Empire of Dust (30 page)

The knife stayed where it was, and the fluid ran down the handle. "I'm gonna kill you sure, you goddamn sonofabitch," Buddy finally said between clenched teeth, and grasped the knife handle with his free hand. Slowly, with a grating animal growl escaping his throat, he slid the knife out of his blinded eye, gazed at it for a moment with the one that remained, and then, with a bellow of rage, reached further over the counter to try and cut Damon's throat.

"Uh-uh," Damon heard someone say, and a second later he saw Rodney grab Buddy around the neck with both hands. Rodney squeezed so hard that Buddy, lying halfway across the counter on his stomach, was unable to do anything. His right eye bulged, and his left eye pulsed jelly. Both fists opened, freeing Damon and the steak knife, which dropped onto Damon's forehead, the blade lightly scoring his flesh.

Damon grabbed it by the handle before it hit the floor and stuck the blade just under Rodney's choking fingers, directly into the soft half circle right above Buddy's collarbone. A shower of blood sprayed down upon Damon's face, and he closed his eyes and laughed wildly. That had taken care of the stupid shit, all right. If he wasn't deader than hell now, he would be in another few seconds.

But when Damon blinked his eyes so that he could see again, he saw that Rodney's face, a red blur behind and above Buddy's, was bleeding too, oozing blood from several slashes that made his cheeks and nose look as though a lion's claws had raked across them. As Damon watched, he saw Rodney's eyes roll up till only the whites were showing. His fingers unclenched from around Buddy's neck, and Buddy's head lolled like a heavy fruit over Damon.

Damon regained his footing and stood up behind the counter. Rodney had fallen over onto the floor, his feet kicking. Charlotte and the four Navajos were still sitting in their booths watching the action, the Indians stolidly, Charlotte in a daze, her mouth open. Jezebel was standing over the dead body of the cowboy, kicking it savagely, and holding in one hand the glass shard with which she had killed him. The jagged glass had cut the heel of her hand, and her blood was trickling unnoticed across her palm and dripping off the ends of her fingertips.

But it was the actions of the counter man that held Damon's attention. He was at the end of the counter next to the kitchen, talking rapidly but softly into a telephone.

It was time to go. They had unloaded a storm of shit and two people were dead. Damon ignored the counter man. What was done was done, after all. He ran up to the front end of the counter and around it and grabbed Jezebel's arm, wary of the glass dagger she was holding. "Let's go," he said.

She glanced up at him, seemed to recognize him, and gave the dead cowboy one last solid kick. Then she ran for the door. Damon knelt and shook Rodney, but the poor guy wasn't going anywhere. His eyes were glazed, and he seemed loopy from loss of blood. He had saved Damon's ass twice over, but there wasn't anything Damon could do for him now. He dug the keys out of Rodney's jacket pocket, then stood back up and looked at Charlotte.

"Let's haul it," he said, and headed for the door. But when he looked back he saw that she was still sitting in the booth, her mouth agape. "Come
on
, man!" he called, but she just shook her head slowly. Fine then, the hell with her, she was going to act like a goddamn moron.

Damon raced out of the roadhouse and over to the van. Jezebel was already in the passenger seat and had flung the driver's door open for him. He climbed in, fumbled with the keys, and started the engine. He backed out, then started to pull onto the road, getting ready to head northwest.

But then he saw another car approaching from that direction, and was afraid it might be the police, so he pulled the wheel the other way and drove southeast.

Shit, shit, shit. Down to two now, and all he had wanted was a goddamn beer.

"L
ooks like somebody's in a hurry," said Joseph Stein, as he saw the big van tear out of Abner's parking lot. "I hope that doesn't bode ill for the quality of the food."

But as he steered the car into the dirt parking lot, a tall Navajo in an apron came running out of the roadhouse, and Joseph lowered the window. The man pointed down the road after the van and shouted, "They're gettin' away! They're murderers—they killed two people!"

That was all Joseph needed to hear. "Call the police," he shouted, as he hit the accelerator and drove back onto the road.

"I did!" Joseph heard the man say, as he tore after the van.

The road was straight, and he could see that the van was half a mile ahead of him. He was closing fast. The car had a big engine, and the van probably didn't, and was hauling a lot of steel and seats and impact beams besides.

Laika reached beneath the front seat for Joseph's Glock 17, then took out her own from the glove box and jacked rounds into the chambers. Then she looked back at Miriam Dominick and smiled. "I know what you're thinking," she said. "We're not the police, so why are we doing this. Well, Miriam, we're trained for this kind of thing. National Science Foundation work can get more exciting than you'd ever imagine—especially in our division."

Joseph would have laughed if he hadn't been so intent on driving. He estimated the distance between them at six hundred yards. Another few minutes and he'd be right on their ass.

B
ack at Abner's, the four Navajos had finally sprung into action. Two were trying to stop Rodney's bleeding, while the others were examining the cowboy and his buddy to make sure there was nothing they could do for them.

The counter man, the waiter, and the cook were all standing over Charlotte where she still sat in the booth. The counter man was now holding a short baseball bat and looking at Charlotte as if he expected any minute for her to go as berserk as her friends had.

Charlotte looked around the roadhouse once more, as if trying to understand what had happened to her dream. Finally she came to the conclusion that it had assuredly ended, drowned in a bath of stupidity and blood and dead men.

She looked up at the suspicious face of the counter man and tried to smile, to show him that she meant no harm. She gave a little shrug, then said apologetically, "I don't know what happened . . . we were a
religious
group . . ."

