The Hunter From the Woods

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Your Rolex,” said Gantt, with impudence returning to his voice. “A nice playtoy, but it can’t compare with a Breitling.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Absolutely so. Well, just look at the difference! Mine has a much larger face with clearer numbers, in my opinion, since yours does not have numbers but difficult-to-read bars where the numbers should be. Mine has an automatic winder and a chronograph. In fact, it’s been created specificially for use by aviators. I’ve had not a bit of trouble with any part of it in the four happy years of ownership. And your Rolex may be very handsome, if that’s what you feel you need to project, but it doesn’t have the pedigree of the Breitling.”

  “Hm,” Michael commented.

  “The Breitling brand dates from 1884. I believe the Rolex name was trademarked in 1908. If you care to calculate the difference between those years, you’ll find that Breitling has twenty-four years of experience on the Rolex. What do you say to that?”

  “I’d say Rolex caught up very quickly to Breitling and surpassed that brand in short order. They learned from Breitling’s mistakes.”

  “Oh, really? And how exactly has Rolex surpassed Breitling?”

  “In the areas of waterproofing and shockproofing,” Michael answered calmly. “A Rolex was worn by the first British woman to swim the English channel, in October of 1927. You can imagine how cold the water was.”

  “Yes, unfortunately I can only imagine,” said Gantt.

  “After ten hours in the water, her Rolex was still performing perfectly,” Michael continued. “As for the area of shockproofing, my Rolex is still performing perfectly after—you may recall—this morning’s airplane crash.”

  “Ah! Touché,” said the flyer, with a narrow-eyed smile. He held out his wrist for Michael to see. “But my Breitling still beats your Rolex. Beats it by far.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because of the band. This leather band. You see it?” It was simply a brown leather band, nothing special about it that Michael could tell. “This band,” said Gantt, “is made from the leather on the instrument panel of my father’s Albatross fighter plane, from 1918. He died in action but he set his plane down first. A perfect landing, they said, and him shot full of holes. His wingman sent my mother a drawing of him that one of his squadron members had done. It was framed in the plane’s wing fabric and panel leather. After my mother passed away I decided I wanted my father to be closer to me than a picture on the wall. I decided I wanted him to fly with me.” Gantt turned his wrist before Michael’s face. “And here he is.”

  Michael realized why Gantt feared the Dahlasiffa so much. They would certainly try to take the watch, and they would likely succeed. With it would go the band, which was actually the most valuable part of it to Gantt. And he would die knowing his father’s memory was lost to the hands of the Death Stalkers. Lost, never to be found. It was time, Michael thought, to start moving once more. He sat up and rubbed his injured shoulder. The boy’s hand kept shaking the dice, and occasionally he opened his fingers to see what the pips read. Gantt leaned back against the red rock, his face painted crimson by the setting sun, his eyes not on the gleaming watch but on the plain brown leather band.

  Michael had never had such difficulty getting to his feet, but he made it. “I think we should—”

  “Ow!” said Gantt, wincing. He had jerked his head away from the rock and grasped at the back of his neck. “Scheisse! Something stung me!”

  Michael looked at the rock and saw a trace of movement in a shadow pool. Peering closer, he made out the three-inch-long black scorpion that sat there, king of its domain, its stinger coiled back and ready to deliver another strike.

  “Scorpion,” Michael said. The poisonous kind, he did not say. The deadly kind, he did not say.

  The kind whose venom could kill a man within several hours, he did not say.

  He didn’t have to, because Gantt also saw the scorpion. Gantt drew the Walther and smashed its grip into the shadow pool until the scorpion was a mass of milky paste.

  Then he looked at Michael with terror in his eyes.

  The boy’s hand stopped.

  “Razor,” said Michael.

  Gantt pulled Michael’s straight razor from his pocket and gave it to him. He leaned forward. Michael opened the razor and found the sting just to the right of Gantt’s vertebrae. It was a small red puncture wound already becoming ringed with white.

  Michael cut an X across the wound and squeezed the blood out of it.

  “Did you get it all?” Gantt asked hoarsely, still leaning forward.

