent, half-sleepy repose on her face; no languid peeling-away of fabric as though her skin were already hypersensitive to the touch. She divested the skirt and blouse in a half-dozen movements. Her skin seemed to glow in the weird light; he felt an almost personal dread of the punishment this tender body would soon undergo.

  She reached for her brassiere clasp and looked at him. “You need this?”

  “No,” he said. “You’ll swim better with it on.”

  She nodded and began tearing the skirt into strips. As Drew tied them end to end, he said:

  “We’ve got three chances, Edith. Our best bet is to get back onto the island unseen, find an abandoned rifle, and kill Ian. I don’t think his men would fight after he was gone.”

  “Most of them would be glad to get out from under,” she said.

  “Okay. If we can’t do that, we’ll swim out to Whale Rock. I think we’re on the same side of the island. Once there we’ll lay low until Ian pulls out.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’ll still have to kill him.”

  She looked at him quizzically, and he could almost read her thoughts. It was a repeat performance of ten years ago, except that this time he was the one who found the neat sterility of death to
be the only solution.

  “You’re right,” she said finally. “We’d never be safe as long as he lived. But I’m not in your class when it comes to swimming to Whale Rock. What’s the third chance?”

  “It isn’t really a chance. We just stay here. I can shoot anybody who tries to come down the tunnel, but they’d just camp at the entrance and wait for us to starve.”

  “Like those people upstairs.”

  “Yes.”

  She shuddered. “I’ll take my chances on the sea.”

  He jerked the knots tight and found that he had a rope thirty feet long. Then he walked around the cavern to where the water glowed. Handing her one end of the rope, he said: “When I get outside, I’ll jerk three times. One two three.”

  She nodded.

  “Okay. If we have to swim, remember: when a shark comes at you, dive for depth. They’re scavengers, and generally attack only on the surface. Do the same thing if there’s shooting. Water will deflect a bullet.”

  She bit her lower lip. “If … something happens, there’s one thing I’d always wonder. You think … if we had more time, you could love me again?”

  He looked into the dark hollowed eyes set in the pale taut face. It occurred to him that she must have been far more beautiful ten years ago, but it didn’t seem so. This ravaged, battered woman before him had something that went beneath her skin. He did not know what it was, and he felt a sudden longing for an endless series of days like the one they’d spent on Whale Rock.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “I’m sure I would.”

  He dived down, found the top of the opening, and groped beneath it until he thought his lungs would burst; he had a terror of drowning here, pressed against the roof of this seemingly endless tunnel. Then suddenly the rock was gone; he rose to the surface and gasped in the sweet, fresh air. It was like wine; he had breathed so long of smoke and dankness.

  His spirits fell as he looked around at the sheer cliffs which rose above him. The sea charged twenty feet up the rocks, then fell back with a hissing roar. They couldn’t land; they’d be pounded to gobbets of pink-white flesh.

  He jerked three times on the line and felt the answering tug. He kept the line taut, guiding her until she bobbed up beside him.

  “We’ll have to try for Whale Rock,” he said. “Tell me when you’re ready.”

  She gasped and pushed the streaming hair away from her eyes. “Let’s go,” she said.

  Drew missed the fins immediately. He’d never swum to Whale Rock without them and the snorkel. Now he had to twist his head above the surface to breathe. It was infinitely harder, and even more difficult for Edith. A third of the way out she choked: “Don’t … wait. I’m just … slow.”

  He thought of lying on his back and floating while she rested, then he realized the current would pull them out to sea. There was no time to rest. He doubled their improvised rope, tied it around his head, and gave her the loop.

  “Just hang on. I’ll provide the power.”

  Her weight dragged like an anchor. Each breath was a ball of fire sucked into his lungs.

  Suddenly the weight was gone. He turned and caught her before she went down. Her eyes were closed. “Can’t … Drew …”

  He passed the loop beneath her limp arms and pulled her onto his back with her face turned up to the sky. He swam with desperate effort, knowing that he had to get through the current or be swept out to sea, knowing at the same time that it was nearly hopeless. His arms seemed sheathed in lead. Knives of pain raked his legs.

  Then he heard the growl of an engine. Hope surged, then turned to despair when he saw that it was Ian’s cruiser. Ian himself stood spraddle-legged on the bow. He held the grease gun pointed at Drew.

