up the dust into the heavy air in thin spirals—and the single raggedy man
crawling toward him, blind eyes staring out of a gaunt and blackened face, one
desiccated hand clawing and twitching in the air like a mummified insect come to
dreadful life. A human skeleton, his clothes in rags and tatters, inching his
way laboriously along the ruined blacktop. Muttering and mumbling to himself as
his knees and bony legs scraped faintly along the dusty road, he pulled himself
wearily forward with the sound of old parchment being gently squeezed.
Dolfo Kaler, A man of considerable will.
Kurt remembered turning and running in blind panic back into town, his bare feet
hammering at the hot, dusty ground. He remembered the confused aftermath, the
deputation of eight armed men, led by Jordan Teague himself carrying a
pump-action, Teague striding out of town toward the blackened, sticklike figure
rustling its way along the rutted blacktop. He remembered how they kept their
distance from Kaler, well out of reach in a half circle, watching him drag
himself slowly toward them. How they glanced at each other, shook their heads,
faces showing a mix of horror, boredom, grim ruthlessness. How they all, as one,
each of the eight, lifted their pieces and fired.
Kurt remembered that, all right.
He remembered it was Jordan Teague who aimed at the head and blew it off with an
ear-cracking roar of sound, automatic fire and pistol single-shot clattering in
echo, rounds jerking and smashing the stick man up and down and back along the
blacktop in a flailing scramble of limbs and blood and flesh chunks.
They said they had to do it because it was a stone-cold cinch that Kaler was
contaminated in some way; maybe he had the Plague itself. That was a popular
theory because guys who caught the Plague found themselves driven to the limits
of their endurance and beyond before they finally fell apart.
But Kurt knew the sun-crisped ruin of a man did not have the Plague. Even at the
age of ten he knew that. Knew for sure. A classic symptom of Plague was that you
could not talk, could not articulate words, you could only gargle and growl and
foam at the mouth. And Kaler might have been mumbling and muttering when Kurt
found him, but there were words coming out of his mouth: most were garbled,
incomprehensible; a few were chillingly intelligible.
Kurt could hear the rasping croak now, the words creaking out through those
blackened lips: “Fog…fog devils… tear you… apart…”
McCandless’s voice cut through his dark musings.
“I said, what do you think, Kurt? You listenin’ to me?”
And now there he was, trekking through this savage land at McCandless’s heels,
following Dolfo Kaler’s trail and the trail of all those other poor bastards who
had never made it back to Mocsin. Never made it back to anywhere.
Sure he was mad. But come to think of it, not half as mad as Jordan Teague would
have been if Teague had gotten his fat hands on him. Hiring on with McCandless
had been the perfect escape—except of course for McCandless’s lousy rep and
McCandless’s lousy destination. If only he’d headed off elsewhere on the road to
the Darks, managed to sneak away on foot or stolen the truck. If only. But
there’d been no time, no opportunity. McCandless had already been able to claw
some gas from somewhere, enough to fill the tank of the beat-up, rickety truck
that had only just managed to get them here before seizing up completely in the
foothills. That was where McCandless had iced the fifth member of the party,
Denning, and that was where they’d bedded down for the night, and that was
where, burn it all to Hell, he should have split.
But he hadn’t. And he still wasn’t entirely sure why.
Maybe the vision of riches or weaponry beyond his wildest imaginings had held
him to this course: an infatuation with power.
Maybe it, was just as simple as a belief that when the chips were down he could
get shot of McCandless and Rogan and maybe Reacher, too—but maybe not Reacher;
Kurt felt a vague kinship with Reacher—and take what was there all for himself.