  Michael didn’t know. He wasn’t sure how deep the stinger had pierced, or how much venom had been delivered. He got down on his knees beside the flyer. “Hold still,” he said, and he sliced another X into the flesh beside the first. Gantt made no sound. Then Michael put his mouth over the wound and sucked the blood like any good vampire in a Bram Stoker horror story.

  He spat blood out and repeated the indelicate task. The smell and taste of it made the animal part of him salivate. He realized that the wolf could have a feast right here on this parachute dining-cloth. A third time he sucked at the wound and then spat out the fluid, and then that was all he could do.

  “Thank you,” said Gantt. He put his fingers to the back of his neck and then held them, bloodstreaked, before his face. “Thank you,” he repeated.

  “I don’t know if I got all of it.”

  “All right. Thank you. You tried.”

  “We’d better stay here awhile longer,” Michael decided. He noted that the boy had begun shaking his dice again. The boy’s eyes darted between Michael and Gantt. “Just be still,” Michael told the flier.

  “Yes. As you say. Yes.” Gantt crawled away from the rock. He lay down on the parachute on his right side, trailing blood as it dripped. He curled up into a fetal position with his hands folded under his right cheek.

  An hour passed, during which the sun dropped to the horizon. The light turned deeper red with blue shadows. The air cooled as night came on.

  “I’m burning up,” Gantt suddenly said. His voice sounded thick. “Burning up,” he repeated. He sat up, and in the red gloom Michael saw the glistening of small beads of sweat on the man’s ashen face. “Can I have some water?”

  “We have none,” Michael said.

  “I must have water. My mouth…it’s not right.”

  “We have no water,” Michael said carefully, for Gantt’s eyes were bright and wild with fever.

  The ace put a hand to his forehead. “I’m burning up,” he said, as if this were news.

  “Rolfe? Just lie down and be—”

  “I must insist on water.” It had been spoken in German. “Would you deny a thirsty man?”

  “Listen to me. Do you know where you are?”

  “I’m… I’m…yes, I’m in the infirmary.” He nodded, verifying this illusion to himself. Again, he was speaking his native tongue. “I remember… I was flying. Then…there was oil on my windscreen. I couldn’t see. I knew I was going down. I jumped, and my parachute opened. What happened to my plane?”

  “It crashed.”

  “The lights,” said Gantt. “Why are the lights so dim?”

  “Lie down,” Michael instructed. He decided to add, “Right there, on the bed.” He heard the clicking of the dice at his back.

  Gantt looked around, obviously confused. He felt for something that was not there. “I don’t like it,” he said, in almost a child’s voice. “So dark in here.”

  Some of the scorpion’s poison had gotten into his system, Michael knew. From what he’d read, there were thirty different varieties of scorpions in the Sahara and four of them were lethal to humans. The one that had stung Gantt was as toxic as a cobra. The venom could cause first high fever and hallucinations, then convulsions, and finally heart failure. It just depended on how much Michael had been able to get out of the wound.

  “Yes,” Gantt said. “I think I will lie down.” He curled himself up agai
n on his side on the parachute, and he closed his eyes.

  Michael waited. He caught the boy watching him as the dice went back and forth.

  A few minutes passed. Gantt appeared to be sleeping, his chest rising and falling.

  He twitched suddenly, but it was a passing muscle spasm. Then he opened his eyes and sat up again, and now he glowered at Michael with an expression nearing rage.

  “I said I need water. It is very uncivilized to keep water from a thirsty man. Do you hear me, sir?”

  “Rolfe, there’s no more water.” Even as he said it, Michael knew it was hopeless.

  Gantt was a wanderer in the desert beyond reason.

  Gantt was silent.

  And silent still, his dark-hollowed eyes fixed upon Michael Gallatin or whoever he thought Michael Gallatin to be.

  “You can’t treat your patients in this manner,” Gantt said quietly. “These men here…they all deserve better, sir. They shouldn’t be so disrespected.”

  Michael had no idea what situation the flyer thought he was in, or whether it had really happened in some way or was strictly fantasy. He saw Gantt’s hand go to the Walther’s grip.

