Abe sniffed, looking down at the sullen, dark green water. They were less than a hundred feet distant, but a fierce thorn hedge blocked their passage, seeming to be impenetrable. “How we gonna get through that?”
J.B. studied it carefully. “See the tracks by the water’s edge. Means animals come down. If they can get through it, then so can we.”
“THERE,” ABE CALLED excitedly. “Kind of narrow tunnel about the size of big possum. Can easy crawl along that if we keep low.”
J.B. was a little behind him. “Might be a better way. I’m sure some of the tracks I saw from up yonder belonged to deer. They’d have opened up a wider path. We can check up and down stream.”
But Abe was in too much of a hurry.
He dropped to his hands and knees, making sure first that his stainless-steel Colt Python was still in its holster. Then he lunged forward into the narrow tunnel through the sharp thorns. Behind him, J.B. had stopped, crouching and looking intently at the maze of tracks in the soft earth.
“Come on, J.B., it’s fine. Get a few snags but it’s gotta be close to the other side. Can’t see the”
The Armorer looked up, as if he’d been struck by an apocalyptic vision. “Dark night!”
Abe hesitated, “You call me?”
“Tracks. Abe, get out of there!”
“Why?”
“Main tracks here. Leading in where you’ve gone. They’re made by a skunk.”
“Didn’t quite” His conversational tone raced up to a scream. “No! There’s a skunk in here and”
The Armorer began to back away, seeing the hedge erupt into violent life. Branches waved, shook and rattled. And above it all came the horror-struck babbling and yelling of Abe, trapped inside.
The wind was blowing strongly down the side canyon, toward the main river. But enough of the skunk’s foul spray filtered back to J.B. to make him turn and gag, doubled over, retching in the dirt.
“CAN I COME OUT?”
J.B. was sitting on a large rounded boulder, cradling the Uzi. He had gone only forty yards or so upstream, finding that the deer had picked their own wider path through the jagged thorns of the tall hedge. He had simply followed them, keeping to leeward of the hapless Abe.
The skunk had vanished into the brush, but it had left its mark.
Abe had eventually emerged onto the gently shelving strip of beach, his face as green as spring grass, his chest and pants slobbered with his own puke. When he saw the Armorer coming along the side of the river, he made a move as though he were going toward his old friends, stopping when the muzzle of the Uzi came up to cover him.
“One more step and I blow you in half, Abe,” J.B. warned. “I swear I’ll do it.”
“What can I do?”
“Predark remedy was tomato juice,” the Armorer offered. “We don’t have any.”
“So?”
“So.” He gestured with the blaster. “So, get in the river and strip off, Abe. Best you can do.”
URGED ON BY J.B., Abe had scrubbed at his clothes with handfuls of the fine silver sand that lined the river, scraping at his skin and hair to try to remove the insidious miasma that clung to him like a discarded lover.
“I can’t tell whether I still stink or not,” he complained. “I reckon it’s gone.”
J.B. sighed. “Wish I could agree with you. Truth is, you’re still no bouquet of violets. Give it another half hour and then try again.”
“I’ll have turned into a pink prune by then.”
“Half an hour,” J.B. insisted.
THE BRIDGE WAS MORE SOLID than it had looked from the top of the cliffs. The wires that had originally held it together had largely rotted and corroded, but they’d recently been replaced and strengthened by long cables of hand-spun rope.
J.B. went first, the Uzi and shotgun both across his shoulders, testing each step of the way, hanging on to the handrails on both sides.
Abe followed him, breathing an enormous sigh of relief as he reached dry land on the eastern shore of the main river. “Best moment for a few hours,” he said.