“It’s over,” Krysty said hoarsely.
Squinting through his stinging eye, Ryan made a quick head count. All six of his people were there, swaying on weary legs.
“What do you know?” he croaked. His tongue felt like a strip of shriveled, ancient leather. “We didn’t die.”
Doc coughed rackingly and sank to the ground. “I am gratified you made that observation. Up until this moment, I was not sure.”
All of them followed Doc’s example, dropping in their tracks. They quenched their thirsts and rinsed out their gritty mouths with water. J.B. fumbled in his coat pocket and brought out his compass.
“We didn’t stray too far off course,” he announced. “What now?”
Ryan eyed the position of the moon. “Only a couple of hours until daybreak. We rest for half an hour, then start moving again.”
Dean scrubbed sand from his hair. “Do we have to, Dad? I’m beat.”
“If we stay here, we roast by midday.”
Everyone was too tired and thirsty to talk during the half hour. When it elapsed, the seven companions slowly climbed to their feet.
Krysty pressed herself briefly against Ryan, lips brushing his, but it was a painful kiss, for their lips were dry and raw from the terrible chafing of the wind.
“We’ll get through this, lover,” she whispered. “Been through worse.”
“Yeah,” he replied, cupping her cheek in one hand. “Shining times await.”
Wind-drifted sand glimmered in long ripples, as if a sea had been suddenly frozen and turned to powder. The moon grew red and menacing as it sank. Before they had covered two miles, the first glintings of dawn peeped over the horizon. Within four miles, the sun topped the edge of the world and drove away the cool of the night. Inside of six miles, the air was heavy with radiating waves of sheer, hellish heat. The desert hardpan seemed to soak it up and reflect it back. There was no shelter in sight from the rising inferno.
Jak and Krysty were fair-skinned and suffered the worst. They bundled themselves in the linens, leaving only their eyes uncovered. They quickly soaked the sheets through with perspiration.
“Omnia sol temperat, purus et subtilis,” Doc muttered.
“That’s Latin,” Dean said. “What’s it mean?”
” ‘The sun, pure and clear, tempers everything.’ ”
They slogged on through the sand. Cacti of twisted, distorted shapes grew nearby, but no trees, not even a decent-sized bush. The terrain inclined slightly, and Ryan, his mind clouded by fatigue, was only dimly aware of climbing. His feet slipped on a lip of sand, and he went rolling down a smooth slope.
Struggling to his hands and knees, Ryan looked up and thought he spotted their salvation. Beneath a shading hand, he squinted through the haze of the skyline at a collection of structures. They looked far away, blurred by the heat shimmer. Distance in the desert couldn’t be measured by the eye alone, but he was certain the buildings were closer than they appeared. Or they could be mirages, fabricated by his brain slowly boiling away in the pressure cooker of his skull. Even so, the sight of the structures galvanized him, raised him quickly to his feet.
Looking back behind him as his companions topped the low dune, he called, “Jak! Do your eyes still work?”
“Halfway,” came the albino’s dour response. “Why?”
Ryan gestured. “What do you see out there?”
Jak cupped both hands around his eyes, protecting them from the dazzle. He stared. At length, he declared, “Shade.”
Chapter Nine
The settlement, if it could be called that, looked like the rough sketch of a shanty town someone intended to build one day.
Two dozen shelters made of splintering wooden siding and rotted canvas formed a horseshoe shape around a spacious central area. At the apex of the horseshoe, several of the ramshackle structures converged, leaning into one another. The suggestion of a stockade fence was barely identifiable in the drifts. Nothing stirred in and around the structures except wind-driven swirls of sand.
On the far side of the settlement, down a short embankment, a thin stream of water trickled, curving around the farthermost outbuilding. A line of gray peaks could just be made out on the distant horizon—mountains or clouds. If they were mountains, it could only be the foothills of the Sierra Madre range. Or it could be a new range, birthed by the Russian earthshaker bombs that had resculpted much of the West Coast.