  “I want water. For all of us. Now.”

  Michael spoke German: “Very well, then. You’ll get it. There’s a jug under the bed. Right there.” He pointed at nothing. “Reach under and bring it out.”

  Gantt stared blankly at him.

  “Under the bed,” Michael repeated firmly. “Right there.”

  The dice stopped clicking.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Gantt, and he leaned over to get the imaginary jug under the phantom bed.

  Michael moved as fast as he could. He plucked the Walther from Gantt’s waistband and when the man looked at him, puzzled, Michael hit him as lightly as possible across the back of the head with the pistol’s grip. Lightly as possible, but hard enough to put him to sleep and quench his thirst.

  Gantt lay on the parachute. His body began to convulse, the arms and legs twisting. For a moment it appeared as if, even unconscious, he was about to get up and go for the waterjug, but then he collapsed again and lay thrashing. Michael put the gun aside and got his sweat-stiff shirt. He knelt beside the man, and with difficulty due to the one hand forced the cloth between Gantt’s teeth. It might prevent him from biting his tongue off, or not, depending on how strong the convulsions became.

  Then all Michael could do was crawl away and sit with the Walther in his hand.

  He watched Gantt suffer, as the last of the light faded.

  The convulsions became more violent. This hideous phase lasted about fifteen minutes before Gantt suddenly became still.

  Michael checked his pulse. Weak. But the man was alive.

  The night turned cooler. A group of jackals came nosing around, until Michael stood up and ran them off with a few stones. His Rolex showed the passage of almost three more hours before Gantt stirred and spat the cloth out and got slowly up on his hands and knees. He retched so hard it seemed his guts would spill out. Then Gantt moaned and cursed and said in a voice barely intelligible, “Damn, my head hurts.” He had spoken in English. After that, he curled down again in a fetal position and went to sleep.

  Michael also slept. His last impression was of the boy, sitting cross-legged under the starry sky, the Commonwealth soldier’s dusty tam on his head and his face hidden by the keffiyeh. Whether he was asleep sitting up or not was anyone’s guess, but at least for the moment his left hand was motionless and the dice were silent.

  Four

  They reached the well when dawn was a thin streak of red across the horizon and the world was made of different depths of darkness.

  How far they had come this night, Michael didn’t know. His legs felt ragged. His left arm was a dead weight. He had left his kitbag behind, to save his energy, but he carried both guns in the parachute pack and Gantt—weak and dispirited—had not protested. Every step Michael took might end in a stumble. But he’d kept going, one of three, walking right behind the boy and following behind him the Messerschmitt ace.

  The well was not pretty. It lay up under an outcropping of rock and so was shielded from the sun. Uneven stones were built up around a small pool the size of a bathtub in a cheap hotel. Dried animal dung was scattered about where the jackals and wild dogs had unsuccessfully tried to mark their territory.

  Pretty or not, the well was full of gorgeous water. Gantt’s cracked lips parted in a gasp of need and he flung himself forward past Michael and the boy.

  He hung over the stones and pushed his face into the water. He reached in with both arms and splashed water over his head. He reached down deeper, into the cooler depths, and when his hands came back up Michael saw the entrails roped around them, and suddenly the gashed-open bloodless torso that the entrails had spilled from surfaced in front of Gantt’s face, and also bursting to the surface was a decapitated human head, mouth and eyes open, that bore the purple hole of a rifle bullet.

  Gantt shrieked; there was no other way to describe the sound. He fought out of the blue entrails that bound his wrists, and staggering back he nearly fell over the boy, who also retreated—but in utter silence—from the grisly mess that fouled the well. Gantt went down to the ground among the animals’ leavings and clawed frantically at his own mouth until the blood ran from his lips.

  Michael approached the well. He had already smelled the beginnings of putrefaction. Desert heat was not kind to a corpse. By the end of another day, the odor would even keep the animals from coming near. There was another scent in the air also: salt. He figured the water had been salted as well as fouled by human remains. He walked a few paces away and knelt down on his haunches to think.

