Trader reached a hesitant hand toward his face, feeling the tug of the Armalite strung over his shoulder. There was stubble across his chin, and the puckered heads of old blisters. The corners of his mouth were cracked and so tender that he jumped in his sleep and nearly awoke at the fiery agony.
There was a temptation to lie down and rest, but the honed boulders would have slashed his desiccated flesh back to the bare bones.
At his feet was a small pool of cloudy water, less than a yard across. In its shallows there were shadowy fish moving, tails waving sluggishly. Trader knelt and dipped a hand into the warm liquid, brought his fingers to his mouth and licked them. He spit it out, his mouth puckered at the dreadful alkaline bitterness. It was bitterly undrinkable.
Thirst was overpowering. Trader would have done anything for a mouthful of crystal water. If it had meant pressing his mother’s face down into white-hot charcoal, then he’d have done it without a moment’s hesitation.
Without a pang of conscience.
That was one of the great hidden truths about the mysterious and solitary man called the Trader. He didn’t have anything approaching a normal conscience. Guilt never plagued him. If he had to do something, then he did it. Slit a baby’s throat. Gun down a helpless old man. Burn a ville to ashes. Anything.
Betray a friend?
“No.”
Chill a friend?
“Yeah.”
A friend betrayed was a permanent threat. One day, in some frontier pesthole, there’d be a voice out of the shadows telling you not to turn around. And there’d be the blazing pain of a full-metal jacket bursting your heart and lungs.
A dead friend was no threat to anyone.
While he’d been thinking about that, the landscape had changed around Trader.
Changed from the salt flats.
Now Trader was among the distant peaks. There was no sensation of time or distance passing, but now he could look back and see Ryan and J.B. and No.
“No!”
The desert was far below and far, far behind.
Right at the farthest edge of seeing, Trader thought he saw something moving fast across the cracked, white surface, a tiny body and immensely long legs, scuttling with gigantic steps. But he blinked, and when he’d rubbed his eyes, the thing had disappeared from sight.
If it had ever been there.
Now the repeated dream was starting to gather its familiar momentum. Trader had started to perspire and his eyes, beneath the closed lids, were flickering from side to side in jerky, involuntary movements.
He was alone.
Betrayed and abandoned by all of his friends. Friends? Men and women who worked for him. Rode with him.
Chilled for him.
The air was a little cooler up in the mountains, away from the baking heat of the lifeless desert. A light breeze was coming from the north, rustling the long meadow grass, blowing at the delicate asphodels.
Trader felt younger, more free.
Despite the pleasant surroundings, the Trader was conscious of an uneasy feeling of apprehension. Somehow it seemed like he’d been there before, almost knew what was going to happen and knew it wasn’t good.
The path was winding downhill into a steep-sided valley, cool among graceful pines. Somewhere in the background Trader would hear a dim roaring, muffled and far away.
Now the trail went up a steady incline, among purple rolling hills.
“Ryan? You here? I can hear you, J.B., close by me. Come out where I can see you, friends.”
The sound became louder, more distinct.
Under his blanket, Trader clenched both fists, the thumbs tucked into the palms, a classic signal of uncertainty and a seeking for security.
The ridge of granite was dappled with streaks of silver quartz, the colors dulled by the leaden sky. The gorge dropped away in front of Trader, less than a quarter mile off, the rainbow mist from its colossal fall already visible.
The Indian was sitting on a large boulder to the right of the trail, holding up a hand in greeting to Trader. And to Ryan and to J.B., who were walking with him.
“It is a good day, brothers,” he said.
Trader nodded. “A good day.”
“The walking woman has not passed this way. Have you seen her on your travels?”
Trader looked to see if either of his two oldest companions knew what was being said. But they were both staring toward the invisible waterfall.
He answered the braided Navaho himself. “We have seen no man and no woman walking this way. No animal and no fish and no bird and no creeping snake.”
“I am Walks Without Fire and you are Man With Fire in Belly. You are dead.”
“No. No, I’m not.”
“It is true. You have had much suffering and lonely pain, and that will soon end.”
Trader rocked back and forth in his sleep. Tears bunched at the corners of his closed eyes and seeped over his cheeks. The night was passing.
“Am I dying, Ryan? John Dix? Come on, guys, you can tell me. I’m the Trader. You know me.”
But the two men were no longer standing with him. Trader had a vague memory of Ryan saying he had to go to do something up in old Seattle.
And the skinny Navaho had vanished.
The scenery had changed once more, bringing him closer to the brink of the drop into the boiling caldron at the base of the falls.
The path had become agonizingly narrow, with a sheer drop to dragon’s-teeth rocks, thousands of feet below him. Only forward. Onward and up. A tattered well of ice-cold mist draped around his head and shoulders.
Trader could hear voices, whispering behind him, invisible in the thickening fog. It was a legion of susurrating voices, and he knew them all.
Knew none of them.
“Stay fucking dead,” Trader breathed, as he lay in an uneasy sleep.
They were pushing him onward, fingers that feathered at his spine, edging him higher and closer to the slick rocks at the top of the falls.
Now his feet trembled, hanging into the singing space. He glanced reluctantly into the mighty chasm and the toppling torrent of diamond water.
“Please,” he said.
It wasn’t a word that came easily to the Trader, not a word he’d used all that often in his life. Certainly not for the past twenty years or more.
It was just like all the other times.
No moment of transition. No actual act of tripping or stumbling or being propelled outward.
Just the falling.
Trader started to scream.
He knew that this was just a dream. A scary kind of dream, like lots of ordinary people had. Maybe they had them every night. But Trader didn’t.
So there was no need to scream.
Not in a dream, a dream where glistening slabs of rock moved past with a surreal slowness. Where water, cold as eternal death, soaked through your clothes and ran into your eyes and nose and mouth. Making it hard to
Scream.
Trader couldn’t squint through the cascade and see what awaited him at the bottomthe circling maelstrom of grinning green foam, lips parted, ready to suck him inside its maw.
He fell into its heart, at what felt like one-hundredth real speed.
And sank, his lungs bursting.
He fell and began to rise again. A tiny flickering green sun, far above him, drew him out into light and safety. In Trader’s mind, the dream had always ended in a bowel-churning terror, not in this quiet ascending toward life.
But something was going to go wrong.
He was near the surface, with a cupful of air remaining in his chest.
“A living man,” he whispered through a rising crescendo of bubbles.
When something from the darkness gripped him tightly.
ABE JERKED AWAKE, certain that a gang of stickies had come on them in the night and he was now going to die a hideous death. His ears were filled with a scream so brimming with terror that he very nearly lost control of his own bladder with the contagion of true fear.
Then sense and awareness eased itself back and he won control over himself, kicking out of his blanket and crawling cautiously across toward Trader.
Cautiously because this nocturnal horror had struck at Trader for five out of the past six nights. Each time Abe had shaken him awake. On the previous night, the older man had gripped him by the neck and tried to strangle him. But Trader had become tangled in his own blankets and Abe had been able to break free.
“Wake up, Trader,” he said. A part of him worried that the screams might have attracted night prowlers.
“I’m awake.” The voice was trembling, an old man’s voice. “What the fuck do you want, Abe?”
“Nothing, Trader. Just I thought you might’ve been having a bad dream, or something.”
“Me? A dream, Abe? Come on, man, what the fuck’re you saying? Trader doesn’t dream.”