lucky the weapon hadn’t discharged as it slammed around inside the
tumbling Camaro.
Coming for me Disoriented, he needed a moment to find the door handle,
which was over his head. He reached up, released it. At first the door
would not open Then it swung outward with a metallic popping and
squeaking.
He crawled off the ceiling, out onto the floor of the desert, feeling as
though he had become trapped in a surreal Daliesque world of weird
perspective He reached back in for the shotgun.
Though the ash-fine dust was beginning to settle, he was still coughing
it out of his lungs. Clenching his teeth, he tried to swallow each
cough. he needed to be quiet if he were to survive.
Neither as quick nor as inconspicuous as the small desert lizards the
scooted across his path, Jim stayed low and dashed to a nearby arroyo
When he arrived at the edge of that natural drainage channel, he
discovered it was only about four feet deep. He slid over the lip, and
his feet made a soft slapping sound as they hit the hard-packed bottom.
Crouching in that shallow declivity, he raised his head slowly to grow
level and looked across the desert floor toward the overturned Camaro
around which the haze of alkaline dust had not yet entirely dissipated.
the highway, the Road king finished reversing along the pavement and
halted parallel to the wrecked car.
The door opened, and a man climbed out. Another man, having exited from
the far side, hurried around the front of the motor home to join his
companion. Neither of them was the kindly-retiree-on-a-budget that a
might have imagined behind the wheel of that aging caravan. They
appeared to be in their early thirties and as hard as heat-tempered
dense rock. One of them wore his dark hair pulled back and knotted into
redoubled ponytail-the passe style that kids now called a “dork knob”
The other had short spiky hair on top, but his head was shaved on the
sides-as if he thought he was in one of those old Mad Max movies. they
wore sleeveless T-shirts, jeans, and cowboy boots, and both carried hand
guns. They headed cautiously toward the Camaro, splitting up to
approach it from opposite ends.
Jim drew down below the top of the arroyo, turned right-which was
approximately west-and rushed in a crouch along the shallow channel He
glanced back to see if he was leaving a trail, but the silt, baked under
months of fierce sun since the last rain, did not take footprints.
After about fifty feet, the arroyo abruptly angled to the south, left.
Sixty feet thereafter it disappeared into a culvert that led under the
highway.
Hope swept through him but did not still the tremors of fear that had
shaken him continuously since he had found the dying man in the station
wagon. He felt as if he was going to puke. But he had not eaten
breakfast and had nothing to toss up. No matter what the nutritionists
said, sometimes it paid to skip a meal.
Full of deep shade, the concrete culvert was comparatively cool.
He was tempted to stop and hide there-and hope they would give up, go
away.
He couldn’t do that, of course. He wasn’t a coward. But even if his
conscience had allowed him to buy into a little cowardice this time, the
mysterious force driving him would not permit him to cut and run. To
some extent, he was a marionette on strings invisible, at the mercy of a
puppeteer unseen, in a puppet-theater play with a plot he could not
understand and a theme that eluded him.
A few tumbleweed had found their way into the culvert, and their brittle
spines raked him as he shoved through the barrier they had formed. He
came out on the other side of the highway, into another arm of the
arroyo, and scrambled up the wall of that parched channel.
Lying belly-first on the desert floor, he slithered to the edge of the
elevated roadbed and eased up to look across the pavement, east toward
the motor home. Beyond the Road king, he could see the Camaro like a