  “Don’t shoot! Your wife will drown!”

  Ian smiled. “You choose a weak bargaining point, Simmons. You can’t buy your life with her.”

  “I’m not buying mine. Just your wife’s. Throw me a line.”

  Ian lowered the gun, looking thoughtful. Drew treaded water, holding Edith’s feebly-moving body on his back. He couldn’t stay afloat much longer.

  “Ian, you fool! She’s carrying your baby! You want to lose that?”

  Ian jerked his head to one of the gunmen in the rear of the boat. A line snaked out and landed a yard away. Drew tied it around her waist, then took another hitch and tied it beneath her arms. He broke apart the line which held her to his back and shouted:

  “Pull her in!”

  “Get away from the boat!” shouted Ian.

  Drew swam twenty feet away. Edith had disappeared.

  “Pull her in, for God’s sake!”

  “Get further away!”

  Helplessly, Drew swam until he was fifty feet from the cruiser. He turned to see Barrington pulling in the line. Drew hoped he would have sense enough to give her artificial respiration, but he knew that he himself wouldn’t be around to see it. Barrington would lose no time in killing him the minute Edith was aboard …

  He froze in horror as Ian pulled a penknife from his pocket. “No!”

  Then the line was severed, and the end which held Edith sank beneath the surface. Drew swam with all his strength toward the spot where she’d gone down. Just before he dived, he heard Ian shout:

  “Fool! Did you think I’d believe you?”

  Drew was beneath the surface when he heard the chug-chug-chug of the gun, then the chuff! chuff! chuff! of bullets slicing into the water over his head. They made curving streaks of bubbles ahead of him. He could see Edith below, a dim white shape turning over and over, drifting down into a deep purple valley. He swam down until his eyes pressed against their sockets and his chest seemed about to burst. Still she sank, deeper and deeper. He wanted to join her in that cool valley, but drowning was impossible for him. Reluctantly he felt himself rising.

  But Edith was rising too. His heart was about to explode when he reached her and seized her hair. Her hands clawed his wrists as he dragged her out of the darkness toward the light. His shoulder bumped something; he saw that it was a fishtrap of woven bamboo strips. He followed the rope to the top and surfaced behind the float, gasping, trying to be silent, thanking God that some unknown fisherman had chosen a truly monstrous float, a two-yard length of bamboo three inches in diameter. Drifted sea weed had become tangled in the rope. He draped it over his head and peered over the float.

  The launch was a hundred yards away, its engine idling as it drifted swiftly in the current. Ian and two of his men were peering over the edge into the water. Drew watched the gap widen between them and realized that he and Edith had escaped the grip of the current.

  Beside him Edith coughed and sputtered. “Drew … what—”

  “Shh. They could still hear us.”

  She raised her head over the float, then dropped back, her face pale. At that moment the launch roared away, bearing around the west end of the island, toward the capital. Drew disconnected the float from the trap and hooked his arms over the bamboo. He started kicking toward Whale Rock, and after a moment Edith began helping. As they moved, Drew told her about the encounter with Ian.

  “Tonight,” he added, “the current will change and we’ll swim to the mainland. We can hole up in the hills until it’s safe to move to another island.”

  “What about Ian?”

  He looked at her. “What about him?”

  “Don’t you want to kill him, after all he’s done?”

  Drew thought of Barrington living on like a poisonous cancer, infecting others with his acid hates and prejudices. It had taken a man like that, Drew decided, to make him realize that Edith had hardly scratched the surface of evil.

  “Let him find his own punishment,” said Drew. “He’s given us the kind of chance some people beg for. Drew Simmons and Edith Barrington are dead. Officially witnessed by at least three people. I’ve wasted a lot of years on revenge, and I’m ready to try something different. As far as I’m concerned, Edith and Drew stay dead.”

  She sighed. “I was
rather fond of old Drew, but … you’re the boss."

  THE END

  of an Original Gold Medal Novel by

  Charles Runyon

  This edition published by Prologue Books an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

  4700 East Galbraith Road

  Cincinnati, Ohio 45236

  www.fwcrime.com

  Text Copyright © 1963 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

  Cover Art, Design, and Layout Copyright © 2012 by F+W Media, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-3988-X

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3988-6