“Son of a bitch is fast,” he muttered, paying closer attention to his climbing and wisely deciding to not try that again.
Then a shout of surprise sounded from above and Dean fell away from the cliff, the end of a thick root grasped in his hands.
“Dean!” Ryan cried, reaching out for the boy, but Dean was completely beyond his father’s grasp.
Chapter Eleven
As Mildred and Krysty fired at the muties below, Doc looked up at Dean’s cry and saw the boy coming. Instantly, the old man dug in his heels and reached out to grab for Dean. He knew it was impossible to catch the lad directlythe impact would pull him off the cliff also. But there was another way. Maybe.
Doc got a hold of the boy’s belt and pulled with all of his strength, the jerk almost tearing him off the rock face. A searing explosion of pain swelled in his shoulder. Holding on for dear life, the old man swung the boy inward and Dean hit the mesa with stunning force, his head cracking against the stones and going limp.
By the Three Kennedys, Doc thought. It had worked! He successfully neutralized the inertia by using the cliff itself. The boy could be dead from the blow, but he would have died anyway. At least the boy was given a chance at life.
Sweating from the strain, Doc could see the boy was unconscious and forced himself to start climbing again. There was no other way. His knuckles were white from tightly holding on to Dean’s belt, and the pain in his shoulder grew into a white-hot agony worse than any bullet wound. It had to be dislocated.
As he had done many times before in his life, Doc blocked the world from his mind and thought only of the climb and holding on to his young friend. Find another crack, shift his weight, climb, brace himself, find the strength from within, tighten the grip on the belt. Now do it once more. Again, and again. There was no time, no sounds. Only the endless cliff and a universe of distant pain.
But then there was no more rock before his face, and familiar arms reached to take Dean under the armpits to try to lift him, but Doc refused to relinquish his ward.
“Let go, Doc,” Mildred said softly. “I’ve got him. It’s okay. Dammit, you old coot, let him go!”
The man tried to do as requested, but his aching body was moving with a will of its own. Sluggishly, he inched over the edge and crawled onto the top of the mesa, still dragging the unconscious boy. When he cleared the rim, Doc collapsed onto the bare soil, pulling in lungfuls of air.
In the background somewhere, Doc heard blaster-fire and the howls of wounded apes. He tried to rise and draw his LeMat, but somebody forced him back down.
“Rest for a sec,” Ryan ordered, and Doc was too weak to even nod in response.
“Thank God, Dean is okay,” Mildred announced, brushing the hair from the boy’s face. There were no broken bones or fractures that she could detect. Oh, Dean would have a new scar under his hair, but that was a fine trade against having his brains splattered across the landscape.
Privately, Mildred still couldn’t believe that Doc managed to catch the boy. She knew his appearance of being old was merely a side effect of time travel, but she had never truly appreciated just how strong the tall man was. Until today.
As the red fog of exhaustion left his vision, the old man saw Ryan crouched alongside him, resting on his boot heels. Gently, the one-eyed man was probing the swollen shoulder with his fingertips. “No breaks,” he said finally. “Must be dislocated.”
“I can fix that,” Mildred said, kneeling.
“Doc, this will hurt bad, but only for a few seconds.”
“Proceed,” the exhausted man whispered.
Mildred placed her left boot under the Doc’s armpit and the other on the side of his neck. Wrapping her hands around the man’s wrist, Mildred gently rotated the arm slightly clockwise to align the bones, then savagely pulled with all her strength. Doc screamed, and the electric shot of pain flooded his body with cold adrenaline.