Страница 47 из 52
Soon, night hunters would be coming out: the scorpion, the rattlesnake, the tarantula.
And me, A
The moon shrank to the size of a dime, passed overhead, slipped down after the stars. Shadows moved in their prescribed arcs. A
A
Taking another pull of the water, she let the sky draw her eyes into its perfect depths. No fear, nothing so petty as murder: it soothed her, overwhelmed her as it always did with a comforting sense of her own littleness; the reassuring knowledge that she was but a single note in the desert's song, a minute singing in the concert of the earth. She thought of Molly, of her office full of clients.
In the city the lights blinded the night sky, robbed it of stars. Only the moon could compete, a pale contender against the roving search lights of mall openings, the unwinking concern of security lights. No one was given an opportunity to feel deliciously small, magnificently unimportant. Everyone was forced, always, to take their dying littles as truth.
Slowly, A
The jagged teeth of the Cornudas Mountains to the west devoured the moon just after four a.m.
Craig Eastern's Martians were not coming. The Smithsonian was not getting its exhibit of the World's Biggest Horse's Ass. Not tonight.
A
The sun turned her nylon home into a Dutch oven an hour before noon. Unable to sleep any longer, she read and ate and dreamed the afternoon away moving as little as possible. There was no sound but the audible sear of sun on stone. Creatures of the Patterson Hills were hidden away waiting, like A
At sunset, she folded her tent and ate her supper. The second gallon of water and half the third were gone. In the cooler evening air, she began her inspection of the area. She'd arrived too near dark the night before to do any searching. Pulling out her binoculars, she examined the hills for three-hundred-and-sixty degrees around. Nothing moved but air shimmering with heat.
A
A
Again she searched land and sky full circle. For the moment she was alone but for a jet in the northeast quadrant of the sky. Leaving the binoculars behind, she trotted down the ridge, following the faint animal track. Lechugilla spines curved like daggers shin-high. Low, rugged barrel cacti, aptly named "Horse Crippler" pushed up through the rocky soil. No trees, no shrubs more than twenty or thirty inches tall grew on the hills, and the cacti were a foot or more apart, rationing the meager rainfall.
On the land bridge co
As the first pinprick stars dared the blue above the mountains, she camouflaged her pack with sand and pebbles and took up her vigil on the dark side of the terraced stone.
Ten-fifteen brought the moon's silver bulge, pushing up the sky above El Capitan. The desert hills began to itch and skitter with small close life.
A
Waiting changed from the passive to the active, became a burden to bear, a weight to lift with each breath. Time seemed to change direction, flow backward.
I don't do well at this, she thought. Good or bad, she ached to make something happen, take action. She pulled out her watch. 11:17. Fourteen minutes had elapsed since she had last checked the time. How many more to go? Thirty? An hour? Never? Irrationally she wondered if she could survive another vigil at the next full moon; if she could survive the next half hour of this one. Surely her nerves, taut an hour and two minutes after moonrise, would begin snapping soon. She'd hear tiny cracks, like rubber bands breaking under pressure, and bit by bit her body would begin to grow numb.
Another waiting, as intense, as desperate, flashed into her mind and she almost laughed aloud. She'd been fifteen, waiting for Dan Woolrick to call. Sylvia had said he'd told Do
A small comfort: waiting for death was easier than waiting for a boy to call.
Somewhere after midnight consciousness crept away, dreams took the place of thoughts. Into this unstable world came the sound of alien footsteps. Craig's aliens walked the desert with faint pounding footfalls and glowing halos of green. The air throbbed with their advance, the regular rhythm beating into A
Nightmare jerked too hard and she woke, still sitting tailor fashion in her shadow. The Martians vanished.
The pulsing footsteps did not.
A
Pulling on her sneakers, A
The helicopter, flying low, passed so close she had to close her eyes against the sand blasted from beneath the propeller blades. It swung up, cleared the ridge by what seemed only inches. For a second it hovered there, silhouetted against the distant pale cliffs of Guadalupe's high country, then settled onto the flat saddle.
A