Panic!

by Bill Pronzini

  “No,” she said, “oh no, no, no!”

  The remaining pursuer broke away from the cactus behind which he had taken refuge, from behind which he had fired, and began to stumble down the grade. Lennox said, “Jesus!” and spun Jana around and they were running again, running with panic again. She forced her legs to keep working, her slender body screaming against the renewed demands of it, and her mind chanted in a frenzied cadence, Hope, no hope, hope, no hope, because all of this was a hideous fluctuation, as if God could not make up His mind, as if He were ridden with indecision as to the outcome, and that made it so much more terrible, so much more of a nightmare ...

  Ten

  Vollyer turned away from the dead cop, fitting another cartridge into the Remington, and looked along the wheel ruts at the fleeing forms of Lennox and the girl. He was facing directly into the half-revealed plate of the sun and its light was like burning embers thrust against the surface of his eyes; he still had only partial focus, the wavering shadows had broadened, and the two of them down there were indistinct images viewed through warped glass. He would just be wasting time and ammunition trying to pick them off from here, looking into that goddamn sun; he had missed them both at a closer range from the slope, hadn’t he? Hitting the cop as he had, had been more luck than marksmanship, the way his eyes were now, and they were bad —there was no use in kidding himself any longer, they were very bad.

  He started to the cruiser, and as he did so, he saw the slope through the swimming blur and Di Parma was there, on his feet, pitching down toward him. A gaping hole in his left shoulder, just under the collarbone, splashed blood in bright red streams over the front of his shirt and trousers as he moved, and his left arm flopped uselessly, almost comically, at his side. When Vollyer had run past him moments earlier, to make sure about the cop, Di Parma had seemed not to be moving and he had thought he was dead; now, seeing him still alive, Vollyer felt nothing at all. Di Parma was still a stranger, a nonentity, a lump of clay—alive or dead, it no longer made any real difference.

  He came up and there was wildness in his eyes, a mixture of pain and fright. He was whimpering, red froth at the corners of his mouth. “I’m hurt, Harry, I’m hurt bad, oh God, oh God, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Not yet,” Vollyer said, “not until we get to Lennox and the girl.”

  From inside the cruiser, the short-wave radio crackled abruptly, angrily to life; a voice demanded acknowledgment. Di Parma looked at the car, looked back to Vollyer. “There’s other cops around here, they’ll be swarming all over this place in a few minutes!”

  “We’re going after the witnesses,” Vollyer said. “Get in the car.”

  Di Parma’s face contorted into a grimace of agony and rage. “You’re crazy, I’m not listening to you any more, oh, you bastard, I’m hurt and I need a doctor, I need Jean, there’ll be cops, I’m getting out of here!” and he pushed past Vollyer and staggered to the cruiser’s open door.

  Vollyer lifted the Remington and dispassionately shot him in the back.

  The bullet shattered Di Parma’s spine just above the kidneys. He screamed once, very briefly, a shrill, surprised feminine sound, and then pitched forward onto his face and lay dead there in the blood-spattered dust.

  Pivoting, emotionless, Vollyer scrubbed at his eyes with his free hand and peered along the wheel ruts again. He could still see the girl and Lennox down there. Silence now, thick and brittle, save for the continued crackling of the short wave; but there was no sign, no sound, of approaching cars from either direction. He had time, he still had time. It would take only a couple of minutes to catch the two of them, and then he would drive out, get back to the Buick if he could or find a place to ditch the cruiser and pick up another car; but he had to get the two of them first, it was no good without getting them. You play all the way or you don’t play, and he had always played all the way; that was why he was a winner and Lennox and the girl and Di Parma, too, were all losers.

  He loaded the Remington once more and slid in under the wheel of the cruiser. The engine started on the first ignition turn. He backed the car away from the boulder and drove over Di Parma’s legs, down to the wheel ruts, hunching forward, eyes slitted, and went after the running, shimmering, distorted figures on the flatland ahead.

  Eleven

  Looking back over his shoulder as they ran, Lennox watched the fat one kill two men in the space of a minute—the wounded police officer and, incomprehensibly, his partner, who had survived the bullet which had felled him on the slope. Vomit boiled up into Lennox’s throat. What kind of man is that, he thought sickly, what kind of black union could have created a man like that?

