Part 25 (1/2)

Curt shot out from under the table and raced for the broken window. He heard two thumps as she dropped Pete's arms, then the crash of a table going over. The thing was leaping after him. He jumped through the window like diving into a hoop, hit the ground on his hands and knees, and crawled madly toward the Buick. A hand caught the back of his s.h.i.+rt, and he knew she was right there with him. He didn't think. He just did. His left hand gripped sand, and he twisted around and flung it into Laurie Rainey's savage, ruined face.

Her eye blinded, she tore the s.h.i.+rt off his back and swiped at him with her other hand. He ducked, saw the glint of little saw blades as her fingers flashed past his face. Curt kicked out at her, hit her in the breastbone, and pulled his leg back before she could grab it. Then he was up and running, and he reached his car and slid behind the wheel, his fingers jamming the key home. The engine made that knocking noise like it did every time it didn't want to start, only this time it sounded like a fist on a coffin's lid. Curt roared, ”Start, d.a.m.n you!” and sank his foot to the floorboard. The tailpipe belched dark smoke, the engine's muttering turned into a growl, and the Buick jerked in reverse. But not fast enough: Curt saw the creature racing after him, coming like an Olympic sprinter across the Bob Wire Club's lot. He battled the wheel as the tires. .h.i.t Highway 67's pavement, trying to get the car turned in the direction of Inferno. But the monster was almost to the car, and he forced the gears.h.i.+ft into first and shot forward to run her over. She jumped just before the Buick hit her, grabbing hold of the roof's edge and scuttling up onto it on her belly. He swerved the car, trying to throw her off. She held on, and Curt laid on the accelerator. He turned on the headlights; in the green glow of the dashboard the speedometer needle edged past forty. He realized he was going north instead of south but he was too scared to do anything but keep his foot on the pedal. At fifty the vibration of the bald tires all but jerked the wheel out of his hands, and at sixty the old engine was wheezing at the gaskets.

Something slammed down over his head and a blister of metal bloomed in the roof. Her fist, he thought. She was trying to beat through the roof. Another slam, and a second blister grew beside the first. Her hand crept into the car, fingers wrenching at the roof's joints. Screws popped loose. There was a shriek of rusted metal; she was bending the roof back like the lid of a sardine can. A crack zigzagged across the winds.h.i.+eld.

Screaming at its limits, the engine hit seventy miles an hour and rocketed Curt along Highway 67.

38 The Streets of Inferno

In the seven minutes since Daufin had left Cody Lockett, she'd seen no other humans on the streets of Inferno. She had gone back to the house of Tom, Jessie, and Ray, and though the doorway was unlocked, the abode was empty of life. She tried the doors of two other abodes, found the door to the first sealed and the second house also empty. The murk was getting thicker, and Daufin found that human eyes had a radically limited field of vision. The brown haze made her host eyes sting and water, and she could see less than forty feet in all directions as she continued along Celeste Street in search of help. Two lights were coming through the smoke. Daufin stopped, waiting for them to get closer. She could hear an engine: the crude, combustion-powered conveyance called a car. But the car slowed and turned to the right before it reached her, and she saw the red smears of its taillights drawing rapidly away. She ran after it, crossing the sandy plot of earth where she'd hidden under the protective sh.e.l.l and met the Sarge Dennison creature. Another set of headlights pa.s.sed on Celeste Street, going east, but the vehicle was moving too fast for Daufin to catch and by that time she'd reached Cobre Road. She kept running in the direction of the first car she'd seen and in another moment she saw the red points of the taillights again, just up the street. The car wasn't moving, but the engine still rumbled. She approached it, saw that the vehicle's doors were open but no one was in sight. A little rectangle fixed to the back of the car had letters on it: CADE-I. It was parked in front of a structure with shattered light apertures-”windows,” she knew they were termed-and the doorway hung open as well. A square with writing above the doorway identified the structure as INFERNO HARDWARE.

