Mount Dragon (53 page)

Unless there were coyotes at the kill.

He put his foot in the stirrup, fighting back a sudden dizziness, and pulled himself upward onto the horse. The effort exhausted him, and he sagged in the saddle.

The vultures were still circling now, perhaps a quarter mile ahead. The two moved closer, Carson propping himself up with the saddle horn. In the distance, something dark was lying on the sand. Coyotes were tugging at it. Roscoe, seeing something in the featureless desert, automatically moved toward it. Carson blinked, trying to focus. His eyes were running out of water. He blinked again.

The coyotes bounded away from the carcass. At a hundred yards they stopped and looked back.
Never been shot at
, Carson thought.

The horses drew closer to the carcass. Carson looked down, working to bring the dead creature into focus. His eyes were so dry they felt as if they were caked in sand.

It was a dead pronghorn antelope. The carcass was barely recognizable: a skull, with the characteristic stubby horns, peeking out of a desiccated lump of flesh.

Carson glanced at de Vaca, pulling up behind. “Coyotes,” he said. His throat felt like it had been flayed.

“What?”

“Coyotes. It means water. They never go far from water.”

“How far?”

“Ten miles, no more.”

He leaned over the saddle horn, trying to control a spasm in his throat.

“How?” de Vaca croaked.

“Track,” Carson said.

The heat played about them. A single cloud drifted across the sky, like a puff of acrid steam. The Fra Cristóbal Mountains, which they had been approaching all day, now seemed bleached to bone by the sun. Behind them, the horizon had disappeared, and the landscape itself seemed to be evaporating, dissolving into sheets of light, floating upward into a white-hot sky. The coyotes were sitting on a rise, waiting for the interlopers to leave.

“They approached from downwind,” Carson said.

He rode in a spiral away from the dead antelope until he located the spot where the coyote tracks entered. As he followed the tracks away from the antelope, de Vaca drew up alongside. They rode for several miles, Carson leading, following the faint tracks through the soft desert sand.

Then the tracks veered into the lava and disappeared.

Carson drew Roscoe to a halt as de Vaca came along beside him. There was a silence. Nobody could track a coyote through lava.

“I think,” he croaked at last, “that we need to divide the remaining water with the horses. We can't last much longer.”

This time de Vaca nodded.

They slid off the horses, collapsing in the hot sand. Carson removed the half-full canteen with a weak hand.

“Drink slowly,” Carson said. “And don't be disappointed if it makes you even more thirsty.”

De Vaca sipped from the canteen with trembling hands. Carson didn't bother to bring out the salt from his pocket; they wouldn't be drinking enough water for it to matter. Taking the canteen gently from de Vaca, he raised it to his lips. The feeling was unbearably good, but it was even more unbearable when it ended.

He gave what was left to the horses, then tied the empty canteen on the saddle horn. They lay down in the shade cast by the two animals, who stood dejectedly in the afternoon sun.

“What are we waiting for?” de Vaca asked.

“Sunset,” said Carson. The drink already seemed a wonderful, unbearable dream. But talking was not the unbearable torture it had been. “Coyotes water at sunset, and they usually start calling. Let's hope the spring is within a mile, so we can hear them. Otherwise….”

“What about Nye?”

“He's still searching for us, I'm sure of that,” Carson said. “But I think we've lost him.”

De Vaca was silent. “I wonder if Don Alonso and his wife suffered like this,” she murmured at last.

“Probably. But they found a spring.”

They lapsed into silence. The desert was deathly quiet.

“Is there anything else you can remember about that spring?” Carson asked at last.

De Vaca frowned. “No. They started across the desert at dusk, and drove their stock until they were near to collapse. An Apache showed them the spring.”

“So they were probably about halfway across.”

“They started with barrels of water in their wagons, so they were probably much farther than that.”

“Going north,” said Carson.

“Going north.”

“You remember anything, anything at all, about the location?”

“I already told you. It was in a cave at the foot of the Fra Cristóbals. That's all I can remember.”

Carson did a quick calculation. They were now about forty-five miles north of Mount Dragon. The mountains were ten miles to the west. Just at the edge of the coyotes' range.

Carson struggled to his feet. “The wind is drifting toward the Fra Cristóbals. So the coyotes probably came from the west. So maybe—just maybe—the Ojo del águila is at the foot of the mountains due west.”

“That was a long time ago,” de Vaca said. “How do you know that, even if we find it, the spring hasn't run dry?”

“I don't.”

“I'm not sure if I can make it ten miles.”

“It's either that, or die.”

“You've got a great bedside manner, you know that?” De Vaca pushed herself into a sitting position. “Let's go.”

Nye trotted alongside the lava flow for a while and then looped eastward, away from the mountains, to ensure that the two would not cross his trail. Although Carson had proven an worthy adversary, he tended to make mistakes when he was overconfident. Nye wanted to make sure Carson was as overconfident as possible. He had to make Carson believe he had thrown him off the trail.