  He saw the fat one get into the cruiser, and he thought then: He won’t come after us now, he’ll know that poor cop isn’t alone, that there have got to be others close by. He’ll run, he doesn’t have any choice now. He’ll have to forget about us, he’ll have to run, he’ll have to let us alone.

  But he didn’t believe it. The brutal, senseless way the fat one committed murder, the relentless way he had pursued Jana and him until now made a false hope of Lennox’s thoughts—and when he glanced back again and saw the patrol car bearing down on them along the rutted trail, he knew beyond any doubt that the situation was as critical now as it had been before the arrival of the single officer.

  God oh God, where were the rest of the cops? It couldn’t be just the one, there had to be others, they had to have figured out what had happened somehow, or else the one wouldn’t be here. But if they didn’t hurry they would be too late—where were they, where were they?

  Lennox swung his head around again, holding onto Jana, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in his side where the bullet had creased him. No place to hide, no sanctuary, not enough time to cross the trail and try to re-climb the slope on the other side, nothing in front of them but a flat plane of cactus and sparse ground cover and the remains of a long-abandoned set of rail tracks—sections missing and grown with mesquite, sections collapsed or windblown into drunken angles—that came looping around the incline from the south, dissolved in favor of the trail, and then resumed in a straight run to the edge of the deep arroyo winding away on their left.

  There was only one way for them to go, and Lennox altered their course in an abrupt quarter-turn toward the brink of the arroyo; if they could get down into that wash, out of the open, maybe they could hold out until more police arrived, if more police arrived. Slim chance, frail chance, but they had nothing else, nothing at all, and behind them the cruiser swerved sharply off the ruts, pursuing, the sound of its engine like the rumbling swell of an approaching earthquake in the quiet morning, the sun-baked soil beneath their feet seeming to ripple to complete the illusion. Lennox cast another wild look over his shoulder, saw the machine bouncing and swaying over the rough ground, gleaming metal leaping at them, a thing gone berserk, gaining in spite of the uneven terrain.

  Dust choked his lungs, bringing on a spasm of coughing, as he dragged the faltering, panting Jana to the edge of the arroyo. It was some one hundred and fifty yards wide and forty feet deep at this point, with steep, layered shale walls that were treacherous but scalable, extending away on both sides, in both directions. Boulders and ironwood and mesquite littered its sandy bed, and a few yards beyond, below where the rail line crawled up to the edge of the wash, twisted chunks and lengths of rusted, disintegrating steel, sun-bleached bits of rotted wood that had once been ties formed heaps and piles and pyramids the width of the jagged incision—all that remained of a long-collapsed, long-forgotten trestle.

  Lennox had the fleeting, disjointed image of a massive, grotesque display of Pop Art sculpture, created by the forces of nature long before man learned the dubious aesthetics to be found in the arrangement of junk and scrap metal. And then, without thinking any further, his ears filled with the rumbling, rattling howl of the cruiser, he turned Jana’s face to his chest and took her over the edge.

  Twelve

  Thirty yards from w
here he had seen the girl and Lennox start down into the arroyo, Vollyer was forced to abandon the patrol car. The ground was too rough here, dotted with too many rocks and thickly grown vegetation, and the glare of the rising sun through the windshield was hellish on his eyes.

  He scrambled out of the car, not hearing the demanding voice half garbled in static on the radio, not thinking about anything but the job he had to do. He had the Remington clenched in his right hand, and he pulled at his coat pocket with his left for the .38; he was taking no chances now, there was time, but very little of it, this particular game had gone as far as it could go.

  He ran in a drunken wobble to the arroyo and ducked his head against his shoulder to clear away some of the astringent sweat, and then looked down into the fissure. He couldn’t see them. Hiding, they were hiding; if they were still on the move he would have been able to pick them out easily from up here; there were plenty of places of concealment at the immediate bottom of the wash, but once you got fifty yards on either side you couldn’t run very far without exposing yourself. And they hadn’t had time to make it all the way across, to scale the bank on the opposite side. No, they were down there, all right, just down there, hiding, and it was only a matter of seconds now.