”Place has been ripped off,” Rick said to Zarra as they stood at the rear of the store. He'd found a flashlight and batteries, and he shone its beam into the broken gla.s.s counter where the pistols had been locked up. Out of an a.s.sortment of eight guns on display, not one remained. ”Somebody cleaned Mr. Luttrell out.” He pointed the light at the racks where six rifles had been; they were gone, hacked right out of their locks by an ax or machete. Boxes of ammunition had been stolen from the storage shelves, and only a few cartridges gleamed in the light.

”So much for findin' a piece, man,” Zarra said. ”Let's get our b.u.t.ts across the bridge.”

”Hold on. Mr. Luttrell keeps a pistol in his office.” Rick started back, through a swinging door into the storeroom, and Zarra followed the light. The office was locked, but Rick bashed open the door with two kicks and went to the manager's paper-cluttered desk. The drawers were locked too. He went out to the storeroom, found a box of screwdrivers, and returned to the job at hand. He and Zarra levered the drawers open with screwdrivers, and in the bottom drawer, under a pile of dog-eared Playboy magazines, was a loaded.38 pistol and an extra box of bullets. At the clinic Rick and Zarra had listened to Colonel Rhodes's story about the two s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps and the creatures called Daufin and Stinger. Rick could still feel the slick scales of that thing's tail around his throat, and d.a.m.ned if he was going to go back to Bordertown without a gun. The Fang of Jesus paled before Smith & Wesson firepower.

”Let's go, man!” Zarra urged nervously. ”You got what you came for!”

”Right.” Rick left the office with Zarra right behind him. They went through the storeroom door again, and suddenly from the front of the store there was a crash and clatter that almost made their hearts seize up. Zarra gave a little moan of terror, and Rick snapped the.38's safety off and c.o.c.ked it. He probed around with the light, following the beam with the gun barrel. He couldn't see anyone. Somebody in here after guns, just like us, he thought. He hoped. ”Who's there?” he said.

Something moved to his left. He swung the light in that direction, toward shelves where coils of rope and wire were kept. ”I've got a gun!” he warned. ”I'll shoot your d.a.m.ned-” He stopped speaking when the light found her.

She was standing there holding a coil of rope between both hands. A bundle of copper wire had fallen off the shelf, upsetting a display of jars of nails. She was wearing just what Colonel Rhodes had said: a dusty Jetsons T-s.h.i.+rt and blue jeans, and her face was that of Mr. Hammond's child. Except behind that face, according to Rhodes, was an alien called Daufin and this was the little girl the thing in Cade's autoyard was looking for. ”Don't move.” His throat clogged up. His heart was beating so hard he could hear the blood roaring in his ears. ”I've got a gun,” he repeated, and his gunhand trembled.

”Cody Lockett needs help,” Daufin said calmly, squinting into the harsh light. Her memory banks found the term gun and identified it as a primitive percussion-cap weapon. She could tell from the human's voice that he was terrified, so she stood very still.

”It's her,” Zarra whispered. His legs were about to fold up. ”Oh Christ, it's her!”

”What are you doing in here?” Rick asked, and kept his finger on the trigger.

”I saw your vehicle. I followed you,” Daufin explained. ”Cody Lockett is in need of help. Will you come with me?”

It took a few seconds for him to register what she'd said. ”What's happened to him?”

”He fell. To below.”

”Below where?”

She remembered the name Cody Lockett had called into the house, and p.r.o.nounced it with difficulty: ”Mrs. Stell-en-berg's abode. I'll guide you there.”

”No way!” Zarra said. ”We're goin' back to Bordertown! Right, Rick?”

The other boy didn't answer. He wasn't exactly sure where Lockett was, but the creature seemed to be saying that he'd fallen under a house. ”Do you know how far down he is?”

”Thirteen-point-six Earth feet. An approximate calculation, plus or minus three inches.”

”Oh.”

”By visuals I calculate this tether to be fifteen Earth feet in length.” She struggled to lift up the heavy coil of rope she'd dragged off a shelf. The muscles of the daughter's arms strained with the weight. ”Will you help me?”

”Forget Lockett, man!” Zarra objected. ”Let's get back to our own people!”