Muerto was still going strong, and Nye himself felt good. The pain in his head had subsided to a dull ache. The afternoon heat was stifling, but it was their friend, the invisible killer.

Toward four o'clock he cut north again, returning to the edge of the lava flow. To the south, he could see a column of vultures. They had been hanging there for quite a while. Some animal or other. Far too soon for Carson and de Vaca to draw so big a crowd.

He stopped suddenly. The boy had vanished. He felt a panic.

“Hey, boy!” he called. “Boy!”

His voice died away without echo, sucked into the dry sands of the desert. There was little in the endless dead landscape to reflect sound.

He stood in his stirrups and cupped his hands. “
Boy
!”

The scruffy figure came out from behind a low rock, buttoning his fly. “Here, put a sock in your boatrace. I was just visiting the gents'.”

Relaxing, Nye turned his horse, bringing him quickly back to a trot. Thirty miles to the ambush point. He would be there before midnight.

The image on the huge screen was of a rambling Victorian house in pure Gothic Revival style, bedecked almost self-consciously with ponderous mansard roof and widow's walk. A white portico ran across the front of the house and along both sides. Panning his view upward, Levine noticed that the entire structure was dark, save for a small, eight-sided garret atop the central tower, its oculus windows piercing the fog with a yellow glow.

He maneuvered his cyberspatial self up the road to an iron gate that hung open on broken hinges, wondering why the house itself wasn't guarded; why Scopes had depicted the yard as being overgrown with chokecherries and burdock. As he approached, he noticed that several of the windows were broken and that paint was peeling from the weathered clapboards. The house and yard had been lovingly tended the summer he'd spent there as a youth.

He looked up again at the octagonal garret. If Scopes was anywhere inside, he would be there. Levine watched as a stream of colored light, like a tongue of fire, burst from the roof of the garret and disappeared into a dark hole in the fog that hovered overhead. He'd seen similar data transfers flashing between the huge buildings he'd first encountered in GeneDyne cyberspace. This must be the encrypted TELINT satellite uplink that Mime had detected. Levine wondered if the messages were encrypted before or after they left this inner sanctum of Scopes's cypherspace.

The front door stood partly open. The interior of the house was dim, and Levine found himself wishing for some way to illuminate the view. The sky had slowly darkened, turning the fog to a leaden gray, and Levine realized that—at least within this artificial world of Scopes's—night was coming on. He looked at his watch and saw it was 5:22.
A.M.
or
P.M.
? he found himself wondering. He had lost all track of time. He shifted position on the elevator floor, flexing one leg that had gone to sleep and massaging his tired wrists, wondering if Mime was still somewhere in the GeneDyne network, running interference. Then, taking a deep breath, he returned his hands to the laptop keys and moved forward into the house.

Here was the large parlor of his memory, with a worn Persian rug on the floor and a massive stone fireplace on the left-hand wall. A stuffed moose head hung above it, cobwebs woven thickly between its antlers. The walls were lined with old paintings of barques and schooners, and scenes of whaling and fishing.

Straight ahead was the curving staircase that mounted to the second floor. He maneuvered up the staircase and along the second-floor balustrade. The rooms off the balustrade were dark and empty. He chose one at random, maneuvering through it to a worn and battered window. He looked outside and was surprised to see not the narrow road winding down into the mist, but a bizarre jumble of gray and orange static.
A bug in cypherspace
? Levine wondered, moving back to the balustrade through the dim light. He turned in to a second hallway, curious to see the room he'd slept in that summer so many years before, but a burst of computer code filled the screen, threatening to dissolve the entire vast image of the house before him. He hurriedly backed away, perplexed. Every other area of the island seemed to have been knit together by Scopes with such care. Yet the re-creation of his own childhood home was disheveled and empty, with rends in the very fabric of his computerized creation.

At the far end of the balustrade was the door to the garret stairs. Levine was about to ascend the stairs when he remembered a back staircase that led to the widow's walk. Perhaps it would be better if he took a look into the windows of the garret before broaching it directly.

Fog rushed up to embrace him as Levine moved forward onto the widow's walk. He swiveled the laptop's trackball, looking around cautiously. Ten feet ahead of him, the angular form of the garret jutted from the walkway. Levine moved forward and peered into the oculus window.

A bent-looking figure sat inside the garret, his back to Levine. Long white hair flowed over the high collar of what appeared to be a dressing gown. The figure was perched in front of a computer terminal. Suddenly, a tongue of fire came shooting down out of the fog, plunging into the side of the garret. Without hesitation, Levine moved forward into the stream of color, and in an instant words were flashing across the enormous screen:

The stream subsided. Levine waited, motionless. Within minutes, a burst of colored light shot up from the tower:

The stream subsided.

Levine stood on the widow's walk, stunned. It was worse than he could ever have imagined. Not only was Scopes mad, but he had in his possession a virus—a virus he was selling to the military. Perhaps even to rogue elements within the military. Judging by the prices involved, the virus could only be the doomsday virus Carson had told him about.