  Vollyer transferred the Remington to his left hand, holding both guns up and away from his body, and dropped into a sitting position with his legs splayed out and pointing at an angle into the arroyo. He went down the bank that way, like a plump and begrimed child going down a long slide, using his right hand and the heels of his shoes to restrain momentum. A few feet from the bottom, an edge of rock bit painfully into the back of his left thigh, opening a deep gash. causing him to limp slightly when he struggled finally into an upright position on the dusty floor. The Remington back in his right hand, he moved forward, slowly, exhorting his eyes in mute viciousness to mend so that he could see clearly, exhorting in vain.

  Something moved, a quick stirring, ahead and to his left. Vollyer reeled around a steel-draped boulder, and the long rattled tail of a sidewinder swayed into the dimness at its base. Cautious of his footing, he backed away and crossed to where a stunted smoke tree offered possible cover. Nothing. A conglomerate of twisted steel. Nothing. He stopped, ducking his face into his shoulder again, and then squinted with myopic intensity on all sides of him. Nothing.

  A high, flat-topped rock, with bonelike fragments of bleached wood strewn at its base, beckoned nearby. That was what he needed, a high vantage point in this proximity; if he could scale that rock, he might be able to locate their place of concealment. He went toward it, painfully, watchfully, listening to the ragged sound of his own breathing. It was otherwise very quiet. But they were close, he could sense their nearness; a tic jumped spasmodically along his right temple, and another pulled the left side of his mouth down crookedly.

  They were very, very close ...

  Thirteen

  The running was over.

  Crouched with Jana in a right angle formed by a canted boulder and a mound of crumbling debris, Lennox knew that with sharp, crystal clarity. He could not run any more; he simply could not run any more. Whenever a crisis had arisen in his life, he had run away from it, he had taken the easy way out—as a child, as a teen-ager, as an adult, never standing firm, never meeting the crisis head-on, just letting the panic take possession of him, welcoming it, never fighting it. And each time he had run away—unnecessarily, foolishly—he had lost a little more of himself, abrogated a little more of his manhood. He knew now that this was what Jana had seen in him, what she had been trying to tell him last night; at long last he, too, was facing his weakness, just as she had faced hers, coming to terms with himself, understanding himself, realizing that if it had not been for Jana and for the ordeal which was now reaching its culmination, he would have been irreclaimably destroyed by the poisons of his fear.

  But now, if he had to die, he could die as a man, and he was very calm. He had felt the exorcism of the panic, the need and the capacity for flight, when he and Jana reached the bottom of the arroyo moments earlier. They could have tried to make it across to the far bank, they could have kept running and they could have died running, but with the understanding, he had instead brought Jana here, to the first concealment he had found. It was here they would make their final stand, if it was to be their final stand; he would fight, somehow, in some way, he would make a fight of it.

  He looked at Jana and their eyes met, and he knew she was with him, all the way, unquestioning, undemanding, seeing the resolution in him and taking strength from it. Together, her eyes seemed to be saying. In life or in death, together.

  He did not want her to die. He wanted her to live even more than he wanted to live himself—the first truly unselfish commitment of Jack Lennox to anything or anybody other than Jack Lennox—and anger rose in him, and hatred, cold and calculating, for the man-thing that thought of them not as human beings but merely as insensate objects, threats to his own warped existence. Lennox listened. Movement, soft, stealthy, coming from somewhere on the other side of the boulder, shoes sibilant on the sand, a deep wheezing of constricted breath. Jana heard it too, tensing slightly beside him, touching his arm. Lennox did not look at her; his full concentration was on the movement and the sounds beyond. Coming closer? Yes, closer, but not too close, not yet, there was still a minute or two.

  A weapon, he had to have a weapon.

  And he remembered the knifelike piece of granite.

