Deathwatch

by Robb White

  Ben tried to remember how much water Madec had but gave up, realizing that he had far more than enough to outlast him.

  And there was gas enough to keep the Jeep roaming around for at least a hundred miles in four-wheel, two hundred in two-wheel.

  Mechanics, machines, supplies were not a part of this game. In the final analysis, even the guns were not a part of it.

  Sitting in the hot, still heat, the flies crawling endlessly on him, Ben felt everything dropping away.

  He thought of search parties he had been on looking for tourists who had left the main highways to do a little rock-hounding or have a picnic. People who had allowed some small accident like a stalled car or a broken axle to kill them.

  He remembered a little family of four, parents and two children, who had died on the desert within sight of the highway.

  That family had done everything wrong. When their car stalled and they couldn’t get it started again they had walked away from it, leaving five or six gallons of dirty but drinkable water in the radiator. They had walked away from the shade it could have given them, walked away from the evidence of trouble the search party would look for. And they had walked away in the daylight, in the sunlight, in the killing heat.

  When Ben found them it had almost made him cry to see how the mother had smeared lipstick on the faces of her children in a futile effort to keep the sun from burning the flesh off them.…

  Ben had always thought that he could survive in this desert he knew so well as long as he could move.

  He could move, if you called stumbling on those torn feet moving. He could move for about twenty-four hours more, and that was all.

  All night long he had hoped that with the coming of day Madec would realize that he was making a fatal mistake. That to kill Ben out here would be far more dangerous than confessing the accident and taking his chances with a jury.

  Now Ben admitted to himself that Madec, as intelligent as he was, was too vain to give up. Vain and conceited and sure of himself, sure that he could convince the authorities that Ben had killed a man.

  Madec would tell a simple, convincing story. Ben had killed the man and when Madec had insisted on reporting it to the authorities had tried to kill him, too. But Madec had escaped to the Jeep and made his way back.

  Madec would tell it well, Ben decided. All the details would fit; he might even go so far as to wound himself to make it more convincing.

  Madec would see to it that all the evidence supported him. The old man, ruined by vultures by the time they found him, would be wearing his clothes again and his boots and hat. The two Hornet slugs would be easy to find.

  Ben would also have his clothes on. Madec would find him where he had at last dropped and would dress him and equip him—with empty canteens and gun and food.

  It was too late now for any reconciliation, too late to just walk off this mountain and go to Madec and beg for his life.

  He fought back the fear. As long as there’s water on this mountain, he told himself, I’m not dead.

  Tonight, he planned, when the moon goes down, I’ll go back to that catch basin. To keep Madec from seeing me I’ll crawl all the way there on my stomach.

  But I’ll get there.

  With the dry heat pressing in on him from every direction, Ben relaxed against the outcrop and forced himself to stop the squirrel cage thinking; to empty his mind and sleep.

  6

  AT FIRST Ben didn’t know what had waked him, but he awoke with dread, as though some enemy was close on him, threatening him.

  His wounded cheek had swollen so badly that his left eye was completely closed and he could not, even with his fingers, open it enough to see out of it.

  It was still daylight, the sun seeming to be squatting on the western mountains, no longer moving down but staying there, pouring its heat on him.

  Then he heard the sound and realized that was what had waked him up. A tinkling sound. Of metal on rock.

  Pushing himself up a little, his head toward the sound and turned far enough to see with his right eye, he looked down.

  Ben could only see Madec’s head and shoulders and could not tell what he was doing.

  Pushing himself on up, pain throbbing into his legs, he looked around the outcrop.

  He could see Madec clearly now. The big Magnum was propped not far from him against the cliff face, and Madec, his fancy bush jacket dark with sweat, was using the Jeep’s short-handled shovel.

  It was insulting, infuriating. And Ben felt a strange, weak, childish thing. Don’t do that, he silently begged. Don’t do that.

  Madec had shoveled most of the sand out of the catch basin and was sloshing out the rest, the sand-filled water looking dull and gray in the sunlight as it flew from the shovel and splashed down on the bare, sloping, hot stone. The water ran down the stone in a little shallow stream, vanishing as it ran.

  Madec shoveled and scooped until the basin was empty, the sand all around it drying fast in the dying sunlight, turning from an almost black dampness to the faint brown of the dry sand.

  Holding to the rock with his hands to keep the weight off his feet, Ben moved back behind the outcrop and slowly let himself down again.

  Now all his hope for miracles was gone and Ben was left with a strange and chilling thought.

  He and this man Madec were locked together, chained together in a struggle for life itself—a struggle with no niceties, no rules of behavior, no sportsmanship, no gentlemanly conduct.

  Madec could not leave him. The struggle had gone too far for that. Nor, on the other hand, could Ben escape. Without water he could not make it across the miles of open desert, and, even if he had water, his feet could not endure that distance. In ten miles the flesh of his feet would be worn away down to the bones.

  The Jeep was the key to life. The man with the Jeep would live, the other man would die. There were water, protection, food, movement, communications, weapons and comfort with the Jeep. With the Jeep one man could kill the other.

  Madec had the Jeep.

