his face. He felt he could stay there forever, propped up against the rock.
Focusing on the road, he registered that McCandless now had only one eye.
The big man was wrestling with Rogan, bare-handed, roaring like an angry bull.
Rogan had a rock in one hand and was trying to smash it down on McCandless’s
unprotected head. Where the big man’s right eye had been was a red mush that was
streaked down his cheek and into his beard, runny with sweat and snow. He was
roaring insanely, clawing at Rogan’s face. Snowflakes, hard driven, blurred the
scene and gave it the quality of nightmare. To Kurt, they seemed like shadow
figures backlit by the lightning, their cries torn from them by the driving
wind.
Rogan clubbed down with the rock, smacking it into McCandless’s head. More
blood. The big man staggered and fell to his knees. Both hands now clutched at
his face. Rogan lifted the rock once more, then yelled in agony as McCandless
head-butted him in the groin. Rogan lost hold of the rock to clutch at himself,
his mouth wide, a soundless howl erupting from it.
He booted out at McCandless and rocked the big man backward. He followed this up
with another savage, jolting kick. McCandless was on his back, clawing for and
then wrenching out a knife. As Rogan grasped hold of the rock again, McCandless
stabbed out at the other’s nearest leg. The blade sank home; this time Kurt saw
blood sluice out through the rent in Rogan’s pants, just above the top of his
boot. Rogan collapsed onto his adversary, smashing the rock down sickeningly.
For a second they lay still, Rogan atop McCandless, then Rogan pulled himself up
into a straddling position, brought the rock down a second time onto
McCandless’s head. Then a third time. A fourth. Kurt could hear nothing, just
the insane shriek of the gale, but he knew that labored gasps were heaved out of
Rogan with every smashing blow as he pounded away at the big man.
McCandless lay unmoving. Rogan finally collapsed onto him. The two figures began
to blur with the snow that thickly distributed itself across the scene, piling
up, whipped into low drifts by the wind.
The fog still quivered and heaved as though alive, the blizzard not affecting
it, the snow around it.
Kurt tried to get to his feet but he was still dazed by the crack to the back of
his head. His boots slipped on the snow-slick ground; it was too much of an
effort to do anything but lie there, go to sleep, drift off into eternity.
A sudden movement caught his eye: Rogan rolling off the body of the big man,
staggering to his feet in a flurry of snow. Rogan was not steady on his feet,
but this did not seem to worry him. He was cackling insanely.
Kurt watched as Rogan leaned forward and dragged at the snow-covered lump on the
road. Snow came off McCandless in a small avalanche as Rogan shook him
violently, like a dog with a rat. McCandless had no face, just a red ruin. The
wind tore at it, rinsing it with snow, but nothing could wash all the blood
away, nothing in the world could clean it up.
Rogan dragged the body to the edge of the precipice. The wind had died yet
again. Crazy weather, muttered Kurt, dully watching the snowflakes die until
there were just a few big ones tumbling silently down, floating gently out of
the lightning-shredded blackness. He saw Rogan heave the dead meat that once had
been a man over the edge. And now the bastard’s coming for me for sure, he
thought.
He watched Rogan limp across the snowy road toward him, watched him suddenly
stoop, grab something. The Armalite. So that’s where it had landed.
“Hey, blaster! Gonna blast ya!” Rogan seemed cheerful. “Maybe I oughta shoot ya
around a little,” he added, triggering a round.
Kurt heard the sharp crack of the shot, heard himself yell as it hammered into
the rock inches from his face, showering him with rock shards as it whined away.
“You thought you was gonna grab it all!” yelled Rogan. “Ol’ Rogan, he wasn’t