"C
an't you go any
faster
?" Jezebel spat out, venom in her voice.

"It's a goddamn
van
, not a sports car," Damon shot back. The car in the rearview mirror was getting closer, and he realized that there was no way he could outrun it. He looked ahead frantically for a side road, anyplace they could get off and maybe try and escape on foot, or lose their pursuer in a labyrinth of dirt roads. The van handled great on dirt.

Just as he topped a small rise, he saw a chance. Fifty yards ahead, a road led off to the right straight through the scrub. The crest of the hill kept the van from the sight of the car behind them, and there was enough cover from a small stand of pi
ñ
on pine that they would be hidden for a while, perhaps long enough to lose the car.

Damon twisted the wheel and the van lurched off the road and bumped over a small ditch, and then he was on the dirt road, heading down it as fast as he could. But when he glanced in the rearview mirror, he let out a curse. The dust was rising heavily over the tops of the trees. The people in the car would see it for sure. He couldn't slow down now.

Then he saw the dirt road split up ahead and he got an idea. The road had been curving slowly to the left and the new road broke to the right. As he reached the fork, he turned left and reduced his speed to less than ten miles an hour.

"What the hell are you
doing
?" Jezebel shrieked. "You want them to catch us?"

"Relax, I just don't want to raise any dust here. Maybe they'll think we went the other way." He hoped the left-hand fork might bring them around again to the main road, though he ached with the pain of driving so slowly. When he was fifty yards from the fork, he slowly increased his speed, still trying not to raise the telltale dust. The road kept curving, and in another few minutes he saw the main road again. They had just made a big U-turn.

"Home free, baby," he said, and hit the gas. It was a mistake. The van's rear wheels skidded in a patch of loose sand and the vehicle fishtailed, then skidded to the left. Damon flung the wheel in that direction, but it was no use. The van slid off the road, its left rear wheel slipping into a ditch just big enough to trap it.

Damon pressed on the gas pedal, but the wheel only spun in the sand. "God
damn
it!" he said, opening the door. "Take the wheel," he ordered Jezebel, who slid across into the driver's seat. "I'll push the bastard!"

He ran to the back of the van and saw that it was wedged nearly a foot deep in the sand. He fell on his knees and started to scoop out the loose sand with his hands like a dog trying to dig its way under a fence.
Jesus
, he thought, as the sweat ran down his face,
how the hell did this all happen?
And he thought for the hundredth time that he never should have killed Ezekiel Swain. He'd be damned if this wasn't purgatory.

The wheels suddenly spun, kicking sand up into his eyes. Jezebel had hit the pedal. "Damn it, not yet!" he shouted. "I'll say
go
! Jesus. . . ." He started digging again, even more tense than before, expecting to get sprayed with sand again any second. It would be like her, he thought, to tear off and leave him alone to face the cops.

Then, for an instant, he sensed that something was behind him, and the thought crossed his mind that the cops were here, that they had caught up with him and were about to clamp their steely fingers onto his shoulder. But when the contact came, it didn't feel like flesh at all.

Instead, Damon suddenly felt as though someone had emptied a basket of sticks over his back and shoulders. But that sensation lasted for only a moment. The pain followed fast.

The sticks seemed to form themselves over the back of his body, pressing him down into the sand so that his eyes and nose and mouth were stuffed with it. Then the flesh of his back and buttocks and legs tingled as if covered with a quilt coated with electric needles.

He tried to rise, but he had barely enough strength to bring up his head out of the sand. When he did, something wrapped itself around his face, and a stench as of something long dead filled his nostrils. He still had enough sight left to see that it was a hand, but a hand whose fingers could have been made out of brown dried leather stretched over dry yellow bones.

Damon barely had time to croak out a scream before the thin fingers slipped into his mouth and scuttled down his throat.

"W
hat's the matter?" Jezebel shouted through the open window of the van. "I didn't do anything." She waited a moment, but heard no reply. Then she looked in the rearview mirror and saw Damon's booted foot sticking out from behind the van. It was twitching, kicking up the sand around it. What the hell was wrong with him? Was he having a fit or something?

J
oseph stopped at the fork in the dirt road and looked down both for a moment. Then he jumped out of the car, examined the road surfaces, and got back in.

"The road not taken," he said, nodding to the right hand fork and steering the car to the left. "You don't need a Navajo to track a heavy van on a sandy road."

In another hundred yards they could see the van ahead. It wasn't moving. "Nice work, Daniel Boone," said Laika. She hefted her pistol in her hands. "Looks like they're stuck."

T
he hell with him
, Jezebel thought, and hit the gas again, but once more the wheels only spun in place. Then she detected movement in the mirror and saw the pursuing car bouncing along not far behind. It was all too clear that she wasn't going to be able to get the van moving before the car caught up to them. She'd have to try and escape on foot, then.

She got out of the car and headed toward the brush on the left, looking over to see what the hell was wrong with Damon. That was when she saw it.

She stopped running and froze in place, and the head of the thing on Damon's back rose up, and the eyes, dark stones deep in furrowed sockets, looked at her. The leathery lips split into a mockery of a smile, and at that moment Jezebel Swain knew what this creature was.

"Ezekiel. . . ."

A
s Jezebel watched in horror and fascination and with a touch of wondrous love, the creature that was still somehow Ezekiel Swain began to stand up. The rapidly diminishing body of Damon came along with him, like a corporeal shadow. Damon's back seemed cemented to Ezekiel's chest, Damon's legs to Ezekiel's, and their arms to one another's.