  Ben sat watching Madec walking back to the Jeep, the gun over one shoulder, the shovel swinging in his hand. He looked so satisfied with himself, so jaunty in that cocked-up Australian hat.

  Ben had been close to death a few times. On highways, on a high crag, once in a helicopter when the rotor clipped a treetop. The closeness could be measured in inches or seconds, and death had gone past him before he actually recognized how close it had been. At those times, the fear came after death had gone and he could, in safety, think back to what might have happened.

  Now it was different. Death was close and he knew that, but now he had time; he could sit here and think about it; could feel it coming, slowly, minute by minute, hour by hour.

  In his mouth and throat he could feel death as a strange, unwettable dryness which his saliva could not diminish. He could feel it in the swelling of his tongue which had started back in his throat and seemed about to choke him with its dry mass.

  Twenty more hours?

  Or was it only nineteen now?

  The sun had finally started moving down behind those huge mountains to the west. Like a hand stretched out to help him a long, thin and almost rectangular shadow came steadily across the desert toward him. Ben followed the movement of the shadow with his eyes.

  Three hundred million years ago the place where he now sat had been submerged beneath an inland sea, and the plateau at the foot of the mountains had been a great marsh covered with weird and enormous mosses and ferns. Then the first animals with backbones had appeared—strange fish—and later there were reptiles in the swamps.

  At this time the great eruptions, the immense flowings of lava, the extrusion of mountains from the almost fluid surface of the earth had quieted, and the climate became cold. All the northern world lay under thousands of feet of solid ice.

  Two hundred million years ago dinosaurs had walked where the Jeep now sat and six million years later tyrannosaurus, lizards that stood twenty feet h
igh and had fearsome claws and teeth, roamed what was then almost all marshland, lying under a cool and rainy climate.

  And then, about sixty million years ago, the earth here had become violent again. The whole chain of the Rocky Mountains was vomited up ward and volcanoes erupted and built themselves up and died and were eroded away by wind and water. At this time the climate was mild and pleasant and the first horses had appeared, hardly as big as basset hounds, with toes rather than hooves.

  At some point during all the violence of prehistory there had been a volcano about seven miles from where Ben sat. Rock, melted by the intense heat of the earth’s deep interior, had been pushed upward by unimaginable pressures and had broken through the cool crust of the earth at that place.

  This molten rock, called magma, had been forced upward with great violence, filling the sky with a fountain of stone so hot it flowed like water. And, like water, the stone had fallen back around the hole in the earth, slowly forming a cone of cooling rock, building up layer by layer into the conical shape of a volcano.

  Even as this mountain of once-molten rock was forming, magma continued to be pushed upward, not only through the hole in the earth but on up through the hole in the conical mountain.

  Gradually then, as the pressure beneath the earth diminished, a solid core of rock filled the hole in the mountain. This rock, because it cooled more slowly than the lava exposed on all sides to the outside climate, formed a harder, more dense stone, basalt.

  As the volcano died, the winds, loaded with fine particles of sand and pumice from the volcanoes, began to erode its conical sides, and rain ran down the slopes, washing them slowly away, and cold, which froze the water caught in stone cracks, split and splintered the surface, and a sea rose and lapped at the top of the basalt core.

  Until, at last, there was nothing left of the high, conical, lava mountain except this core, the plug of the volcano. It towered straight up from the floor of the desert, steep-sided, erect, slender. A monument to those ancient times of violence. A tombstone.

  And its shadow beckoned him, its shape haunted his mind.

  Ben estimated the butte to be about four hundred feet tall and half a mile in circumference. In some places enormous, almost flat-surfaced slabs had been broken away and lay scattered on the desert below, making a rubble of stone called breccia around the base. The breaking away of these thin slabs had left flat ledges like giant steps up the sides of the butte, and other erosive elements, such as the cold of the glacial period, had split the surface stone, leaving long, perpendicular cracks in the sides.

  The top of the butte had been worn flat.

  There was little on that monument of stone to interest an animal, no vegetation for the bighorn and so no carcasses for the coyotes; no reason for a cougar to lurk there. Vultures might use it for a roost, snakes would investigate the cracks for lizards and rats. But that stony pinnacle would be home for few.

  In the morning the butte had been a beautiful reddish copper color, the areas where the slabs had broken away looking almost golden. Now, with the sun behind it, the face toward him was a deep, dark purple.

  With his one seeing eye Ben studied the butte and the desert floor around it. He studied the landmarks of rain-cut arroyos, mountain peaks, the small mesas, other buttes.

  The one whose shadow reached out to him was the most majestic of them and, with the sun setting behind it, almost seemed to move toward him as the stone merged with the shadow.

  Now the sun was completely behind the butte, turning it into a tower of blackness.

  And then a single brilliant ray of light appeared to come straight through the solid stone of the butte. It lasted for only a moment and then the stone was solid and black again.

  That was all Ben needed to see and for a second he felt a great triumph, for he knew now where he was going.

  He turned his head and looked down at Madec.

  The whole desert was tinged with a soft red glow. Even the white Jeep was pink now and Madec, moving around his camp, was a tiny, red-tinged man.

  Darkness came very slowly as Ben sat there, waiting. But at last the sunset faded and the moonless sky grew black and the stars began to appear.