  He thought he understood the motive for this brutality. “The Dahlasiffa,” he said to Gantt, who had crawled on his belly a distance away and lay with his hands to his face. “They’ve poisoned this well to keep other tribes from drinking.” In the strengthening light, he found the camel tracks that led southward. “Their own village must not be far. They’ve likely got a well there. They’re probably demanding tribute from other tribes.” He stood up and looked over the hammada toward the south. A muscle worked in his jaw. “We need water, or we’re going to die.” He spoke to Gantt not harshly but firmly: “Stand up.”

  “I can’t.” The other man’s voice was almost gone. “I can’t.”

  “If you won’t stand up, I’ll stand you up.”

  “Please…let me lie here. I can’t…dear God… I can’t—”

  Gantt was interrupted by the hand that reached down and grasped the back of his collar, pulling his face out of the sand.

  “You hear me,” Michael said. “Loud and clear.” His eyes gleamed bright green in the dawning light. The sun was a red semicircle rising over shadowed mountains to the east. “You can handle a gun. So can I. The guns can get us some water. That means we live, at least for another day, unless the Dahlasiffa kill us first. But I’m thinking they’re not going to be expecting two men with guns. I told you to stand up.”

  “I’m done,” Gantt gasped through his bloodied lips, his eyes swollen from the horror of what he’d just seen. “You go.”

  “The odds are not good for one man. Not much better for two, but they are better. Now…you’re a soldier and so am I. We go out fighting. Do you hear me?”

  “I can’t make it. Please. I’m done.”

  “I’ll tell you when you’re done or not.” Michael gritted his teeth and tried to haul the man up but for all his best effort he didn’t have the strength. “Rolfe,” he said, “don’t die on your belly.” And he decided to add, “Your father didn’t.”

  Gantt didn’t respond for a few seconds. Then he reached back and roughly pushed Michael’s hand away. He slowly rolled over and sat up. He pressed his hands to his face once more and rocked back and forth.

  Michael heard the noise of the dice. He saw that the boy was throwing them onto the ground and then leaning forward to read the pips before they were collected and the p
rocess repeated.

  “We have to try,” Michael said, though he himself was unsure they could even get close enough to the Dahlasiffa village to try. “We can think of something.”

  “I’m too weak. I can barely walk.”

  “Can you crawl?” Michael asked.

  Gantt lowered his hands and looked up at Michael Gallatin. His eyes were deep sunken, dull and lifeless. It was a bad sign, Michael thought. A sign of giving up. He reached into the parachute pack, got the Walther P38 and offered the weapon to its owner. “Take it,” he said when Gantt hesitated. “Go ahead and blow your brains out, if you want to. I’ll bury you out here or you can join Hartler for a long bath.”

  Gantt stared fixedly at the pistol. He frowned, searching for solid ground in this desert hell. The sun was rising quickly now, and the air was already hot. No breeze stirred a particle of dust.

  At last Gantt spoke. “Why would I want to commit suicide?”

  “It would be faster than dying of thirst. You still have some strength left. The village may be only a few miles away. Their well will be clean.” Something Michael had read suddenly came to him. “If I have to die today, I want to die fighting to live.”

  “That makes not a bit of sense,” said the pilot.

  “I know. It’s one of your quotes from your last article in Signal.”

  In spite of his raging thirst and deadening fatigue, Gantt summoned a weak smile. “You’re a strange bastard.”

  “Save your insults for tomorrow. For today, take this pistol and stand up. I’m thirsty enough to kill for a drink. Are you?”

  Gantt gingerly rubbed his raw mouth. Then he reached out and took the pistol. “Yes, I am,” he said, and with the greatest effort he got himself to his feet.

  They aimed themselves along the camel tracks, with Michael leading the way, the boy next and then Gantt. As the sun steadily rose and the heat intensified the Englisher and German stopped to put on their face and head coverings, and then they continued southward.

  They passed into a surrealistic landscape. The hard-packed crust of sand was brown with streaks of yellow. Emerging from the earth were huge ridges of wind-sculpted sandstone rocks standing twenty and thirty meters tall. Michael kept to the camel tracks, which led them through winding passages in the rocks.