the arroyo wall, she would have to turn and immediately climb the
opposite wall, for she now knew she could not hold her own in a chase.
Her only chance of survival was to get above him and find some rocks to
hurl down on him as he ascended in her wake. She hoped he would not
come after her for a few more minutes, because she needed time for the
pain in her. ankle to subside further before testing it in a climb.
Distant thunder sounded from Barstow in the west, one long peal,
another, then a third that was louder than the – first two. The sky
over this part of the desert was gray and soot-black, as if heaven had
caught fire, burned, and was now composed only of ashes and cold black
coals.
The burnt-out sky had settled lower as well, until it almost seemed to
be a lid that was going to come down all the way and clamp tightly over
the top of the arroyo. A warm wind whistled mournfully and moaned up
there on the surface of the Mojave, and some gusts found their way down
into the channel, flinging bits of sand in Rachael’s face. The storm
already under way in the west had not reached here yet, but it would
arrive soon, a pre-storm scent was heavy in the air, and the atmosphere
had the electrically charged feeling that preceded a hard rain.
She rounded a bend and was startled by a pile of dry tumbleweeds that
had rolled into the gulch from the desert above. Stirred by a
downdraft, they moved rapidly toward her with a scratchy sound, almost a
hiss, as if they were living creatures. She tried to sidestep those
bristly brown balls, stumbled, and fell full-length into the powdery
silt that covered the floor of the channel. Falling, she feared for the
ankle she had already hurt, but fortunately she did not twist it again.
Even as she fell, she heard more noise behind her. She thought for a
moment that the sound was made by the tumbleweeds still rubbing against
one another in their packlike progress along the arroyo, but a harder
clafler alerted her to the true source of the noise. When she looked
back and up, she saw that Eric had started down the wall of the gulch.
He’d been waiting for her to fall or to encounter an obstacle, now that
she was down, he was swiftly taking advantage of her bad luck. He had
descended a third of the incline and was still on his feet, for the
slope was not quite as steep here as it had been where Rachael had
rolled over the edge. As he came, he – dislodged a minor avalanche of
dirt and stones, but the more she tried to find or make handholds and
footholds. She required all the tenacity of a spider to retain what
ground she gained, and she was terrified of suddenly slipping back all
the way to the bottom.
The top of the arroyo was less than twelve feet away, so she must be
about two stories above the floor of it.
Rachael,” the Eric-thing said behind her in a raspy voice like a
rat-tail file drawn across her spine.
Don’t look down, don’t, don’t, for God’s sake, don’t…
Vertical erosion channels cut the wall from top to bottom, some only a
few inches wide and a few inches deep, others a foot wide and two feet
deep. She had to stay away from those, for, where they scored the slope
too close to one another, the earth was especially rotten and most prone
to collapse under her.
Fortunately, in some places there were bands of striated stone-pink,
gray, brown, with veins of what appeared to be white quartz. These were
the outer edges of rock strata that the eroding arroyo had only recently
begun to uncover, and they provided firmer footholds.
“Rachael…”
She grabbed a foot-deep rock ledge that thrust out of the soft earth
above her, intending to pull and kick her way onto it, hoping that it
would not break off, but before she could test it, something grabbed at