  Ben picked up the slingshot and pouch and pulled himself up. Then he set out, going down the northern flank of the mountains so that Madec could not see him.

  He had not gone far before doubt began to eat at him. The pain of the stones against his feet was enormous, breathtaking, and he could never tell when some sharp edge was going to send it shooting through him.

  But when he at last saw the dark shape of the giant saguaro lying there on the sand, other younger ones standing like dumb, motionless sentinels around it, the going seemed a little easier, the pain a little less.

  Oh, little Gila woodpecker, Ben begged, be here. Like this place; make your nests here. I need you.

  He had often wondered angrily how a woodpecker could be so much smarter than a man. The Gila woodpecker knew better than to kill a giant saguaro. The bird, like men, left its mark on the great cactus but, unlike men, it never killed one.

  A saguaro ten years old is no bigger than a baseball. At twenty-one it is as tall as a man. After seventy-five years of life in the rugged desert it will have grown to twelve feet but it will still be a dwarf among its elders for, after two hundred years, when the saguaro is full grown, it towers fifty feet above the desert, a great thorny stalk of growth, with strong, upright, praying arms.

  A man carving his initials in the skin of a saguaro, initials that will probably never be seen again by another man, can cause this giant, two-hundred-year-old plant literally to bleed to death.

  And many men have done just that.

  The Gila woodpecker, on the other hand, knows when it is not safe to nest in a saguaro. It will never injure the plant during the rainy season for the little bird depends on the saguaro and will not hurt it.

  However, when a nest will do no damage, the woodpecker cuts a small, round hole through the tough hide of the plant and works its way into the saguaro’s pulpy, wet interior. Then the bird hollows out a place for a nest, and the plant soon coats the walls of the nest with a tough, dry, corky plaster which not only keeps the moisture of the plant from running out and thus killing it, but keeps the nest dry and snug for baby Gila woodpeckers.

  In an old plant there will be dozens of these nests which, when the plant eventually dies, remain, looking like dry, somewhat shapeless boots.

  The moon was coming up when Ben reached the old cactus, now long dead as it lay on its side on the floor of the desert. Nothing was left of it now except a cylindrical cage of what, in the first moonlight, looked like long, slim fishing poles. These hollow ribs had once been the pipes for water storage, pumping water almost as fast as it was gathered from the roots which often spread out for sixty feet around the base of the plants.

  Now they were bone dry and crackled as he pulled them aside and lifted out one of the woodpecker nests, a tough-skinned, gourd-shaped thing with a hole at one end of it.

  Ben worked two of them out from among the dried ribs and, first shaking them carefully to get rid of any scorpions that might be in them, he sat down on the sand and put them on his feet. It was a painful process but once his feet were inside the nests the pain eased and, when he stood up, he knew that, with just that much protection from the stones, he could go ahead.

  They would not last long, the corky stuff being brittle and thin, but by walking carefully, picking his way and putting his feet flat down and lifting them straight up, he could move.

  There were five more nests and he got them all, carrying them in his arms as he turned west and began to walk.

  One by one the nests wore out as he went on westward, the moonlight full on the desert now, making distance deceiving.

  Ben passed up the occasional yucca, hoping to see the tall, swablike flower of a sotol rising seven or eight feet above the compact plant.

  He had almost given up hope of finding one and, now
barefooted again, the last nest worn through, was heading for a yucca when he saw the swab over to his right, the flower stalk standing straight and motionless, shaped like an oversized bottle brush.

  Neither the sotol nor the yucca are cacti but are of the lily family. However, the sotol doesn’t have the vicious thorn at the end of its leaves that have given the yucca the name Spanish bayonet and the leaves are tougher.

  It was a good, young plant and Ben went to work with it. Tearing off a few of the older leaves, he sat down with them and stripped them of their outer edges which were barbed the entire length of the leaf so that they made a sort of double-edged bandsaw blade.

  The sharp edges gone, he continued to work with the leaf, pulling off half-inch-wide strips and laying them in a pile. When he had enough he took new leaves and tore them into wider bands. These he wove together, layer on layer, each layer laced to the others with the thinner strips. When the foot-shaped pad was an inch thick, he wove the thin laces across it and then continued adding layers of the woven leaf.

  At last he had two clumsy sandals, thick-soled and with laces of leaf strips which he tied around his feet and ankles.

  They were painful to walk in but not nearly as painful as being barefoot among the stones.

  Gathering more of the leaves, he strung them together and started out again, carrying the bundle of leaves by a knotted strip.

  He went on westward toward the butte, the moon now setting, the night far advanced.

  Added to the pain of his feet was the increasing pain of thirst. His tongue was very dry and felt as though it had cracked open in places. It filled his entire mouth, a great, stiff swollen mass that pressed against his lips. His throat felt hot and as though coated with dust, and the pain in it came in slow, long-lasting throbs, each one seeming more intense than the one before.

  In the fading moonlight the butte seemed as distant as the far mountains, and there was no shadow from it on the desert now. It was still far away, standing silent and somehow, sullen, in the empty desert. It looked ominous and black, threatening, forbidding.