  His hand came up to touch his belt, where he had put the stone earlier—and it was gone. Damn, damn! It must have pulled free when the bullet skinned his side and he had fallen on the slope. He released a silent breath, passing his fingers over his split and puckered lips, looking around him, looking for another weapon, any weapon. His eyes touched small stones, a piece of decaying wood, an unwieldy section of rail—discarded them, moved on, restless, urgent, wanting something substantial, something heavy, something to throw, perhaps, or something sharp

  and he saw the rusted splinter of steel.

  It lay in the sand eight feet away from him, on open ground. Some two feet long, warped but otherwise unbent, it was a dull, cankered brown in the sunlight, its forward edge tapered into a point that appeared sharp, that appeared capable of penetrating flesh. Beside it was a long section of rail, the parent which had spawned it through metal fatigue or through impact in the collapse of decades past.

  Lennox stared at the splinter, and he thought: Spear, it looks like some primitive spear, and there was a bitter irony in the association. Wasn’t what was happening here, this battle for survival, a primitive thing too—as old as man, as old as life itself?

  He had to have that spear. He had to take the chance of going out there to get it. That two feet of slim oxidizing steel represented the last remaining thread of hope, the battle lance, and without it they were naked—there could be no battle.

  He put his lips to Jana’s ear and breathed, “I’m going out after that piece of steel, stay here and keep down,” and then, because this was perhaps the final goodbye and there was the need, just this once, to put it into words, “I love you, Jana.”

  He waited for her reply, the same three words, and when they were his he squeezed her hand and then moved out toward the splinter, the spear, lying in the sand beyond. He advanced in a humped, four-point stance, fingers splayed just ahead of his shoes, both sliding silently through the sand, his head turned to the left so that he could see the widening area around the boulder. He made a foot, another foot, coming out of the shade now, coming out of hiding, and from just beyond his vision there was a scuffling sound, leather scraping rock, pebbles tumbling, and he stopped moving and leaned forward, holding his breath, craning his neck, and twenty feet away, atop a high flat rock, the fat one, the killer, was pulling himself onto his feet, turned in profile, Death standing outlined against the bright, bright blue of the desert sky.

  There was no quickening of Lennox’s heart, no tightening of his groin, none of the symptoms of fe
ar and panic and irresolution. Time had run out, there was no more time to brace himself with the lance, there was only time for one quick attack before the fat one turned and saw him, a single offensive and nothing more.

  He thought: This is the moment, this is the judgment—and lunged toward the waiting spear.

  Fourteen

  Breath whistled asthmatically between Vollyer’s lips as he straightened on top of the rock. He hunched forward, squinting, turning his body as he tried to fuse the dancing shadows below with the objects from which they sprang, cursing his eyes, screaming silently at his eyes. Sweat streamed down from his forehead, over his cheeks, and he lifted his left arm and in that moment he saw the movement, definite movement, independent of the shadows.

  His body stiffened, the cords in his neck straining as he tried to focus on the source of the movement. It took shape for him, a man-shape, Lennox, Lennox, and the Remington came up in his right hand, jumping, roaring unsighted as the distorted figure ran across into the open. The bullet ricocheted off the boulder there, showering flakes of rock and dust, goddamn these eyes oh goddamn these eyes, and Lennox was bending down there in the sand, bending, two of him wavering, dancing. Vollyer dropped the Remington and the .38 slapped against his right palm and he fired and sand puffed up a foot wide, I missed him, you son-of-a-bitching eyes, I missed him, and then Lennox was coming up and moving forward, arm drawn back, something in his hand, and Vollyer squeezed the trigger again and again he missed, and Lennox’s arm pistoned frontally and the something in his fingers broke free, a blur, a thin brown blur, he threw something at me, get out of the

  impact, Jesus! sudden pain, blackness behind his eyes, fire spreading out molten from his stomach, no, no, what did he throw, my belly, oh oh my belly, and the gun clatters down onto the rock at his feet, he staggers, his hands come up and encounter coarse steel, a length of steel, imbedded there and deep deep inside him, sticky wet, blood, steel, a spear, he threw a steel spear at me but that’s not right he’s a runner he’s not a fighter runners don’t fight, and Vollyer’s legs no longer support him, he falls to his knees, blind, fingers jerking desperately at the shaft penetrating the soft flesh just below his breastbone, trying vainly to pull it free