Daufin didn't understand the tone of refusal. ”Is Cody Lockett not one of your own?”

”No,” Rick said. ”He's a 'Gade, and we're Rattler-” He stopped, realizing how dumb that must sound to somebody from another planet. ”He's different,”

”Cody Lockett is a human being. You are human beings. What is the difference?”

”Our kind lives across the river,” Zarra said. ”That's where we're goin'.” He walked on along the aisle toward the door, paused in the doorway when he saw Rick wasn't following. ”Come on, man!”

Rick kept the flashlight on the little girl's face. She stared fixedly at him, waiting for his response. Cody Lockett was nothing to him, but still... it seemed like they were all in this together, and the violet skygrid had caged both Renegades and Rattlers alike.

”Please,” Daufin implored.

He sighed and lowered the.38. ”You go on back to the church,” he told Zarra. ”Tell Paloma I'm okay.”

”You're off your bird! Lockett wouldn't do s.h.i.+t for you! ”

”Maybe he wouldn't, but I'm not Lockett. Go ahead, take the car. I'll come when I can.”

Zarra started to protest again, but he knew that once Rick's mind was made up, he couldn't be swayed. ”d.a.m.n stupid!” he muttered, then, in a louder voice: ”You watch your a.s.s. Got it?”

”Got it,” Rick answered, and Zarra went out to Cade's Mercedes, got in, and wheeled it toward the bridge.

”Okay,” Rick said to Daufin when the Mercedes was gone and it was too late for second thoughts.

”Take me to him.”

39 Highway 67

The creature's fist banged down like an anvil on the top of Curt Lockett's Buick. The metal dented in over his skull, and now the underside of the roof was as crumpled as a crushed beer can. The car was shuddering, just on the edge of going out of control, and the speedometer needle trembled on the wild side of seventy.

Curt screamed, ”Get off!” and jerked the car to right and left. The Buick roared around a curve, slipped off the road, and threw up a boil of dust and stones. When he got the tires back on the pavement, he saw a shape before him in the headlights: a pickup truck going about twenty miles an hour, its bed loaded down with a mattress and junk furniture and a little dark-haired Mexican child sitting atop a stack of crates. The child's eyes had widened with terror, and as Curt fought the wheel the Buick grazed past the pickup and left it in a swirl of dust.

The road wound between red boulders the size of houses. Over the engine's shriek Curt heard the squeal of the roof peeling back; the metal-nailed fingers were at work, gripped along the top of the pa.s.senger door. More screws popped out, and she kept battering the roof in with her other fist. He jerked the car violently left and right again, but the monster held on as tight as a tick. The roof broke loose from the rim of the winds.h.i.+eld. Cracks jigsawed across the gla.s.s. Her hand folded around the rusted metal at the top of the driver's door, and Curt beat at the fingers with his fist. She reached in, groping for him, and almost snagged his hair before he could slide across the seat. The car slewed to the right, left the road, and bounced over ruts that whammed Curt's skull against the roof dents. And suddenly the creature lost her grip, slid backward over the roof with a skreek of metal nails and down the rear winds.h.i.+eld. She tried to catch hold, found nothing to grip. In the rearview mirror, Curt saw her slide over the fishtailing trunk, saw her half-mangled, half-beautiful face glisten in the red glare of the taillights. Her face disappeared over the trunk's bulbous slope, and Curt whooped with joy.

”To h.e.l.l with you!” he shouted hoa.r.s.ely as he veered the car back up on the road. ”Teach you to mess with a cowboy!”

Highway 67 straightened out to meet more desert. In the distance, maybe two miles ahead, the purple grid plunged into the earth all along the horizon. It blocked the road, but beyond it was a sea of flas.h.i.+ng blue-and-red lights: state trooper cars.

Cain't such a thing be solid, he remembered Harlan saying. Ain't such a thing possible. Curt glanced at the speedometer. Seventy-five. I can bust through it, he told himself. Bust right through like it's made out of gla.s.s. And if I can't... well, I won't never know it, will I?